At its best, Capitalism: A Love Story is a searing outcry against the excesses of a cutthroat time. At its worst, it's dorm-room Marxism.

This pleasantly rote movie will rouse you.

A stunt masquerading as a statement.

Re-creating that ensemble buzz and that alcoholically fueled soul scraping is an almost impossible task, but in She’s So Lovely, director Nick Cassavetes, working from an unproduced script by his old man (who died in 1989), gives it a ballsy go.

A notch more watchable than Volume I, if only because Joe, the self-destructive heroine, is now played front and center by the magnetically dyspeptic Charlotte Gainsbourg instead of the vacuous model Stacy Martin.

Though one of his later films, Topaz suffers from unusual pacing that drags for long stretches, but it also features exemplary Hitchcock suspense sequences, including a brisk escape set piece in Copenhagen and an impossibly tense scene in Harlem.

An overdeveloped coming-of-age potboiler.

The interviews Bitton conducts, almost all with Arabs and Jews who share her despair, are less meaningful than what she captures in silence: the sight of farmers separated from their farmland, everyday people thwarted in their dailiness, and children playing next to what looks like prison walls.

Check your brain at the door and fasten your seat belt.

The film loses some of its fizz by giving in to a so-so caper plot that unintentionally proves the axiom they were just satirizing.

Even at a relatively brief hour and 37 minutes, the familiar contours of Scanlon's story line struggle to conjure the wonder that Pixar’s most transcendent movies do; instead of truly new, it’s mostly old things borrowed, and tinted blue.

Who among us comes to a J.Lo joint just for the music? She is more than a pop star, an actress, a fragrance mogul — Jennifer Lopez is spectacle. Then, now, and always.

Ransom has some clever and exciting moments, but in scene after scene it teases you with gamesmanship only to pummel you with contrivance.

French art thriller 13 Tzameti has a literal hair-trigger premise, yet it's so lacking in human dimensions that it creates virtually no suspense.

Couldn't Mike Judge, with his acid wit, have come up with a better title for a suburban-schlub comedy than ?Extract?

Abominable’s themes and arc are familiar kids’ movie fare, with only one real plot twist. But its reverent attitude toward nature and wonder is a welcome addition to the cartoon canon.

The fun of Role Models is that it's a high-concept movie executed with speed and finesse and the kind of brusquely tossed-off obscene banter that can get you laughing before you know what hit you.

The trouble with Giuliani Time is that Keating, as a filmmaker, wants to give power to the people but in his every perception he takes it away from them.

In making a movie about the hot mess of Afghan history, a sense of reserve turns out to be a useful tool for peace.

The performances are winning -- Gyllenhaal is particularly sharp as an aggrieved sibling, and there's mutual zing in her scenes with Reilly.

Excessive, but I, like Mr. Jingles, can't resist the Christmas-season cheese.

For a visual bonus, Hugh Dancy appears in bike shorts as the lone male Jane-ite.

If any character steals Bill & Ted's Bogus Journey, it's the Grim Reaper, who, as played by William Sadler, keeps smirking with pleasure at the chance to loosen up.

The Incredible Hulk is just a luridly reductive and violent B movie -- one that clears a bar that hadn't been set very high.

The drama is so minimalist that it's hard to glimpse the man behind the woe.

Have there ever been two less energetic stars than Eric Stoltz and Annabella Sciorra? Casting this diffident duo in an allegedly romantic comedy proves disastrous; they suck the air out of virtually every scene.

Godzilla is still the most awesome of tacky movie monsters — a Jurassic knockoff of King Kong whose ritual stomping of Tokyo never quite lets you forget that you’re watching a man in a lizard suit trash a very elaborate toy train set.

Murderously dull stretches of dialogue suck most of the fun out of this sloppy drama.

Blue Beetle never loses sight of the community it seeks to honor, not once pandering nor offering surface-level representation of what it means to be Latino. Latinidad is complex — it's more than where you were born, what language you speak, or what food you eat. But one thing it's full of is heart, and Blue Beetle has plenty of that to go around. Animo!

An efficient, intense formula thriller.

Wargnier directs his French historical drama, a foreign film Oscar nominee, in a way that allows little perspective on the extent of Stalinist cruelty; even when terrible things happen, they do so sedately.

A serviceable time-passer for kids, grandparents, and poochophiles.

What blows us away is the power of Ifans' moist puppy eyes and chilling smile as a true believer undeterred by reality.

In such an audience stroker, where casting is everything (on Broadway, James Gandolfini brought exciting menace to the role of Mr. Longstreet), Winslet and Waltz jell while Foster and Reilly flounder, unable to make sense of what kind of people they're supposed to be.

A dark, ambitious, unsettling piece of work.

I love a good mind-bender, but it's getting more common these days to see thrillers that don't so much bend your mind as chop it, smash it, and place it in the Cuisinart. Trance, the new film directed by Danny Boyle is a high-brainiac art-world thriller that wants to do nothing more (or less) than give your head a majorly pleasurable spin.

Lust, Caution wants us to feel the erotic ping of buttoned-up people ripping open those buttons, but too often it's the film's drama that's under wraps.

Bay, at heart, isn't a fantasist; he's a literal-minded maestro of demolition.

Writer-director Salvatore Stabile has a good eye for the details of hard-luck ordinariness, and he sketches believable family bonds with a minimum of flourish.

It's like "Capturing the Friedmans" scrubbed to a happy ending.

Director Sérgio Machado, who worked as an assistant to Central Station's Walter Salles, lingers sensually over every wrong move his attractive tragic trio make.

It's a tribute to the actors' appeal that they can sling this hash and keep our sympathies, but they can't squeeze much drama from pure soap.

The Comfort of Strangers is luridly silly, yet it isn’t quite dull. Walken takes his usual glassy-eyed menace to new levels of high-camp refinement — he manages to be over the top and minimal at the same time — and the film has an extravagantly lush atmosphere, due in large part to the music of Twin Peaks‘ Angelo Badalamenti.

For a lot of its runtime, Velvet is fun and silly and enjoyably outrageous. It’s hard, though, to walk away with a real sense of anything more than blood on the canvas and a blank where your feelings — beyond mild bemusement, and a sudden appetite for prime Los Angeles real estate — should be.

Cheery, silly, splattery, and respectful of its elders (and betters, particularly Sam Raimi's "The Evil Dead").

Adapting the script from his own 2020 audio play, Eisenberg treats his cast with measured acidity, drawing out their snarky moods and narcissistic missteps without mocking them too cruelly; you may not particularly love these characters, but that's no match for how little they like themselves.

This galvanizing cinematic work is also gorgeous, experimental, alive with a Scandinavian strain of chutzpah, and artistically elegant.

Splattery, puncture-heavy violence — the hard-R rating is earned — alternates with deadening rafts of therapy-speak, including an actual therapy session. But there's no deeper meaning to any of it; the Scream idea, meta to its core, was always a preening celebration of its own cleverness, never mind the occasional half-explored nods to toxic fandom or cancel culture.

The War Within plays effectively off our voyeurism, yet it has such a cloistered, American-eyed view of the nightmare of terrorism that I kept searching for the profound explanation beneath its piecemeal ones.

Renner's Cross is a conflicted hero built to take advantage of the "Hurt Locker" star's best qualities as an actor - his default intensity, the way he conveys that complicated mental calculations are taking place under cover of watchful stillness, even underwater.

I wish that the film had more of the tasty futuristic detail promised by that dummy parole officer. I also wish that Blomkamp took us deeper into the world of Elysium.

Gracious, if meandering.

Bale exists all too large under the circumstances, a well-fed actor playing at emaciation for the sake of a fiction about a character whose torment is as unreadable as his vertebrae are countable.

Fred Dekker’s 1987 horror comedy is, like totally, the ultimate ’80s movie. An agreeably goofy, Little Rascals-meets-The Goonies time passer, the movie is proudly anti-CGI.

Blessed with some firm hands on the terror tiller and a winning cast, Scary Stories to Tell in the Dark is a handsome, and deliciously horrible, horror movie.

You have to hand it to Marvel for managing to leave audiences breathless in anticipation of a sequel after making them sit through two-plus hours of merely satisfactory storytelling.

Day of the Soldado is our generation’s Rambo: First Blood, Part 2, a half-mad sequel transforming a traumatized political parable into a fantasy of all-American murder gods.

Fun, and believable, on the most important level: It convinces us that Jaden Smith has what it takes to fight his way to the top.

The film is not for the faint of heart, but it is viscerally compelling and unafraid to luxuriate in its own elegant weirdness. Its endless visual and literary layers will bring its ardent admirers back to it again and again, because it is a triumph of the cinema of excess, in all its orgiastic, unapologetic glory.

Genre-hoppers like Steven Soderbergh ought to love this neat triple doozy. [Note: From a review of the entire trilogy.]

This very Canadian thriller (i.e., no humor, lots of literal-minded future-shock portentousness) certainly does a number on you, though not necessarily a pleasurable one.

Writer-director Frank Henenlotter’s disturbing antidrug parable has more gross-out scenes than it probably needs, but it also has the funniest and most literate dialogue ever to grace a no-budget monster movie.

Mo’ Better Blues repeatedly draws back from its characters, exchanging intimacy for shtick and, in the end, lapsing into half-baked psychodrama.

A portentous and goopy Dutch drama.

Speaking of young men, newcomer Taron Egerton, playing Harry’s protégé, delivers a star-making performance flush with the kind of charm and unexpected gravitas that no amount of flashy filmmaking can fake.

Ejiofor is eminently relatable as an analog man who can't seem to understand where it all went wrong, and Clarke's eyebrows knit with such pained expressiveness, it's as if they're having their own wriggling monologue throughout the movie.

Does the movie’s pop-feminist message need to be as consistently, cartoonishly violent as it is? Almost definitely not. But in a world gone mad, the catharsis of Prey’s twisted sisterhood doesn’t just read as pandemonium for its own sake; it’s actually pretty damn sweet.

Hart’s exuberance make him a captivating performer — and his energetic delivery helps even the most mediocre jokes land.

For This Boy's Life to work as ominous domestic drama, it's essential that we see Dwight as a flesh-and-blood monster. De Niro, unfortunately, just seems to be reveling in the chance to play another viciously demented freak, like Cape Fear's Max Cady.

It's a wildly entertaining love letter to a night of television that marked a cultural watershed.

The message that comes across is: We're all screwed, and then we die. Ba-DUM.

The whole thing is feverishly earnest and more than a little manipulative, but it’s also possibly the prettiest two hours of emotional ­masochism so far this year.

You sense Simien’s pushing into uncharted territory. Yet his distinctive gifts as a director are increasingly relegated to the margins, propelling a narrative that works better in theory than execution.

In aiming for a new kind of lit-drama cool, Jane Campion freezes the warmth right out of Henry James' expansive heart.

Again, we know the beats by heart, but there’s a reason A Christmas Carol has been told every which way from Muppets to Disney. You can’t help getting swept up in it, even if you’ve heard it all before.

As bad as Ebert’s screenplay is, Meyer’s direction is just as choppy. The film also looks ugly.

It's a royal, finely modulated double performance by an actor who always wears his powers with graceful modesty.

Pandaemonium goes a long way toward capturing the compelling delirium of opium among a crowd of freethinking British iconoclasts.

It’s a cliché to say that they don’t make movies like this anymore — nasty, nihilistic, nicotine-stained ‘70s death trips. But thank goodness that Zahler’s doing everything in his power to prove that cliché wrong.

Nothing in Lost City would really hang together without its main pair, whose chemistry movies like this inevitably live or die on.

Mostly an epic rehash of the tale Larsson has already told, and that makes it, at two hours and 28 minutes, the first movie in the series that never catches fire.

Dark, funny, paranoid, arbitrary, humming with tamped-down eroticism and in love with all things weird: That's the good news.

Goldberg, for all her character's tough bluster, is sweet too: Her performance here is contained, modulated, dignified without cushioning the Whoopi edge that makes her work so interesting and uncategorizable.

The movie may feel minor next to Vinterberg’s more serious work, but it’s more personal, too: A messy, tender window into the world that shaped him.

A wry movie that, packed with his well-known friends and scored intermittently to bouncy accordion music, plays like a softer episode of "Curb."

Embarrassingly entertaining.

It’s possible that Skyfall created expectations that were too high for Spectre to match. But with all he’s done for the franchise, Craig deserves to go out with a bigger, smarter bang.

If you look hard, you can make out a story in Femme Fatale, but it has nothing to do with the senseless pileup of jewel thievery, shutterbug voyeurism, and leggy sex bombs so shallow and bad they seem to have come out of a 1978 copy of Hustler magazine.

Its tone is stilted and mannered -- and most of it seems a bit loony.

A smashingly effective documentary -- I found it more resonant than ''Fahrenheit 9/11'' -- yet to say that it's preaching to the converted would be generous; it's preaching to a microscopic sliver of the converted.

The only thing that could possibly be any better is a field-goal-kicking mule.

Has a genial, funky charm.

With a cast as daring and quick as this one, Ghostbusters is too mild and plays it too safe.

You'd better deliver the goods. And Them, despite some moody imagery out of the "Blair Witch" school, never does.

Give Sam Raimi a multiverse, and he will take a mile. The director's take on Doctor Strange feels like many disparate and often deeply confusing things — comedy, camp horror, maternal drama, sustained fireball — but it is also not like any other Marvel movie that came before it. And 23 films into the franchise, that's a wildly refreshing thing, even as the story careens off in more directions than the Kaiju-sized octo-beast who storms into an early scene, bashing its tentacles through small people and tall buildings like an envoy from some nightmare aquarium.

It ultimately proves too unwieldy a subject for Ebersole and Hughes to essentialize in under 100 minutes.

What makes Freakier Friday so special is that amid the laugh-out-loud humor and welcome fan service, there's also a beautiful film here about parenting, coming-of-age, loneliness, grief, loss, and sacrifice.

I do wish the movie's ending weren't so squishy. It's been changed from the finale that Sundance audiences saw earlier this year and now reeks of focus-group testing.