Like any craftily layered confection, what at first presents itself as colorfully whipped reveals itself to be a more tangy, lasting bite.

Supplementing the interviews with well-chosen archival material, Hanks assembles a capsule history of the music biz and youth culture.

Francella and Lanzani are excellent, not only in their charged moments together, but throughout this nervy and provocative picture.

L.I.E. has embraced tragedy, folly, perversity and outrageous dark humor. Like "Happiness" and "American Beauty," it takes an unflinching look at the darker aspects of life in American suburbia.

As the film, with its haunting score and inspired use of popular music, builds flawlessly to its resounding conclusion, it is accompanied by a pitch-dark humor that grows out of the sheer absurdity of the city's daily body count.

Connects the antics of professional wrestlers with their lives out of the ring with such compassion, humor and perception that the result is utterly captivating.

The Corporation takes great and successful pains to be as visually diverse and clever as it is intellectually provocative.

Has a warmth and sweetness that is especially hard to resist.

This is a mostly genial film that gets as much mileage as it can out of the undeniable charisma of its stars.

An admirable, thoughtful venture, but it may leave you with the feeling that you've seen it all before.

Mostly, just as “SPL” did with Yen, this sequel serves as an ideal showcase for talented martial artists. Kill Zone 2 watches with awe as Jaa and Wu move with balletic force. There’s grace within their violence.

This is Krieps’ show, another elegantly virtuosic, intelligent turn that, in this case, imbues sickness with dignity so that every strained grasp for breath feels like a victory for autonomy.

Against considerable odds, Spider-Man: Homecoming finds its pace and rhythm by the end. Not only did figuring out how to become an effective Spider-Man require more of a learning curve than Parker anticipates, figuring out how to make a successful superhero movie mandated one for the filmmakers as well.

King for a Day is never less than riveting.

As intriguing as Prince Avalanche can be in its contemplations, and as glad as I am to see Green cozying up to his more elemental and esoteric side, the film ultimately plays like an unfinished thought. It's a good thought, mind you, but like the road, it seems to go nowhere.

The Man in the Moon, a gently scary ballad of a movie, is about how love can open your eyes and then blind them with tears. Perhaps that sounds overly sentimental. But this deeply moving film, directed by Robert Mulligan and produced by Mark Rydell, from a script by first-time scenarist Jenny Wingfield, never strays into bathos.

Though this look back is formidably researched and should appeal to both obsessives and the uninformed, it’s the insistent echo to our present upheaval, and the refreshing reminder that a polarized nation only got more unified in its desire for the truth, that gives “Watergate” its peculiarly of-the-moment power.

An exercise in pure cinematic style filled with the most ravishing images, The Grandmaster finds director Wong Kar-wai applying his impeccable visual style to the mass-market martial arts genre with potent results.

Genteelly erotic, surprisingly emotional, exquisitely made from start to finish.

Germans and Jews is too sophisticated to provide a glib answer, but it shows how deeply involving just asking the question can be.

Ordinary but sufficiently effective in its execution, the film’s most resonant segments are those where the upstanding son reflects on his torn family and a rotten system in which paroling alleged offenders even after so much time is seen as an affront to the toxic institutional loyalty to police.

Writer-director Chen, along with the two leads, delicately navigates this story, and the result is something deeply humanist and nuanced rather than sensational, though the rainy milieu adds drama to the proceedings.

Perhaps the best thing about Schenk's script is that it enticed Eastwood to end his self-imposed acting hiatus and bring his one-of-a-kind aura back to the screen.

Buoyed by sensitive and ferocious ensemble turns, “Honey Boy” is a cinematic salve for a tortured soul, in many regards a powerful vehicle for its star-screenwriter-subject and a vibrant narrative debut for documentary and video artist Har’el.

The Killer is an opportunity for America’s most stylish director to reboot, to get back to basics, to come in under two hours.

The nimble, naturalistic performers are uniformly terrific.

The research is there, certainly, but it is presented as if it were just that, without thought for the ways it could be presented in a more expressive form. There is a sense here that film is at most a communicative tool to simply transmit this information, rather than a way to enliven and reactivate new ways of thinking about this galvanizing figure’s past and the resonance of their work in our present. This is a shame. Murray deserves nothing less than a history in full color.

The movie offers hope in the form of a survivors’ network started by another maligned victim who attempted suicide.