The situations are more or less standard (fights over sleeping arrangements, emergencies that have to be solved, moments of truth and confession), but the dialogue and the acting bring the material up to another level.

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.

Director Silver delivers a visually arresting melodrama with some stunning dramatic turns, and Lindsay Burdge is nothing sort of sensational as the sad and lost and potentially dangerous Gina.

There is a whole genre of films about childhood friends still living in the old neighborhood and going down the drain of crime and drugs. Few of them capture the fatigue and depression, and the futility, as well as this one, in which the characters hold on to their self-respect by obeying the very rules that are grinding them down.

It’s a Hollywood story of a spectacular rise to the top that was quite apparently a real-life horror story all along.

The film works as well as it does due to the genius of Benedict Cumberbatch and the way he has inhabited Alan Turing’s persona.

A love story about two strong-willed people who find exhilaration in testing each other. It is not about sexual love, or even romantic love, really, but about that kind of love based on challenge and fascination.

In an uncanny way the movie works as a gangster movie and we remember that the old Bogart and Cagney classics had a childlike innocence, too. The world was simpler then. Now it's so complicated maybe only a kid can still understand the Bogart role.

This Is Elvis is the extraordinary record of a man who simultaneously became a great star and was destroyed by alcohol and drug addiction. What is most striking about its documentary footage is that we can almost always see both things happening at once.

While the surface of his film sparkles with sharp, ironic dialogue, deeper issues are forming, and Chasing Amy develops into a film of touching insights.

Like most British family films, Water Horse doesn't dumb down its young characters or insult the intelligence of the audience. It has a lot of sly humor about what we know, or have heard, about the Loch Ness monster.

Gets off to a start that's so charming it never lives it down. The movie is all anticlimax once we realize it's going to be about gimmicks, not characters.

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

David Gordon Green's second film, is too subtle and perceptive, and knows too much about human nature, to treat their lack of sexual synchronicity as if it supplies a plot.

An intelligent, upbeat, happy movie.

I praised "Lovely & Amazing," which also features a romance between an adult woman and a teenage boy. But "Lovely & Amazing" is about events that happen in a plausible world (the adult is actually arrested). Tadpole wants only to be a low-rent "Graduate" clone.

Bahrani, as director, not only stays out of the way of the simplicity of his story, but relies on it; less is more, and with restraint he finds a grimy eloquence.

If what you’re after is insane, mind-bogglingly violent martial arts action, “The Raid 2” is quite possibly the ultimate.

Shang-Chi gets a little bogged down in the grand finale, which features an overlong and typical MCU battle featuring all manner of otherworldly creatures and bombastic special effects — but the journey to that final destination is fantastic.

Director Enrico Casarosa is making his feature-length debut here, and he and the vast Pixar animation army have delivered a gorgeous and lovely coming-of-age fantasy with plenty of slapstick laughs, the obligatory heartwarming family moments and a friendship for the ages.

With Midthunderr’s blazing screen presence in “Prey”—moving with athletic grace through the wild, delivering her lines with power and wit and style, there’s little doubt we are witnessing the ascension of a true star.

Directed with just the right amount of stylistic flair (including terrific and helpful graphics) by the talented Muta’Ali, “MoviePass, MovieCrash” is a worthy companion to documentaries such as “Eat the Rich: The GameStop Saga,” “WeWork: Or the Making and Breaking of a $47 Billion Unicorn,“ and the Fyre Festival documentaries.

Working from a clever if sometimes ridiculously over-the-top script by Seth Reiss and Will Tracy, the British director Mark Mylod (“Game of Thrones,” “Succession”) teams with a well-cast ensemble to deliver a deadpan spoof of “Cabin in the Woods” type horror films, draped in a “White Lotus” setting.

A movie so strange that it escapes entirely from the family genre and moves into fantasy. Like "Willy Wonka and the Chocolate Factory," it has fearsome depths and secrets.

Has no ragged edges or bothersome detours, and flows from surprise to delight. At the end, when just desserts are handed out, it arrives at a kind of perfection.

Simple enough to delight a child and complex enough to baffle a philosopher.

Petzold, who also wrote the script, doesn't make level one thrillers, and his characters may be smarter than us, or dumber. It's never just about the plot, anyway. It has to do with random accidents, dangerous coincidences, miscalculations, simple mistakes. And the motives are never simple.

Astin's performance is so self-effacing, so focused and low-key, that we lose sight of the underdog formula and begin to focus on this dogged kid who won't quit. And the last big scene is an emotional powerhouse, just the way it's supposed to be.