Akerman, though, is her own best spokesperson as she discusses her films at locations where they were shot.

I Went Down is an offbeat Irish gangster movie that overcomes its meandering nature with engaging performances, an avoidance of formula, and, above all, its characters' way of making us take everything personally - as they certainly do. [1 July 1998, p.F4]

Hegedus and Pennebaker do solid work presenting Wise’s arguments. It’s a tricky narrative challenge to shift from inherently compelling wildlife scenes to abstract courtroom debate, but the film manages it capably, even spicing things up with one justice’s admonition that Wise needs to cut his slavery analogies.

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.

Lupita Nyong’o (“12 Years a Slave”) finally gets a movie role worthy of her status as an Oscar winner. She isn’t hidden behind pixels, as in “Star Wars: The Force Awakens” or “The Jungle Book.” You can see her. She’s magnificent.

Vitkova brings a distinct gender sensibility to her story, especially with her recurring imagery of milk and blood.

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

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.

Half melodrama, half Holy Minimalism, mostly engrossing, the film is guided by the idea of two women moving slowly toward each other in friendship and understanding, one an atheist doctor and the other a worldly bride of Christ.

I like this movie a lot, but it may be too intimate, too slow for some moviegoers.

Personal Shopper is as coolly, beautifully ambiguous as we’ve come to expect from France’s Olivier Assayas, and it contains the kind of mysteries that can leave adventurous audiences tingling pleasurably while others spit out their gummi worms in frustration.

If Gimme Danger never quite solves the secret of Iggy’s onstage atavism — how he pushed the myth of sheer, unhinged rock ’n’ roll abandon until he embodied it better (or worse) than anyone else, ever — it reminds us of when he was, verily, the velociraptor of popular music.

When Ducournau keeps the viewer off balance and doesn’t lose her own, she shows signs of being an outstanding stylist and storyteller, balancing mood, composition, startling images, slow-burning suspense, and sardonic humor.

Debuting at last year’s Cannes Film Festival and updated in light of recent events, it’s a failed film whose failure makes it interesting; it’s less a portrait of Assange than an account of how the scales fell from one admirer’s eyes as she looked at him.

There’s one NSA staffer in particular — seen in shadow, her voice altered — who’s the real star of Zero Days. Her reveal is at once solid journalism and dramatic tour de force. It’s a challenge Gibney meets with ease.

Alain might not have the very particular set of skills of Liam Neeson’s character in “Taken” (2008), but he does have the perseverance of John Wayne’s Ethan Edwards.

The result is nonstop, epistemological slapstick.

Tweel has edited this material into a complex and emotionally exhausting vérité-like tapestry.

In short, the film inserts us into a solipsistic universe of Norman Lear, one that also overlaps many of the most significant social, political, and show-biz issues of the second half of the 20th century.

It’s film noir meets Jason Bourne with a dash of John le Carré, and its chief claim to your attention is our reigning lady badass at its center.

Teller is cornering a market on recklessness in the roles he chooses -- the energy from that demonic drum solo at the end of “Whiplash” seems to carry over into the ferocity with which Vinny pounds at life. He’s not very smart, he’s kind of a jerk, but he never, ever stops, and Bleed for This earns your respect for him.

Kudrow and Robinson are intriguing casting and they get some sharp Bickersons material, but the movie unconvincingly shorthands how they got together. And Revolori’s horndog just feels like the film coasting on his quirky persona from “The Grand Budapest Hotel.”

Kenner and Schlosser not only remind us of a danger that never went away, but honor the men whose bravery was never recognized.

Of course what’s most interesting of all is the art. Huystee’s many closeups and slow pans over Bosch’s teeming backgrounds are transfixing, unsettling, and a rare privilege.

Unlike “Belle,” however, in this case Asante does not allow her story to be overwhelmed by period decor and costumes.

The movie is 141 minutes long but you rarely feel its weight; that’s how confident a filmmaker Gray has become. All The Lost City of Z lacks is a great leading actor, someone magnificent and flawed like a Peter O’Toole.

Monkeys end up supplying the movie’s real drama. While parentally overlooked mischief-maker Tao Tao gets up to the requisite, well, monkey business, he’s also witness to a stunning snatch-and-fly attack by an opportunistic goshawk. It might not be nature on demand, but it’s some scene.

A decent biopic, rousing and well-made and unruffled by depth, with an expertly judged performance at its center.

Because Free Fire is a essentially a comedy of bad manners — a bedroom farce that only happens to take place in a warehouse, with volleys of gunfire rather than slammings of doors — it’s a highly enjoyable 90 minutes, especially if your tastes run to the violent, the absurd, and the violently absurd.

Frantz is pleasurable slow going, developing its themes at an amble but with a measure of suspense, sympathy toward its characters, and a lasting faith in filmmaking craft.

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.

Luke Wilson, Eddie Izzard, director Ash Brannon (“Surf’s Up”), and crew combine these ingredients into something that’s uniquely likable, and even unique-looking at times.

A lean indie horror flick that manages to creep us out even before getting to the part that’s meant to be truly unsettling.

In the end, Mulan 2020 stands as an inspired oddity: A reenvisioned remake that improves on the original even as it owes everything to movies that have come before.

We hear from Spielberg, Martin Scorsese, several still-awed costars, one of Mifune’s sons, Kurosawa’s script supervisor, and a film sword master identified as “killed by Mifune more than a hundred times.”

You may find yourself wishing that Webb (“500 Days of Summer”) would just power through court. We’d gladly watch more of Grace and Evans silhouetted against the sunset, their connection evident in his indulgent posing as her makeshift jungle gym.

Not just one of the best but, at its best, an exercise in pure action-movie propulsion and an essay in how to get from Point A to Point B in the most ingenious and exhausting way imaginable.

It’s only the first week of January, but it will be hard to beat Hong Kong director Ding Sheng’s Railroad Tigers for the best opening credit sequence of the year.

What separates the good teen romances based on young adult novels from the soppy, ridiculous ones? Emotional conviction, mostly, and committed performances. Everything, Everything is mostly one of the good ones, even if it has everything (everything) that makes these movies head south for everyone (everyone) but the target audience of teenage girls.

Exuberantly mixing live action and animation, it's a high-energy dream teaming that shrewdly takes advantage of the chance to goof on Jordan's temporary retirement from basketball and unsuccessful fling at baseball, and even more winningly exploits the antic wildness that always distinguished Warner Bros.' bouncy Looney Tunes. [15 Nov 1996, p.D1]

The movie reaches its emotional climax with the signing of the accords. But even under the best of circumstances, climate change offers no quick solutions. “This is a mission I have dedicated myself to,” Gore says, a mission that remains “a constant struggle between hope and despair.”

Spider-Man: Far from Home isn’t really a superhero movie. It’s a wholesome teen comedy disguised as a superhero movie.

Those who don’t especially like cats — or Istanbul, for that matter — might not get a lot out of Turkish director Ceyda Torun’s love letter to the feline population of her native city. For everyone else, it should be an almost unadulterated pleasure.

Isle of Dogs is a fascinating (and furry) place to visit, but visit is all it does. It’s a good boy. But it’s not a great one.

A lot of the humor, sage as it is, comes from the players, Winger and Letts in particular.

For all her “Clueless” comedy cred, Silverstone just might be at her best conveying a mother’s special knack for witheringly guilting her boys.

For all its smarts, however,the film feels the slightest bit impersonal and risk-free. Coppola has been faulted in various quarters for dropping a female slave from her remake.

Girls Trip is a hilarious reminder that we all need a Flossy Posse to make us laugh until our sides ache and give it to us straight when no one else will. Black girl magic, indeed.

The film concerns itself more with beauty shots of the region’s rugged, intimidating vastness than with “Backdraft”-rivaling imagery of combustion as art.

A hard-R espionage thriller heavy on themes of sexual degradation and graphic, sometimes sadistic violence.

Perhaps it’s just as well that other issues remain in the background and the film focuses instead on the bond between Leavey and Rex. Not only is it a compelling metaphor for a woman finding independence and empowerment, it dramatizes a primal emotional relationship that proves heartbreaking and triumphant.

Stay patient through those Seinfeldian stretches in which Martin isn’t so much acting as performing, and you’ll be treated to the bonus of some surprising emotional depth and poignancy.

The film manages to be both crudely hilarious and bluntly satiric while also establishing sympathetic characters, a sharp contemporary wit, a sly, dry absurdism.

Lines are drawn and connections are made. The intentions are pure. The results are enraging, often in accordance with the filmmakers’ hopes, sometimes against. Personally, I came out of Detroit angrier than I’ve been at a movie in ages, and not entirely the way director Kathryn Bigelow probably wants.

All three actors are excellent. So’s Gil Birmingham, as the victim’s father.

Beatriz at Dinner has been directed with subtle but damning chamber-comedy finesse by Miguel Arteta (“The Good Girl,” “Chuck & Buck”) and written by that great deadpan satirist Mike White (“Chuck & Buck,” “School of Rock,” TV’s “Freaks and Geeks”).

By turns strikingly original and dramatically slick, deeply felt and a little cooked up. It’s well worth seeing, though.

Patti Cake$ charts a path of rise and fall, breakthrough and disappointment, montage and romance that would be woefully predictable if we weren’t having so much fun tagging along. What’s fresh is the central figure, her talent and presence, and an exuberance that all that concrete Tri-State armor can’t hide.

A story steeped in emotional remoteness manages to command our attention in Thoroughbreds, first-time filmmaker Cory Finley’s darkly satirical portrait of the young and disconnected in old-money Connecticut.

Whose Streets? gives us more than enough stories from people not often enough heard, and their refusal to remain silent is invigorating.

Slowly it emerges that Gaga is Naharin’s “dance language,” a way of expressing one’s inner being through external movement. Gaga is dada — for dancers.

More problematic for Hudlin is the nature of the case — only by proving that a rape victim is a liar can Friedman and Marshall win an acquittal for their client. Fortunately, the case (in the film, if not in real life) is resolved in such a way that racism and misogyny are found equally guilty.

The painterly beauty of anime detaches the viewer from the terrible events depicted, but it also makes these cataclysms more accessible to the imagination.

Hirschbiegel and Friedel win credibility points for painting Elser as noble without painting him as a saint.

The final scenes are both ambiguous and terrifying, and they left a preview audience as shaken as any I’ve seen. I had the distinct feeling, though, that a lot of them wouldn’t be recommending the movie to their friends. It gets very far under the skin.

More than an hour passes before Khaled and Wikström’s stories intersect, and though it would be an exaggeration to say each redeems the other, in this film the other side of hope is not despair, but decency.

Animal lovers stand to flinch at the hunting scenes and other moments of violence, all of which appear to have been staged aside from documentary footage of creatures fleeing from gunshots. By contrast, the movie makes a dark but compelling case that the people on the other end of the barrel deserve whatever’s coming to them.

Jolie does not dwell on the atrocities, though a horrifyingly ironic battle scene near the end contains some gruesome imagery.

Rendered heartfelt and compelling by an outstanding cast.

Karmic influences or not, the new "Mighty Joe Young" works. This is one remake that isn't trying to make us forget the original, but seems rather to embrace it and bring it into the present in solidly crafted, family-friendly fashion. [25 Dec 1998, p.C9]

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.

A modern comedy-drama in the Woody Allen-Noah Baumbach mold — urban intellectuals talking their lives in circles — but what keeps it from being a live-action New Yorker cartoon is the heart beating away in the script and the performances. At over two hours, it’s long but it’s true.

Battle of the Sexes is slick and wholly enjoyable, a pop provocation whose medicine goes down easy via outsize, engaging performances in the leads.

Director David Lowery (“Ain’t them Bodies Saints,” “A Ghost Story”) did the adaptation of David Grann’s New Yorker magazine article. His direction is winningly relaxed, and his script has real flavor.

What’s most compelling is the near-documentary quality of Teller, Koale, and Bennett’s characters playing against a VA backdrop of prosthetic limbs and catheter bags, of desensitized clerks and overwhelmed therapists.

Gyllenhaal’s excellent, but, playing his girlfriend, Tatiana Maslany (star of TV’s “Orphan Black”) is something special.

Berg and Wahlberg deliver a relentlessly paced, addictively slick paramilitary thriller actively catering to fans of gonzo brutality and turbocharged machismo.

In this semi-autobiographical period piece, Simón achieves the rare feat of faithfully recreating the mysterious consciousness of a child. Though her techniques can get repetitive and stall the narrative, more often than not her elliptical editing recreates an innocent’s perception of the slow drift of time.

The proof that the “Trip” formula hasn’t become formulaic? How often, and hard, these two can make an audience laugh.

With so much going on, it’s easy to overlook that the most profound and moving relationship in either film is the bond between Elsa and Anna. It’s the most human and least-calculated thing in “Frozen” or Frozen II. Their love is the ultimate special effect. Ice is nice. But sisterhood is what’s really powerful.

Theron is so good that when Tully climaxes by revealing whole new depths to her character, an audience can’t help but feel cheated. Maybe the rosy, complacent final scenes can fool the filmmakers, but not us, and certainly, one senses, not Theron. The movie’s over, but it feels like the star’s just getting started.

The main reason it does not seem contrived is the performances of Catherine Deneuve and Catherine Frot. Because of their authenticity, and Provost’s mostly sure hand at maintaining mood and tone, the film is a moving immersion into the mysteries of time, memory, and mortality.

Some of the best scenes show the family gathering after court sessions to discuss strategy, support each other, and vent.

I walked out of the movie on a cloud of happiness that was only slightly dissipated after a night’s sleep. A critical acquaintance found the whole thing much too icky-sticky sweet. It may be a generational issue.

You’ll be in the mood for it or you won’t. 24 Frames is slow cinema at its slowest, and as meaningful as you want to make it. Above all, it breathes with the sensibility of an artist who saw beauty in people and places where most of us never thought to look.

The idea behind Eugene Jarecki’s nonfiction film The King — you can’t really call it a documentary — is crazy-good inspired.

Plays a little like “Sex and the City” as reconceived by a Minimalist composer. That makes the movie sound like a threat, when actually it’s a dry, lightly sad, and very French comedy of romantic neurosis, brought to us by two great artists, director Claire Denis (“Chocolat,” “Beau Travail,” “White Material”) and star Juliette Binoche.

I wish I could tell you that Mamma Mia! Here We Go Again is ridiculous and I hated it, but the fact is that it’s ridiculous and I loved every minute.

Miss Piggy may not be Babe, but she sure packs a good oink. Her garish performance in the last third of "Muppet Treasure Island" is one of the highlights of this pleasant, cuddly addition to the world of Muppet fantasy. [16 Feb 1996, p.55]

What’s most unexpectedly gratifying is how much energy veteran standup director Jeff Tomsic and his splashy cast pour into ensuring that this is legit entertainment, packed with gonzo wit and even some sentiment.

Billy Crystal's wit and sweet energies carry it past what could have been a fatal degree of mushiness. Although there's rather too much redemption for one cattle drive, and the film's attitude toward women is at best opaque, Crystal brings warmth and ease to his sharp timing and edgy comic style as he and his pals entertainingly usher us into their brotherhood of schlepdom. [7 June 1991, p.53]

Two scenes in Misery are shockingly brutal. But many more are wickedly amusing - especially the ones stemming from the fact that no small part of the writer's torture is the way his deranged muse uses language. There's something simultaneously comical and scary about the way Bates employs euphemisms to keep the lid on. [30 Nov 1990, p.29p]

Solid B-level stuff, better than most filmed King novels. [27 Aug 1993, p.81]

So the big surprise about White Boy Rick is how well the movie works. It’s one thing to know a story is based on nonfiction. Being made to believe its plausibility is something else. White Boy Rick you believe.

Channeling Nye’s own gift for making complex ideas simple and clear, the filmmakers edit together these various aspects of Nye’s life with deceptive ease, drawing on interviews and archival material and following him throughout his hectic schedule. This is not hagiography, however; they don’t back off from examining some of his more controversial endeavors and characteristics. That includes his fondness for the spotlight and his ambition, which in a couple of instances has backfired on him.

Mostly people talk. Lovely to look at, In Transit is even better to listen to. The documentary tells us straightaway that what we hear matters just as much as what we see.

Sharif is a paragon of decency and endurance, but his camera skills are limited and often constrained by circumstances. For the most part this roughness reflects the raw immediacy of the experience.

For 75 minutes or so, Air Doll is the lightest of Kore-eda’s movies, which include the superb “Nobody Knows’’ (2004) and “Still Life’’ (2008). Gradually, though, the tender music-box score — by one-man Japanese band world’s end girlfriend — is tinged with foreboding.