Works best when it seems like it's not working at all.

Director Candler acquits herself nicely in her third feature-length film, never allowing the agonizing narrative to drown in self-pity. She keeps the film’s head above water despite the occasional contrivances in her screenplay.

Even in the hail of bullets, shrieking needle drops, and blinding lighting effects, John Wick: Chapter 4 still works as a cohesive, linear film with a strangely philosophical heart.

The strangest biographical film ever made is also one of the most charming, melancholy and quirkily humorous films of the year.

Las Vegas may demolish its own history, but The Last Showgirl will break your heart by showing you a woman clinging to the rubble of her life.

Final Account is about today as much as yesterday, and that makes it perhaps the most urgent World War II documentary of them all.

The Duke of Burgundy doubles down on the genre conventions and ends up being all the better for it. That’s thanks in large part to the score by the UK group Cat’s Eye, the two flawless lead performances, and cinematographer Nicholas D. Knowland’s keen eye for creating a more-than-acceptable simulacrum of Franco and Rolin’s hallucinatory, dreamlike vibes.

DreamWorks has gathered for the movie and for these extracurricular projects an amazing collection of voice talent that complements the film's stunning technical achievements.

Director Lane and screenwriter Thom Stylinski take a lighthearted, folksy approach to telling Brinkley’s life story, using fairly unsophisticated animation and twangy vocalizations in the spirit of the man’s carefully created image.

Most importantly, Sherman and Abbasi deflate the myth that has dominated the last decade, that somehow Trump is some kind of aberration from the historical Republican Party, perverting it to his will.

August: Osage County is not for the timid or those who prefer family reunions without histrionics. This film is like a long day’s journey into another damn day.

Goodbye to Language is the kind of cinematic essay that Godard has come to specialize in; it’s really a montage of thoughts, aphorisms, and images, and not a story, although there are some consistent characters (often naked – and how better to hold our interest in their philosophical queries?) and one dog.

Living in Emergency, then, is like a hard slap to the face: There is nothing remotely romantic about this grim depiction of two missions in Liberia and Congo in the mid-2000s.

As in his previous documentaries, Brügger’s actions and tone are shot through with pitch-black gallows humor and dizzying moments of absurdist farce, equal parts Hunter Thompson, Michael Moore, and the great, self-effacing British journalist Jon Ronson.

I laughed, I cried, I longed for a pet dragon to call my own.

Favreau keeps the picture throttling forward with a carefree charm.

No background material is going to help the viewer who isn't already aware of why a Fugees reunion is such a cool thing to witness, but it's impossible not to get caught up in this party's good vibe.

This film is a pleasurable experience, but it’s a frustrating one as well. There’s a nagging feeling we should expect something more from this guy. To borrow the most quotable line of dialogue from "The Room" (bellowed at the top of the lungs): “YOU ARE TEARING ME APART, FRANCO!”

It's a rattling, heartrending performance (Moore) in, yes, a long, hard slough of a film – one that is well worth the journey, if not a repeat trip.

Winger is as good here as she’s ever been, and Letts, an actor whose face you know but whose name you can never quite remember, is terrific, communicating his lust for Lucy with dry aplomb.

Chef is filled to the brim with the kind of heart and vivacity that makes up for the film’s familiar storyline.

For the most part, though, Nothing Bad manages to hold a tight grip, evocative as it is of Lars von Trier’s similarly unflinching "Dogville" and equally bound to start some conversations among those willing to stomach it.

As for Johnson's grasp of the era in tech firms, it's astoundingly accurate, so much so that you'll swear you can smell the switch from the Sprite-and-sweaty-T-shirts years to the days of chrome and corporate art.

What's so intensely pleasurable about The Artist, however, is not its predetermined seriocomic trajectory but the endless parade of smartly creative and self-referential gags, which include all manner of sly, silent delights; the inevitable Jack Russell; and even an extended orchestral cue of Bernard Herrmann's, cribbed outright from "Vertigo."

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.

It's another tour de force performance from Jenkins, in the same week as his headturning performance as the pater familias of a clan of grifters in "Kajillionaire."

It's a period piece about the origins of psychoanalysis and the sexual confusions of its progenitors that is eloquent and handsomely made, if never quite revelatory.

Timecrimes is a tremendously entertaining bit of Kafka that whirlpools down into "The Twilight Zone."