28 Years Later isn’t sure what kind of movie it wants to be: Action-comedy? Gory grindhouse? Serious family drama? Despite some interesting concepts and commendable lead performances, its identity problems alienate. It seems like the years have finally caught up.

Tamblyn's surprisingly measured performance commands attention.

Succeeds in its central goal: to turn a forgotten class of women into real, memorable human beings who deserve a different life.

Here the result is often disjointed and frustrating. That 2,000 people lived in the cellars of the Hermitage during the siege of Leningrad is certainly remarkable but not altogether germane to the fate of art during the war.

It's the kind of romantic comedy that doesn't cheapen the word ''heartwarming.''

Wants to claim Bukowski (1920-1994) as a 20th-century West Coast Walt Whitman -- a people's poet of modern degradation. Through a selective presentation of his writing and a reverently crass treatment of his life, it makes a funny, often intensely moving case, and you're having such a good time that you're glad to let it.

The film's bountiful warmth and gusto do their work. By the end, we feel part of the family, too.

A less than inspiring documentary about extremely inspiring individuals, High Ground is worth seeing for what it shows rather than how it shows it.

Think of it as "Glee" without music. Without a net, too.

As narrative, the film doesn't quite work, but as a pungent ethnic scrapbook filled with eccentricity and deadpan humor, The Plot Against Harry is a treasure chest of quirkiness. [20 Sep 1989, p.82]

Code Black shows the passion, frustration, and skill of those who work to heal despite the system, but it remains in the dark about why that system is broken and how it can be fixed.

What unites the film’s two halves — what makes it worth watching, period — is the road Close’s Joan travels as she decides whether to reclaim authorship of her own life. It’s a diamond forged under pressure — a performance of great fury that only finds its voice at the end.

How to Train Your Dragon 2 recaptures those lyrical highs. But returning writer-director Dean DeBlois also aims to layer on more poignancy for Baruchel and his castmates to play. At points, we’re left feeling a little detached.

Career Girls is a film that knows how wounding and complicated life can be, yet still believes in, and convincingly renders, the healing power of friendship. [15 Aug. 1997, p.D4]

The quiet strength of Dheepan is how it shows these lives — the people in our midst we never see — rolling on forever, adapting, struggling, and finding their way.

How’s the movie? Extremely entertaining and fairly pointless, and it will probably be taken for a classic by a generation that has likewise never heard of Tim Burton’s “Ed Wood” (1994), a movie that plumbed the wayward soul of its misbegotten moviemaker to depths The Disaster Artist never manages to touch.

It's as much a portrait of a kind of artist as it is a document of a city's evolving sense of style.

It’s like a collection of short stories — most dystopian, some not — trying to pass itself off as a novel.

Merry, filthy, unstoppably hormonal, Serbis feels very much like the sort of movie that happens when no one is minding the store.

The result is one of the most unforgiving ground-level documentaries about the music business ever made -- the six-string equivalent of "Hoop Dreams."

It runs out of story about midway through, and spends more time attempting to make these guys look cool than showing us the importance of their acts of linguistic civil disobedience.

As with the simpler and stronger “Rivers and Tides,” there are moments where you may want to stop the film to assure yourself you’re seeing what you’re seeing, so disordering to the senses are Goldsworthy’s re-orderings of nature.

It’s both ridiculous and ridiculously romantic, which is an apt description of a work shaped like a heart and structured like a pretzel.

The bleakness of Rosetta will not be for all, but it's one of the best films of the year.

A bleak road movie that often ambles. But its many moments of poetic grace make this haunting and harrowing journey a rewarding one.

The cast is uniformly good, and the stories are intriguing.

The film’s a character piece with a tightening noose of suspense, and while it has its artsy-indie-dawdly moments, it’s disturbing in ways that aren’t easy to shake. Is the movie necessary? Do we need a “John and Lee: Portrait of Two Serial Killers”? Because it shines a light, however hesitant, into the cramped, resentful mind-sets that fester in the corners of America, I’d have to say yes.

This is the rare occasion when one of these brittle, neurotic social comedies serves as the vehicle for a woman’s sensibility rather than a man’s. In the process, Miller quietly but forcefully reinvents an entire movie genre.

Harmless enough, but "indie comedy" sounds like something better seen at Urban Outfitters than at a movie theater.

In Every Little Step, the performers bleed, sweat, cry theater - without having to tell us.

It is hard to rate Vikander’s acting abilities from this performance. Her sly automaton in “Ex Machina” had more emotional range.

The new film is slender, and it plays obliquely with the style of the 20th-century Japanese master Yasujiro Ozu: simple shots of simple people revealing universal truths.

On the one hand, welcome to the music business. On the other, if A Tribe Called Quest can't stay together who can? It's a worry that eventually gets at the eccentricity of both the music and the movie.

Lady Macbeth” is thus simple in the telling while leaving us with a lapful of thorns; it’s as sensual as a tryst and as wintry as a grave.

Washington hasn't been this relaxed in years. When he feels like it he can be the most charismatic star in the movies.

In person, as seen in Fifi Howls From Happiness, Mitra Farahani’s ambitious and self-reflexive documentary of the artist’s last days, Mohassess enthusiastically acts out those traits. It’s a performance enhanced by his diabolical, phlegm-choked laughter at his own bleakly ironic pronouncements and denunciations of the world in general.

A likable but cliched star-crossed romance set along the post-WWII Havana-New York jazz axis, the Spanish-made film features terrific music, passable artwork, and characters who stubbornly refuse to become more than sketches.

With a minimum of melodrama and a fluid camera style that weaves restlessly in and out of the throng, Something in the Air is attentive to the users and the used in this generation of supposed equals. There’s no anger to the film, though, and what sometimes feels like passivity is really just the fond, unromantic gaze of an artist carefully considering his younger self.

For the first 90 minutes, the film has a light touch that centers its story and makes us identify with Shayda.

Murphy grounds the film, in part because the actor has the gift of motormouth hustle himself, but also because he gets the anger at the core of Rudy Ray Moore — the rage to be noticed that propelled Moore away from Arkansas, an abusive stepfather, and the life of a black sharecropper.

The motley crew’s repartee makes for comedy that’s surprisingly consistent, yet freewheeling and sharp enough to pinball from Kevin Bacon to Jackson Pollock and back.

Unfortunately, Hatley chooses not to offer much context or background history regarding that or other aspects of Helm’s half-century career, other than archival footage of Helm and the Band in their prime, press clippings, and comments from the Band “biographer,” Barney Hoskyns.

I’m not sure Lore holds up to repeated viewings — Shortland’s style is so feverish it could quickly turn precious — but it demands to be seen at least once.

I Carry You With Me is an act of memory, of romance, and of friendship all in one — a movie that takes the kind of undocumented immigrants’ saga we think we know and recasts it in a dreamy, bittersweet light.

It's often a downer, with a sweet but largely passive protagonist.

It's hard to dislike a film that wants to say that the bereft have to move on with their lives, that death is part of living, and that poverty is a state of mind. But it's not impossible.

Despite the film’s tendency to drag, Vicky Krieps remains compulsively watchable, as always. She almost saves the movie.

It's superb filmmaking, uncluttered and utterly assured. Miike places us in the household of Li, offering up rich, deep colors, with an almost painterly exploration of fields of depth and volume.

It's a tale powerfully told, nevertheless, with an unusual vantage point in its upper-class young hero.

It’s no surprise that [Rex] gives Mikey everything he’s got. What is a surprise is how much he’s got to give. The performance is riveting until, like the movie, it just becomes too much.

Both actors are among the best, most intuitively creative we have, and whatever transpires offscreen in Crowe’s case, onscreen they only serve their characters. Neither man showboats here, and it’s a thrill to watch them work.

This may not be the greatest movie version of the novel, but it's possibly the truest.

A Monster Calls is a portrait of coping that’s both fascinating and heartbreaking.

The man's mythology precedes him, and it's the movie's failing that we don't understand how or whether he uses that mythology because he knows it's good business.

Every moment... is a cleverly constructed live-action joke on aloofness: The world is ending, and these people are too self-centered to notice.

While the words belong to the storyteller, the story in And Everything Is Going Fine appears to be telling itself.

At its best, which is often, Their Finest by Danish director Lone Scherfig (“Italian for Beginners;” “An Education”) manipulates appearance and reality, relief and recognition, with exquisite finesse. As befits a film about making films.

Director Bahrani has always buried his social concerns in story and character; he’s one of the very few American filmmakers to pay attention to this country’s poor, and he applies his creativity to the paradoxes of India without missing a step.

In its seriousness, Syriana has an absorbing, ominous roundness that plays even better with a second viewing.

Silent Souls is a road movie, a guy movie, a treatise on burial customs in northern Russia. Mostly it's a sigh at the way entire cultures can slip away in the flow of time. It's lovely and slow and melancholic and short - 75 minutes, yet you feel you've been gone for an epoch or two.

Swift, brutal, lurid, often overheated, and occasionally comical, but it’s also a serious, well acted, and unromantic exploration of the rise and demise of a terrorist gang whose radicalism ultimately reached beyond the young men and women who set it in motion.

A delightful road movie.

It's taken Dreamgirls 25 years and several false starts to get to the screen, so it's a shame to see what a rush job it feels like.

Does a terrific job of evoking the electric magic of an extraordinary era.

Zappa also gently touches on Frank’s contempt for the general run of humanity, not just Tipper Gore and other members of the Parents Music Resource Center. He spoke witheringly of his appearance on “Saturday Night Live,” where the cast made fun of his lifelong no-drugs stance.

Flight is a so-so movie with Denzel Washington as a commercial-airline pilot who crash-lands a plane while drunk, high, hung over, and horny. It doesn't do much that you couldn't anticipate just by seeing the trailer - the trailer is more exciting than the movie itself.

It's also [Coppola's] most gloriously extravagant film since "One from the Heart." [12 Aug 1988]

The movie works as a twinned character study, a moral suspense thriller, and an indictment of an America stacked against its working classes.

"Trial” is so inherently compelling — and so directly germane to an America where the government labels cities “anarchist jurisdictions” and states are drawing up laws against free assembly — that it doesn’t need the frills. Let the kids know what happened the way it happened. They can handle the truth.

The perfect movie to curl up with on a rainy day, Flora and Son tells us that music is the tie that binds people together, whether they’re ex-lovers, potential partners, or a scared mother reaching out to her equally skittish son hoping he will reach back.

The Lunchbox isn’t an example of bravura moviemaking or cutting-edge style but simply a tale told with intelligence, restraint, and respect.

Short, perhaps, on originality but long on savvy and panache, Dave is a feel-good film that's bound to have a lock on the popular vote. [07 May 1993, p.25]

Shine a Light did something I didn't think was possible. It got me caring about the Rolling Stones again.

It's all we ask of a film but almost never get, as it first makes us squirm, then makes us cheer.

Stunning performances help make The Sleepy Time Gal a thoughtful, moving piece that faces difficult issues with honesty and beauty.

It's that central dance between teacher and student that makes the movie both hard to watch and worth your attention - a subtle waltz of power in which it's difficult to tell who's leading until too late.

Turns out to be one of the finer peeks into the creative process of staging a play. Granted, that's a tiny genre, and the film's core audience -- theater majors and the people who love them -- is narrow. The lessons, however, are big.

Flattens you with concussive detail and the awfulness of war; it plays like "Saving Private Ryan" as remade by a Continental mathematician flipping out on Ecstasy.

A remarkable look at the people behind an organization that understands its limitations.

By far the best part of Say Her Name: The Life and Death of Sandra Bland is that we get to see her face and hear her words.

Behind the cool, nonjudgmental gaze of Cartel Land is a despair that never comes to terms with itself.

The idea is to share with us that this show happened. But gluttons for these artists and for music festivals in general might wonder, as I have, whether there's any way the filmmakers might share more of the remaining 123 1/2 hours.

“A place is the people,” a closing screen credit tells us. It’s a lovely sentiment, but “We Grown Now” feels more like fleeting memories of those people rather than a fully formed reminiscence.

It would violate a taboo to relate how this movie magic, masterfully orchestrated by Weinstein and Measom, is done. Their film is as smooth as Randi’s patter and demonstrates how the documentarian’s camera is quicker than the eye.

The documentary has its memorable moments. Period footage of the now-legendary 1973 auction of contemporary art by the collector Robert Scull is riveting.

It goes for broke on high-roller, high-energy scenes, and wins big. [11 Jun 1993, p.41]

This is a party, and you're either having a good time or wondering when Akin is going to get down to business. But for an hour and a half, fun is the business.

Goofy is easy. Earnest is easy in a different way. Disturbing is both easy and hard. They’re all dissimilar, and Hail Satan? has lots of all three.

Much about the new film feels simultaneously playful and dangerous, with fanciful inventions like the whistling language taught to the hero by the gangsters so they can communicate out loud in secret.

Bizarre, fascinating, and frustrating documentary.

A cautionary tale for the fleet-fingered social media generation, Zola explodes off the screen in a burst of emoji confetti.

The truth is that this is a mystery movie, and the mystery is trying to figure out exactly what the heck is going on here.

The film's case against overdevelopment needs to be, and could be, aggressive, airtight. It should play to the unconverted. Instead, The Unforeseen gives us . . . poetry.

Like most films about gay men, Undertow can't envision a normal life of couplehood. But Fuentes-Léon works in a blithe and breezy magic-realist manner that fends off attendant feelings of depression.

This crudely powerful film is a throwback. Unfolding at an elliptical pace that feels like a revelation, or tedium, or both, Japon recalls the glory days of 1970s art-house filmmaking.

By the end of Tickled the realm of superficial giggles has long been left behind. Though his lighthearted tone has difficulties keeping up with each new sinister discovery, Farrier has exposed in the least likely setting the network of power and money that preys on the weak with impunity.

Piercingly co-written and directed by Susanne Bier, the movie dramatizes one man's collapse and the other's surprising maturation.

The movie’s a chocolate box of nougaty performances, from Christopher Plummer’s delightful depiction of Tolstoy as a ribald old naïf to Paul Giamatti twirling his waxed mustache and playing to the gallery as Vladimir Chertkov.