The film is a canny balancing act, making Koch's arrogance so plain that you quickly move past it and concede that he accomplished remarkable things for a city that was broke and in chaos and with much of its housing stock in ruins.

There's a huge change that turns the nihilistic carnage of Craven's original into something suffused with old-fashioned family values, so that we can relax and enjoy watching the bad guys get beaten, skewered, dismembered by garbage disposals, and tortured with microwave ovens.

Even at three-plus hours, the gargantuan Avengers: Endgame is light on its feet and more freely inventive than it needed to be. Given the year-long wait, its audience — Pavlovian dogs, myself (woof!) included — would have salivated over less. It’s better than Avengers: Infinity War, which was better than Avengers: Age of Ultron; and it is, for a change, conclusive.

Even if the film is more thoughtful than pulse-pounding, the intelligence brought to bear is appropriate for a sport that’s as much about mental toughness as it is physical skill.

Architecton comes across as a more plaintive depiction of our desire to imagine ourselves able to leave a lasting mark on this planet.

Keys takes a scattershot approach to Cuban music, filming not only specific artists, like Los Cohibas and Los Zafiros, but also street musicians in the barrio and just about everywhere else he can find them.

Morel will inevitably be compared to John Woo, whom he trounces. He has fewer mannerisms (no damn doves) and a keener eye; his fastest, most kinetic shots flow together like frames in a flipbook.

I think Eastwood’s audience is going to eat this movie up, and maybe even turn it into a rallying cry. The legacy of the bombing of Olympic Centennial Park might end up suiting the bomber just fine.

The Awakening has the good sense to find a mood and stick with it. It's not afraid to take itself seriously. It'll send shivers up your spine, both as a thriller and as the melodrama it eventually becomes.

Jackass Forever is a kinder, gentler Jackass, but thankfully, it’s not a more mature one.

Here’s a movie about the efforts to bring the soldiers stationed at Auschwitz to justice, and it’s strangely light on its feet.

Gray knows how to sell the idea of unalterable destiny with a car chase: That’s the mark of a real action director.

The fights and chases are well designed. You can always tell where everything is in relation to everything else and who’s hitting or shooting whom — which isn’t a given, surprisingly, when fast cutting and loudness can cover a lot of infelicities.

Unfriended really does use everything teens cherish about their technology lifestyle against them. It’s a mean, potent little movie.

In the end, perhaps the most touching quality of this film is its low-key, but sensitively rendered portrait of a young, awkward child who hasn't quite managed to figure his way out in the world yet.

It’s so unapologetically absurd and so very fun.

As with all Ozon's work, Time to Leave resounds with grace notes. The wide-screen cinematography by Jeanne Lapoirie offsets (or maybe disguises) the movie's narrow scope, and there's something private--withholding--in Poupaud's beauty that gives his misanthropy a touch of mystery.

Deadpool is a send-up of Marvel movies but in no way a takedown of them. It’s not subversive — it’s meant to elasticize and enhance the superhero genre, to flatter the audience for being hip enough to get all of those in-jokes.

Saudi director Shahad Ameen’s mesmerizingly bleak fable Scales accomplishes something many films attempt but generally bungle: It tells a highly symbolic tale while conveying recognizable human emotions.

Caine makes a grave, soulful vigilante avenger, and first-time director Daniel Barber gives the film a dank, streaky, genuinely unnerving palette.

Even at its most self-conscious, there’s something lovable about A Ghost Story.

Cosmopolis is often beautiful, but at times it feels like a movie sealed off from itself.

A score by the Newton Brothers thumps like an errant heartbeat. The actors sparkle with chemistry. At times, its aesthetic and thematic pursuits click into place and the film sings at a mournful register as it charts the generational trauma and addiction of Dan Torrance (Ewan McGregor). But Doctor Sleep proves stronger in parts than as a whole.

Everyone seems to be a walking embodiment of an essence, not cartoons exactly, but something more totemic. If all this makes Darkest Hour propaganda, then the shoe may fit, though it’s hard to find fault with its protagonist’s aims, at least in this small of a scope.

Daddio is a classic two-hander, focusing entirely on the seesawing power dynamic between two very different individuals. As such, it’s at times theatrical and precious, a bit too on the nose with its metaphors and symbols and running themes. But boy, can it be fun to watch these two go at it.

It’s impossible not to be impressed by the sheer audacity of The Brutalist’s existence, even if the finished product doesn’t end up matching its ambitions.

All of the miseries that are revealed as the two men go about their day may be bleak, but the humor comes from the small indignities inflicted on them even as they try to go out with a bang.

More than a fantasy adventure, Damsel is a grisly and at times even touching tale of endurance and survival. It’s sweaty, snarly fun.

The movie is semi-infantile camp but often riotous.

May be at once too gimmicky and too sincere. But it still exerts an uncanny power: Like the best of Almodóvar’s work, it throws you a first-love sucker punch that will stagger your heart, mind, and soul.

It’s a dry, arm’s-length movie that seeps into your blood as it seeps into Jones’s.

The movie is too long (nearly two hours), but the acting--Gere, Molina, the peerlessly edgy Hope Davis, Marcia Gay Harden as Irving's loopy Swiss-German painter wife--keeps you giggling. And the story has something up its sleeve--a dream finish.

It’s funny, fast, and charming.

If you’ve never seen a Johnnie To crime picture, Exiled is a simple, stylish, and utterly delightful introduction.

Gloria Bell is best when it’s least definite, when the conversations are full of awkward holes and the relationships are in flux.

They don’t feel like black characters grafted onto roles that were initially conceived of as white, but they don’t always feel entirely formed either, an impression that’s not helped by the choice to keep the siblings in largely separated narratives.

Jake Paltrow's comedy takes familiar male-angst material and turns it into a painful--but fun--string of jokes.

This is a deceptively weird movie. There’s always been an immediacy to Jacquot’s visual style; he likes to follow his characters closely, and he gets performances that are energetic but quiet.

I Got a Story to Tell is essential viewing, provided that you’re the kind of person who can rap the first verse of “Hypnotize” from memory. You come away wishing B.I.G. could’ve dreamed bigger.

As in many a French movie, especially crime movie, the philosophe and the crook turn out to be each other’s mirror image.

Although Catfish is opportunistic, even borderline exploitive, it gets at-by indirection, through the back door-the magic-carpet aspect of this scary new medium. Real people are so complicated and irreducible, you know?

Sports biopics are so common that one couldn’t blame Safdie for trying to avoid conventionality, but sometimes the conventions are there for a good reason. In the end, though, he understands that his greatest weapon here is his star. A weapon, and a gift: It’s nice to have the Rock acting again.

I’m only half-kidding when I suggest that you see the movie but leave (especially if you have kids) at what’s obviously the end of the first act. You’ll still get the dissonances, ambiguities, and portents of doom, along with much that is pure enchantment. And you won’t leave thinking the movie had been made by the Big Bad Wolf.

A delightfully goofy slapstick cartoon with a surprisingly dark heart.

It’s both lowdown and effete, a jamboree of whoopee jokes and sick wit.

Early on, writer-director David Michôd serves up "Trainspotting"-like tricks and narration that is beguiling, if rarely apropos. But the actors are something.

Lisa Kudrow does a dazzling turn as a guidance counselor who's a flickering mixture of sympathy and narcissism. But the movie belongs to Stone, that gorgeous, husky-voiced redhead.

Sirens of the Deep accomplishes what it sets out to do, and it’s both the most confident and the most enjoyable Witcher story on Netflix in years.

Mamet has to learn to trust the camera more than he does; he has to stop trying to control everything with language; he has to let loose a little and just give in to the fluency, the ease, the free-flowing pleasure of making a movie.

A poky but blood-freezing throwback to the gothic horror films of the seventies, when ingénues moved tremulously down dark corridors without holding digital video cameras.

Solondz conjures a world that's rotting away from the inside, in which only the children--freckle-faced Dylan Riley Snyder and Emma Hinz--weep over the loss of moral authority. This might be some kind of goddamned masterpiece, but I'm not sure I want to watch it again to say for sure.

You might go nuts trying to figure out exactly how anything works in this movie. But in the right hands, this can be a strength too. It certainly enhances the overall sense of dread, since we’re now in a world whose rules haven’t been clearly defined.

This is a paycheck movie, to be sure, the kind of direct-to-video title that gets a theatrical release because the lead actor still has star power. But he and his director have earned that paycheck. I’m excited to see what Liam Neeson will be stuck inside next.

This wistful little film is at just the right temperature.

Licorice Pizza — a movie as exasperating as it is delightful — could be described as an exploration of the unstable ground where Alana’s arrested development and Gary’s precociousness meet.

Maestro somehow proves that Cooper is a director of genuine vision, even though it’s not a particularly successful movie.

The film’s central tension, between hand-wavingly vague science and the contagious immediacy of the characters’ emotions, becomes most pronounced during the final act, which is somehow both impressively suspenseful and frustratingly confusing. Still, Stowaway is never boring, even as it leaves you with a million unanswered space questions.

A fine example of what a filmmaker can achieve when she takes on a great subject and lets it play out with all the respect and attention it deserves.

Uprising’s script isn’t great at jokes or nuance or originality, but it’s pretty good at shuttling us from one set piece to the next. And when those set pieces are good — as is the case with an early Jaeger fight in Siberia, or the gee-whiz silliness of the climactic battle in Tokyo — it’s easy enough to overlook.

Mohan seduces us with form while the central performance engages us on a more elemental level.

Perhaps the film’s most telling part comes during the deep dives themselves. When Cameron finds himself alone in his submersible, crammed into a little turret from which he can watch and film the world around him, the bravado fades away, and he becomes a little kid again.

Despite the mercenary nature of its existence, Road House is better than it has any right to be — perfectly enjoyable schlock that’s helped along by how unserious it is.

Rust Creek lets you exhale just a bit. It’s tight without being punishing, and its humor takes you happily by surprise. In this sort of film, you’re on guard for pop-up scares and sudden spasms of gore, not for moments of blessed connection. The humanism feels positively radical.

It goes soft, but even a gelded traditional farce is more potent than most of our slob comedies.

Caine is burlesquing his own iconography and enjoying every minute of it. He hasn't lost his dignity, though; it takes a lot of self-possession to act this blissfully silly. He even looks good with bad teeth.

Like most art world satires (a generally cursed subgenre), The Gallerist doesn’t ultimately have all that much to say about the art world that hasn’t been said a million times before. But it’s also a blast, thanks to its energetically mannered performances and director Cathy Yan’s snappy pacing and flair for visual humor.

Sadly, DelGaudio’s showmanship doesn’t always translate to its new medium — now you feel it, now you don’t. But DelGaudio’s oddly yearning text still has power on TV. He hides thorns among the card tricks, prickly questions about identity that don’t disappear with the next shuffle.

It’s busy, harmless fun. Very, very busy.

It is remarkable, however, that The Stanford Prison Experiment works as well as it does, and for as long as it does. Crudup and the young cast (particularly Angarano) deserve much of the credit.

A collection of swashbuckling set pieces with the hustle of a vaudeville show.

In the details, Blue Beetle comes alive — in the warmth with which the Reyes family is depicted, for example, or in Jaime’s utter cluelessness as he tries to control his newfound powers. Maridueña conveys the overwhelmed young hero’s anxiety with real charisma; the more helpless he is, the more we like him.

Tukel takes a big risk in Catfight: using farcical means to weave together personal and political tragedies, so that each dimension feeds the other. The rough edges and occasional clunks are a small price to pay.

The Lost City of Z(ed) isn’t as expansive as you might initially wish but still pulls you in and along.

You can find fault with virtually every scene in Luhrmann’s The Great Gatsby — and yet in spite of all the wrong notes, Fitzgerald (and the excess he was writing about and living) comes through. The Deco extravagance of the big party scenes is enthralling. Luhrmann throws money at the screen in a way that is positively Gatsby-like, walloping you intentionally and un- with the theme of prodigal waste.

Wasikowska's Jane is as watchful as only a damaged soul can be, and, when challenged, frighteningly fast.

Something in the Dirt deftly bounces between the oddness of its central story, the silliness of its documentary framing, and the resentments that eventually develop between its main characters, all buried inside what is essentially a hangout movie.

The peculiar charm of Paralyzed by Hope: The Maria Bamford Story ... lies in the way it’s driven by genuine curiosity about its subject. ... Watching Paralyzed by Hope, we start to understand why other comedians, including Apatow himself, would be so fascinated and electrified by Bamford’s work.

The film is at its best when it focuses on Lou and Jackie’s love for each other . . . Their passion fuels a lot of the characters’ impulsive decisions later in the story. But as things descend into further violence, the film can start to feel one note.

The even-tempered, exceedingly rational “El Doctor” seems more laudable than Eastwood and Bronson combined, especially in light of the Mexican government’s notorious ineptitude and corruption.

Moment to moment, Sleepwalk With Me is smooth and very entertaining, but it's arrested somewhere between fiction and autobiography.

Fanning is a child actor with a grown-up soul, and every move, every breath, seems mysteriously right.

Delicate, wrenching, occasionally vexing.

There’s a lot of cartoonish potential in Snitch, but director Ric Roman Waugh (who previously made the excellent prison drama "Felon," another exercise in somber desperation) seems intent on trying to sell the movie as a more serious enterprise. And amazingly, the gambit works.

One might say that this new film attempts to be something closer to a standard-issue mystery, with its ornate story line, ambitious action scenes, and historically resonant milieu. But in the end, it still thrives or dies on its teenage star’s charm. It mostly thrives, even if the luster is a bit off this time around.

The movie doesn't quite come together, but it's full of smart, cynical talk, and it's very entertaining.

With The Old Oak, Ken Loach goes out with one last, full-throated call for brotherhood and solidarity. It’s the most hopeful the old soldier’s been in years.

The sheer scale of the movie is mind-blowing--it touches on every aspect of modern life. It's the documentary equivalent of "The Matrix": It shows us how we're living in a simulacrum, fed by machines run by larger machines with names like Monsanto, Perdue, Tyson, and the handful of other corporations that make everything.

More fun than any civilization’s fiery extinction should ever be, Paul W.S. Anderson’s Pompeii 3-D is gloriously exciting kitsch – a poor man’s "Titanic" crossed with an even poorer man’s "Gladiator."

For all its original touches, though, An Education follows a conventional trajectory.

The confusion in For a Good Time, Call… is delightful, the phone-sex talk sweetening the vibe. Justin Long is peerlessly funny as the girls' gay pal, but the movie belongs to Graynor, who's like Sandra Bullock with a touch of Ginger Rogers–y brass.

It's a different sort of experience: a stately, somewhat plodding but endurable science-fiction saga.

Phillips kind of stumbles when he tries for a pat wrap-up of a still-horrific problem. But when he digs into the muck of the rot at the heart of it, he comes up with some unforgettable moments.

It’s an inviting, approachable world that Murdoch creates for us — still a total fantasy, of course, but one with a veneer of plausibility. Get on its wavelength, and you’ll be utterly charmed. Don’t, and you’ll run screaming from the theater.

For all the wizardry on display, Hugo often feels like a film about magic instead of a magical film.

Where the film really shines is in reuniting Bridget with her faithful friend group (Shirley Henderson, Sally Phillips, and James Callis), her withering gynecologist (Emma Thompson), and, of course, with Daniel Cleaver (Hugh Grant), the red flag-laden lothario who represents everything Bridget knew she shouldn’t be attracted to.

There are a couple of hundred instances in which Johnson or her actors could take condescending short cuts and slip into white-trash stereotypes, but I didn't see any - only gifted performers vanishing into their characters, refusing to pass judgment.

The weirder its treatment of the treat becomes, the better the movie is, cutting through the script’s more potentially sentimental tendencies. It never reaches the singularly compelling strangeness of the source material, but it lands somewhere close enough to be mostly satisfying.

In political terms, True Crime is a far cry from "Dirty Harry" -- it actually stands up for due process of law. In Hollywood, I believe this is known as mellowing.