A sweet screenful of quirky chaos.

Who’s the audience for this? Well, me and about five other movie junkies at the crossroads of history and art. Maybe you, too, even if your knowledge of Buñuel stops with the slashed eyeball of “Un Chien Andalou” (1929), still one of the most shocking images in all cinema.

The film is actually a major artistic breakthrough for Araki, a onetime bad boy of independent filmmaking. Its psychological intelligence, attention to emotional currents, and humanity are surprises.

In a way, Howard has made a philosophical drama about the way men move through the world. It’s just a really, really fast drama.

Adults should find its simmering drama at least as compelling as teens will, even if parental figures are only slightly more present here than in a " Peanuts" comic strip.

Bully contains some moments of real alarm and, in the school bus, one nightmarish motif.

The lead performers put it over, with Lewis very appealing as Ellie. She plays this small, fierce character as comfortable in her social invisibility yet increasingly exasperated by the insularity and ethnic slurs of her small town.

Even at the movie's most ridiculous (and Mongol is not without its ridiculous moments), this is a picture you laugh with more than laugh at.

Zooey Deschanel shows off her singing on a couple of generically pleasant soundtrack ditties.

The self-congratulatory, back-patting nature of this film is what makes it so insulting.

The director can work wonders within his celluloid universe, but when the time comes to hand us back to reality, he stumbles. With this movie, that hurts.

A moody, mannered, and lingering coming-of-age story with a Stephen King-like twist.

Westmoreland’s narrative is cluttered with undeveloped subplots and loose ends. He compensates by evoking the era with images drawing from painters like Gustave Caillebotte and Toulouse-Lautrec and soundtrack music that ranges from Strauss-like waltzes to Erik Satie’s “Gymnopédies.”

The “Cowabunga” dudes have become “Cowa-boring.”

You really don't need to borrow someone else's kids to ponder and enjoy what Millions has to offer.

Ronit’s ebullient spirit spreads vivacity, discontent, and resentment. She offers the possibility of choice — between secular independence or religious tradition. But Lelio opts for an insipid neutrality that does a disservice to both.

It isn't often that lives of quiet desperation are served up with such pearly restraint.

This engaging ensemble comedy that could have been called ''Father Doesn't Know Best.''

Intoxicating fun.

With all that good will and with an abundance of source material, why does the documentary Love, Gilda feel like such a disappointment? It’s fine for casual viewers: you’ll come away reasonably satisfied if you want to catch up on the basics of Radner’s life and career while having your nostalgia gently stroked.

The film’s made with more heart than art and more skill than subtlety, and it works primarily because of the women that it portrays and the actresses who portray them. Best of all, you come out of the movie knowing who Katherine Johnson and Dorothy Vaughn and Mary Jackson are, and so do your daughters and sons.

This is more than retro, it’s a re-imagination of the past, of the stories and role models that could have been available to Black audiences (and white ones) but weren’t. Better late than never.

As a general survey of Williams’s life, as a collection of precious backstage outtakes, and as a nostalgic trip back into his comedy stylings, Robin Williams: Come Inside My Mind does the trick. It’s a sad, but satisfying, visit with a special man.

The end result's a muddle and a good argument for why actors shouldn't direct themselves first time out. Farmiga's a generous and observant performer, but she lacks a shaping hand, not to mention the ruthlessness that's probably a necessity for any director.

It's so hypnotically breathtaking, you don't realize you're not breathing. By the final shot, you don't realize you're crying either, but there go the tears.

"This was the Rosa Parks moment,'' another participant says, "the time that gay people stood up and said, 'No.' ''

A pretty decent crime drama - not a patch on the best parts of his directorial debut, 2007's "Gone Baby Gone,'' but it's moody and grim and engrossing if you approach it with the right expectations.

Tom Bean and Luke Poling’s documentary shows that its subject’s true talent may have been for an occupation no less rarefied than the ones he failed at: movie star.

It’s a secondhand vision, when all is said and done, but that doesn’t have to be a bad thing when the craft is rapturous.

The archival footage in Bill Siegel’s documentary The Trials of Muhammad Ali is wondrous. How could it not be, featuring the gentleman in the title.

In Darkness is a disaster movie, and the disaster is the Holocaust. In the space between the two halves of that sentence, you have what works about the film and what's a little creepy.

Frears makes every note count for a lot in this beautifully gauged microcosm of big emotions expressed in small gestures.

In a way, Lipes’s documentary resembles Jonathan Demme and David Byrne’s “Stop Making Sense” (1984) — in which Byrne goes on stage solo with a beat box and the rest of the Talking Heads gather one by one — as much as it does Wiseman’s films.

Through a fluke of release-schedule timing, it arrives as the anti-“Inglourious Basterds’’ - a story about heroic Nazi-killers in which heroism itself sinks under bewildering crosscurrents of motive and uncertainty.

As with “American Sniper,” Sully gets a little gooey in the final scenes, opting for a simplistic celebration of American know-how, where everything up to that point has been darker and more nuanced. Whether you want to accept it or not, Eastwood remains one of the best and most quixotic filmmakers we have, torn between jingoism and doubt, exceptionalism and despair.

"Pulp Fiction" wannabes don't get much slicker or edgier than Go.

What Herzog almost accidentally captures in his viewfinder is profound and unsettling: an entire American underclass where at least some prison time is the norm and where only luck and the grace of God keep a person from either wrong end of the shotgun.

The movie is “Gravity” cubed, an epic of space travel and human destiny that swings by Saturn, slingshots through a wormhole, and pinballs across a handful of planets on its way to a rendezvous with infinity, conveniently located inside a black hole.

It's like an After-School Special version of "Pan's Labyrinth ," and I actually mean that as a compliment.

Though director Ziad Doueiri’s uneven treatment of this provocative premise suffers from contrivance and implausibility, it nonetheless arouses profound questions about fanaticism, cultural identity, and the essential mystery of other people, even those we think we know best.

It's a wrenching, ennobling essay on teamwork and the hard struggle to change one's life.

Most coming-of-age tales chart a course from childhood to maturity. Scrapper flips the premise, allowing a kid who grew up too fast the luxury of slowing down to savor childhood.

“Happy” isn’t meant ironically. Herzog, who narrates, clearly loves, and envies, the trappers’ elemental existence and connection to nature.

Warm, wry, endearing.

(Washington's is) an astonishing performance, partly because it's so devoid of histrionics, and it has Oscar nomination written all over it.

Bell is utterly persuasive as the boy literally yearning to leap beyond the oppressively apparent confines of his world.

Ultimately, Joy Ride is an uneasy melding of “Girls Trip” and “Return to Seoul”; it’s two pieces that work well by themselves but clash when forced to collaborate.

Kung Fu Panda goes nowhere surprising even as its images unscroll handsomely before our eyes. The sound could go out in the theater, and you wouldn't ask for your money back.

Maybe the key is how nicely self-aware the move is. On the soundtrack, for example, we hear both “Material Girl” and “Money (That’s What I Want)” sung in Mandarin. Everything’s so over the top it’s a bit weightless, which in this context is a compliment.

The sardonic laughs include title cards with the name of each character who has joined the ranks of the disappeared.

It’s a pleasure watching Broadbent and Mirren share the screen. That’s true even when they bicker, which they frequently do.

Simple in outline, liberating and exquisite, The Secret Garden is loaded with meaning. [13 Aug 1993, p.43]

A shrewdly acted, bittersweet comedy.

By the end of “When Fall Is Coming,” we recognize the film for what it is: a character study elevated by Vincent’s superb performance.

There's no dust on this snazzy new Hercules. It's got lots of muscle and lots of lift. [27 June 1997, p.C1]

I almost wish A Mighty Heart were about the Captain, and I'd bet director Michael Winterbottom does, too. The character contains all the contradictory impulses of this region of the world that the West tries and miserably fails to boil down to black and white.

Becoming Traviata might make you feel you’ve seen Verdi’s opera, or it might make you want to see it.

What’s stimulating and fun about “Raise Hell” is quite stimulating and fun. But the more smitten you become with its subject — and it’s hard not to be — the more you feel there’s something missing or that what isn’t missing is yet too thin.

Zeiger's movie is a timely salute to the risky and brave men and women who had the temerity not only to think for themselves but to speak their minds.

I don’t think the third act of Dream Scenario works at all. It’s too obvious. However, its saving grace is Cage, whose petulance in these late sequences never ceases to be as funny as it is uncomfortable to watch.

Lovers of science-fiction pictures will certainly go home satisfied. [18 Jun 1954, p.15]

Everyone in the documentary agrees that the undertaking was truly terrible and misconceived. The extensive footage here does nothing to contradict such a view.

Beneath the japery and rough-edged filmmaking is an abiding love for the work — its passion and resilience — and respect for the women whose hidden lifelong language that work may have been.

It's rare that a crime movie achieves such emotional complexity, but this one is smartly layered.

Music by John Williams is a fine tribute to the magic of a legendary maestro.

Freeman portrays Mandela not as a saint but as a man who knows he has the political freedom of being seen as one; it’s a majestically two-dimensional performance with glimpses of a third dimension peeking through.

Seemingly limitless access is what makes the movie interesting.

A rousing movie that’s satisfyingly infused with traditional Disney sentiment.

Like the children’s films of Iranian directors Abbas Kiarostami and Jafar Panahi, Bad Hair explores such social pathology, in part, in the guise of a kids’ movie. But it also takes on the intensity of more pointed films such as “Bicycle Thieves” (1948) and even Hector Babenco’s sensationalistic “Pixote” (1981).

There’s an optimism here that coexists with humor, joy, sadness, and more than one laugh-out-loud moment.

It's foreign, it's inspiring, it has an adorably resourceful kid; it depicts grinding misery in a land far from West Newton, and it holds out the possibility of clambering over all that misery to attain your dream.

This is one of the year’s best films. It’s also one of Lee’s finest joints.

The film's a minuet fetishistically repeated until either the audience or the lovers go crazy. I'd say it was a tie.

The storytelling here is at times as awkward as its hero, and since it is a Gray film Two Lovers takes itself dreadfully seriously. Yet it's one of the few movies I've seen recently that improves on a second viewing, in part because Phoenix does such remarkably subtle work.

The coming of age is not just that of character but of a whole nation, and despite the mild-seeming moniker, the Jasmine Revolution earned its victories the hard way.

The result is nonstop, epistemological slapstick.

Tarantino may have nicked the title first, but this is the real ''Pulp Fiction," with all the drama and the dead ends that implies.

Neil Young Journeys is easily the least of the three documentaries director Jonathan Demme has made with the legendary rocker; but in its shaggy, eccentric way, it may be the truest.

When coupled with the itchy urgency of Garfield’s outstanding performance as Jon, the brio with which Miranda infuses tick, tick … BOOM! helps to camouflage the fundamentally clichéd nature of the dilemma faced by the protagonist.

She Said is successful where it matters most: It shows just how easy it is for predatory men in power to be kept there by an equally corrupt system of people who either look the other way or protect them.

A Matter of Taste, French director Bernard Rapp's polished second film, swims in lies, ones that sate at first, but soon intoxicate, seduce, and drown.

One of the most compelling films the Holocaust has yet produced.

While no individual plot strand is vividly compelling, their interplay makes for a hearty and humanistic mix, carried by the performances.

If you've seen the Beatles documentary "Let It Be," you know what four men who are heartily sick of one another look like, and in 2001, Metallica had been recording twice as long as the Fab Four.

You won't see a more humane and delicately moving riff this year on the theme of getting clean.

I'm still not sure what "source code" means here. I suspect the actors, the director, and the screenwriter haven't a clue either. But the thing keeps you watching.

Under DaCosta’s sure, steady direction, Little Woods belongs with movies like “Frozen River” (2008), “Winter’s Bone” (2010), “Wind River” (2017), and last year’s “Leave No Trace” — dramas about overlooked communities that ache with empathetic detail. The movie steers clear of polemics, though, and puts its faith in its characters, specifically the exhausted, unbreakable bond of sisterhood that unites these siblings.

Joe is one more in the line of Southern Gothic miserabilism that includes “Winter’s Bone” and “Beasts of the Southern Wild,” films that many have praised but some find condescending.

There is a fair share of such Betty White-ish feistiness on display, but the pathos creeps in unexpectedly.

The images in The Song of Sparrows have a poetic grace that's to be desired in storytelling. You feel Majidi's hand much more than you do God's.

As directed by Nobuhiro Yamashita , the sluggish haze between extracurricular activities is exquisitely captured and framed, then patiently edited. Every shot feels like a gift.

Brilliantly, the movie becomes a double coming-of-age story. The parents' political awakening parallels their daughter's.

Thor’s bloodsport detour diverts an inordinate amount of the filmmakers’ attention, and ours, from the whole end-of-days buildup. Hopkins gets short shrift, as does Idris Elba’s returning interdimensional gatekeeper, Heimdall.

Barrels along on a diverting enough sugar high, but in the hangover that follows you may wonder where the wonder was.

Referencing the popular song, the movie's title reminds us that "the fruit of the poor lemon is impossible to eat." That, in a rind, is Riklis's deeply frustrated view of his country's stalemate, but you can only take a metaphor so far before it falters in the face of endless geopolitical complexity.

It’s a tale as old as time and a story ripped from the news feed; a dream of connection and an anvil to the heart. See it for the arrivals of a directorial talent and a stunning young actress, and see it to remind yourself of this country’s ancient and eternal sins.

A compelling and eerily effective little drama.

The film's unhurried pace is actually one of its strengths. Entirely appropriately, the tale unfolds like a lazy summer afternoon and concludes with the crisp clarity of a fall dawn. That's not just a farm movie, that's life.