Owen is a hugely engaging screen presence.

The movie is a cunning piece of storytelling, but it’s thin.

The result isn’t an all-the-feels, drown-us-in-tears kind of experience, but something rooted in wisdom and clarity. It’s the rare movie that can sacrifice the clean lines of fantasy and melodrama for the messiness of ordinary life — that neither burnishes nor condemns the up-down turmoil of the teenage soul, but rather lets it be.

A pro-union, anti-corporate, race-conscious, Silicon Valley side-eyeing tale of one man’s journey through the late-capitalist nightmare of an “alternate present” version of Oakland, Sorry to Bother You’s greatest asset is the strength of its conviction, and how far it’s willing to go to make sure it stays burned in your brain.

So, it’s Edge of Tomorrow meets Interstellar meets Aliens meets Tenet meets Independence Day, with their brains removed. But it’s still tremendous fun, because this thing moves. Let’s face it: If it slowed down, the audience might start asking too many questions. The Tomorrow War is just as stupid as it needs to be.

After seeing "Brokeback Mountain," with its sanctified couplings against a backdrop of purple mountain majesties, some of us felt that Ang Lee owed us a dirty movie with more bodily fluids. Lust, Caution is that movie--for maybe 10 of its 158 minutes. The rest of the film is absorbing, though.

White Noise is certainly uneven — wildly so, probably by design — but it’s also never boring, always eager to throw something new at the viewer, and it’s eager to entertain. I never imagined I’d laugh so hard while watching a movie adaptation of Don DeLillo’s White Noise.

All in all, Frozen River is gripping stuff. Except it's also rigged and cheaply manipulative.

Excruciatingly vivid.

There is so much fascinating, underplayed tension running through Burning.... I was a little let down, then, when Burning lost its steam in its second half.

The movie is a broad ethnic comedy, but there’s nothing broad about the wicked-smart way it’s executed.

Too much of this fantasy is filled out with artsy folderol, but it's a movie like no other--except, maybe, one by Guy Maddin.

Disobedience isn’t packed with surprises, but that’s not why you go to a movie like this. You go to watch humans with wayward emotions labor to make peace with (or opt to war against) a formal, ritualized way of life.

A lovely confection.

Therein lies part of the dissonance with this often-wonderful, deceptively strange movie. You could get emotional whiplash watching it.

The director of "Gallipoli" and "The Year of Living Dangerously" has muffled the rage and darkness of his best work in favor of an antiquated pleasingness. Master and Commander is a too-comfy classic.

It’s both dumber and more entertaining than anyone had a right to expect.

Tabloid is candy for voyeurs. We laugh like mad at a nut whose only mistake was being born in the last century, too early to have made real money.

As uneven as Ridley Scott’s career; at times, it seems to be a journey through the director’s greatest strengths and weaknesses. The good news is that his strengths eventually win out; the bad news is all the awkward storytelling and botched character interactions we have to wade through to get to the good stuff. Once we do, though, Exodus is a hoot.

At least this time "Goopy" Paltrow gets to perform a few superheroics herself, along with enduring some heavy-duty torture that’s bound to please her haters — for whom the sight of the top of her face being peeled off in "Contagion" was like Christmas in July.

Uncle Boonmee is entrancing-and also, if you're not sufficiently steeped in its rhythms, narcotizing.

Save Yourselves! is a small movie about small people doing small things in the face of a (mostly unseen) big event. If it plays things a little too safe at times, that’s probably because it has to. And besides, it’s charming enough that you may not notice, or care.

Given that this retrograde memory loss has cleansed Doug Bruce's perceptions and made him an altogether more open and emotional person, Unknown White Male suggests that amnesia could be the ultimate chicken soup for the soul.

As a narrative, it’s clunky. As a whodunit, it’s third-rate. As the drama of a closed-off man’s awakening, it’s predictable. But Haggis has got hold of a fiercely urgent subject: the moral devastation of American soldiers serving in (and coming home from) Iraq. At its heart are deeper mysteries--and a tragedy that reaches far beyond anything onscreen.

Half the time in the mystical saga Youth Without Youth, I had no idea what the movie was about, but I always felt that the director and screenwriter, Francis Ford Coppola, did, and that he was deeply in tune--and having a hell of a time--with the material.

The absurdity is what makes it such a hoot-and-a-half.

Batmanglij keeps the movie even-keeled, full of medium close-ups, underscored by ambient plinks and shimmers, with nothing to break the trance until a last scene that upends everything we thought we knew.

Begin Again is very funny, mostly because Ruffalo makes such an adorably rumpled drunken a--hole.

Aquaman’s as formulaic, excessively thrashy, and mommy-obsessed as any other entry in the DCEU, but its visual imagination is genuinely exciting and transportive, and dare I say, fun.

Watching Big Nick get a little lost in a boozy dream of abandon, an ocean away from his troubles, we understand him better than we understand most of today’s movie heroes.

Atonement works reasonably well as a tragic romance, but that sting is dulled. As a book, it was a blow to the head; as a movie, it’s an adaptation of a book.

Menzel’s touch is sprightly, lyrical, mischievously understated.

Taking pretty much every rom-com trope and distilling it into highly concentrated ridiculousness, Wain’s film is both a takedown and a tribute: As with his summer-camp-movie spoof "Wet Hot American Summer," you walk away with a renewed love for the genre.

At times, I found myself wishing Berg focused more on Brower and Krakauer’s investigations and given the film a more present-tense narrative. This is a fascinating movie, but there’s a lot to cover here, and one can occasionally feel lost amid all the strands.

Adam Shankman's movie of the Broadway Hairspray gets better as it lumbers along, but there’s something garish about its hustle--it’s like an elephant trumpeting in your face.

The Last Showgirl is reluctant to abandon the limelight. Amid its hesitation for resolution, though, it proves how much more Anderson has left to give.

The biggest disappointment is the role that Baumbach wrote for Charles Grodin — his juiciest in many years but with only one or two laugh lines. If nothing else, I wanted Grodin to kick Stiller’s butt across the screen for desecrating the name of "The Heartbreak Kid."

The film is wrenching all the same, and subtle enough in its portrait of the four major grown-up characters to qualify as Jamesian.

The Keeping Room is slow and rather arty, with a chamber-music (plus harmonica and fiddle) score and cinematography that shrouds the faces in shadow. But it’s a fine piece of storytelling and earns its look and feel.

A well-crafted family flick that gets the job done, then gets out of the way.

Yes, it’s all illogical and silly: Lions don’t behave this way, and humans tend to be better at self-preservation than such movies would have us believe. But if everybody always acted correctly, we wouldn’t have movies like Beast, and that’d be no fun at all.

He’s (Singer) reborn — deft, elegant, spring-heeled — in X-Men: Days of Future Past. The special effects don’t bog him down: They lift the movie to a surreal and more emotional dimension.

In the new Speak No Evil, the ineffectual nature of the characters becomes not a shortcoming so much as a teased-out joke — a Straw Dogs moment that never arrives, leaving us instead to wince at these bumbling fools as they strive, however poorly, to save themselves.

If Harden weren’t such a naturally magnetic presence, The Black Sea would not work nearly as effectively as it does. But he’s fascinating and unpredictable to observe, carrying the entire film on his shoulders as if it weighs nothing at all.

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.

The actors manage to show crack comic timing while looking as if they’re groping along blindly — a high compliment for psychodrama.

His (Aoyama) existential odyssey is so attenuated and aloof that he turns suffering into an art thing.

Jordan has a great face for doubt and inner conflict. There’s a quizzical, nervous quality to him — which is also why when he does action movies, he’s so wonderfully unpredictable — and you can sense his devotion to justice clashing with his genuine fear.

Fennell’s film is a vibrant, stylistically precise piece of work, but the sentiments it conveys don’t feel examined. It’s an acceleration off a cliff when what you’d really like to see is some kind of road forward, no matter how rough.

The tony cast emotes like mad, but polished Brits are so temperamentally unlike Russians that every four-syllable patronymic sounds like iambic pentameter.

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.

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.

Danes gives a marvelously quiet, poignant performance.

Surprisingly diverting as a case study: not only of a talented misfit sublimating like mad to keep his loneliness from consuming him but also of a fringe artistic community (which includes the makers of this film) that rallies to give him the reinforcement he craves.

You come away from Jim & Andy wondering — not for the first time — about the cost to great artists of what they do, envious of their talent and thinking, “I’m glad that’s not me.”

It’s awkward and weird, and yet all that awkwardness and weirdness give it personality and charm and a freewheeling, nonsensical quality that feels refreshing.

This is a mood piece, shapeless but often lyric.

Sentinelle is an admirably swift, elegantly filmed spine-snapping action thriller with moments of surprising grace.

While there is some gore late in the film, what makes Backcountry special is the care and patience it invests in its characters and the quiet, haunting tension of its story line.

The driving in the film is a thing of beauty.

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.

A shameless but exuberantly well-done caper comedy.

Parts of this film are as blandly lulling as a mood tape, but at best it’s a literally soaring experience.

Dante’s newest movie, Burying the Ex, doesn’t make the leap to satire. It has a lame-pun title, a zombie premise that might have seemed fresh two decades ago, and the sexual politics of an unusually backward adolescent male horror nerd. For all that, it’s a lot of fun, and Dante’s heart is palpably in it.

The script, by Dan Fogelman, is unusually and gratifyingly bisexual - i.e., it boasts scenes from both the male and female points of view!

At its most basic level, Cast Away is a graceful and powerfully rendered survivalist saga.... And yet there's something generic about Chuck's plight. The filmmakers don't opt for the usual happy-face Hollywood ending, but even the half-smile they provide smacks of inspirationalism.

It’s the kind of solid, small-scale, entertaining action flick we probably need more of these days.

All joking aside, this is a director who is incapable of creating something that’s not beautiful. He can, however, on occasion indulge in a little too much cliché.

Whatever the style, the point is blunt, reductive: Civilized humans can transform, in an instant, into blindingly destructive forces of nature. Not exactly an original thesis, but as a source of movie fodder, it’s scarily entertaining.

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 comes together neatly, perhaps too neatly to be … poetry. But it's not prosaic, either. It has a lucid grace.

Michael Keaton is sensational as Kroc.

It comes by its emotions honestly and wins you over.

This is probably Cheadle’s most electrified performance since the one that made him a star, as the incorrigibly homicidal Mouse in "Devil in a Blue Dress."

Gibney does finally kick the focus off Abramoff to bemoan the legalized-bribery system that’s the rule, not the exception.

So fizzy it nearly fizzles out.

There's something appealing about the movie's unpretentious carnival of carnage, although I could have done without the flamethrower assault on a school bus to raise the stakes.

More fun are the imaginative prehistoric beasts, from land-sharks to six-eyed spider-wolves to a tribe of “punch monkeys” that has developed a language that consists entirely of, well, punches and slaps. This was one of the strengths of the first picture, too: You sensed that the filmmakers had a blast inventing crazy new creatures for this primeval fantasy land.

Like most of West’s films, X is not particularly ambitious in its psychology or storytelling. It’s his technique that makes his work feel like it has one foot in the arthouse, with its elegant compositions and the way the camera moves as though daring us to see something the characters have yet to spot.

Isn’t It Romantic has plenty of fun toying with various familiar elements and sensibilities, but its deconstructions also feel like resurrections.

I can’t help thinking the movie’s amorphousness would have worked better with a more definite actor — someone who didn’t disappear so fully into the scene. Eden has a remarkable orbit, but it spins around a void.

The usual Sayles mix of torpor and talent prevails here.

What truly distinguishes Last Voyage of the Demeter, beyond its thick atmosphere of dread, is its gleeful cruelty, the delicious mean streak with which it sets up its suspense set pieces and its kills.

For all Eichner’s intentions to make history with the movie, it’s at its best when it frees itself from representing anything more than two characters falling in love. That gives us more space to laud its pioneering work in putting awkward foursomes onscreen, anyway.

Although it’s patchy and gives off an air of trying too hard, the movie is surprisingly funny.

The patient, somber direction gives the characters — and the actors playing them — room to breathe. It lets them do the things they’re best at: Costner gets to be the sad dad. Diane Lane gets to be passionate. And Lesley Manville gets to eat up the screen. For all its surface simplicity, Let Him Go is a surprising emotional roller coaster, and it stays with you.

The artistry here lies in the mutations and permutations of language and rhythm that are spoken onscreen. Bodied is uneven, but it has the fire where it counts.

Mr. Peabody & Sherman is slight, but it’s exceedingly charming, making good use of a talented voice cast.

How pleasurable to once again escape to this thoroughly ridiculous, richly rendered place and live there, if only for a couple of hours until the credits roll.

The movie might be scary for small kids--but good scary, with goose-bump-inducing frames, witty repartee, and three resourceful kid protagonists.

The movie nails all this, and it’s smashingly effective as melodrama. But McQueen’s directorial voice — cold, stark, deterministic — keeps it from attaining the kind of grace that marks the voice of a true film artist.

Ultimately, this is Sanders’s show. His performance breathes new life into one of American literature’s most heartbreaking and controversial characters.

It's not fresh terrain for satire, yet most of the jokes play riotously well.

Both the film and the “notorious” figure at its center are the best imaginable retaliation to mansplaining.

It’s hard to believe Nichols thinks he can get away with all this and harder still to believe he does. It’s the quality of the attention that he brings — his focus — that makes his work so engrossing.

The final sequence dodges (or elides) many of the movie’s central logistical dilemmas, but the song (“Glasgow,” written by Mary Steenburgen, Caitlyn Smith, and Kate York) and the performance are so rousing it almost doesn’t matter. Like the best country music, the movie finds its own kind of truth.

Equal parts trippy, tacky, and monumental, the blend surprisingly agreeable, a happy change from all those aggressively down-to-earth superhero flicks like "Iron Man."

Cooper's performance is outlandishly great, but Phillippe’s knocks Breach down a peg.