On a purely visceral level, Training Day is easily the most exciting movie out there right now, but as a morality tale with anything large on its mind, it's a cop-out.

This winning coming-of-age comedy understands that, when you’re 13 years old, the world really does feel like it could end if you’re not able to wear the dress of your dreams to your bat mitzvah, or if, God forbid, your crush expresses interest in someone other than you.

Linklater must have recognized a kindred spirit when he read Belber's play. He's given us a reality-fantasy game, a psychodrama, a harangue, and a detective story all rolled into one.

I urge you not to pass up Black Book, especially on a wide screen. It's a marvelous movie-movie, with a new screen goddess. Van Houten has a soft, heart-shaped face on top of a body so naturally, ripely beautiful it has its own kind of truth.

Actress and director build a symphony out of Grandma Wong’s grimaces and her glares. There are emotions in there, but she’s not about to let us get to them, and to her, that easily. And so, we are transfixed.

Like "Bridesmaids," it makes no more promises than an actual night out: These people will be there, and the goal is to have a good time. And while it may not quite have the undergirding pathos of the former, Girls Trip is a very good time.

It’s a wobbly, uneven, ultimately wonderful film — its unevenness befitting its title character, who we come to love despite her loopy lack of awareness of her own deficiencies.

If The Theory of Everything cut as deeply as Redmayne's performance, it might be on the level of "My Left Foot." But there are so damn many problems, easy to ignore at first in the elation of watching Redmayne and the gossamer Felicity Jones as his future wife, Jane, but impossible to shake off in the last third.

Kohn’s gripping Manda Bala is the opposite of a high-school science doc. It’s a free-form portrait of a place--Brazil--with scary running motifs: kidnapping, mutilation, plastic surgery, bulletproofing, and frog farming.

Outrageously entertaining.

Dogman doesn’t have the scale of a major work, but it tugs you in and roughs you up — in a good way! It haunts you long after it ends.

Tate Taylor’s film cares less about narrative clarity and more about portraying a life lived between the extremes of sin and grace, between the abject and the sublime. It’s lively, stylized, and genuinely surprising.

It’s the worst movie McQueen’s made, which by wider standards means that it’s still not bad. But Blitz’s admirable intentions consistently outstrip its execution, which is clunky and full of narrative artifices required to keep its angel-faced lead on the run from danger and from the authorities who intend to send him back to the train station.

If Gazer doesn’t pick up the momentum needed to match Frankie’s increasingly dire situation, it’s nevertheless a pleasure to watch — a project that feels, like its heroine, unstuck in time, reminiscent of a whole other, more vibrant era of American independent cinema when the films themselves were the point and not just calling cards for a bigger commercial opportunity.

So what makes The Brink so different from just another platform for this professional troll? Though Klayman sticks to a largely vérité approach of following her subject around and observing his various interactions, she also provides important context.

So Shazam! feels blessedly old-fashioned, which isn’t to say it’s perfect — or even very good. It’s certainly fun when the juvenile actors are front and center, before the CGI moves in for the last half-hour and change.

It's hard to know whether to marvel or weep when James Carville goes into his Bill Clinton–meets–Looney Tunes act in Rachel Boynton's knockout documentary Our Brand Is Crisis--the context is so morally topsy-turvy.

The Room Next Door is an alternately rapturous and ponderous meditation on mortality, though in a very Almodóvarian fashion, that exploration comes by way of a fantasy of set directing one’s own death, down to the moment, location, and outfit worn.

The movie is broad and mean and for a while very funny, but even when it goes sour — when the world slaps them in the face for their sins — it doesn’t lose its momentum.

Villeneuve is trying like hell to elevate what turns out to be a dumb genre picture.

Practitioners of Cajun, Creole, and zydeco music strut their stuff. So do the players of a style new to me but instantly beloved: I'm speaking of swamp pop.

Jeunet wants us to know that times are hard for dreamers and that one shouldn't pass up a chance for true love. He means it, no doubt, but he doesn't have the simplicity of soul to quite bring off the sentiment. Still, we're charmed by the attempt.

Begins, at two-hours-plus, is a nonstarter.

Theater Camp really just wants to bask in the world it’s created, and it’s hard to complain about something being too affectionate.

I’m not sure Morris clinches his case, but I’m not sure he wants to: His aim is to throw a monkey wrench into the cogs of our perception.

I Love You, Man is totally formulaic, but the formula is unnervingly (and hilariously) inside out.

The problem — not fatal — with The Walk is that the narrative wire droops between the movie’s opening and final sequences.

With its clever construction and comic timing, it’s a mean romp with an escalating death count and some nice quips.

A Complete Unknown doesn’t attempt to offer up a solution to the enigma that is Bob Dylan. It does something more achievable — shows us what it’s like to bob around the wake of greatness.

The film wallows in a particular brand of Americana — denim and leather, cornfields and Harley-Davidsons, crumpled packs of cigarettes and boilermakers on the bar at a dive — without being comfortable laying claim to it.

Ozon has a smooth gift for scenes of unease, but ultimately Swimming Pool liquifies into a dreary puzzle movie.

As Catch-22 limps along from vignette to vignette, one sees that what it lacks is cohesion, style and essential mood. [29 June 1970, p.54]

Ought to have been an eye-roller. What a surprise that it's so seductive. The Woodman lives!

Public Enemies has incidental pleasures (its hi-def video palette is fascinatingly weird), but it’s only Depp’s sense of fun that keeps it from being a period gangster museum piece.

Sisu veers between the elemental and the ethereal. Once it’s over, it feels like you must have dreamed it.

About halfway through Resurrection, Rebecca Hall delivers a nearly eight-minute monologue about her character’s past that is so riveting, so mystifying and terrifying that you shouldn’t be surprised if it shows up in every acting class sometime in the near future.

Rush is a wonder. It takes bravery to convey closure, tunnel vision, total indifference to the camera that actors always know is there, however self-effacing they might want to be appear. Final Portrait is, like Rush’s performance, a miniature, but there’s a fullness to Tucci’s vision transcending every surface.

Much of Her Smell, especially these backstage scenes, border on unintelligible, with numerous exchanges getting lost in the chaos. I found this to be incredibly, teeth-grindingly effective — this is a thoroughly subjective depiction of mental illness and substance abuse, and the accurate relay of information often takes a backseat in the throes of such a state.

The Nice Guys has a nice feel: just slick enough to keep from falling apart, just brutal enough to keep from seeming inconsequential.

The film treads familiar territory when it’s trying to carve cinema-worthy myth from its semi-fictitious protagonist’s life, but its more impressionistic, painterly moments are what feel truly fresh.

Attains a level of quiet grace. It's too bad that I can barely remember the movie after only a week. Nothing lasts, indeed.

Hoffman has his specialty, though, and it’s not inappropriate here: He always looks supersmart and yet his reactions to what goes on around him are superslow.

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.

Vigalondo demonstrates that even the dumbest genres can be used to profound ends — not cheapening serious things but kicking them to the next metaphoric level. A woman finding her inner strength is inspiring. But a woman finding her inner giant monster who kicks butt — that’s just so cool.

Whenever it finally opens, we’ll probably all be too busy trying to cancel each other over this or that, in part because, despite the fact that he makes grandiose, overstuffed films, Audiard rarely holds our hand when it comes to telling us how to feel about his characters; he has a maximalist’s eye and a minimalist’s heart, which is a fascinating tension to bring into a musical.

Sword of Trust feints at being an Ideas movie, but really only wants to hang — which is certainly not a crime, but given the subject matter, and These Times, it’s a little disappointing.

As an action flick, Monkey Man is often quite entertaining, but it keeps distracting you with images of the film it’s trying, and often failing, to be.

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

What comes through are Vaniček’s expert orchestration of suspense, and the cast’s ability to make their characters’ fears feel genuine.

The cancer-buddy movie Paddleton (which premieres today on Netflix) is embarrassingly bad until 20 minutes from the end, when it’s suddenly very good — quiet, tightly focused, stunning. It’s a pity that the first hour needs to be endured, but it does set the stage as well as soften you up for the indelible scene to come.

Beneath the expensive, computer-generated busyness of this second Captain America installment is a bracing, old-style conspiracy thriller made extra-scary by new technology and the increasingly ugly trade-offs of a post-9/11 world.

This entertaining but rather peculiar movie asks extraordinary questions, and I wish it were better equipped to give the answers.

Thirteen doesn't really offer much more insight into exasperated mother-daughter relationships or twisted teens than, say, "Freaky Friday," which I much prefer. At least that film was funny and didn't try to fob itself off as a bulletin from the front lines.

Freaky Friday gives Curtis the chance to go all goofy and showcase her gift for splayed physical comedy.

It’s quite a mix: Far From the Tree throws so much at you that you’ll want to pick up the book and read (or reread) it. You might be surprised that one of Solomon’s subjects is the accomplished composer Nico Muhly, who’s on the spectrum. Muhly (along with Yo La Tengo) composed the movie’s music, which, like the film and book, doesn’t settle for easy harmonies.

Gunner Palace too often makes the grunts look like mean slackers -- precisely the opposite, one presumes, of what was intended.

It's the only Almodóvar movie in which feeling, emotional or sexual, doesn't suffuse the imagery and hold the ramshackle melodrama together.

The surprises are mostly in the details. Mike & Nick & Nick & Alice is bursting with ideas that feel like clever marginalia on an otherwise familiar setup.

It’s just another example of art-house hokey-pokey. Amazingly, this film won both the Palme d’Or and Best Director Award at Cannes, beating out, among others, "Mystic River."

The Science of Sleep transports you, but it strands you, too. Apart from the time-machine bit and two or three other daft exchanges, Gondry’s scenes tend to circle around the same drain: the hero’s insufferable narcissism.

Honoré has proven you can make a movie musical in which style doesn’t upstage content--a movie musical that blossoms from the inside out.

Doubt is still overpowering; it took me a while when it was over to stop shaking. It's the dramatist’s business to sow doubt, to set down points of view that can't be reconciled, and Shanley makes visceral the notion that one can be right but never absolutely right, that doubt might be our last, best hope.

McKinley establishes just the right amount of physical and emotional stakes, and a cast led by Ethan Hawke infuses the drama with believable camaraderie, conflict, and tension. It’s the kind of atmospheric, exciting period drama we don’t really get much anymore.

The film’s bursts of violence are genuinely bracing — a face bashed in, a skull shattered, and the signature act of animal mutilation performed by a carnival geek, a figure of abject degradation who haunts the film’s ill-fated protagonist. But for a pulpy tale of addiction and desperate lives on the fringes, Nightmare Alley is otherwise depressingly short on actual darkness and discomfort.

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.

A rare example of first-rate filmed opera.

It underscores, with ample footage from his rallying speeches and his 1971 testimony before the Senate Foreign Relations Committee, just how important it was for the antiwar movement to be represented by someone like Kerry.

John Andreas Andersen’s The Quake, a sequel to the excellent 2015 Norwegian disaster film The Wave, should be required viewing for all of today’s Hollywood franchise jockeys. It shows you how to make one of these things without sacrificing your characters’ souls (or your own, for that matter).

Swift, entertaining documentary.

It’s forceful, to be sure, but in a lurid way that suggests a telenovela that’s been baking in the sun too long.

An expertly woven narrative, as nail-bitingly effective as any good Hollywood thriller.

I would say that what Almodóvar pulls off in the end makes the rest of the film worthwhile, but only barely and only if you’re invested enough in his ongoing arc as an artist to find intriguing the idea of a self-lacerating late-career self-portrait about the nature of inspiration.

As Brown becomes more flagrantly self-destructive and at the same time more deluded, you realize you're watching "Bad Lieutenant" made by a tediously finger-wagging Jew instead of a tediously desecrating Catholic.

Even the film’s most charming character work is undone by the stale jokes that populate its script.

This fake Weird Al movie could have used some of the real Weird Al’s cleverness. Weird doesn’t feel like a parody; it feels like an impostor.

Brimstone & Glory, in a lean 67 minutes of cinematic poetry, bears that love out in dizzying extremes.

I watch The Old Guard and try to imagine a new world, one where other comic-book movies are this well made and breathtaking.

Like much of Soderbergh's recent work, Contagion feels a little sterile, more like a cinematic exercise than something with blood pumping through it. It's certainly high-minded - it might be the most high-minded disaster movie ever made.

It's madly funny--a treat for moviegoers who don't mind gnawed-off limbs with their high jinks.

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.

We know, of course, that none of this will end well, and Blichfeldt gives us every gnarly, disgusting consequence in agonizing detail, be it vomit, blood, severed body parts, or some combination thereof. Nevertheless, the film is beautiful in its own way, like a Scandinavian fairy-tale riff on Italian giallo, narratively disquieting but cinematically exhilarating.

My kind of Christmas movie--profane, subversive, and swarming with scuzzballs.

The documentary could hardly be more timely or essential.

Ozon is doing sexual gymnastics all over his uncanny womb-based plot, and somehow it all coheres pretty seamlessly, even at its most ridiculous.

While the press tour for the film has highlighted the rapport between its attractive and game stars, that doesn’t reflect the chemistry between them onscreen. There isn’t a flicker of heat between any of them. But the bigger issue is that each character is more of a threadbare idea improperly stitched together than a person.

It’s a movie that makes you long to be able to freeze frames in order to appreciate the loveliness and wit of its details, while at the same time giving you little reason to want to revisit the thing as a whole.

In truth, I’m not sure the movie jells — even the title, from an album by The Smiths, seems oblique. But I loved it anyway.

It helps that Reilly is the opposite of a slob-comic. With his hangdog melancholy, he makes even the nonstop cunnilingus allusions poignant-the product of emotional longing.

Téchiné gets deep inside the dread and exhilaration of people who have lost their bearings so suddenly they don't even have the luxury of grief.

Downey found a way to channel his working-class audience’s anger against liberal shibboleths and not incidentally take down both his dad and his surrogate dad — Teddy ­Kennedy. It’s a ­riveting Oedipal tragedy.

Mackenzie and his cast dance around and through this drama so elegantly and delicately that the twisty, generic ending feels like even more of a letdown than it might have in a more ordinary picture. The details are not worth getting into, but Relay is the rare movie where I might recommend leaving ten minutes before the end.

Often howlingly funny, and the actors are a treat. But the underlying message is so suspect that it’s hard to suspend disbelief.

A jaw-dropper: a delirium-inducing crash course in international trash.

One of the wonderful things about Thumbsucker is that, unlike so many movies in which a character changes in order to propel the plot forward, this one stops to follow up on the consequences of those changes.

Even more than his other genre mash-ups, this is a switchback journey through Tarantino’s twisted inner landscape, where cinema and history, misogyny and feminism, sadism and romanticism collide and split and re-bond in bizarre new hybrids. The movie is an ungainly pastiche, yet on some wacked-out Jungian level it’s all of a piece.

Mermaid is a very, very funny movie, but its caustic swipes at China’s nouveau riche, combined with its despairing look at the devastation of the country’s environment, suggest a filmmaker trying to find ways to reconcile his buoyant sense of fun with deeper, darker themes.

In their last collaboration, "21 Grams," the director Alejandro González Iñárritu and screenwriter Guillermo Arriaga did syntactical acrobatics to disguise what a dreary and exploitive little soap opera they’d made. Their new movie, Babel, is more mysterious and less coherent.

If there’s a sure thing in movies, it’s that if you cast Nicolas Cage in a role in which he goes crazy, he’ll rise to the occasion and keep on rising until he seems even loonier than his character.