Belkin’s smart, dynamic documentary shares its subject’s slam-bang style. That’s good. Watching it is exhilarating. It also shares Wallace’s aversion to nuance. That’s less good. Belkin has a weakness for split screens and rapid-fire editing. In fairness, that’s one way to cram in more material, and Belkin has lots (and lots) of material to cram in.

A generally thrilling entertainment that's not quite the grand slam you want it to be.

The movie is about hope and courage and fortitude. It's about beating the odds and defying expectations. But Lucy Walker's movie is also about whether the trip was a good idea in the first place. The answer is compellingly complicated.

There’s a lot of Michael Moore’s ambulatory spirit in this film, which the comedian Jeff Stinson directed. There’s also a lot of the damning comedic commentary that made Rock’s old HBO series so urgent.

Presumed Innocent is interesting to the extent that it goes beyond the usual whodunit and courtroom drama formulas and shows how nobody really has clean hands. [27 July 1990, p.29P]

It's pure plastic product from plot line to the pro forma 3-D to the tidy moral lessons - ersatz family entertainment as disposable as it is diverting. It made me want to go read a book.

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

ParaNorman is supposedly for kids, but it's really aimed at their snarky older brothers, and it illustrates the limits of the new family creepshows.

Watts’s insistence on pursuing in secret the truth about her son, as opposed to asking him simple questions outright, doesn’t quite track. The questions echo long after the credits roll — which is either brilliant or maddening, depending on who you ask.

Knappenberger can’t paint his subject as an imperfect human being because Swartz simply means too much to too many people right now. He’s a focal point for social and political change, with communal grief as its engine.

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

It has been said before but it’s worth saying again: Gore Vidal was born to the toga, even if he never actually wore one.

It’s noted that General Tso himself was a guardian of Chinese tradition and would himself shudder at what the dish named for him has become. On the other hand, what does “authenticity” even mean when it comes to cuisine that has assimilated into another culture along with the people who make it? The best food — the kind we want again and again — always tastes like home. Wherever that is.

Reed follows the proceedings as they happen and builds the suspense of a top-notch courtroom drama.

In more ways than one, Mark Wexler gets the release he's seeking.

So forget about taking anyone under 12. But if you want to see what a benign demon looks like when he's eating nachos and unwinding to Al Green, this is the movie for you.

Violette demonstrates how suffering produces great art, and that the artist isn’t the only one who suffers for it.

There are the serious Coen brothers movies, like “No Country for Old Men” and, um, “A Serious Man,” and there are the not-so-serious ones. Hail, Caesar! is the opposite of their serious ones, and it is delightful.

Immense, mystical, and deranged beyond immediate comprehension, Ilya Khrzhanovsky's 4 is an apocalyptic allegory of Mother Russia and its current state of squalid exhaustion.

A fresh perspective on one of the world’s longest conflicts.

The Color Purple ultimately works far better in pieces than as a whole. Considering those pieces contain some of the best moments I’ve seen in 2023, I’m able to put my concerns aside as a mildly nagging uncertainty.

There is no continuity in narrative or character and it’s all shot in an elliptical, heavily stylized, gaudily lit (much of it looks like it’s shot through an algae-filmed aquarium) collage.

Across the board, the performances testify, often hilariously, to the pain these characters feel and inflict but are incapable of expressing.

At its heart, this is a film about sisterhood.

The final scenes deliver a payoff worthy of the film's scrappy optimism, but that may not be the reason you walk out of the theater on a cloud. It's the sight of a character coming rapturously into her own at the same time as the actress playing her.

Campos really doesn’t need to tack on such heavy-handed irony as the scene near the end of a disconsolate woman eating ice cream and singing along with the theme song of “The Mary Tyler Moore Show.”

Heymann's film was originally a six-part series for Israeli TV. The feature he and his crew have made smoothly truncates those three hours into a rich, discretely damning 85-minute portrait of intolerance.

All Abrams wants to do is give us a great ride while holding firm to our longstanding emotional investment in these characters.