I enjoyed Ashes of Time Redux, up to a point. It's great-looking, and the characters all know what they would, although we do not.

The mission of Eating Animals isn’t to get you to swear off meat (though I’m sure the filmmaker and the narrator would applaud that). It’s to raise your consciousness about the good, the bad and the ugly of animal agriculture.

This film is so good it is devastating.

The Dead Zone does what only a good supernatural thriller can do: It makes us forget it is supernatural.

Palo Alto is a well-directed but relatively slight, only occasionally provocative and unremittingly bleak slice of life.

The De-Dee character subverts those expectations; she shoots the legs out from under the movie with perfectly timed zingers.

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

Body Double is an exhilarating exercise in pure filmmaking, a thriller in the Hitchcock tradition in which there's no particular point except that the hero is flawed, weak, and in terrible danger -- and we identify with him completely. The movie is so cleverly constructed, with the emphasis on visual storytelling rather than dialogue, that we are neither faster nor slower than the hero as he gradually figures out the scheme that has entrapped him.

The costumes and everything else in the film--the photography, the music, above all Shakespeare's language--is so voluptuous, so sensuous.

Lion is a beautifully told, uplifting story of courage and determination.

What comes across is that she is, after all, a very good editor.

Jim Braddock is almost transparent in the simple goodness of his character; that must have made him almost impossible to play. Russell Crowe makes him fascinating, and it takes a moment of two of thought to appreciate how difficult that must have been.

I Went Down is a crime movie in which the dialogue is a great deal more important than anything else. It takes the form of a road movie and the materials of gangster movies (do real gangsters learn how to act by watching movies?), but what happens is beside the point. It's what they say while it's happening that makes the movie so entertaining.

The real support group at this place is the one formed by a small band of students, who lean on each other and reinforce each other in the face of the small-minded bigotry of the so-called adults in their lives.

Elton John deserves a movie operating on a much grander scale than a standard, paint-by-numbers showbiz biopic, and Rocketman is a suitably snazzy vehicle.

The acting is on the money, the writing has substance, the direction knows when to evoke film noir and when (in a trick shot involving loaded dice) to get fancy.

Plays like a collision between a lot of half-baked visual ideas and a deep and urgent need. That makes it interesting…and the film contains an astonishing performance by Christina Ricci, who seems to have been assigned a portion of the screen where she can do whatever she wants.

Problem is, it's so laid-back it eventually gets monotonous. If the style and pacing had been as outrageous as the subject matter, we might have had something really amazing here.

Some of the film's more thought-provoking scenes involves games played at Chicago's Near North Elementary. The players are obviously emulating pro games they've seen on TV. It's not a "game" for them. They go for hard hits.

Hannah Arendt takes seriously the life of the mind.

True, The Little Hours is essentially a one-joke comedy — but most of the jokes under the umbrellas of that one joke are pretty damn, I mean darn, funny.

The movie resembles Mad magazine's "Spy vs. Spy" series, elevated to labyrinthine levels of complexity.

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.

IT...carried me along from the opening frame, rarely missing a beat.

But what's most visible in the movie is the engaging acting. Murphy and Aykroyd are perfect foils for each other.

Equal parts film noir, relationship drama, dark comedy and mood piece, Digging for Fire is a movie made by someone who clearly loves the art of movies.

Barthes takes her notion and runs with it, and Giamatti and Strathairn follow fearlessly.

A Shock to the System confounds our expectations and keeps us intrigued, because there's no way to know, not even in the very last moments, exactly which way the plot is going to fall.