What’s worse, the songs often distract from the far more interesting real drama occurring onscreen. Kids may find it engaging, but adults may get more restless than usual. Turn the sound down or play your own music over it, and Penguins may well be a near masterpiece.

It's one of the best kinds of documentaries--not calculated but serendipitous.

The first two thirds and change of I Am Legend is terrific mindless fun: crackerjack action with gnashing vampires barely glimpsed (and scarier for that) and how’d-they-do-that New York locations that retroactively justify the traffic jams.

It’s a testament to the strength of Thompson’s performance, and DaCosta’s control of tone and action, that for all the bleakness of this world, we keep watching. The result is a work that lingers, grimly, in the mind.

The movie is not camp. It’s deliciously deadpan sex farce played by some of the deftest clowns in the English-speaking world. The more matter-of-fact it is, the more screamingly funny.

The movie’s central motif — rituals that dull pain and heighten unhappiness — doesn’t clobber you. It seeps into you.

Certainly for any fan of Cave’s, 20,000 Days on Earth makes for a creative, enthralling journey through the man’s world.

Meeting Gorbachev is a hagiography, but it’s unafraid to position itself as such; Herzog makes his case proudly and passionately.

This vital documentary gives you a world of hurt, prescribes nothing, and calls the ultimate questions you can ask as an American.

Lisa’s drive is more than biological; it’s intellectual and emotional, and that’s what keeps what often risks becoming camp madness in an identifiably human place — almost all the way to the end.

Fire and Ash is in some ways the messiest of the three Avatar movies, but it’s also the richest, the one in which we most lose ourselves, the one that makes us wonder about these characters and constantly peer into those rapturous backgrounds, trying to see forever.

Delectably ambiguous, the film always feels on the verge of some thematic breakthrough — a crystallized metaphor, a revealing flashback, a tell-tale fictional projection — but it admirably never gets there.

A hell of a picture. And shrewd.

Creepily evocative.

Like Someone in Love has rather simple, sentimental, melodramatic underpinnings, but the vantage changes everything. It opens up this world — and the next. It’s an enthralling journey.

Much more kid-oriented than any other computer-animated movie thus far. In other words, it's much more Disneyish. I enjoyed it.

Sicko is Moore’s best film: a documentary that mixes outrage, hope, and gonzo stunts in the right proportions; that poses profound questions about the connection between health care and work.

One word springs to mind after 15 minutes of Loveless: Getmethef**koutofhere. The chill eats into you — the cold burns and cuts. But it turns out Zvyagintsev has more on his mind than emotional cruelty to kids.

Moving Midway is thrilling.

Buoyed by Chopin, Schubert, Schumann, and more, Seymour: An Introduction is lyrical without getting fancy, its director plainly rapt.

It’s a deeply assured piece of direction, and though it only plays a few emotional notes, they are ones that won’t soon leave your memory.

Brown explores a potentially enraging subject--rigidly upheld racial segregation in the country's oldest Mardi Gras celebration, in Mobile, Alabama--but her touch is so unforced and her gaze so open that no one is bruised.

Westfeldt, now 42, belongs to a generation (and class) of people for whom nothing about having kids is easy. Her intensity feels just right - better than in any film I've seen in years - for How We Breed Now.

In the end, What If belongs to Zoe Kazan. And both she and it are wonderful.

Certain Women turns out to be a study in women’s uncertainties, in the experience of pain that leads not to action but acceptance. It’s a slow go — but you get there.

Weiner is a tabula rasa documentary — one of the most provocative of its kind I’ve seen.

It’s remarkable how engaging and light on its feet the director and cast are able to keep this subject matter, how much permission he gives them to f*ck up and try again.

In the end, is Finding Dory better than Finding Nemo? It’s funnier and more intricate, but the tears it jerks have been jerked before. It’s not as original, not as deep.

Emily moves among immigrants, fellow ex-cons, and people like Youcef who are striving toward some sort of financial legitimacy, even as she moves in the other direction. But she doesn’t show any sense of commonality with them, only fury that she’s been made to join them, which is the film’s most astringent aspect.

They’re great stories, and it’s through them that Jodorowsky’s Dune shows us how the greatest movie never made, in its own crazy little way, somehow still came to be.

Premium Rush is that rare bird: a chase picture that's just a chase picture - and a dandy one.

It’s a hyper-aestheticized meditation on the meaning of history, visually astonishing, dramatically stilted. No masterpiece, but quite a feat (and quite effete).

It’s whimsical and bold and also easier to admire in the abstract than to get deeply emotionally invested in, though it features a late-breaking burst of beauty that will soften the hardest of hearts.

Save the Date works best when it's getting under your skin, and it does that when it's capturing the queasy halfway point - part sadistic, part bittersweet - of still loving somebody while trying to move on to someone new. It's a kind of subtlety that movies, especially American movies, rarely do well, but this quietly unassuming, secretly brilliant little charmer nails it.

A sci-fi saga that manages to be at once stirring and screwball, gut-busting and gut-wrenching, and more fun than you had at any bigger-budget movie this past summer.

Reeves loves these dead-end apocalyptic environments, and delights in tales that toy with the moral calculus of typical hero narratives. He has given us a Batman that he himself can believe in, not to mention a Batman that feels right for our times.

By all odds, Tarnation should have been an unwatchable, masochistic morass, but Caouette's love for the broken Renee--which is the true subject of the film--is awe-inspiring.

[A] haunting, beautiful movie.

Philippe Claudel's direction is both probing and delicate, and Scott Thomas's face, even immobile, keeps you watching, searching for hints of her character's past, unable to blink for fear of missing something vital.

Gloria doesn’t lie about a woman’s dwindling options. It’s rife with disappointment and humiliation. But bleakness does not preclude buoyancy. It still manages to leave you with the urge to dance.

The Korean director im Kwon-Taek has made more than 90 films since his first in 1962, and perhaps this explains why his latest, Chunhyang, seems so effortless and masterly. Based on a highly popular eighteenth-century Korean folktale, it's a movie that, stylistically, mixes the traditional with the avant-garde; the narrative may be ritualistic, but there's a let's-try-it-on-for-size friskiness to the filmmaking.

There's nothing in David Ayer's cop drama End of Watch that you haven't already seen, but the film has moments so riveting that you might not care too much.

My Winnipeg is overloaded and digressive--it comes with the territory--but it's also grounded in a place, Maddin's Manitoban hometown, and it's painfully engrossing.

The actors playing parents and spouses (among them Steve Buscemi, Halley Feiffer, Portia, and Kevin Hagan) are stunningly believable. I'm not sure how Morton made sense of her character's ebbs and flows, but I never doubted her. She's a mariner in uncharted seas of emotion.

Here comes The Naked Gun, unabashedly crude and stupid and brilliant and weird and obvious and current and archaic and, finally, fall-out-of-your-seat-and-roll-on-the-floor hilarious. See it with the biggest audience you can find. It might just heal you. It might just heal the world.

My only serious complaint about Deepwater Horizon is that it’s not quite the muckraker I’d hoped for.

What a mind-bending odyssey ensues--a tale of good old-fashioned American free expression at war with good old-fashioned American capitalism.

A work of criticism as well as a work of art, it’s a sharp takedown of our culture’s obsession with true crime, identifying and skewering the genre’s most familiar tropes even as it playfully indulges in them.

You can't make this stuff up. You can, however, capture it on film for all time. Trouble the Water is ineradicably moving.

Exposed, abandoned, branded as traitors, the Wilsons finally have no choice but to tell their story, the latest chapter of which is this potent Hollywood melodrama.

Fortunately, it never dips into bathos. These two actors SHOULD be noticed. They've crafted the most ingenious résumé of the year.

Kasper Collin’s documentary puts a human face on Ayler’s legacy.

What emerges is a portrait of a man whose fall was precipitous but whose sensibility and techniques outlive him and continue to evolve. This is the acid test for a good journalistic documentary: No matter how far back it reaches, Divide and Conquer always feels as if it’s in the present tense.

The film is packed with so many strange gems of moments, and while a few feel like Bong losing the plot (specifically any time Okja decides to loosen her bowels) it always snaps back together.

Oh, Canada might be a movie that was conceived in the long dark night of the soul, but it moves towards brightness and possibility.

Paddington is decidedly, proudly unhip. It’s a lovely, endearing chocolate-box of a movie.

Le Week-End is a marital ­disintegration–reintegration drama that opens with a dose of frost and vinegar and turns believably sweet—and unbelievably marvelous, in light of what had seemed a depressing trajectory.

Purposefully aggravating yet still beautiful, The Mitchells vs. the Machines is both a takedown and a celebration of our dissonant, tech-obsessed world. It gets us.

Hedges keeps everything in balance: The sadness and frivolity all seem to be part of the same emotional continuum. He’s made a lingeringly poignant little movie.

The cutting is hyperkinetic, yet Lee is always in synch with the cast’s phenomenal energy. He’s in their thrall--and so are we.

Operates as stealth art: stately, moving, beautifully acted, and urgently subversive to our own status quo.

Should you ever be tempted to wax nostalgic for an age in which wars were fought according to the laws of cause and effect and for reasons that may confidently be labeled “rational,” pick up Vera Brittain’s World War I memoir Testament of Youth or steel yourself for James Kent’s mournful, very fine new film starring Alicia Vikander as Brittain.

Romantic comedies involving people moving on after divorce are a dime a dozen, but rarely are they as generous, sharply observed, and humane as Angus MacLachlan’s Goodbye to All That.

Django Unchained doesn't merely hit its marks; it blows them to bloody chunks. It's manna for mayhem mavens.

Unlike many modern-day animated films, which find inspiration in fantasy and present us with unique, fanciful designs, the world of The Sea Beast is so realistically rendered, so detailed and physical, that much of the time it feels like a live-action adventure. It’s so thoroughly immersive it might make you believe in sea monsters.

It's so money! It's so fun!

An elaborate techno-heist thriller, The Italian Job features some spectacular chase scenes, but for a change, the people doing the chasing are also worth watching.

What she (Ullmann) does achieve is a couple of scenes of lacerating power.

Still, in its own Saturday-morning-serial kind of way, Attack of the Clones is a commendable example of the sort of movie we once loved and then outgrew. Of course, if it was even better, we wouldn't feel as if we'd outgrown it.

It elevates female sacrifice into an aesthetic. The movie isn't about suffering, really. It's about how you look when you suffer, how you dress up for it. Style is all.

With a light touch but deep reserves of respect for fans both old and new Ryuichi Sakamoto: Coda is an extremely fitting portrait of the influential composer. There’s an air of patience that presides over director Stephen Schible’s footage, even during a period that presents a lot of tumultuous questions for his seemingly unflappable subject.

Agathe is concave in both posture and spirit, but she feels right for this muted world of amorous contemplation, of long, uncertain glances met by equally long, equally uncertain glances. By the end, romance in the abstract becomes something much more real — and we can’t help but fall for all these characters ourselves.

Salles hasn't reinvented On the Road, but rather turned it into a rambling, beautiful, and occasionally even heartbreaking museum piece.

It’s an unshowy, quietly intense drama with grace notes in every scene — and a hellish punch.

Lee doesn’t do subtlety. But the movie is very entertaining and comes with a stupendous, lushly melodic score by Terence Blanchard.

The first thing to know about The Diary of a Teenage Girl is that young British actress Powley is staggeringly good in it.

Coming Home works best on a more lived-in, emotional level. It presents a trajectory not uncommon in Zhang's films: a journey from howling passion to somber, almost tragic acceptance.

Highest 2 Lowest is an old man’s movie, and I don’t mean that as a criticism.

Narrated by Rhys Ifans with the dryness of a dessicated toad, Exit Through the Gift Shop is both an exhilarating testament to serendipity and an appalling testament to art-world inanity.

Jim Jarmusch’s Father Mother Sister Brother finds the director in a minor key, which is sometimes his best key.

This is the rare “profile” documentary that is also a transcendent work of art. It raises questions we’ll be trying to answer for as long as there is art.

A generous film that’s ragged at the edges but manages bursts of the sublime.

The actors are in a nice place--poking fun at themselves without spilling into travesty. Fogged by self-absorption, Coogan makes you like him most when he's most dislikable; he has a fool's vulnerability.

The true revelation lies in the whole, in the gathering sense that life is full of change and that nothing ever really resolves itself. That might also be why this particular anthology works so well, and also why it lingers afterwards.

Sion Sono’s Prisoners of the Ghostland throws so much extreme weirdness and violence at us that we might overlook the fact that there’s method to its madness: Beneath the craziness and cacophony lies a tender, tragic tale of emotional paralysis and a civilization eating away at itself.

I have zero doubts about the first half of A Star Is Born — it couldn’t be more charming.

For the most part, Mu’min’s script is pleasantly inquisitive, and its refusal to arrive at easy answers is its engine. Jinn is a special little film, one that never lets its complicated, contradictory characters become abstractions, but instead revels in all the disparate elements that make them who they are.

Seriousness does eventually descend on Afire like the check at the end of a meal, but until then the film, the latest feature from German filmmaker Christian Petzold, is a beguilingly funny affair about getting in your own way.

A fascinating movie for kids, but it’s an improbably effective and tear-jerking one for adults as well.

The Dardennes' most accessible film. Their handheld camera catches tiny flickers of emotion that few filmmakers come near; you feel as if you're watching the movements of a soul.

A meticulous, thoroughly engrossing lesson in how not to win friends (or wars) and influence people (or potential terrorists).

Washington manages the near-impossible feat of delivering his lines as though he’s putting the words together in the moment, speaking some of the most famous sentences in the English language as though they’re actually being dredged up out of Macbeth’s roiling consciousness.

Marvelously funny.

Dope isn’t perfect — it’s got a couple too many endings, and it loses the romantic subplot for a distressingly long time. But it moves with amazing energy, the dialogue and soundtrack and imagery a constant stream of pop-culture references, in-jokes, and digressions.

The fact that his fumbling journey toward fatherhood is not just tolerable but genuinely touching is a testament to the disarming earnestness with which Firstman approaches the clichéd set-up.

Half-amazing, half-ridiculous, thoroughly exhilarating.

The mystery of the artistic process is left mysterious -- as it should be.

The hotel scenes go on a tad long, but what holds us is that we’re right in the room as history is being made — with the guy, the actual guy, soon to be notorious all over the world.