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.