The Lady in the Van is about a talented young writer still wrestling with how to draw upon his own experiences without exploiting others — and it’s about the boundless talents of Maggie Smith, sometimes chewing up the screen, sometimes saying volumes simply by sitting very, very still, with a perfectly perfect expression on her face.

A surprisingly touching ending brings to fruition the idea that “all of us are connected.” Moore manages this life-affirming touch without being preachy and by simply melding unusual old folktales into a new story filled with visually stunning images sure to captivate children of all ages.

A documentary with privileged access to the legendary designer in his studio, workshop, backstage, his homes, even aboard his yacht and private jet.

It is exciting to watch this movie. It is never boring. Lee is like a juggler who starts out with balls and gradually adds baseball bats, top hats and chainsaws. It's not an intellectual experience, but an emotional one.

Make no mistake: The Cannes version was a bad film, but now Gallo's editing has set free the good film inside. The Brown Bunny is still not a complete success -- it is odd and off-putting when it doesn't want to be -- but as a study of loneliness and need, it evokes a tender sadness.

Sleeping Dogs has pacing problems, and the direction is competent but not particularly stylish. What holds the film together, and what holds our attention to the very end, is the powerful performance by Russell Crowe as a man haunted by demons he can’t quite remember.

The guests at the dinner are a strange lot. To describe them would be to give away their jokes, and one of the pleasures of the movie is having each one appear.

The Internship is the movie version of a goofy dog that knows only a few tricks but keeps on looking at you and wagging his tail, daring you not to like him. Down, boy. You win.

If someone could give you a pill that allowed you to live for 500 years, would you take it? Not me.

Twisters is hokey and dumb, but spectacular fun.

In the hands of writer-director Lee Cronin, a brilliant makeup and practical effects squad and a terrific cast that really sinks its teeth (sorry) into the material, the first film in the “Evil Dead” franchise in 10 years ramps up the gore and the supernatural elements while remaining true to its creatively gruesome origins.

What works: the brilliant dialogue, and the raw intensity of the performances. It’s a privilege to watch Washington and Davis lay it all on the line.

This is a film that pulls off the difficult balancing act of carrying an important and uplifting message while delivering consistent laughs and introducing us to some wonderfully badass teens.

Its best scenes come as the characters are established and get to know one another. Sharif at 71 still has the fire in his eyes that we remember from "Lawrence of Arabia," and is still a handsome presence.

Writer-director Dan Krauss takes a creative risk by combining traditional non-fiction storytelling techniques with re-creations that go far beyond the usual shadowy-silhouette snippets.

A Saturday afternoon stop for the kiddies -- harmless, skillful and aimed at grade schoolers.

Cute, crude and good-hearted movie.

There are enough plots here to challenge a Robert Altman, specialist in interlocking stories, but the director, Bob Giraldi, masters the complexities as if he knows the territory. He does.

Brief, spare and heartbreaking.

I’m So Excited! is random, episodic and essentially meaningless, but it’s also a hoot. And if that’s all you’re looking for, you might as well get it from the master.

There’s nothing new or particularly memorable about the serviceable CGI and practical effects, but we remain invested in the outcome in large part because Holland remains the best of the cinematic Spider-Men, while Zendaya lends heart and smarts and warmth to every moment she’s onscreen.

If you're curious about why the demonstrators are so angry, this is why they're so angry.

Though aimed at a young audience, this is one of those superhero adventures that will keep the adults entertained as well.

The movie is kind of sweet and kind of goofy, and works because its heart is in the right place.

There are elements in the movie that make it worth seeing, and that set it aside from the routine movies in this genre.

A visually arresting, consistently entertaining story featuring a host of endearing and memorable characters. Everyone in the ensemble is excellent, but the standout is Awkwafina, who does some of the best animated voice work I’ve ever heard.

This movie is bat-bleep crazy even as it makes solid and thought-provoking arguments. It veers all over the place, at times scoring major laughs, on occasion working quite well as a social satire and a screwball romance. But it also falters with some running jokes that stumble and collapse, and a few cringe-inducing scenes that aim for provocation but seem forced.

I enjoyed the film more than I expected to. It's harmless, simple-minded.

Backstage at the Muppet works, we see countless drawers filled with eyeballs, eyebrows, whiskers and wigs. It's the only world Kevin wanted to live in, and he made it.

You have to make some distinctions in your mind. In one category, "2001: A Space Odyssey" remains inviolate, one of the handful of true film masterpieces. In a more temporal sphere, "2010" qualifies as superior entertainment, a movie more at home with technique than poetry, with character than with mystery, a movie that explains too much and leaves too little to our sense of wonderment, but a good movie all the same.

A whimsical comedy, very whimsical, depending on the warmth of Segal and Sarandon, the discontent of Helms and Greer, and still more warmth that enters at midpoint with Carol (Rae Dawn Chong), Sarandon's co-worker at the office.

Panic about pop culture is not new. Yet Antiviral finds a novel angle of attack.

Always sweet and sometimes surprisingly touching.

His story is simple, unadorned, direct. Only the margins are complicated.

A good film for most of the way, and then a powerful film at the end, when, in the traditional Shakespearean manner, all of the plot threads come together, the victims are killed, the survivors mourn, and life goes on.

Preserves the flavor of the original and even improves upon it.

The Killing of a Sacred Deer never hedges its bets, never takes its foot off the gas. The same can be said of the actors, from skilled veterans Farrell and Kidman to young Barry Keoghan.

Christopher Nolan's The Prestige has just about everything I require in a movie about magicians, except ... the Prestige.

I have problems with Naqoyqatsi as a film, but as a music video it's rather remarkable.

As in "The Wedding Banquet," Lee shows off a real gift for fleshing out characters with quick, deft strokes. [19 Aug 1994, p.41]

A movie made with charm and wit, and unlike some family movies it does not condescend, not for a second.

The result is not quite a documentary and not quite a drama, but interesting all the same. It uses the approach of Haskell Wexler's "Medium Cool" (1969), but without the same urgency.

Filmed in the colors of newborn Technicolor, plotted as a tribute to the conventions of Hollywood romance, filled with standard songs, it's by and for people who love those kinds of movies. Others will find it cliched and predictable, but they won't understand.

Berg was the pioneer for an indie TV entrepreneur like Lucille Ball.

Sutherland's performance is the film's treasure. Watching the way he gently tries to direct his headstrong young star, we are seeing a version of Phil Jackson's Zen and the art of coaching.

Nanette Burstein...provides steady, no-frills direction that includes snippets of Taylor’s movies, a myriad of behind-the-scenes photos and newsreel footage; there’s a nearly endless supply of material, given Taylor starred in some 80 films and offscreen was one of the most photographed and filmed people ever.

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

A brawny space opera, transplanting the conventions of Western, cop and martial arts films to the Red Planet.

I would be lying if I did not admit that this is all, in its absurd and overheated way, entertaining.

The film has its rewards and one performance of great passion. That would be by Ellen Burstyn, as Miss Addie, who plays it all in her sick bed in a Tennessee country mansion with a debutante party going on downstairs.

The plot exists to be disregarded, the characters are deliberately constructed of cardboard, the sight gags are idiotic, and the dialogue is dumb. Really dumb. So dumb you laugh twice, once because of how stupid it is, and the second time because you fell for it.

Cuts between a rich assortment of characters; it's like a low-rent, on-the-fly version of Robert Altman's "The Player" or "Short Cuts."

By removing elements of magic and operatic excess from the story, the brothers Scott focus on what is, underneath, a story as tragic (and less contrived) as the one cited in the ads, "Romeo and Juliet."

Even if the ending doesn't entirely succeed, it doesn't cheat, and it comes at the end of an uncommonly absorbing movie.

The Swedish director Mikael Håfström, whose best-known American film is the chilling 2007 Stephen King adaptation “1408,” employs jump scares and quick cuts to capture the looming sense of danger (or is it paranoia?) aboard the ship, while the screenplay by R. Scott Adams and Nathan Parker takes the story back and forth between the present-day unraveling on Odyssey-1 and flashbacks on Earth.

Sometimes it’s a creepy thriller. Sometimes it’s a gripping and heartbreaking story of a man losing his memory. Sometimes it’s drive-in movie about a charismatic and thoroughly reprehensible cult leader. And then, from time to time, it’s for all intents and purposes a musical.

Born of a years-long collaboration by Ben Platt, Molly Gordon, Noah Galvin and Nick Lieberman (which included a proof-of-concept short film), with all four writing the screenplay and Gordon and Lieberman co-directing, Theater Camp is an affectionate and winning yet sometimes bittersweet satire created by a talented quartet who clearly know the territory quite well.

I don’t see Aquaman ever reaching icon status, but I’ll say this: He’s a lot more fun on his own, when he’s not saddled with those overly serious stiffs Superman and Batman.

That it transcends this genre -- that it is a well-crafted and sometimes stirring adventure -- is to its credit. But a true visualization of Tolkien's Middle-earth it is not.

The ending is a cheap shot. An inconclusive ending would have been better, and perhaps more honest. The movie and the ending have so little in common that it's as if the last scene is spliced in from a different film.

A lighthearted and goofy musical comedy about a love affair between an extraterrestrial and a manicurist.

A mercilessly convoluted version of a Twister, that genre in which the plot whacks us as if it's taking batting practice. I will not hint at anything that happens. I will simply observe that it's all entertaining.

End of the Road was produced for maybe 10% of the budget allotted for the big, bloated, star-studded Netflix thrillers “The Gray Man” and “Red Notice” (both reportedly cost some $200 million to make), and it doesn’t come close to approaching the glamour value, breathtaking location shots and epic action sequences of those two films — but it’s better at executing its mission, which is to immerse us in 90 minutes of old-fashioned bloody vigilante satisfaction.

The Green Knight contains some beautifully written passages, and cinematographer Andrew Droz Palermo delivers one award-worthy visual image after another.

The movie consists of the journey, the conversations, the scenery, the little human stories. No big drama. No emergencies. Just carrying the mail, which over the years has supplied the threads to bind together all of these lives.

Movies like this do not grab you by the throat. You have to be receptive.

Everything that transpires in the tightly spun if sometimes plausibility-bending psychological thriller “The Wasp” eventually connects — and when it all comes together, it’s a shocking and visceral gut punch.

It’s not that we haven’t seen this type of frat-life social commentary before, but Berger and the outstanding ensemble infuse his film with a docudrama authenticity. This is a not a movie you can easily shake off.

We walk into the theater expecting absolutely nothing of substance, and that's exactly what we get, served up with high style.

Science-fiction fans will like it, and also brainiacs, and those who sometimes look at the sky and think, man, there's a lot going on up there, and we can't even define precisely what a soliton is.

The movie is a little more lightweight than the usual People's Choice Award winner at Toronto, but why not? It was the best-liked film at the 2006 festival, and I can understand that.

Wise and subtle in the way it presents its older man. A less interesting movie would make him lustful and self-deceiving, a man who believes his is the secret of eternal youth and virility.

Tucci and Eve play well off each other, especially when they are slinging ugly revelations back and forth.

The kind of comedy where funny people say funny things in funny situations, not the kind of comedy that whacks you with manic shocks to force an audible Pavlovian response.

With clear and obvious influences from films such as “Joker,” “The King of Comedy,” “Whiplash” and, most prominently, “Taxi Driver,” writer-director Bynum and Majors team up for a disturbing and blistering case study of a man who feels utterly unseen and is obsessed with making a name for himself.

Antoon injects an occasional note of rancor, but the more radical point here is showing how freely Baghdad residents now speak in public on politics and how widely their views range. [12 Nov 2005, p.35]

The movie may leave you scratching your head way too much when it's over. Yet it proves Ben Wheatley not only knows how to make a movie, but he knows how to make three at the same time.

Claire Danes is as fresh as running water in this role, exhibiting the clarity and directness that has become her strength; her characters tend to know who they are, and why.

Redford considers this material in an unusually literate and thoughtful historical film, working from years of research by his screenwriter, James Solomon. I found it absorbing and relevant today.

Like many thrillers that begin with an intriguing premise, Bad Influence is more fun in the setup than in the payoff. For at least the first hour, we are not quite sure what game Lowe is playing, and the full horror of his plan is only gradually revealed.

While it has its moments of baffling plot development and the human characters aren’t exactly Shakespearean in depth, there’s some pretty impressive CGI monster destruction here, and the talented English director Gareth Edwards clearly respects the thought-provoking sci-fi roots of the original.

The cloak-and-dagger stuff with the appropriately named Grace is reminiscent of a mid-20th century Cold War film. Director McQuarrie and his team are experts at staging these types of sequences.

At times The Fifth Estate seems as cutting-edge as the 21st century techno-info revolution it portrays. On other occasions... it’s almost like an expensive “Funny or Die” bit.

Firth and Macfadyen (hey, they’ve both played Mr. Darcy!) are terrific together as two men who really don’t like each other, don’t trust each other and have different ways of trying to connect with Jean.

Mr. Malcolm’s List is a low-key, pleasant slice of escapism, with some lovely scenery and the attendant period-piece costumery and lavish estates, and a host of great-looking people bending themselves into all sorts of knots and doing their best to keep up with the quipping and the courtship rituals and the obligatory Misunderstandings, Deceptions and Betrayals before it all ends with … spoiler alert … declarations of true love!

This is an A-list cast that consistently elevates the material, even when we’re traveling down some very familiar roads.

If you want to see a solid movie about Bundy as mostly experienced through the viewpoint of the single mother who fell in love with him without knowing he was a murderer, check out the Netflix feature film Extremely Wicked, Shockingly Vile and Evil.

Al Pacino sells the heck out of his performance as Danny Collins.

The formula is obvious, but the story, curiously, turns out to be based on fact.

As suspense thrillers go Point Blank is pretty good.

The movie is not a special effects extravaganza like "The Grinch," but in a way that's a relief. It's more about charm and silliness than about great hulking multimillion-dollar high-tech effects.

The movie is effective, well-acted and convincing.

It's fractured and maddening, but it's alive.

Chalk is not the kind of movie many people will appreciate at first viewing. You have to understand who Nilsson and his actors are, and give some thought to the style, to appreciate it.

This is a smart and accomplished work with a quick wit, a palpable sense of melancholy and genuine heart.

The movie is essentially a morality play, and it's not a surprise to learn that Larry Cohen, the writer, came up with the idea 20 years ago--when there were still phone booths and morality plays.

I understood the general outlines of the story, I liked the bold strokes he uses to create the characters, and I was amused by the camera work, which includes a lot of shots that are about themselves.

Here is a perplexing and frustrating film, which works with great skill to involve our emotions, while at the same time making moral and racial assertions that are deeply troubling.