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.