It may be that a relationship like the one here between Rosalba and Fernando is impossible in real life. All the more reason for this movie.

Poetic in its sadness, and Blanchett's performance confirms her power once again.

A skillful action movie about a plot that exists only to support a skillful action movie. The entire story is a set-up for the martial arts and chases. Because they are done well, because the movie is well-crafted and acted, we give it a pass. Too bad it's not about something.

Although playing a hockey coach might seem like a slap shot for an actor, Russell does real acting here. He has thought about Brooks and internalized him.

This is a grand, confident entertainment, sure of the power of Adjani, Depardieu and the others, and sure of itself.

Neither hagiography nor cold-plate dish, this is a solidly researched, well-photographed, crisply edited film that chronicles Trotter’s life with journalistic integrity, while providing fascinating glimpses into the “foodie” culture of the times, in Chicago and around the world.

Leave the World Behind is a bold and tricky endeavor that pays off in just about perfect fashion. You might never think of “Friends” in the same way again.

The film is astonishing in its visual beauty; cinematographer Greig Fraser ("Snow White and the Huntsman") finds nobility in this arduous journey.

It’s funny because it gets it RIGHT without ever being too mean-spirited.

There is a lot of truth in this portrait of a marriage running out of the will to survive.

Off the Map is visually beautiful as a portrait of lives in the middle of emptiness, but it's not about the New Mexico scenery. It's about feelings that shift among people who are good enough, curious enough or just maybe tired enough to let that happen.

Even in its more melodramatic moments, Hustle feels like it’s taking place in today’s NBA world. This is Adam Sandler’s love letter to the game, and it is great fun from the opening tip to the final buzzer.

We’ve seen this movie before, or at least versions of this story — but thanks to Hall’s well-crafted script and sure-handed direction, and the heartbreakingly effective performances from Teller and the supporting players, this is a powerful and valuable addition to the coming-home war movie canon.

Imperium is a well-spun, tight thriller, thanks in no small part to Radcliffe’s excellent, sharply focused performance.

One thing I like about the film is the way it teasingly introduces elements that, in other films, would lead to big dramatic formulas, and then sidesteps them.

Infinity War might be the biggest and most ambitious Marvel movie yet, but it’s certainly not the best. (I’d put it somewhere in the bottom half of the Top 10.) However, there’s plenty of action, humor and heart — and some genuinely effective dramatic moments in which familiar and beloved characters experience real, seemingly irreversible losses.

It’s well-made and well-acted, but it’s also a grotesque, self-indulgent and ultimately tiresome satire that leaves behind an unpleasant stench.

Fletch needed an actor more interested in playing the character than in playing himself.

True Confessions contains scenes that are just about as good as scenes can be. Then why does the movie leave us disoriented and disappointed, and why does the ending fail dismally? Perhaps because the attentions of the filmmakers were concentrated so fiercely on individual moments that nobody ever stood back to ask what the story was about.

A lean, spare, stylish and grimly, methodically ultra-violent extravaganza that provides star Keanu Reeves with a much-needed infusion of cool. And hard-core action fans with combat-centric cinematic expertise on a par with 20ll’s “The Raid.”

Directed in disjointed and sometimes unfocused fashion by Bonni Cohen and Jon Shenk, An Inconvenient Sequel: Truth to Power is nonetheless worth a viewing, if only for the continued, irrefutable, scientifically sound reminders that humankind continues to harm the planet in shocking and sobering ways.

Co-writers/directors Faxon and Rast have created a little gem of a film. Without question, The Way Way Back is the best coming-of-age movie of the summer and should be seen by audiences of all ages.

Funny, quirky and insightful, with a bounty of interesting supporting characters and not a ton of concern about telling a conventional story.

Detropia offers no solution to this crisis, and indeed there may be none. This documentary is more eulogy and elegy.

The movie tells us nothing we haven't heard before.

We can see every plot point rounding the turn long before the finish line, but that’s OK, because we’re having a (dare I say it) jolly grand time every step of the way.

On Golden Pond is a treasure for many reasons, but the best one, I think, is that I could believe it. I could believe in its major characters and their relationships, and in the things they felt for one another, and there were moments when the movie was witness to human growth and change. I left the theater feeling good and warm, and with a certain resolve to try to mend my own relationships and learn to start listening better.

You want loud, dumb, skillful, escapist entertainment? Twister works. You want to think? Think twice about seeing it.

Sophie's Choice is a fine, absorbing, wonderfully acted, heartbreaking movie.

The movie has its pleasures, although human intelligence is not one of them. Caesar, to begin with, is a wonderfully executed character, a product of special effects and a motion-capture performance by Andy Serkis, who earlier gave us Gollum in "Lord of the Rings."

If you have ever wondered what kind of person volunteers to become a human bomb, and what they think about in the days before their death, this film wonders, too.

Luke Ford's performance as Charlie is a convincing tour de force. You may recall him as Brendan Fraser's heroic son in "The Mummy: Tomb of the Dragon Emperor." Rhys Wakefield, in his first feature role, is a good casting decision, suggesting inner turmoil without overacting.

Timecrimes is like a temporal chess game with nudity, voyeurism and violence, which makes it more boring than most chess games but less boring than a lot of movies.

The middle 100 minutes of the movie are charming and moving and surprisingly interesting.

The movie lacks the warmth and edge of the two previous features ("Walking and Talking" and "Lovely and Amazing"). It seems to be more of an idea than a story.

Such a brilliant, spine-tingling buildup — and such a thudding disappointment of an ending. Watching the creatively creepy and starkly haunting Come True is like going to see a great new band in concert and seeing them kill it for the first 90 minutes, only to end the night dressed in wacky costumes and playing bagpipes.

Even if you’re never seen the first two “A Quiet Place” films (though we highly recommend that you do), “Day One” writer-director Michael Samoski, working from a story he conceived with John Krasinski, delivers a compelling and at time surprisingly poetic and melancholy survival story, with the brilliant Lupita Nyong’o carrying the film every quiet step of the way.

My Cousin Vinny is a movie that meanders along going nowhere in particular, and then lightning strikes. I didn't get much involved in it, and yet individual moments and some of the performances were very funny. It's the kind of movie home video was invented for: Not worth the trip to the theater, but slam it into the VCR and you get your rental's worth.

Perhaps in the next generation a mutant will appear named Scribbler, who can write a better screenplay for them.

Carny is bursting with more information about American carnivals that it can contain, surrounding a plot too thin to support it. Without knowing much about the reasons why the movie was made, I'd guess on the evidence that the director, Robert Kaylor, was fascinated by carnivals, spent a lot of time with one and shot a lot of film, and then found himself forced, to shape his material into some sort of traditional, commercial story. Inside this movie is a documentary struggling to get out.

This is the best DiCillo movie I've seen, and he's made some good ones ("Box of Moonlight," "The Real Blonde").

Stripes is an anarchic slob movie, a celebration of all that is irreverent, reckless, foolhardy, undisciplined, and occasionally scatological. It's a lot of fun.

An ingenious little horror film, so well made it's truly scary.

All of this makes an interesting, if not gripping, film about the play, the playwright and the lead-up work to a stage production. It also leaves me wanting a great deal more.

Still, this is a breathtakingly gorgeous, sometimes thrilling, well-acted and suitably profound sendoff to Daniel Craig in all his ice-blue-eyed, tightly wound, gritty gravitas —a Bond who seemed much more of this world than, say Roger Moore’s 007, a Bond who bled when he was cut and bruised when he was beaten, a Bond who grieved deeply for those he lost, a Bond who will be a very, very tough act to follow.

Redford and his writer, Richard Friedenberg, understand that most of the events in any life are accidential or arbitrary, especially the crucial ones, and we can exercise little conscious control over our destinies.

This is one of those curious films before which the viewer is struck dumb. To describe it is to question and praise it - at one and the same time. I enjoyed the time I spent with Moretti, much as I might enjoy sitting next to an interesting stranger on an airplane, and hearing about his life.

This curious idea for a movie actually works.

Rich with characters and flowing with music.

A confused and sometimes overwrought new treatment of the director's most obsessive theme, suicide.

The entrancing fifth feature of the Zellner brothers, Kumiko the Treasure Hunter, is like found art in the beguiling, haunting manner it combines the seemingly ridiculous and desperate with an ineffable and quiet sadness.

I now believe in Chronic Fatigue Syndrome. I was one of many who somehow absorbed the notion that it was an imaginary illness. I am ashamed of myself.

The first movie I’ve seen about the disease that is told from the sick person’s point of view, not that of family members. The director, Yukihiko Tsutsumi, often uses a subjective camera to show the commonplace world melting into bewildering patterns and meanings.

Jarmusch is a poet of the night. Much of Night on Earth creates the same kind of lonely, elegaic, romantic mood as Mystery Train, his film about wanderers in nighttime Memphis. Tom Waits' music helps to establish this mood of cities that have been emptied of the waking. It's as if the minds of these night people are affected by all of the dreams and nightmares that surround them.

A tough, bitter little sleeper of a movie that's about four times as good as you'd expect.

The plot, the pursuit, the quarry, are all forgotten during Hackman's one-man show, and it's a flaw the movie doesn't overcome.

As for disappointments ... Judd Nelson wasn’t available for the documentary, while Molly Ringwald declined to participate. Perhaps she’s learned to let it go. One hopes McCarthy will be able to do the same after making this film, but we get the distinct impression the best he can hope for is to learn to live with it and realize it doesn’t define him.

This film is a symphony of recognizable notes.

The music, the cinematography, the acting choices, the daring plot leaps — not a single element is timid or safe...The Place Beyond the Pines earns every second of its 140-minute running time.

The movie is bright, the dialogue has wit and intelligence, and Roberts and Grant are very easy to like. By the end, as much as we're aware of the ancient story machinery groaning away below deck, we're smiling.

I enjoyed the film very much. It was a visceral pleasure to see a hard-boiled guy like David Carr at its center.

The flight sequence and many of the other action scenes in this new Disney animated feature create an exhilaration and freedom that are liberating. And the rest of the story is fun, too.

In a movie with the energy of this one, we're exhilarated by the sheer freedom of movement; the violence becomes surrealistic and less important than the movie's underlying energy level.

Weirdly intriguing.

Beatriz at Dinner is entertaining enough as farce — but over the course of a feature-length film, the characters actually become more one-dimensional and less believable.

But there is no way, within the film, to be sure with any confidence exactly what happens, or precisely how, or really why. Kubrick delivers this uncertainty in a film where the actors themselves vibrate with unease.

I don't much care if the battles aren't that amazing, because the story doesn't depend on them. It's about a sacrifice made by Spock, and it draws on the sentiment and audience identification developed over the years by the TV series.

Episode III has more action per square minute, I'd guess, than any of the previous five movies, and it is spectacular. The special effects are more sophisticated than in the earlier movies, of course, but not necessarily more effective.

Every character has life and depth. It's unusual for an episodic film to involve us so well in individual lives; as the narrative circles through their stories, we're genuinely curious about what will happen next.

Here is another Western in the classical tradition.

The movie is uncommonly absorbing.

Reich is a more lively speaker than Al Gore, however, frequently working jokes about his sub-five-foot height (his growth having been disrupted by a genetic disorder) into his presentation, and many of the film’s statistical interludes have been entertainingly animated as insurance against eyeball-glazing.

El Crimen Perfecto has energy, color, spirit and lively performances, but what it does not have are very many laughs.

This is just the movie for two hours of mindless escapism on a relatively skilled professional level.

What makes Never Say Never Again more fun than most of the Bonds is more complex than that. For one thing, there's more of a human element in the movie, and it comes from Klaus Maria Brandauer, as Largo. Brandauer is a wonderful actor, and he chooses not to play the villain as a cliché. Instead, he brings a certain poignancy and charm to Largo, and since Connery always has been a particularly human James Bond, the emotional stakes are more convincing this time.

The movie delivers all too well on its promise to show us dinosaurs. We see them early and often, and they are indeed a triumph of special effects artistry, but the movie is lacking other qualities that it needs even more, such as a sense of awe and wonderment, and strong human story values.

About 40 percent of Neighbors falls flat. About 60 percent made me laugh hard, even when I knew I should have known better.

Together [Christopher Eccleston, Rachel Griffiths and Kate Winslet] stake a difficult story and make it into a haunting film.

This movie will cheerfully go for a laugh wherever one is even remotely likely to be found. It has political jokes and boob jokes, dog poop jokes, and ballet jokes. It makes fun of two completely different Hollywood genres: the spy movie and the Elvis Presley musical.

This is a Noah for the 21st century, one of the most dazzling and unforgettable biblical epics ever put on film.

While there are times when Cronenberg seems to be indulging in his trademark gross-out visuals for the sake of shock, Crimes of the Future is darkly funny and consistently thoughtful — and, for all its moments of extreme horror, offers legitimate commentary on issues such as body dysmorphia and the extreme measures taken by some real-world individuals in order to carve, sculpt and tattoo their bodies as evolving canvasses of expression.

It’s worth the journey due to the sheer star power of Cage’s performance, his willingness to commit to this Funhouse Mirror silliness, and a half-dozen moments that are comedic gold and yet somehow absurdly touching.

After a setup worthy of a John le Carre adaptation, the main storyline is an admittedly well-filmed and well-acted but disappointingly lightweight journey more akin to a lesser Bond movie (there’s more than one reference to “Moonraker” along the way), with a cartoonishly forgettable villain and far too much time devoted to domestic soap opera antics played for easy laughs and unconvincing sentimentality.

An unreasonably entertaining movie, causing you perhaps to revise your notions about women's Roller Derby, assuming you have any.

Warren Beatty's production of Dick Tracy approaches the material with the same fetishistic glee I felt when I was reading the strip.

There’s no denying that Torres (a former writer on “Saturday Night Live” and the co-creator of the HBO series “Los Espookys”) is a unique talent; it’s just that his first feature film, while featuring some clever ideas, has a repetitive nature that grows more irksome as we go along, and the humor dissipates into heavy-handed social commentary.

The scenes involving the dragon are first-rate. The beast is one of the meanest, ugliest, most reprehensible creatures I've ever seen in a film, and when it breathes flames it looks like it's really breathing flames.

This story is told by writer-director Im Sang-soo with cool, elegant cinematography and sinuous visual movements. The dominant mood is gothic, with the persistent sadomasochistic undertones that seem inescapable in so much Korean cinema.

It is maddening, fascinating and completely successful.

What the film is really about is social embarrassment, and Bleistein's clear-headed, calm understanding that his old friend has a stupid daughter who has caused fraudulent trouble for a great many people.

Four Lions is impossible to categorize. It's an exceedingly dark comedy, a wicked satire, a thriller where the thrills center on the incompetence of the villains.

More often than not, the dialogue turns into quotable speechifying and the overwrought score pounds the points home in decidedly unsubtle fashion, but thanks to the performances of an outstanding ensemble led by Colman Domingo’s electric and moving work in the title role, this is a valuable portrait of a man who hasn’t exactly been forgotten to history but is hardly a household name. (He should be.)

This is a movie about spies, but it is not a thriller in any routine sense of the word. It's just the meticulously observant record of how naiveté, inexperience, misplaced idealism and greed led to one of the most peculiar cases of treason in American history.

Nick Nolte plays a great shambling wreck of a wounded Hemingway hero in The Good Thief, a film that's like a descent into the funkiest dive on the wrong side of the wrong town.

It employs depression as a substitute for personality, and believes that if the characters are bitter and morose enough, we won't notice how dull they are.

Edmands avoids the in-your-face emotional punch that most filmmakers would employ (police, lawsuits, confrontation) and instead opts for a more delicate, observational pacing, creating a set of vignettes that give a stark glimpse into these disrupted lives.

Moon is a superior example of that threatened genre, hard science-fiction, which is often about the interface between humans and alien intelligence of one kind of or other, including digital.

This is not an easy watch, but there are also moments of deep emotion and genuine inspiration in the documentary.