Bonham-Carter is somehow both perfect for the part of Mother Holmes and, unfortunately, wasted. Perhaps we’re merely being set up for future adventures, in which these characters will presumably play greater parts.

I'm all for films that don't flow from the usual Hollywood test tubes, but A Civil Action is basically the standard formula with a dash of downbeat.

What Now? Remind Me is all over the place, but it never feels messy or lax.

The Grand is a seesaw, but the setting--the high-stakes poker subculture--is remarkably fertile and the actors are a treat.

Miguel Arteta’s rollicking Youth in Revolt is one of several recent movies to elevate the generic coming-of-age teen sex comedy to a plane of surrealism.

It’s so smart, so winsome, so utterly rejuvenating that you’ll have to wait until your eyes have dried and your buzz has worn off before you can begin to argue with it. And you should argue with it — even if you had a blast, as I did, and want to see it again with the kids, as I do — because it’s a major pop-culture statement with all sorts of implications, both vital and nutty.

As Ain’t Them Bodies Saints moves along, its elliptical approach to drama goes from keeping us on our toes to dulling everything down.

Noah Taylor does startlingly well by this role, but the conceit behind the film is a bizarre piece of wish-fulfillment.

The chronology is confusing at times, but the film is never not fascinating.

Entertaining documentary.

But the question hangs: Does this artificial, three-hankie scenario justify its 9/11 appropriations? Dry your eyes and decide for yourself.

The good news is that Final Reckoning does eventually recover from the calamity of its first hour to give us an entertaining, if still messy, Mission: Impossible movie.

I doubt many things — almost everything, to be frank — but I have no doubt that my Heaven Is for Real audience slept better that night. Whatever works.

When Skinamarink sets out to actively scare . . . it’s very good at it. But the idea of the movie is more beguiling than the overall experience of watching it.

The talented writer-director Scott Frank comes awfully close in his adaptation of one of Block’s better novels, A Walk Among the Tombstones. I’d be way more enthusiastic if Frank hadn’t swapped out the book’s horrific, unforgettable ending for something so conventional, I can barely remember it a few days later.

Mexican director Michel Franco’s somber drama about the ghosts of the past has a lot on its mind, and not all of it makes sense. But its two leads are so good together, so weirdly right together, that everything slips away and you just watch them.

Cameron Crowe is a romantic bordering on utopian, and his authentic family values - biological and surrogate - shine through in his enchanting We Bought a Zoo.

On the whole, this is a good B-movie that hits it modest marks.

Green, despite having co-written and directed all of the entries in this most recent crop of Halloween sequels, isn’t really a horror guy. He doesn’t seem to have the precision and rhythm required to truly shock us. Luckily, with Halloween Ends, he’s found a way to make one of these movies his own, sans scares but with tons of atmosphere and a sense of queasy, gathering dread.

It left me bemused instead of moved, but true Andersonites will likely float away in a state of nirvana.

Sometimes you just have to let yourself be a sucker for the obvious — whether it’s for a holiday movie, a ridiculous romance, or an awkwardly grafted-on but very timely theme.

The movie version of Goosebumps replicates that balancing act. It’s a cheerful, nasty delight.

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.

An ungainly, intermittently harrowing omnibus filled with moments of piercing sorrow and rage.

Roadrunner may have been made too soon, and made with a misguided approach in mind, but in its closing moments, it manages a sudden magnificence in affirming that there’s no right way to mourn. Grief, in all of its ugly reality, is a part of life too, and there’s no tidying it up for the camera.

"Perverse” is a good overall description for Stars at Noon, a hypnotic but relentlessly disconcerting movie and never more so than in the way that Denis frames Qualley like an influencer on a sponsored trip

As a technical achievement, K-19 is right up there with Das Boot. Don't expect much dramatic depth, though. The fathoms descended in this movie are strictly nautical.

The film ... is more emotional than definitive; stopping just short of bestowing sainthood on the artist, but still aiming for something a little more cosmic than reportorial. This is not a “what really happened” exposé of his death, nor is it an academic postmortem on Peep’s musical or cultural legacy. It’s most effective as a character study.

It doesn’t come close to the emotional heft of those two rare 2s that outclassed their ones: Superman 2 and Spider-Man 2. But Iron Man 2 hums along quite nicely.

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

Not every sight gag works, and there's a brief stretch in the middle where the action becomes landlocked. But once we're out to sea the movie goes swimmingly--its three protagonists fighting, flailing, and often on the verge of drowning as their tiny skiff surges toward the land of the Inuit.

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.

Howard A. Rodman's script has a lot of juice, and the rhythms are so pregnant that the air vibrates with something, even if you're not sure what.

Our Mothers (which won the Caméra d’Or at last year’s Cannes Film Festival and is available to watch on demand beginning May 1) is the sort of movie that gets lost in the U.S. when life is normal. It’s a good one to see when you’re anxious, in pain, hypersensitized, uncertain of the ground beneath you, and thinking — maybe for the first time — that you ought to start digging.

A deeply silly midsummer lark that makes up for the fact that it’s about nothing by being incredibly entertaining.

Honestly, watching One of Them Days, you start to wonder why Palmer isn’t one of the biggest stars in the world by now, though part of the problem is that she’s a creature of comedy, and studios barely make them anymore. Even when the writing and pacing falls slack in this one, as it definitely does on occasion, she wrings laughs out of scenes with screwball physicality and surprising line readings.

Despite Chalamet’s blazing brilliance, we don’t particularly root for Marty, or feel for him, or even hate him; he feels like a plot device in his own story. And yet there’s something there. Maybe the fact that this tale of constant forward motion has little room for humanity or reflection or reason says something about Marty and his times — which of course are ultimately our own.

Like his "Wendigo," the film has a lot of mumbo jumbo about ancient spirits revived and angered by human disrespect--the old Indian-graveyard paradigm, as clunky as ever. But the context is overpoweringly eerie.

Farmageddon made me laugh quite a few times, and kids will probably love it. But it can’t quite measure up to the glories of the first Shaun the Sheep film.

Hyams's film, which may at first seem like a glorified VOD entry in a forgotten franchise starring has-been action stars, is an admirably tense sci-fi/horror adventure that somehow turns its considerable limitations into virtues.

Loveless gives us a multicourse meal of social ills, too dispersed to feel like a thesis, yet too chilly to feel like a raw, unbridled tantrum.

It’s a real crowd-pleaser, and I hope a lot of people will be inspired by its mixture of grittiness and uplift. But it also demonstrates that showbiz go-for-it stories are more alike than unalike, even when they have a vivid countercultural vibe and feature actors who don’t conform to (Hollywood white male) studio ideals.

The best thing in Gilroy's "Michael Clayton" was the final scene between George Clooney and Tilda Swinton, the one in which the vise tightened click by click on Tilda. This is another vice-tightening sequence, but scary instead of triumphant, and with a long and explosive punch line. Finally, a sequence we can follow! After this, Gilroy owns us.

Scene after scene rockets past dumb, past camp, past Kabuki, and into the Milky Way of Silly where laws can be made up and discarded as long as what happens gets laughs.

It's deftly calibrated and acted with relish: Kasdan is really good!

Outside of its open and shameless heartstring tugging, Gifted at least sets up a compelling, multisided moral dilemma.

When it works, which it does most of all in its opening and closing acts, it’s because it manages to give a surprising emotional solidity to what’s otherwise a whimsical premise.

The film is at its best when it lets Dickinson’s deceptively blank face and Hélène Louvart’s lyrically natural cinematography tell the story, which is far more informed by mood than events.

This is a film made by a wiser man who recognizes that everybody's looking for salvation in their own way. In the end, as the camera revisits the cast of broken, fallen characters, we may realize that Red Hook, as far as Spike Lee is concerned, is a state of mind.

That makes Brosnan the more interesting protagonist, Chan the wild card — and changes The Foreigner from a standard revenge melodrama into something weightier and less predictable. It’s an awkward weave, but it has gravitas.

Hideously depressing but also enraging documentary.

It’s a sweet, swift 91 minutes long, and only about 80 if you skip the credits — but it’s a surprisingly immersive affair, and the authenticity writer-star Hanks and director Aaron Schneider bring to it is a huge part of its appeal.

It's still possible to have a good time at this movie, and the primary reason is De Niro.

Like Teddy, there’s a lot of sophomoric silliness Night School feels obligated to perform. But there’s a heap of good intentions behind it, and enough big laughs to make us want to forgive it in the end.

It’s a fun little movie, more of a giddy rom-com than a splatter-y slasher.

The result is that rare Hollywood genre film that earns its intensity rather than forcing it upon you.

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

Delpy may be starting to channel Woody Allen's directorial skills, but Rock has fully appropriated the Woodman's barbed comic anger.

Like all good YA fantasy, it’s rooted in earnest adolescent anxieties, and dresses them up with the same level of earnestness.

It's a new Neeson as Dr. Alfred Kinsey, all spiky-haired and harried, and he's enormously appealing in the role.

Kargman is light on her feet, and she has chosen to follow a fascinating group of kids preparing for the 2010 Youth America Grand Prix.

Has William Hurt ever been this perfectly cast? He uses his groggy self-importance to make the pastor the victim of evil and the very fount of it.

In the end, Memory’s greatest asset might be that it knows exactly what it is — a fun combination of sleazoid action and surprising emotion. It’s the best kind of B-movie.

As a horror buff, I hate to admit it, but Peele’s attachment to creaky genre tropes is already starting to hold him back. The good news is that he’s more than halfway to creating his own syntax, his own means for illuminating the sunken places of the world. I have a feeling there will be miraculous excavations to come.

Nichols’s mythic aspirations are still a puzzle to me; I’m not sure he has connected all the dots in his psyche yet, or that he fully brings off his finale. But I love watching his movies.

The Village is a better movie (than Signs) --probably his best since "The Sixth Sense"--but it indulges Shyamalan's penchant for messianic uplift.

Venus is worth seeing for the scenes between O’Toole and Vanessa Redgrave as the woman he abandoned--the mother of his children.

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

For a movie so visual (how many shades of blue can you count?), John Wick: Chapter 2 has quite a clever script. Derek Kolstad anchors that abstract action with good, spiky passages of dialogue.

It’s a graceful, engaging film — I enjoyed it. But it could have been called "The Tasteful Dozen."

The new Russian horror film Sputnik whipsaws between suggested horror and schlock so furiously that it turns inconsistency into a virtue. It’s a creepy chamber drama that morphs regularly into an effects-laden ick-fest. But transformation is in the film’s DNA.

It’s tough to sustain a story line this thin for two hours, and the movie runs down at the two-thirds mark.

Mamet doesn't take the material as far as it can go -- we're left with a pleasing fable about the battle of the sexes and the virtues of persistence in a just cause. The neatness of it all is both appealing and appalling, and perhaps this combo is what finally hooked Mamet.

The film mostly retains its humanity, largely thanks to Deutch’s performance and Russo-Young’s insistence on keeping her at the forefront of almost every shot.

The Incredible Hulk is weightless--as disposable as an Xbox game. It's also fairly entertaining: swift, playful without pitching into camp, and acted with high spirits.

It has a bad, slapstick first act but by midpoint becomes strangely compelling, tapping into the fantasy of reliving one's high-school years (which did a number on us all) and getting it right.

Koreeda's compositions have a sympathetic detachment that Americans rarely value but is, for many Japanese, the whole point of art. That means you can contemplate the wonder in these glowing young faces without feeling as if you're on an intravenous drip of corn syrup.

The movie didn’t rekindle the thrill of seeing, say, The Empire Strikes Back, but Rogue One will loom pretty large in the Star Wars galaxy — if only because there’s so little competition.

Furious 7 kicks the biggest and hardest, but it’s far from the best. Lin has handed the keys to James Wan, the cunning horror director of "Saw" and "The Conjuring," and though the thrill isn’t gone, the finesse is.

Whatever its occasional stumbles, Last Night in Soho is a mostly intoxicating affair.

The film lands somewhere between hand-holding fan service and brutal portrait of chronic illness.

It shows us things — obscene and hilarious, yes, but also just as often harrowing and unforgettable — we never thought we’d see. It’s ridiculous, but it has a ragged nobility all its own.

Tight, fun little thriller.

The Murmelstein interview didn’t make it into Shoah, and Lanzmann sat on it, saying in a written prologue that he finally decided he had “no right to keep it to himself.” I wish he’d brought it out in Murmelstein’s lifetime. (The rabbi died in 1989.) He deserved the chance to be heard by the people who hated him most — who probably still would hate him but come away with ­respect.

Dragon 2 is at its best when it quiets down and dares to be intimate.

The relationship McInerny and Tucker build is so convincing in its mixture of exploitation and yearning that Palm Trees and Power Lines capably secures what Lea desires most too: your attention.

In Bloom feels, more than anything else, like a war movie.

Solo: A Star Wars Story hits all its marks except the one it needed to hit most: accounting for one of pop culture’s most cantankerous charismatics.

Most of all, De Palma proves that greatest suspense (and horror) come from helplessness, a sense of impotence.

What makes An Unreasonable Man so compelling is its perfectly fluid line. Simply put, the private Nader and the public Nader are the same: There are no contradictions with which to grapple, no byways to explore.

It can’t quite match the power of Östlund’s film, or its bemused, clinical (dare I say Scandinavian?) sensibility, but it has an awkward, American charm all its own.

As much as its premise may sound like the start of a bad joke, Peter Ramsey's movie preserves just enough genuine childhood wonder in its whooshing, high-tech theatrics to make it a delight.

Milk is one of the most heartfelt portraits of a politician ever made--the man himself remains just out of reach.

Most of The Dead Lands, in fact, adheres to a fairly simple action film template. But the dynamic between the characters works because Fraser keeps it tough.

It’s probably no great loss, but here and elsewhere the seams show. And in this sort of movie it’s often more fun before we get our bearings and have time to say, “This makes no sense.”

The Post is a good enough “procedural” to keep you hooked.

The director seems to be drawing a line from the horror of the war years to the infantilism of the Boomers and rock; the father lost his innocence, and the son froze his.

As a onetime dramaturg and Brechtian, I enjoyed the chin-wags and the glimpses of Streep in rehearsal--especially her quivering admission that she can't bear the thought of anyone seeing her process.