Portrait of men and a few women who stubbornly try to maintain some dignity in the face of personal disaster.

Kicking and Screaming doesn't have much of a plot, but of course it wouldn't; this is a movie about characters waiting for their plots to begin.

Captain America: Civil War is a classic example of what the big-ticket summer movie experience is all about.

I had heard the music before. What the film gave me was an opportunity to see Thelonious Monk creating some of it, and, just as importantly, an opportunity to see how those who knew him loved him.

It’s a big puzzle that the filmmakers piece together in an intriguing and engrossing way.

Middle of Nowhere isn't a highly charged drama, as you might have gathered. Most of the action takes place within the mind of a lonely woman. That's why Corinealdi is so effective in the lead.

We realize that the most frightening outcome of the movie would be if it contained no surprises, no revelations, no quirky twist at the end.

As an inside view of the bursting of the Internet bubble, Startup.com is definitive.

Emerges as an accurate memory of that time when the American melting pot, splendid as a theory, became a reality.

The director, Peter Cattaneo, takes material that could would be at home in a sex comedy, and gives it gravity because of the desperation of the characters; we glimpse the home life of these men, who have literally been put on the shelf, and we see the wound to their pride.

The movie, written and directed by Dylan Kidd, depends on its dialogue, and like a film by David Mamet or Neil LaBute has characters who use speech like an instrument. The screenplay would be entertaining just to read, as so very few are.

A new documentary about the life of this producer who put together one of the most remarkable winning streaks in Hollywood history, and followed it with a losing streak that almost destroyed him. It's one of the most honest films ever made about Hollywood.

It lovingly, almost sadistically, lays out the situation and deliberately demonstrates all the things that can go wrong. And I mean all the things.

Nothing Cruise has done will prepare you for what he does in Born on the Fourth of July. His performance is so good that the movie lives through it. Stone is able to make his statement with Cruise's face and voice and doesn't need to put everything into the dialogue.

Morales trafficks in familiar formulas of an everyman in a bind with evil men. What sets Graceland apart are the conflicted values of its characters.

In the alternately exhilarating and heartbreaking documentary Whitney, the Oscar-winning director Kevin Macdonald (“Touching the Void,” “The Last King of Scotland”) does a magnificent job of taking us through the paces of Houston’s life and times.

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

Thanks to the first-class special effects, a star-packed cast, screenwriters who know just when to inject some self-aware comic relief without getting too jokey and director Bryan Singer’s skilled and sometimes electrifying visuals, X-Men: Days of Future Past is flat-out big-time, big summer movie fun.

Peggy Sue Got Married is a lot of things - a human comedy, a nostalgic memory, a love story - but there are times when it is just plain creepy, because it awakens such vivid memories in us.

The weakness of Black Girl is in its slow, journeyman style; one feels that Sembene learned filmmaking by making this film. It also suffers from a kind of primitive naturalism, as if the script were by James T. Farrell out of Theodore Dreiser. Every motive is spelled out in unnecessary detail, and little attempt is made to get into the minds of the characters.

Mel Brooks will do anything for a laugh. Anything. He has no shame. He's an anarchist; his movies inhabit a universe in which everything is possible and the outrageous is probable, and Silent Movie, where Brooks has taken a considerably stylistic risk and pulled it off triumphantly, made me laugh a lot.

Director Chris McKay keeps things zipping along, alternating between smart and often hilarious rapid-fire exchanges of dialogue, and big, big, BIG action sequences that fill every inch of the screen with brightly colored, fantastically kinetic action.

What a lovely film this is, so gentle and whimsical, so simple and profound.

It’s a quirky and unique coming-of-age story.

What an anguished story it tells, of a marriage from hell.

What's fascinating is the way Mario, working from his father's autobiography and his own memories, has somehow used his first-hand experience without being cornered by it.

Trainwreck is my favorite romantic comedy of the year, and despite (or maybe because of) all its sharp edges and cynical set pieces, it’s a movie you want to wrap your arms around, or at least give a high five.

We have all the action heroes and Method script-chewers we need right now, but the Cary Grant department is understaffed, and Hugh Grant shows here that he is more than a star, he is a resource.