The grubby, low-budget intensity of the film gives it a lovable quality that high-tech movies wouldn't have.

In some truly inspired casting choices, Ashley Judd provides emotional depth as Barack’s mother, and Jason Mitchell (who deserved an Oscar nomination for his portrayal of Easy-E in “Straight Outta Compton”) and Ellar Coltrane (who literally grew up onscreen in “Boyhood”) deliver stellar work as friends of Barry’s who remind of us of the multiple worlds he inhabits.

Directed by David Tedeschi and produced by a team including Paul McCartney, Ringo Starr and Martin Scorsese, “Beatles ’64” could have been subtitled, “Everything Old Is New Again.”

Schlaich portrays a society in which some are racists who act cruelly toward the black man, and others, even strangers, go out of their way to help him.

The movie felt long to me, and there were some stretches during which I was less than riveted. Is it possible that there wasn't enough Sendak story to justify a feature-length film?

Mean Girls dissects high school society with a lot of observant detail, which seems surprisingly well-informed. The screenplay by "Saturday Night Live's" Tina Fey is both a comic and a sociological achievement.

This is not a great movie, and you will be able to live quite happily without seeing it, but what it does, it does with a certain welcome warmth.

Baldwin and Moore generate genuine heat and chemistry together, even in some ridiculous moments.

A riot of visual invention and weird humor that works on its chosen sub-moronic level, and on several others as well, including some fairly sophisticated ones.

Movies like Wonderland invite me into the screen with them. I am curious. I begin to care.

This one doesn't go on the list of great recent European thrillers, but it's engrossing, and in the character of Martine/Candice, it touches real poignancy.

We appreciate Mister Rogers even more after seeing this film, but I’m not sure we really got to know him any better.

This is a smart, sensitive, perceptive film, with actors well suited to the dialogue. It underlines the difficulty of making connections outside our individual boxes of time and space.

It is not about whether the hero will get the girl. It is about whether the hero should get the girl, and when was the last time you saw a movie that even knew that could be the question?

This is the most gruesome and quease-inducing film you are likely to have seen. You may not even want to read the descriptions in this review. Yet it is also beautiful, angry and sad, with a curious sick poetry, as if the Marquis de Sade had gone in for pastel landscapes.

This is not a major Spielberg film, although it is an effortlessly watchable one.

Not perfect; a vice cop played by Pam Grier is oddly conceived and unlikely in action, and the movie doesn't seem to know how to end. But as character studies of Jack and Claire, it is daring and inventive, and worthy of comparison with the films of a French master of criminal psychology like Jean-Pierre Melville.

It's a political conspiracy thriller, a science fiction adventure, and sort of a love story. Most movies that try to crowd so much into an hour and a half end up looking like a shopping list, but Dreamscape works, maybe because it has a sense of humor.

The Last Boy Scout is a superb example of what it is: a glossy, skillful, cynical, smart, utterly corrupt and vilely misogynistic action thriller. To give it a negative review would be dishonest, because it is such a skillful and well-crafted movie.

What surprised me was how much I admired Kristen Stewart, who in "Twilight," was playing below her grade level. Here is an actress ready to do important things. Together, and with the others, they make Adventureland more real and more touching than it may sound.

We see different movies for different reasons, and Diamonds Are Forever is great at doing the things we see a James Bond movie for.

Spectacle matters more than story for Reygadas, who wants to create a world onscreen instead of developing characters or critiquing society.

Although The White Diamond is entire of itself, it earns its place among the other treasures and curiosities in Herzog's work. Here is one of the most inquisitive filmmakers alive, a man who will go to incredible lengths to film people living at the extremes.

With a dialogue-driven, authentic screenplay by Alanna Francis, an effectively poignant score by Owen Pallett and powerful work by Kendrick and Kaniehtiio Horn and Wunmi Mosaku as Alice’s best friends, this is the kind of intimate drama that sticks with you long after the viewing experience.

If you see only one martial arts Western this year (and there is probably an excellent chance of that), this is the one.

One of the things I like about the movie is the wit of its dialogue, the way sentences and conversations coil with confidence up to a conclusion that is totally unexpected.

Told as a melodrama and romance, not docudrama, and that makes it all the more effective.

Exactly the kind of documentary we all want to have made about ourselves, in which it is revealed that we are funny, smart, beloved, the trusted confidant of famous people.