The movie gets the feel right, and there's real energy in the concert scenes, especially the tricky debut of Buddy Holly and the Crickets as the first white act in Harlem's famous Apollo Theater.

You couldn’t ask for a more unlikely avenger than the ill-equipped sort-of hero of Blue Ruin, and that’s precisely why it’s far, far more suspenseful than the typical violent revenge thriller. It’s also why it functions equally well as a potent reflection on the futility of revenge.

As for Beatty, Reds is his bravura turn. He got the idea, nurtured it for a decade, found the financing, wrote most of the script, produced, and directed and starred and still found enough artistic detachment to make his Reed into a flawed, fascinating enigma instead of a boring archetypal hero. I liked this movie. I felt a real fondness for it.

This is about the residents of Ferguson, who reacted to the killing of Michael Brown by galvanizing a movement on the streets of their town and via social media. They knew the whole world was watching, and they had seized the opportunity to tell their stories.

Foster directs the film with a sure eye for the revealing little natural moment.

The film is poetic and erotic, creepy and melodramatic, overwrought and sometimes mocking, as if F. W. Murnau's "Nosferatu" (1922) had a long-lost musical version.

Odd is played by Baard Owe, a trim, fit man with a neat mustache, who may cause you to think a little of James Stewart, Jacques Tati or Jean Rochefort.

Infinity War might be the biggest and most ambitious Marvel movie yet, but it’s certainly not the best. (I’d put it somewhere in the bottom half of the Top 10.) However, there’s plenty of action, humor and heart — and some genuinely effective dramatic moments in which familiar and beloved characters experience real, seemingly irreversible losses.

Wood and Cage have a terrific dynamic together.

It haunts you, you can't forget it, you admire its conception and are able to resolve some of the confusions you had while watching it.

Serkis is brilliant and memorable and sometimes absolutely heartbreaking as Caesar. The supporting players excel, with each getting a moment or two in the sun.

Southside with You is a sweet, intelligent, well-crafted, wonderfully romantic, no-frills re-imagination of the first date between Barack Obama and Michelle Robinson.

There is a long central section in the film which is a triumph of narrative technique.

Thanks to a legendary director at the top of his game, this is easily one of the best action movies of the year.

Guilty by Suspicion is about a period that is now some 40 years ago (although some blacklist members did not work again until the 1970s). But it teaches a lesson we are always in danger of forgetting: that the greatest service we can do our country is to be true to our conscience.

With spare and precise dialogue that often sounds inspired by Dashiell Hammett, a labyrinthine story with a few heart-stopping twists and pitch-perfect performances by Brosnahan and the supporting cast, this is one of the best movies of the year.

One of the more completely entertaining movies I've seen in a while--a well-crafted character study that, like a Hollywood movie with a skillful script, manipulates us but makes us like it.

The movie is sure to be appealing to younger viewers (they may find it more accessible and certainly less frightening than "Jurassic Park"), and it's smart enough to keep older viewers involved, too.

How this all finally works out is deeply satisfying. Only after the movie is over do you realize what a balancing act it was, what risks it took, what rewards it contains. A character says at one point that she has grown to like Bianca. So, heaven help us, have we.

If you thought the magnificently flamboyant Luhrmann was well-suited to put the flashiest of spins on “The Great Gatsby,” you can imagine what he does with the made-for-overkill mythology of Elvis — and from the moment we see a bejeweled version of the Warner Bros. Pictures logo, we know Luhrmann is going to flood our senses with a nonstop medley of arresting sights and sounds, never taking his foot off the directorial gas pedal.

Fighting — presented with Jackson’s usual double helpings of visual splendor, emotional oomph and low-key comedy — is what Battle of the Five Armies is all about.

It would be a cliché to call In the Heights the Feel-Good Movie of the Year, but it would also be accurate. Perhaps for these times we might call it the Feeling-Better Movie of the year.

You might be tempted to think that Arthur would be a bore, because it is about a drunk who is always trying to tell you stories. You would be right if Arthur were a party and you were attending it. But Arthur is a movie. And so its drunk, unlike real drunks, is more entertaining, more witty, more human, and more poignant than you are. He embodies, in fact, all the wonderful human qualities that drunks fondly, mistakenly believe the booze brings out in them.

A big budget historical drama that carries Denmark's hopes into the Oscar season. It provides still more exposure for the rising Danish star Mads Mikkelsen, the latest male sex symbol of the art house crowd.

One view of what happened that day, a very effective one. And as an act of filmmaking, it is superb: A sense of immediate and present reality permeates every scene.

This is the kind of movie where every note is put in lovingly. It's a 1950s crime movie, but with a modern, ironic edge: The cops are just a shade over the top, just slightly in on the joke.

A tight, taut thriller with a twist.

It has the unsettled logic of a nightmare, in which nothing fits and everything seems inevitable and there are a lot of arrows in the air and they are all flying straight at you.