Many of the film's images will prove more than some viewers can take.

Imagine my surprise when I discovered that Book Club: The Next Chapter was not only watchable but occasionally amusing.

Voyeurism is central to the cinema and to acting, of course, and you'd better believe these women know it. Still, Casting About feels oddly disingenuous.

The film has an ending that anyone who has watched a movie in the last 15 years will see coming half an hour into the film. But even with that, the weight of the performances from Yu Nan and Bater is enough to make for a satisfying, if uneven, film.

It’s a relief to see a minimum of huffing and puffing on such a hot-button subject.

Thanks to its two leads, The Good House very much succeeds as character study. As narrative, it doesn’t fare anywhere near as well.

You’ll just have to look to your own effects-jazzed inner child to find a kid who’s relatable here.

Many of the story lines offer only superficial insight into the characters; Silver's rich but unhappy mogul has been done far too many times.

The resulting movie is atmospheric and compelling, and it makes an empathetic case for Borden as an intelligent, passionate woman so stifled by her father and the suffocating society he represented that she lashed out (and then some).

It's better to see it on the stage... a moderately enjoyable film that lacks the awe-inspiring visual and aural aplomb of Montreal-based Cirque du Soleil's live shows.

Flow preaches to the choir with a starry-eyed NPR eco-humanism that can set the wrong kind of person's teeth on edge.

This is an old-fashioned sports hagiography of the sort that Gary Cooper used to star in while Teresa Wright sat smiling and worried on the sidelines, and, amazingly, it engages your attention and even respect while trotting out every clubhouse cliche in the book.

“Don’t Worry” is not a conventional biopic. That makes sense — Callahan sure isn’t a conventional biopic subject — but that unconventionality can present problems. Sometimes the movie is sentimental. More often, it’s scabrous. Maybe if the movie didn’t feel overlong (trim and tight it’s not), those qualities might seem better balanced.

Tricky territory to navigate, but it ultimately lends some genuine poignancy to the story’s familiar accidental-family themes. If there’s someplace Roth makes a mark, it’s here.

Color Me Kubrick digs all sorts of devilish ironies out of this "true...ish story," and it's a fine dark farce before turning sad and, worse, monotonous. The con wears off before the movie does, but while it's in the air, "Kubrick" spins with bogus cheer.

The best scenes - the only time This Is 40 taps into genuinely messy comic anxiety - feature Brooks, who shpritzes shabby false confidence as Pete's pop, saddled with a younger wife and triplets he can't tell apart. Otherwise, the movie never quite comes to a point.

What was intended as a tart elegy for a vanished way of life becomes a valedictory to a certain kind of filmmaking: beautifully appointed, intelligently played, and civilized into inertia.

Bratton’s unique perspective is so much more interesting when you hear him talk about The Inspection that you often wonder where it is when you’re watching it.

All in all, Beaton could have been a character in an Evelyn Waugh novel — both belonged to the Bright Young Things, in ’20s London — except that he and Waugh detested each other.

At an hour and a half, the action in Free Birds gets stretched thin. It’s Thanksgiving fare, sure, but it only partly satisfies our hankering.

The movie's silly, predictable, and surprisingly sweet - the sort of thing you can and probably should take your mother to.

Cheerful, skittish entertainment that never takes its subject seriously enough.

As visually overstuffed as a hoarder’s apartment, the movie improves as it goes.

Drawing on the memories of family members, friends, and collaborators, and tapping into a trove of archival material, including tapes of James’s raucous, raunchy live shows, Jenkins keeps pace with his subject’s breakneck progress. Along the way James encounters opportunities that are missed or exploited and tragedies that are averted or courted. He transforms hard times into artistic success, and squanders success in debauchery.

There's a certain pleasure to be had in some of the physical blowouts.

It seems to play as vastly different movies depending on who's looking at it.

As murky and derivative-looking as the film is, it moves with an authority that pummels you into submission.

That uncertainty is the strength of writer-director Tayarisha Poe’s debut feature and ultimately its undoing. There’s dramatic ambiguity and there’s a muddle, and you may spend the movie’s 97 minutes trying to untwine one from the other.