It's a portrait of a time and place, characters keeping company around a simple kitchen table, and the helplessness adolescents feel when faced with the priorities of those in power. What I'll take away from it is the knowledge that now the Fannings have given us two actresses of such potential.

What Raising Arizona needs more than anything else is more velocity. Here's a movie that stretches out every moment for more than it's worth, until even the moments of inspiration seem forced.

Overall, this is a Boston Strong film about one of the worst terrorist attacks ever on American soil, and a community’s resounding response.

The point is not really what is said, but the tone of voice, the word choices, the conversational strategies, the sense of life going on all the time, everywhere, all over town.

It’s the kind of music doc that makes you want to download about 50 songs — although you already should have most of them on your playlist.

Mona Lisa and the Blood Moon plays like a graphic novel come to life. Everything has a heightened sense of color, and the soundtrack pulses with banger tunes and wall-rattling EDM.

The film is unusual for not having a plot or a payoff.

A sleeper that talks like a thriller and walks like a thriller, but has more brains than the average thriller.

Director Josh Boone does a wonderful job of celebrating the sentimentality without shying away from the tough moments. The pacing, music and editing are all first-rate.

Wiig manages to make Alice funny as hell, endearing, sad and sometimes a little frightening. There’s not an ounce of condescension or preciousness in the performance.

The film is too confusing to be successful, but too striking and visually beautiful to be ignored.

One of the pleasures of 21 Jump Street is that the screenplay by Michael Bacall and Jonah Hill is happy to point out all of its improbabilities; the premise is preposterous to begin with, and they run with that.

It never really pulls itself together into the convincing, focused drama it promises, yet it kept me involved right up until the final scenes, which piled on developments almost recklessly.

After seeing Kinyarwanda, I have a different kind of feeling about the genocide that took place in Rwanda in 1994. The film approaches it not as a story line but as a series of intense personal moments.

A powerful, brutal film containing a definitive Charles Bronson performance.

The screenplay packs a punch and a sharp bite, the visuals are dazzling, the camerawork captures the fever-dream madness of the story — and the performances from the young cast (and a few solid veterans) are spot-on.

What's effective is how matter-of-fact Fair Game is. This isn't a lathering, angry attack picture.

Directed by Bao Nguyen, who expertly combines the multi-camera recordings from the night of the session with new interviews with Richie, Cyndi Lauper, Kenny Loggins, Huey Lewis, Smokey Robinson and Bruce Springsteen, as well as technicians who were there, “The Greatest Night in Pop” is a terrific behind-the-scenes chronicle of the making of a single that sold 20 million copies worldwide, won multiple Grammys and, most important, of course, raised more than $60 million in 1985 dollars.

A lot of rock stars and other showbiz heroes have the notion that because they’re successful in other areas, they can direct a movie, too. Usually they’re wrong. But Mellencamp turns out to have a real filmmaking gift.

This premise is well-established because of a disturbingly good performance by Daryl Sabara as Kyle, the disgusting son.

Guncrazy is a consistently sharp and observant retooling of Joseph H. Lewis' 1949 B classic, Gun Crazy. Davis has a gift for breathing quirky new life into an old genre and not overstating her American themes. She also makes wonderful use of her settings and gets first-rate performances from her cast. [12 Feb 1993, p.39]

Circle of Friends is heartwarming and poignant, a love story that glows with intelligence and feeling.

Everything that transpires in the tightly spun if sometimes plausibility-bending psychological thriller “The Wasp” eventually connects — and when it all comes together, it’s a shocking and visceral gut punch.

The Drop is filled with many such small, near-perfect moments where there’s so much more going on beyond the simple exchanges of dialogue.

Although the actors are convincing and the film well-crafted, The Company Men delivers few satisfactory character portraits because the movie isn't really about characters, it's about economic units.

An energetic and eccentric animated cartoon.

Kill Bill: Volume 1 shows Quentin Tarantino so effortlessly and brilliantly in command of his technique that he reminds me of a virtuoso violinist racing through "Flight of the Bumble Bee" -- or maybe an accordion prodigy setting a speed record for "Lady of Spain."

A warm human comedy.