It’s Never Over, Jeff Buckley is a repudiating of the typical narrative of inescapable fate, instead pursuing the richness of a gifted artist’s ups and downs. Director Amy Berg would rather us see Buckley as he was in the world instead of some conveniently doom-laden figure.

What makes The Devil’s Candy a standout is how well-developed these characters are.... More importantly, Byrne is as skilled as ever at constructing sequences at once bizarre, suspenseful and oddly beautiful.

By and large a notable piece of work, a strong directing debut by actor Ben Affleck that highlights attention-getting performances...But, as adapted from the novel by Dennis Lehane, this brooding, somber film is also ragged around the edges and not without problematic aspects.

At a certain point, we are no longer watching a naturally escalating conflict so much as a rigged allegory of masculine aggression, contrived not only for our entertainment but also for our edification.

Beautiful and melodic as well as pointedly political.

If Young's work here is another master class in painterly under-lighting, then Pfeiffer's brilliantly self-effacing performance feels like something sculptural by comparison. Remarkably, she doesn't compete with the movie's rigorous visual scheme; she completes it. Her powers of expression, far from being obscured by all this darkness, are instead enriched and heightened by it.

In a year that’s seen a valuable rethink of how we process crime stories — from the eye-opening documentaries “Predators” and “The Perfect Neighbor” to Caroline Fraser’s deeply researched book “Murderland” — Shackleton’s perspective is still an intriguing, worthy provocation regarding our cultural bloodlust.

Life, however, cannot be lived entirely on stage, and once the characters have to take off their thongs and return to their real lives, the film goes nowhere that is either interesting, involving or surprising.

There's something delightfully pure and fresh about the children's film The Adventures of Milo & Otis. [25 Aug 1989, p.C8]

Alternately riveting and wearying, up-to-the-minute relevant as well as self-mythologizingly self-indulgent — as much of a heroic origins story as anything out of the Marvel factory — Straight Outta Compton ends up juggling more story lines and moods than it can handle.

Diverting but rarely transporting, unpredictable yet strangely overdetermined, Garrone's film never conjures the sustained, enveloping magic promised by its extravagant design and its agreeably unhinged story sense.

Anchored by performances that refuse to tell us what to think (especially Hoult’s cagey calm), Juror #2 skillfully depicts how, in practice, the ideal of blind justice too easily becomes the shortsighted, look-the-other-way kind.

By the end, Ross’ initially disarming fusion of cleverness and whimsy has curdled into a dispiritingly familiar mix of sentimentality and self-satisfaction.

Though the film’s casual structure lulls you into thinking not much is going on, the gently shifting power dynamics between the characters, and a reversal of the traditional gender roles sets up an unexpectedly moving resolution.

It’s a touching glimpse at a community solution to an inclusion problem, where the water’s more than just fine.

A delightful, embracing cultural experience.

Though it is small in scale and lasts only 78 minutes, New York Doll, like any documentary, goes places we expect it to and places we do not. As journeys go, this is one to treasure.

Though its theme of the corrosive influence of unimaginable wealth is not exactly news, "All the Money" benefits, in much the same way that Scott's similar (and underappreciated) "American Gangster" did, from the director's expertise at bringing pace and interest to stories he cares enough about to sink his teeth into.

One Week and a Day keeps an impeccable balance between absurdity and sadness, comedy and heartbreak. Increasingly outrageous but always plausible, it applies its pitiless, pitch black sense of humor to a very particular situation.

The estimable James Cromwell splendidly anchors this tender, true-life tale.

In her elegantly unsettling portrait of an invisible woman straddling two notions of home — far from what she’s known, working inside a perilous system — Jusu is letting us know she’s got all diasporic women employed by wealthy families on her mind. And that their fears can easily become nightmares.

It's a haunting, thoroughly evocative ride.

The laughs come easily, the screams not so much. It's as if the filmmakers got so wrapped up in the satire they forgot to include the intense sensation of rising dread that creates all the thrills and chills that are part of the attraction.

The cold irony that Foster provocatively presents is that if the idiocy surrounding pain clinics hadn’t become too gross and widespread for the authorities to ignore, people like the Georges might still be getting rich off of addiction today.

What makes Miami Blues unsettling, in spite of itself, is the sense that the garish ultra-violence we're witnessing is just a species of high jinks. Armitage, adapting Charles Willeford's smart, nasty 1984 novel, doesn't provide the kind of moral dimension that might make Junior's sprees cumulatively frightening. The film careens along as a blithely funky shoot-'em-up. It might have been made by a sociopathic Chuck Jones.

Rudd and Robinson’s scenes together are great.

What is most involving about Gould is the extraordinary way he played.

Burton's gifts ensure you won't be able to take your eyes off the screen, but that doesn't necessarily mean you'll be happy with what you're seeing.