Interesting to watch like well-performed gymnastics but it never really connects.

While Abrams peddled name recognition, Johnson understands that the classic characters have to reignite the torch before they can pass it on, and gives both Leia and Luke defining moments.

The Cove exposes the dark secrets that underpin the world’s dolphin mania, whether it’s our enjoyment of the animals performing circus tricks in aquariums, the swimming-with-dolphins industry, or the government recruitment of the sea mammals’ intelligence, communication, and sonar abilities for military applications.

Wonderful performances anchor this biopic of country star Loretta Lynn's rise to fame. In a time before the TV music channels made star biographies into such a formulaic joke, Coal Miner's Daughter was the real deal.

This indie rambler was my favorite movie of South by Southwest 05, where it premiered. But before I go any further, let's establish that Mutual Appreciation is not for you if you go to the movies to see things blown up or if you expect such conventional niceties as a three-act structure or lighting effects not achieved by yanking up a window shade.

While never taking credit away from the other rescuers who also risked life and limb, The Rescue comes back to the bunch of self-described oddballs who got the kids out.

Together's portrait of its social moment is right-on.

It’s far and away the most original symphony of terror since F.W. Murnau raised hackles and Schrecks with his 1922 Nosferatu.

It's also a deeply moral antiwar film, if one chooses to view it that way.

The Disappearance of Shere Hite is an illuminating, haunting, and ruminative documentary worth watching, if not for crystalizing the history of Hite’s work on film then for a look at how much and how little things have changed for women.

Far more engrossing are the long, dialogue-free stretches that fix on, say, bobbing feet or curled fists on a speed bag. The soundscape, too, is endlessly fascinating, a layer cake of squeaks, grunts, gasps, and rattling chains that, combined, catches a rhythm that sounds an awful lot like song.

Bridges makes this sozzled and desperate ex-desperado – a cliché by any other name – as fresh and vital as one final shot at cowboy-poet redemption. It may sound crazy, but it's true.

From its opening tracking shot of four furry legs sauntering through a bed of colorful pansies as cars and trucks whoosh nearby, Stray is a documentary of unhurried pleasures.

Since so many of De Palma’s films have become part and parcel with the American cultural consciousness of the last 50 years, I can’t imagine this filmmaker’s insights not providing every viewer with some memorable takeaways.

Director Alfonso Cuaron, in his first American movie, has fashioned a world so real and so engaging that you can feel it and smell it and taste it as surely as if you were there.

Indie filmmaker Azazel Jacobs (The Lovers, Terri) has assembled so many tender spots – sibling estrangement, dead moms, dying dads, the sad drudgery of hospice care, the messed-up family dynamics we reproduce in successive generations – that you might reasonably wrap the entire film in a trigger warning for anyone who’s ever had a family, full-stop. But it – his deft script, their aching performances – is absolutely worth the trauma watch.

A peerless fusing of dumbshow performance and background sound editing, there's a rising panic that allows the final, violent closing act to seem shockingly organic.

Make no mistake: This is a horror film right to its core, although the nightmare comes both from without (the war, the state decrees regarding how Shideh must dress in public, even when fleeing incoming missiles) and within (the unknown but entirely evil Middle Eastern djinn).

Probably the ultimate writers' film, but it's also a brash, daring, and dynamic film -- as delicate as an orchid but as durable and malleable as the species.

There's not as much bombast here as there was in Parker's Commitments, but then Frears is an entirely different kind of director. He prefers the ensemble to the character study, and here he does a wonderful job of it.

[A] prescient and sharply drawn comedy about the depths to which one unscrupulous station will sink.

The camera tracks, cranes, and dollies through the dance space, anticipating with the boldness of the greatest director working at MGM in 1951, that the New Wave is, indeed, not so very far away. Finally, like all of Minnelli's collaborations with Lerner (Brigadoon, Gigi, On a Clear Day You Can See Forever), An American in Paris is a paradox - a musical that embraces solitude and romantic despair. It is a resplendent motion picture.

The on-target performances, along with the unceasing barrage of popular music and daring narrative gambles, combine to make Trainspotting one of the grand movie rushes of 1996.

As Dawn, Matarazzo isn't afraid to evoke the horrors of puberty with a straightforward charmlessness: She's gawky, unhappy, and confused, while her tingling of sexual desire downright gives you the shivers.

Hoffman and Bancroft are phenomenally cast in a script co-written by Buck Henry and Calder Willingham that is by turns sly, touching, and amazingly fresh 30 years later. [Review of re-release]

I suspect where the plot goes will be polarizing; I’m not sure they landed the plane was my first thought when the credits rolled. But days later, Between the Temples has stuck with me. On the zoom out, I think it’s simply marvelous.

It speaks to both the head and the heart, and it is, in myriad ways, some of the best work the legendary animator has ever created.

This is an animated film that happily has room for both an existentialist dread of death and a grinning joie de vivre.

Limbo may be a smiling teardown of any society that actively facilitates the deportation of its most vulnerable inhabitants, but there’s a wildness in the film’s eyes – a darkness Sharrock only feels comfortable approaching through artifice and sentimentality – that betrays the political message underneath.

Deliciously bleak, black political satire from British director Armando Iannucci.

Far from being atypical, the events of June 12 and the litany of tiny nightmares that led up to that day are brutally obvious.

Bloody Nose, Empty Pockets is as real as it gets, a snapshot stolen from the very year everything turned to sh-t. It’s a masterpiece.

The title, with its built-in weightiness ... well, it’s a tall order, one this latest Pixar animated feature falls just short of. The dominant mood here is not so much soulful as spirited, which is still better than most – and a most welcome gift.

For those willing to submit to its terrible charms, it may be the single most important debut to come out of the Americas in years.

Osama begins in fear and ends in terror. In between there's all manner of hopelessness, deprivation, and death, which is to say that as the first film to come out of a post-Taliban Afghanistan, it's practically a documentary.

The Salt of the Earth travels to the heart of darkness, but thankfully comes out on the other side and leaves you with a hopefulness that no matter what kind of madness and repression happen in the world, there is still hope for humanity.

It’s in this space that masculinity is interrogated, imagination is nourished, and these men get to be defined not by their past trauma but by their resilience and renewed capacity for joy. This is the space in which the empathic Sing Sing soars.

This heartfelt portrait, which brings the artist tantalizingly close, will certainly bring greater renown to Dalton. But she remains, stubbornly, unknowable.

It’s perfectly delightful.

Moreover, dark as Better Days gets – and it is often an uneasy watch because of its delicately-handled themes – there's still a hopeful story about how honesty and courage and fix even the most broken systems.

Sollett’s first feature is a small, but indelible picture, one that approaches the most universal of themes -– first love, confused hormones, parental clashes -– with originality.

Take the politics out and you’d still have a powerhouse action film. But please, don’t take the politics out.

Without ever feeling stagy or theatrical, The Guilty is an exquisite reminder that all you need is four walls and a great performance.

The dead have more fun than the living, again, in Tim Burton’s new stop-motion animated feature, a gift to gothlings everywhere and as exquisitely crafted as one of Federico’s post-mortem still lifes on "Six Feet Under," and just as melodramatically melancholic.

While Gravel’s film resonates with the larger themes of labor inequality, parenthood, job insecurity, and social unrest, Full Time never loses the focus of what it is, which is one of the best thrillers of the year.

There are no easy answers in The Territory, just a plea for awareness, for intervention.

When looking at the one-two punch of The Lighthouse and "The Witch," Eggers seems to find inspiration in how superstition and folklore blurred the boundaries of human knowledge throughout history. His characters live in the space between mankind and mysticism, where things like witches and mermaids can (and maybe even do) gain access to our homes.

Love, death, hope, and hatred: Spider-Man 2 has ’em all, in spades.

There’s something beautifully refreshing about the casual way that it takes on so many everyday issues that we just never talk about.

Mandy, though, is flat-out orders of magnitude a more emotionally adept and shockingly powerful film in virtually every department, from the dazzlingly insane cinematography and lysergically–inclined production design to what I can only believe is Nicolas Cage’s single best performance to date.

The stunning vitality and passion of this film arises not only from the high-voltage personalities involved (especially Ali and King) but from the way they galvanized political and ethnic pride among the people of the poor West African nation.

It's thrilling and lovely and sad and explosive in all the right ways, and it needs to be seen – on the big screen, in 3-D – to be believed.

This movie is delightful – funny and dreamy and sometimes desperately sad.

Excepting the occasional shot that forces the eye on a particular dancer, Wenders largely films the action in a way that re-creates the effect of attending a performance in a proscenium theatre – only without having to scrabble for the best seat in the house. No matter where you are, you're already in it.

In many ways, Animal Kingdom could have become a stylish but routine cops-and-robbers tale. Instead, Michôd shapes this film into a memorable character study about uncaged beasts.

Although a nip and a tuck here and there might improve Hugo's overall pace, there is no denying that this love letter to the movies is something to cherish.

While the story of Wild Reeds may be at times unbearably obscure, the images infuse the film with a drama and beauty that is unrelenting in its impact.

The film is one big advertisement for the multicolored building blocks from which it’s made. The Lego Movie may be the shrewdest marketing ploy you’ve ever seen.

Like the disco sounds that accompany the end of Gloria, this film seems a bit superficial.

Nothing short of horror-hound heaven.

Pure, goofy fun.

Cronenberg’s nonlinear narrative is trying at times – it keeps you nearly as off-kilter as the characters, and surely that’s intentional – but as a character piece about madness and stymied dreams, it’s remarkably realistic.

To its credit, the film never feels like a patchwork, but rather a cohesive whole. Or to be more specific: a haunting and meditative yet often hilarious cohesive whole.

So many follow-up questions are left unasked. The film is at its liveliest when the filmmaker and his subject discuss the twofold presence of human monstrosity and artistic gifts or the human propensity to value talent over craft.

The middle is terrific, especially in a lengthy, unassuming scene in which the three leads sit, sip drinks, and have a good chat: It marks one of the great celluloid pleasures of the year, so virtuosically written, performed, and filmed is it.

The deeply heartfelt Milk is more of a surface skim: a fairly standard biopic – if a very fine one, indeed – but never the transcendent work one would have hoped from the filmmaker or his subject.

This film began the fine tradition of deviating from Ian Fleming's novels, which gave us the suave, sophisticated Bond over Fleming's monosyllabic misogynist.

Heinzerling allows us to read whatever we want into this picture. The endless struggle for money and professional recognition is either a curse or a raison d’être.

The warmth of the film’s gaze has managed to take the political and make it all personal. It’s hard not to feel just as affected by the way these men have moved each other.

The Reason I Jump will be revelatory for viewers who know little about the subject, and affirmative for caregivers and parents of children on the autism spectrum. What everyone, however, can take away from the film is the knowledge that just because someone is unexpressive, it doesn’t mean they are without thoughts and ideas; and just because someone’s bodily motions may appear odd and eccentric, it doesn’t mean they are possessed or unmanageable.

Everyone has secrets, Hosoda posits, and the internet may play a role in our ability to process them, heal our wounds, and maybe find the person who can save us from ourselves. That he does that through a gorgeous SF-tinged version of a classic fairy tale is not simply a bonus (just those components would have made a memorable new version of Villeneuve's timeless story). It's a vital act of recontextualization, not ham-fisted revisionism.

Perhaps one of the cutest children's films ever made.

A compendium of really neat stuff and nifty sequences, and it will just have to do until Vol. 3 or reunification comes along.

In an era in which too many of us automatically accept women's right to choose, Vera Drake reminds us that the time for complacency is not now.

At first, you may question whether this is all some elaborate head game, but gradually the creatively unorthodox approach to pay tribute to a man who gravitated toward unconventional artistry enlightens more often than it disorients.

For all its amazing high points (and this satirically minded takedown of the ludicrousness of the American racist right has many of those) BlacKkKlansman also shows Lee at his weakest. The slight running time drags, a sensation not helped by Terence Blanchard's underwhelming score.

If you grew up in the 1990s post-hippie Massachusetts performance arts scene (as Baker did), Janet Planet may tug on your nostalgia, but you may not feel otherwise drawn to its ethereal qualities.

Sirocco is structured like a children’s book, as a young person’s guide to grownup emotions. Yet it may well be grownups – who can use the story to look back at times in their lives when the word “awe” wasn’t preceded by “shock and” – who will take most from it.

What makes Under the Skin such a mind-blower has everything to do with Johansson’s chillingly unempathetic turn as the, well, whatever she is, coupled with cinematographer Daniel Landin’s disorienting, hallucinogenic visuals.

The U.S. won the Olympic gold, but as seen here, the Russians’ story is by far the more genuinely Olympian, making this a handy victory over all previously told accounts of that so-called miracle.

Co-produced and edited by Austin filmmaker Karen Skloss, Have You Got It Yet? is as exhaustive a study of Barrett as possible. It does suffer from the flaw that affects so many biographical documentaries, that the subject is somehow unique.

Some have remarked that The Post is the story of Kay transforming into Katharine Graham, which is pretty on the mark.

Cunningham adheres to a distinctly romantic approach to the artist: irascible and railing against the hypocrisy of humanity through these wonderful and complicated movements that soar above and beyond.

Efforts to pin down its odd seductive power are as futile as, say, describing the specific sense of disorientation you feel at the instant when a darting cloud suddenly obscures the sun, throwing all your perceptions into a new light before you realize what's happened. Disquieting, but subtly consciousness-expanding. Just see the movie.

While it’s perhaps not the best date film of the year, it is a grim and unmistakable masterpiece of bleak, black sorrow.

It's brutal to watch the bigger-they-are-the-harder-they-fall tragedy of this once-great heavyweight. In fact, it's enough to make you cry.

It's Cronenberg's film, but it's the actors who elevate Eastern Promises from mere thriller to some other, more disturbing plane.

This is a film that skims the surface layer of politesse from human interactions and reveals us as the blustering bundles of ego that we all are.

Even the documentary crew, composed of seasoned climbers and longtime friends, can barely watch their buddy painstakingly move up the peak.

The Roberts are unforgettable figures, and their insiders' perspective and ultimate survival and rebirth provide an exhilarating example of how wondrous things can emerge from the flood.

With elements of psychological terror, spiritual warfare, and even a dash of repressed sexual urges, Saint Maud is the kind of complicated, slippery horror that fans will talk about for years to come. This is the horror film most A24 titles wish they could be.

Misericordia feels like a big metaphysical shrug, sluggish to the point of lethargy.

Scorsese’s outsized presence in the documentary – its very framework built around his relationship to Powell and Pressburger – ends up jamming an immovable object between viewer and subject.

It's a gripping and wild film that can't be tamed.

It upholds deep respect for everything that makes a rom-com great: unabashed joy.

It is filled with unsettling imagery and a paranoiac atmosphere, and has a wicked slant on the horror genre’s obsession with burgeoning sexuality. You’re not likely to shake it anytime soon.

What Dennehy grasped was people - what made them tick. His performances were never one-note, but understood that joy, grief, and and oft-ignored emotions like resignation could all be contained with in a character. He was a big man, but he could keep his performances small, and so it's fitting that one of his final performances, Driveways, is so tiny and fragile that you'll feel like it can fit into your hands.

What it conveys, quite beautifully, is the essentialness in sharing your life with others, through joy and grief.