Writer-director Martin does a stellar job of balancing sketch-comedy style laughs with genuinely touching moments.

As we’re enjoying the beautiful cinematography and the fine acting and the dark humor, Benjamin Dickinson is delivering a signature work announcing his arrival as a filmmaker to watch for years to come.

In the uncomfortably funny, unapologetically insensitive, cheerfully outrageous Jojo Rabbit, writer-director Waititi (“Thor: Ragnorak”) delivers a timely, anti-hate fractured fairy tale AND turns in hilarious work as Adolf Hitler, imaginary friend to a 10-year-old German boy near the end of World War II.

Involving and inspiring in the way a good movie about sports almost always is.

The movie contains violence and death, but not really very much. For most of its languorous running time, it listens to conversations between Bella and Edward, Bella and David, Edward and David, and Edward and Bella and David. This would play better if any of them were clever conversationalists, but their ideas are limited to simplistic renderings of their desires.

Die Hard With a Vengeance is basically a wind-up action toy, cleverly made, and delivered with high energy. It delivers just what it advertises, with a vengeance.

There’s little in the way of originality in Work It, but there’s a fresh, upbeat, infectious vibe to the silliness, thanks in large part to the talented and likable cast of young actors.

All the players in The Misogynists sound as if they’ve been handed talking points instead of a screenplay.

Of course, Gilliam’s quest to make his Don Quixote film mirrors the original novel, and the movie he finally made is like a funhouse mirror version — filled with wonderfully, sometimes disturbingly strange imagery as tragedy meets comedy meets romance meets the noble glory of the artist sacrificing nearly everything in the quest to make lasting art.

Alas, the sweet-natured and occasionally moving but surprisingly stiff and slight Cry Macho is most likely destined to be remembered as one of Eastwood’s lesser works.

Even though many of the segments are brief, Guevara-Flanagan does a remarkably thorough job in covering such a wide range of areas. The only complaint one might have about Body Parts is it easily could have been twice as long.

The chief delight in “Wicked Little Letters” is watching Colman and Buckley in action.

A comedy worthy of the best Woody Allen, and Adrian is not unlike Woody's persona: a sincere, intense, insecure nebbish, hopeless with women, aiming for greatness.

What is most wonderful about Man on the Moon, a very good film, is that it remains true to Kaufman's stubborn vision.

Troche's tone is so relentlessly, depressingly monotonous that the characters seem trapped in a narrow emotional range. They live out their miserable lives in one lachrymose sequence after another, and for us there is no relief.

Bounds from one gag to another like an eager puppy.

Some kind of sweet, wacky masterpiece.

Seems Like Old Times is another one of those near-misses that leaves a movie critic in a quandary. It's a funny movie, and it made me laugh out loud a lot, but in the final analysis it just didn't quite edge over the mystical line into success.

Populaire has no interest in rewriting the rules of romantic comedy, but it does run through the expected paces with admirable style.

Although I liked the first "MiB" movie, I wasn't particularly looking forward to this belated sequel. But I had fun. It has an ingenious plot, bizarre monsters, audacious cliff-hanging, and you know what? A closing scene that adds a new and sort of touching dimension to the characters of J and K.

Big Fish of course is a great-looking film, with a fantastical visual style that could be called Felliniesque if Burton had not by now earned the right to the adjective Burtonesque.

The movie is flimsy, glib, and occasionally pretty funny.

BAT*21 was shot on location in Malaysia, however, and it looks authentic and gets us involved through the energy of its performances.

Snowden works best when it’s just Edward and the three journalists in that hotel room, sweating it out, or when we see the pattern of events that led him to commit acts that exposed the shocking practices of our own government but also quite possibly created serious security breaches.

Lawless is a well-made film about ignorant and violent people. Like the recent "Killer Joe," I can only admire this film's craftsmanship and acting, and regret its failure to rise above them.

There's a lot of potential charm here, but the director, Emma-Kate Croghan, is so distracted by stylistic quirks that the characters are forever being upstaged by the shots they're in.

This becomes Tobey Maguire's film to dominate, and I've never seen these dark depths in him before. Actors possess a great gift to surprise us, if they find the right material in their hands.

Julia is the story of a fascinating woman, told from the point of view of someone who hardly knew her. That is, I realize, an unkind judgment against Lillian Hellman, whose wartime memoirs provide the inspiration for the story. But this movie's problems start with its point of view, and it never quite recovers from them.

Writer-director Tom Tykwer is clearly a fan of the source material, and he has done an admirable job of taking a melancholy, beautifully rendered piece of prose and catapulting it to visual life.

It feels as if about 50% of this movie accurately captures the music business, while the other half is a fluffy confection of pure fantasy — and that’s a formula that works perfectly in an escapist film such as this.

What finally makes Miss Firecracker special is that it is not about who wins the contest, but about how all beauty contests are about the need to be loved and about how silly a beauty contest can seem if somebody really loves you.

The skill of the actors, who invest their characters with small touches of humanity, is useful in distracting us from the emotional manipulations, but it's like they're brightening separate rooms of a haunted house.

In Thunderheart we get a real visual sense of the reservation, of the beauty of the rolling prairie and the way it is interrupted by deep gorges, but also of the omnipresent rusting automobiles and the subsistence level of some of the housing. We feel that we're really there, and that the people in the story really occupy land they stand on.

Walter Hill's "Geronimo," a film of great beauty and considerable intelligence, covers the same ground as many other movies about Indians, but in a new way.

There are some one-liners that zing not only with humor but truth. On the whole I was satisfied.

A first-rate, slam-bang action thriller with a lot of style and no little humor.

This movie rocks.

There are far more laugh-out-loud moments in the first half of Jumanji: The Next Level than in the second hour, but I liked the unexpected (if kinda trippy) spiritual element that comes into play late in the story.

For a time, “Moana 2” seems more fixated with creating memorably weird imagery than telling a story, but it regains its footing in a third act filled with genuine emotion and a spiritually rousing finale.

Has moments of great imagination.

The movie is cast so well that the actors bring life to their predictable destinies, and Elizondo casts a kind of magical warm spell over them all.

Ask the Dust requires an audience with a special love for film noir, with a feeling for the loneliness and misery of the writer.

On the basis of this second performance as Bond, Dalton can have the role as long as he enjoys it. He makes an effective Bond - lacking Sean Connery's grace and humor, and Roger Moore's suave self-mockery, but with a lean tension and a toughness that is possibly more contemporary.

The final few scenes of The Kill Room stretch the satiric premise to the breaking point, but by then we’re content to go along with the ride and enjoy the dark humor and the fine work of the entire cast, led by Jackson and Thurman in twin knockout performances.

It will keep reminding you of better movies in the same genre.

Fuqua and screenwriter Richard Wenk veer close to “Godfather” territory with an extended sequence that cuts between a somber religious ceremony and extreme carnage, but this is not Important Cinema — it’s well-filmed, well-acted, high-class B-movie pulp, and we get a neat little twist to wrap it all up at the end.

To Annette Bening’s credit, she finds just the right notes to illustrate Grace’s capacity for love, as well as her special gift for never letting up and driving you a little bit crazy.

Just when we think we’ve got it all figured out, Southbound serves up another deliciously bloody twist.

A damped-down return to the Kingdom of Far Far Away, lacking the comic energy of the first brilliant film and not measuring up to the second.

The Finest Hours feels stitched together. None of the three main plot lines is particularly powerful or moving.

Perhaps the whole business is too cerebral and circumspect to stir up emotional involvement, or perhaps there’s a tinge of wine snobbery that has a slightly distancing effect. Then again, maybe it’s wrong to expect much in the way of excitement from a quiet art best suited to the sedate setting of a fine restaurant.

It's fun, it's slick and it's carefully put together, but it's more of an exercise than an accomplishment. Everyone does their schtick, the plot complications unfold like clockwork, but we find ourselves not really caring.

Wood and Cage have a terrific dynamic together.

Sharky’s Machine contains all of the ingredients of a tough, violent, cynical big-city cop movie, but what makes it intriguing is the way the Burt Reynolds character plays against those conventions.

Weir is good with his actors and good, too, at putting a slight spin on some of the obligatory scenes.

Writer-director Nguyen cleverly unspools the story like a heist film, with Vincent wheeling and dealing every step of the way.

It's innocent and sometimes kind of charming. The sets are entertaining. There are parallels in appearance and theme to a low-rent "Dark City."

At times, it’s really funny. More often, it’s “shocking” for the sake of shock value, gross for the sake of being gross, and stupid-goofy without much of a payoff.

Positive points to the Hotel Artemis for trying to achieve something original, and for the quality of the cast. But after that bloody boldness, the analogies and the life lessons and the moments of closure are all too predictable and familiar.

There is a kind of pleasure to be had from its directness, from its lack of gimmicks, from its classical form. And just like in the Warners pictures, there is also the pleasure of supporting performances from character actors who come onstage, sing an aria, and leave.

I like the movie on a simple physical level. There is no deeper meaning and no higher skill involved; just professional action, well-staged and filmed with a certain stylistic elegance.

It is not inspired, but it's cheerful and hard-working and sometimes funny, and--here's the important thing--it's not mean.

The movie subtly darkens its tone until, when the horrifying ending arrives, we can see how we got there. There is a final shot that would get laughs in another kind of film, but May earns the right to it, and it works, and we understand it.

The movie is all about behavior, dialogue, star power and wiseass in-jokes. I really sort of liked it.

'Return of the Jedi' is fun, magnificent fun. The movie is a complete entertainment, a feast for the eyes and a delight for the fancy. It's a little amazing how Lucas and his associates keep topping themselves.

Burt and Verona are two characters rarely seen in the movies: thirtysomething, educated, healthy, self-employed, gentle, thoughtful, whimsical, not neurotic and really truly in love.

There are moments of surprising tenderness in Fading Gigolo, and Turturro gives us some beautiful shots of a city he clearly loves. But this film is all over the map, veering from pathos to absurdist comedy to romance to weirdness for the sake of weirdness.

Hey, it's no masterpiece. It is what it is: soft-core eroticism. But on that basis, it succeeds, which is why I am giving it three stars. All criticism is subjective, all star ratings are relative, and if you have read this far you want to know if "Sex and Zen" is a superior example of its genre. It is. If there is the slightest doubt, stay around for the closing credits, which begin with gigantic block letters reading: "Recommended by Penthouse." The possibilities for additional recommendations in other kinds of movies are tantalizing.

Once you get past the amazement this thing was made at all, the movie itself is an intermittently clever but mostly tedious, convoluted David Lynch knockoff that wanders all over the place.

Where it succeeds is as the story of a chapter in history, the story of how one coach at one school arrived at an obvious conclusion and acted on it, and helped open college sports in the South to generations of African Americans.

Flash Gordon is played for laughs, and wisely so. It is no more sophisticated than the comic strip it's based on, and that takes the curse off of material that was old before it was born. Is all of this ridiculous? Of course. Is it fun? Yeah, sort of, it is.

Nine to Five is a good-hearted, simple-minded comedy that will win a place in film history, I suspect, primarily because it contains the movie debut of Dolly Parton. She is, on the basis of this one film, a natural-born movie star, a performer who holds our attention so easily that it's hard to believe it's her first film.

There are times the family-friendly slapstick comedy and heavy messaging about the heartbreak of animals in tight, dark, cold captivity don’t exactly mesh. But the visuals are truly impressive and the story has an uplifting arc, and oh do these actors have fun hamming it up.

The result is too much formula and not enough human interest.

The film indulges in sentimental and sensational tropes. The manipulative touches do more than dis­­­­­­tract, they irk. This story could have been retold without resorting to all the unfortunate formulas used in prime-time and cable fare.

An expensive, exhaustive, 150-mintue odyssey that doesn’t so much conclude as cross the finish line and collapse. It has been outfitted with expensive stars and a glossy production, but it doesn’t really make us care.

Problem is, the more we know about these two, the less we care about what happens to them.

A perfectly cast film that depicts a moody world of jazz musicians, drugs and self-destruction.

The movie unleashes all sorts of considerations it doesn’t really deal with, and the material edges closer to horror than it probably intends.

This is a good but not great Star Trek movie, a sort of compromise between the first two.

Of course, the aging-hit-man theme is hardly original, and at times Asher feels almost TOO familiar — but thanks to the great performances by Perlman and the supporting cast; a knowing and literate script by Jay Zaretsky, and the slick direction of Michael Caton-Jones, this is a sparkling black diamond of film noir.

A film that grows in reflection. The first time I saw it, I was hurtling down the tracks of a goofy ethnic comedy when suddenly we entered dark and dangerous territory. I admired the film but did not sufficiently appreciate its arc.

De Niro is so good at playing a man who has essentially emasculated himself because of fear of his anger, so that sex and anger may be leashed in precisely the opposite way, as in "Raging Bull." And Norton, the puppetmaster - it may not even be freedom he requires, but simply the pleasure of controlling others to obtain it.

The screenplay is dense with crackling dialogue, and the performances are uniformly excellent, with Shea Whigham leading the way in a badass anti-hero performance.

Dial of Destiny has a few clever ideas and some well-crafted action sequences, but the main plot line is creaky, corny and contrived, and the final action twist lands the story in such disastrous, B-movie territory that not even Harrison Ford as Indiana Jones can rescue it from collapsing in a dusty heap of mediocrity.

Janet Montgomery is heartbreakingly good as Emma.

In its amiable, quiet, PG-13 way, The Invention of Lying is a remarkably radical comedy.

It's that ambiguity that makes the film interesting.

It's worth seeing for the acting, and it's got some good laughs in it, and New York is colorfully observed, but don't tell me this movie is about human nature, because it's not; it's about acting.

I was torn between walking out immediately and staying to witness a spectacle more dismaying than anything on the screen: the way small children were digging gratuitous bloodshed.

This sort of stuff is magnificently silly, and Lee, to give him credit, never tried to rise above it. If a movie like this were directed seriously, it would be a disaster.

Unfortunately, not even Gordon-Levitt’s stellar work can sustain a well-made but ultimately underwhelming docudrama from first-time German writer-director Patrick Vollrath.

Benny and Joon is a film that approaches its subjects so gingerly it almost seems afraid to touch them. The story wants to be about love, but is also about madness, and somehow it weaves the two together with a charm that would probably not be quite so easy in real life.

The movie wants to be a laffaminit extravaganza like the Zucker & Abrahams productions, but with slyer humor, more inside jokes, throwaway references and just plain goofiness, as when the characters occasionally break into their own language.

The key to the film is in the character of David. One can imagine a scenario in which an overbearing father drives the son to rebellion, but what happens here is more complex and sinister.

It's an incredible lapse in a movie of this size and ambition - but they've failed to make Judge Roy Bean interesting. He's one-dimensional, predictable, propped up by Paul Newman's acting style, with no personality of his own.

A fresh and lovable comedy about a dysfunctional Jewish family planning their son's bar mitzvah.

The movie’s funniest touches are quiet flashes of character, expertly timed and nimbly played by a deft ensemble. It’s a Disaster is consistently funny, but you wince more often than you laugh out loud. It’s like a Christopher Guest improvisational farce with the volume turned down to 5.