It’s impressive how well director Malcolm D. Lee (working from a script by Kenya Barris and Tracy Oliver) balances the serious material with the bawdy, freewheeling comedy pieces.

The Book of Life is a delight. In an animated universe cluttered with kung-fu pandas, ice princesses and video-game heroes, Gutierrez and del Toro have conjured up an original vision.

Even the smaller touches in Save Yourselves! ring true.

This film has few tangible pleasures, such as some somber shots of Demester walking far away in a field. Its achievement is theoretical. It wants to depict lives that are without curiosity, introspection and hope.

What makes the film fun is the deadpan, tongue-in-cheek humor that undermines the seemingly sincere dramatic scenes.

On the surface, this film is an enchanting meditation. At its core is the hard steel of individuality.

These fears explain why in its scenes on the Eiger itself, North Face starts strongly and ends as unbearably riveting. They also explain why it was a strategic error to believe this story needed romantic and political subplots.

It was probably the right time to say goodbye to “Ray Donovan,” as the series had begun spinning its wheels in recent seasons, after the action moved from California to the East Coast, but with this movie, Ray gets the send-off he deserves.

The world didn’t need yet another Cinderella story, but the one we got is one of the best versions ever put on film.

It's a strange, magical film, in which Allen uses the arts of the ancient Chinese healer as a shortcut to psychoanalysis; at the end of the film, which covers only a few days, Alice has learned truths about her husband, her parents, her marriage, her family and herself, and has undergone a profound conversion in values. Because this is a Woody Allen film, a lot of that metaphysical process is very funny.

McKellen is brilliant throughout, his piercing blue eyes revealing the gallantry of youth and the sadness of a life’s worth of memories slipping further away. His understated and charming approach to the role makes it all the more potent and engaging.

Worth falls just short of having enough strength in the screenplay to warrant a recommendation.

The movie's intriguing in its fanciful way, and there are times when both Calvin and Ruby seem uncannily like they're undergoing revision at the hands of some uber-writer above them both.

Green's approach certainly opens up opportunities for his students, and is a refreshing change from the lockstep public school approach, which punishes individualism.

By the end of the movie, I frankly didn't give a damn. There's an ironic twist, but the movie hadn't paid for it and didn't deserve it. And I was struck by the complete lack of morality in Demonlover.

Thanks to the stylish direction by Paul Feig, a whip-smart screenplay by Jessica Sharzer (adapting Darcey Bells’ novel) and performances that pop from the screen, A Simple Favor is a sharp-edged delight.

There are some moments in The Witches of Eastwick that stretch uncomfortably for effects - the movie's climax is overdone, for example - and yet a lot of the time this movie plays like a plausible story about implausible people. The performances sell it. And the eyebrows.

Would it be heresy on my part to suggest that Fiddler isn't much as a musical, and that director Norman Jewison has made as good a film as can be made from a story that is quite simply boring?

The Eclipse is needlessly confusing. Is it a ghost story or not? Perhaps this is my problem.

The movie may leave you scratching your head way too much when it's over. Yet it proves Ben Wheatley not only knows how to make a movie, but he knows how to make three at the same time.

Zoë Kravitz’s “Blink Twice” is a radical blend of trippy and unnerving social satire and blood-spattered horror, with Kravitz taking a big swing in her feature directorial debut and connecting with bone-rattling impact. It is a film that takes one big leap after another and sticks the landing far more often than not.

As you listen to his uncanny narration of Tupac: Resurrection, which is stitched together from interviews, you realize you're not listening to the usual self-important vacancies from celebrity Q&As, but to spoken prose of a high order, in which analysis, memory and poetry come together seamlessly in sentences and paragraphs that sound as if they were written.

The movie is essentially a filmed stage play, one of those idea-plays like Shaw liked to write, in which men and women ponder their differences and complexities.

I think the secret to the appeal of the entire “Kung Fu Panda” franchise is the enormous affection we feel for Po, that seemingly bumbling good guy who also can rise to the occasion and showcase true heroism and mystical power.

Speak No Evil eventually goes full-on with the familiar horror movie blood-spattering, but the social satire in that well-executed build-up is the real strength of the film.

What elevates Stephen Chbosky’s adaptation of the bestselling novel of the same name by R.J. Palacio is the myriad ways in which Wonder catches us just a little off-guard and puts lumps in our throats even when Auggie is off-screen, and we’re learning about supporting characters who rarely get their own sections in movies such as this.

At times Jimi: All Is By My Side feels pure authentic. More often, though, it’s meandering and melodramatic, with far too many scenes of Hendrix jabbering and squabbling with two key female figures in his life, and not enough of the music.

To Be Takei is a celebration of a man of great resilience, infectious humor, a voracious appetite for the richness of the human experience, and the best laugh in the history of laughing.