The takeaway isn’t exhilaration; the unease is what makes Garland’s film valuable. You watch it with your jaw hanging open.

This clever bag of tricks is made with so much cinematic skill it makes implausibility irrelevant. What happens on screen is unapologetically far-fetched, but it unfolds with enough panache to make turning away out of the question.

The joy on display here is contagious.

What audiences end up with word-wise is a hackneyed, completely derivative copy of old Hollywood romances, a movie that reeks of phoniness and lacks even minimal originality.

Once Oceans' exhilarating visuals get going, it's easy to ignore the words. This really is a film that manages to show us things we've never seen and make what we have already seen look different and new.

It's hard to believe, but Hal Holbrook, one of the stage and screen's enduring talents, has never had the solo lead in a feature film. That has been duly rectified with the actor's achingly memorable star performance in the superb That Evening Sun.

There is something about the calculation of Blindspotting, a movie all too aware of its own impressive ambition, that somehow resists the poetic abandon, the electrifying spontaneity that Estrada and his collaborators are trying to pull off.

If anything, you want even more stories from these guys who started out as rock and roll dreamers, transitioned to individual contractors, then came to feel part of something larger than themselves.

For fans of this kind of roots music, it was an event you would have given anything to attend. Down From the Mountain lets you do that and gives you terrific seats in the bargain.

Soulful and reflective film, as gentle as it is potent.

It’s not just that Pike changed the timbre of her voice, the way she walks and even her posture to accurately reflect Colvin physically (though she has). It’s that this fierce, lived-in performance, complete down to the drawn face and go-for-it personality, is so convincing that people who knew Colvin were shaken at the resemblance.

It tells a story irresistible to our age of rampant voyeurism and reality TV, yet it also has a potent emotional core that cannot be denied.

I have only kind words for The Kind Words, an emotionally rich, beautifully textured family dramedy that touches on a wealth of interpersonal issues with buoyancy, charm and grace. It’s one of the best films so far this year.

This lively and at times moving film explains, eloquently, why Hawk has endured in popular culture — and why he can’t stop risking his bones to master the maneuvers few can do.

The movie is one of the few films I can think of that examines the baffling combination of smugness, self-abnegation, ceremonial deference and status anxiety that characterizes middle-class Gen X parenting, and find sheer, white-knuckled terror at its core.

More elaborate than the original, but just as shrewdly put together, it cleverly combines the most successful elements of its predecessor with a number of new twists (would you believe a kinder, gentler Terminator?) to produce on e hell of a wild ride, a Twilight of the Gods that takes no prisoners and leaves audiences desperate for mercy. [3 July 1991, Calendar, p.F-1]

Much like the father-son bond at its center, the comic drama is warmhearted but never cloying.

Jagged and acrid, yet also slippery and provocative, “The Plagiarists” is a micro-indie talkathon with the edge of something forcibly overheard but fragmented, as if you’d been thrown into a cramped rideshare with many discursive routes and no obvious destination

An amazing achievement of personal filmmaking.

Nothing about Together screams comedy, yet that’s precisely how it’s put together. Awkward humor is the skeleton under its prestige nightmare surface, even as it’s wonderfully, heartbreakingly tragic to watch our leads roil to melt together like mozzarella.

In lieu of poetry, [Ozon] has composed an exemplary piece of prose: clear, direct and quietly illuminating. At the same time, you would hardly describe this movie as neutral or devoid of anger. On the contrary, its moral outrage is all the more pronounced for being so controlled.

It's remarkable for where it takes us, how it takes us there.

Baumbach surely does make these characters, all of whom are impeccably acted, absolutely real, but at 25 he may be too close to the material to achieve the detachment from which irony and meaning flow.

Hopefulness and rawness, much like society and the self, are ultimately inextricable in “Martin Eden,” a work of art that abounds in its own beautiful contradictions. It might reject individualism, but it’s also a glorious singularity.

If you live and breathe Marvel, this is one of the MCU's stronger offerings. If you are a spy coming in from the cold, the answer is not so clear.

Considering the amount of such material Welles left behind — sketches, drawings and paintings from his formative childhood travels through decades in movies — it makes for a tantalizing reappraisal sure to appeal to even the most knowledgeable Welles enthusiast.

This is a superbly crafted mixture of old and new footage.

Tells a tale that is stranger than fiction several times over. Viewers of this remarkable documentary will be astonished at not only what this art looks like and why it's forbidden, but also where it is and how it got there.

Thanks to a trio of solid performances (especially the dryly bitter O'Shaughnessy, who suggests a young Helena Bonham Carter), this first feature, although a tad long, nevertheless emerges as a diabolically effective anti-date movie.

Although the substance of the film is not manufactured, there is art in the presentation

What we find out about Maier, revealed in self-portraits as a striking woman with a singular sense of self, is fascinating.

Like any good sunset, the beauty to be found in “Cusp” is in between the darkness and the light, in the almost imperceptible shades of gray. Most important, it’s found in the bonds the girls have with each other.

What makes Super Dark Times one of the most exciting American filmmaking debuts in recent years is how well Phillips and company grasp both the intensity and ephemerality of adolescence.

So though it echoes the films of Charles Burnett, the plays of August Wilson and "A Raisin in the Sun," at its heart Middle of Nowhere is old-school, character-driven narrative at its most quietly effective.

A witty, colorful and poignant account of the life and times of producer Robert Evans.

Nimbly documents the rise and fall of a Web company through its charismatic leaders.

Moll, in only his second feature, evokes a sense of foreboding, playing the routine against the unnerving, the humorous against the sinister, with a wit and deftness that might have impressed Hitchcock.

If you don't go expecting the depth and subtlety of a Mike Leigh working-class film, The Full Monty can be heart-warming fun with more serious undertones than you might have expected. [13 August 1997, Calendar, p.F-5]

It is Scott's work as the savagely articulate Roger, a tireless would-be seducer, bottomlessly self-confident and oblivious to rejection, that is the film's glistening and provocative centerpiece.

A mature, accomplished piece of work, both funny and deeply felt, personal cinema of the best kind...Levinson has made the memory film we always hoped he would.

There's nothing casual about the way this film has been put together, yet that painstaking care leads to laughter that is completely unrestrained.

Consistently inventive and surprising, Beauty in Trouble evokes human nature in all its strengths and weaknesses, contradictions and ambiguities. It is itself a beauty -- rich in imagery, deftly paced and structured.

As one might expect from stuntman-turned-director Nash Edgerton, the action is well staged.

While the movie's second half feels more consequential - and more impressively action-packed - than its first part, it also loses some of its initial charm and quirk via a protracted, often dizzying descent into a kind of booty-centric game of hot potato.

It’s a masterful effort.

This is a film that delights in unspoken terrors and audience misdirection.

Steeped in shrewdness about the often contradictory workings of human nature, Poison Friends is gratifying in the best tradition of French cinema.

Possibly because Stone empathizes so enormously with co-writer Kovic, who came back from Vietnam at the age of 21 paralyzed from the chest down, the director has lost the specificity that made "Platoon" so electrifying. In its place he uses bombast, overkill, bullying. His scenes, and their ironic juxtapositioning, explode like land mines. [20 Dec 1989, p.1]

Timelessly elegant and charming 1957 musical with a Gershwin score. [20 Nov 1994, p.6]

Mayor proves a unique, involving and edifying experience.

In its extreme length and precise technique, it’s decidedly not for everybody. But although it is at times distractingly opaque, occasionally Heise’s family’s words, juxtaposed with his sounds and images, crystallize into something singularly wise about the nexus of place, history and trauma.

Le Guay effectively keeps the pressure on his characters and their loaded situation throughout, using ominous camera angles and anxious music cues to heighten the dread and uncertainty. He receives a fine assist from Renier and Cluzet, who commit to their divergent roles with unnerving intensity. It’s a terrific film.

Graceland is a tense, twisty cinematic artichoke brimming with moral complexity and intriguing shades of gray.

The main reason to see Whitney is the way it explores the baffling conundrums of her life.

For all his genre-hopping and shape-shifting Spielberg seems to have become too big to tell small stories, which is one reason why the film sputters on one too many false endings.

There is action galore, but Future Past is a deeper, richer, more thoughtful film, more existential in its contemplations than earlier Xs, all rather nicely embedded in the mayhem churned up by the mutants' altered states.

Crisply and efficiently put together by writer-director Zandvliet, Land of Mine has the inherent edge-of-your-seat concern about what kind of damage the bombs will inflict on which of these boys, but it is the psychological qualities of the situation that hold the greatest interest.

Manzoor, an instinctive stylist, always finds an honest vibe to win you over, whether it’s sisterly camaraderie (or annoyance), youthful awkwardness or you’re-going-down spunk, which allows the abundant personality in her wonderful cast to hit all the necessary top notes.

The threat of violence churns beneath nearly every frame of this poised and coolly disturbing movie, but Finley's diabolical sense of mischief is held in check — and in some ways amplified — by his discretion.

The antics are wacky, the jokes are dense, and “The Bob’s Burgers Movie” is both nail-bitingly tense and genuinely moving. It’s a story that demonstrates the powerful force of family unity, and that small businesses are tantamount to preserving the fabric of a community. But most importantly, it’s hilarious, and it’s likely to make you crave a burger too.

You go to Peggy Sue Got Married expecting '60s nostalgia, "a blast from the past," Buddy Holly and lime-green leisure suits. You get all that, but nothing prepares you for the rush of real emotion the film generates, for its poignance, its reassurance or its high of pure pleasure.

The script is lean enough that there really isn’t room for narrative flubs besides one breakdown that’s a bit too convenient. Hawkins lets herself get vulnerable, too, and the film never fakes a punch by pretending she’s anything more than a small, desperate and bedraggled woman with eyes that look like a bottomless well of need.

Kim is deft and sensitive with her tiny co-stars, but Treeless Mountain lacks the freshness and surprise of "In Between Days."

In its best moments, this gag-a-minute Bat-roast serves as a reminder that, in the right hands, a sharp comic scalpel can be an instrument of revelation as well as ridicule.

Although Greene swerves unnecessarily into obvious audience indictment at the end, Kate Plays Christine makes for a twisty, unsettling probe into our fascination with transforming lives, and deaths, into digestible storytelling.

The result is at once familiar and disconcerting, meta-Keillor done in Altman's desultory, distracted style.

The whole thing is as satisfying as a meal at a slow food restaurant, and when Gianni's mother gratefully tells her son, "you mellow these hours," we wholeheartedly agree.

Evans has made a touchingly honest ode to the inner life of all artists.

Afterimage may depict a losing battle for one uncompromising artist, but it’s also a bracing final dispatch for the uncompromising artist who survived long enough to tell of it.

Ruizpalacios creates a visual style that continues to reinvent itself right up to the end, crafting an unpredictable feeling that matches the volatile plotting.

What is particularly powerful is that the film does not feel the need to overexplain Monica. The film offers glimpses into her life, her relationships and her livelihood, but Monica doesn’t have to spell out the details of her past or justify her present to anyone.

There’s an immensity to the small dramas of this awkward in-between stage, where Microbe and Gasoline revel in no longer being boys, but not yet men. Gondry brings a sense of heartfelt nostalgia, pathos and humor to this portrait of a short, unique adolescent moment.

At its heart, and there is a great heart to be discovered here, Morgan Dews' documentary Must Read After My Death is a searing and intimate account of an unconventional woman struggling not to lose her identity or her sanity in the rigid 1950s suburban world of stay-at-home moms, well-behaved children and sparkling-clean houses.

In its spirit and execution, Baadasssss! lives up to its forebear.

Apatow, working in his signature tone of sweet raunch, directs another writer's script for the first time, and the comedic marriage is a fruitful one.

Their personal story is no less fascinating than their experiences working on hundreds of movies, together and separately.

Like a movie DJ, Kandhari is flexing a pulpy mood of big-city dislocation, building a trippy, jarring and blackly funny experience out of a city’s stray colors, sounds and personalities.

As compelling as it is illuminating.

Secret Ballot, which has a rich, spare score by Michael Galasso that blends Eastern and Western motifs, is funny, provocative, well-paced and leaves a memorable bittersweet aftertaste.

Admirably ambitious and utterly unsparing, but as credible as the arc of Danny's odyssey is in itself, the all-important need to evoke a profound sense of the enigmatic and paradoxical in relation to Danny's fate has eluded Bean.

Because a gradually thawing Will plays more to Grant's strengths, the second part of the film, helped as well by Rachel Weisz as a love interest, is much more fun. But it is still hard not to feel that this film is pushing us too hard, slickly trying to seem more honest than it actually is.

What we are seeing may be a representation of the truth, but it is not real, and this collision of artifice and reality is jarring and disconcerting. This is a hurdle but not an insurmountable one. Even if it is counterfeit in a number of ways, the story In This World tells finally wins us over because it is too disturbing and well told not to.

Plays out smaller and less climactic than the way anyone old enough to recall will remember.

Never does Down by Love, handsome and fully crafted, have the feel of being a filmed play. It emerges as a fresh, challenging and unpredictable experience with a stunning finish.

Written and directed by the Australian actor Frances O’Connor, making a vibrant feature filmmaking debut, it will surely madden sticklers for accuracy, which is all to the good.

An impassioned piece of activist filmmaking that's as persuasive and entertaining as it is disturbing.

Marques-Marcet, co-writer Clara Roquet and the actors are alert to something less obvious: the ways that they become self-conscious performers. Even though the characters aren't always likable, their pained awareness is poignant.

That Kasbe, who also shot and co-edited, so firmly embedded himself in this distant, hardscrabble world results in a wealth of candid, you-are-there moments that highlight the complex intersection between the fraught state of wildlife preservation and the desperate scramble for human survival.

By the end, DuVernay has, with editor Spencer Averick’s fleet stitching, massaged her adaptation’s various threads into a collage of insight and emotion worth treasuring.

While Walker-Silverman couldn’t have imagined his movie’s jarring real-world parallels, Rebuilding is as much a character study as it is a warning about our increasingly fragile planet and the beloved places we call home.

First-time director Anjelica Huston's frightening film about child abuse is a jolt. And be forewarned: The violence is brutal and the molestation and rape scenes of a child are repugnant. [15 Dec 1996, p.3]

The engrossing documentary Peace Officer looks at the militarization of police work from a fresh, provocative angle.

A taut, roller-coaster ride clocking in at under 90 minutes about another everyman caught in an extraordinary situation.

A surprisingly intimate film, a completely involving look inside the life of a gifted and complex woman.

Ultimately, "Bloodlight and Bami" is a rich, delicate tapestry of a life, where each thread is lovingly woven together to create a full picture.

a movie about adolescence unlike any other; An intimate portrait of a singular personality in the making and a stark look at our culture of suspicion and conformity.

It's just as thrilling as it is edifying.

Music and sports are a fascinating blend, as both baseball and rock offer collective community celebration and catharsis, with Wrigley as the host. Mostly though, it’s fun to see rock god Eddie Vedder reveling in his own fandom, the joy he shares with all of Chicago and Cubs fans everywhere.