As he gets older, Todd Solondz outgrows the cheap shocks and easy nihilism and stumbles toward a mellow misanthropy. He compares his new film Wiener-Dog to “Au Hasard Balthazar” (1966) and “Benji” (1974), though it tends more toward the latter than toward Robert Bresson’s masterpiece.

The Founder is a solid, smart, worthwhile film and the only remaining mystery is why the Weinstein Company is burying it with a quiet January release rather than pushing its much-loved star into the awards race with the usual fanfare.

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.

Our advice: Forgive any conflicting elements and just drink them right down. They might be a peculiar blend, but they’re well crafted, just as you’d expect from Loach.

The movie is big and ostentatious when its delicate, sad story needed to be more quietly told. Anderson definitely understands this idea; despite playing a chaotic and unlikable character, she’s the most stable element here.

Gives three first-rate actors a chance to stretch, and they do.

As is par for the course in a "Fast and Furious'' movie, the only persuasive physical intimacy is between the men.

Consistently weird and frequently wonderful, “Sasquatch Sunset” uses its high-concept premise to consider a host of themes: collective living, coexistence with nature, longing stirred by seclusion.

Absurdly entertaining even after it disappears up its own hindquarters in the last act, and it gives some of our weirder actors ample room to play.

These actors offset the modern-day ordinariness of the leads -- Jackson, especially, seems as if he's just driven over from a mall tour -- and so, ultimately, does the exquisite moral dilemma of Tuck Everlasting.

Boys of all ages, by contrast, will be mesmerized by the relentless, breathtakingly visualized action.

If there were a liberal equivalent to Fox News (no, not MSNBC, which is so much milk-fed veal to Rupert Murdoch's steak tartare), Boogie Man is the sort of programming it would thrive on.

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.

The studied impassivity of The Bling Ring feels increasingly like a dodge as the movie progresses; we sense an anger and a moralism that the director’s too cool or too wary or too close to engage.

It’s never a good sign when the most dramatic scene in a movie owes its power to C-SPAN footage. That’s the case with The Report.

Any metaphoric meaning is left up to the viewer, who will be too busy basking in the fine performances to give it much thought.

After Love is like being stuck at a dinner with an unpleasant couple who won’t stop squabbling.

Tales, which (as the title suggests) is an "Arabian Nights"-style omnibus, has similarly eye-bending backgrounds but a creatively monochromatic foreground that comes to feel like a limitation.

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.

While Q & A derails, it's still marked by a love of language and a genuine civic passion that isn't afraid to face ugly facts, and of how many films can that be said? [27 Apr 1990, p.29p]

The Trigger Effect is a smarter-than- average thriller that proves David Koepp can direct films as well as write them. [30 Aug 1996, p.F1]

The movie’s fun to watch, but you can tell it was a lot more fun to make, and that’s a problem. The party stays up on the screen; down here, it’s been over for a year.

This is a film that believes deeply in ghosts, and half of them are in its director’s head.

With its overly solemn, by-the-numbers approach, “Cyrano’' doesn’t make a strong enough case for another go at the story.

This is an unusual role for Mortensen, but after you’ve played a thinking woman’s hunk so long and so well, what else is there?

Too eccentric to be a massive box-office hit yet too mainstream for a cult following; it nevertheless deserves to be seen. Mostly, it works as a singular and slightly wobbly mash-up of two creative artists and their differing sensibilities, and it benefits greatly from the contributions of one brilliant actor and one little girl. Maybe I’m squibbling, but I think it’s pretty delumptious.

The movie is strong and holding as long as it's shambling about in the Montauk dusk; when Dieckmann has to bring things to a resolution, Diggers turns ordinary -- sweet, but you've seen it many times before.

Its characters come straight from the assembly line of screenwriting archetypes, and too often they act in ways that archetypes, rather than human beings, do. You can feel its creator shuttling them here and there on the grid of greater LA, pausing portentously between each move.