The superb English stage director David Leveaux keeps the pacing taut while creating space for his actors to work their magic.

But days later, I keep coming back to Jennifer Lopez’s performance. With a wave of her hand or a dip in her hips, light seems to change and move with her. Lopez has always been charming — even great — in films like "Out of Sight" (1998). But here she’s doing the best work of her career, weaponizing an undeniable charisma and turning it into something hard, pointed, righteous, even angry.

Blistering and nihilistic--a vision to reduce you to a puddle of despair.

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

It's an unusually funny, literate, worked-out script, and Mendes seems hell-bent on making the best Bond since "Goldfinger" - or the best, period, given that he exhumes Bond's old Aston Martin only to shoot it cheekily to pieces.

The turtles’ unceasing, rapid-fire banter is all affectionate dunks on one another and pop-culture quips, and the look of the film is never less than entrancing, with computer animation that creates the feel of something handmade.

The camera moves with heightened sensitivity, as if on currents of emotion, and Kendrick is infinitely winning. She’s that rare thing, a movie star with a trained soprano.

What is on paper a small-time heist film in the vein of the Coen Brothers or "Breaking Bad" is ultimately a cover for a more observant and relatable portrait of loneliness.

Much like the first "Lego Movie," Spider-Verse feels like a bit of a conceptual dare, but it wins with its nano-second sharp timing, and percussive rat-a-tat-tatting of panels and split screens that make the action and visual gags feel jumpy and alive.

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.

This movie, one of the most bizarrely ambitious works directed by an American in recent years, is certainly a mess, but it's a joyful mess, with far more invention and life than many a more conventional well-made film. [16 Aug 1982, p.42]

This is an conversation- and character-driven film with an occasional eye for something more ineffable, but Falco and Duplass’s complicated, nakedly searching performances are the main event.

It’s the little comedic cul-de-sacs that make the movie work as well as it does, sustaining it as much as the growing tension between Craig and Austin.

There’s a sealed-off quality to The Souvenir Part II that the first installment doesn’t have, a sense of surrendering to the idea that it’s possible to authentically portray only oneself — which may be true and may be a creative dead end. But even that turns out to be by design, something both the film and its protagonist can acknowledge and then escape.

The Kill Team, an essential film no matter what your political convictions. The setting is Afghanistan, but it might be Iraq or Vietnam or anywhere with occupying forces. It might be Gaza. This map of hell is timeless, placeless.

Clement and Waititi are intimate with the conventions of vampire movies and reality TV and must have had a crazy-great time blending the unblendable in the best SCTV tradition. But it’s the absence of camp that I keep coming back to. They scale it down and play it real. They’re undeadpan.

Trashy and lurid as this movie is, it’s certainly not boring, and it keeps its star in hog heaven throughout.

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.

A 90-minute kid- and grown-up-friendly work of cartoon comedy that’s as consistently delightful and clever as the series always was.

This world is ravishingly beautiful, but there’s also something oppressive about its exoticism. The color doesn’t just saturate the frame; it thickens it.

Nolan sustains an arty note of existential dread that probably will work better for noir-steeped film critics and overserious philosophy grad students than for general audiences, but he brings off a few brisk bravura moments.

The film’s appeal rests almost entirely on his fight scene with his student, Chuck Norris — arguably the best one ever captured on celluloid.

This picture about people obsessed with criminals and their grisly crimes confronts us with the mystery of who the obsessives truly are; the questions we ask of Kelly-Anne could also be asked of all us genre fiends. The expressionless, fascinated gaze at the heart of this film is ultimately not the protagonist’s, but our own.

The film is about the power of storytelling, and not in the cornball, self-congratulatory sense in which that phrase is normally deployed.

The Unknown Known is a worthy addition to Morris’s body of work, an epic search that demonstrates the limits of language, the ease of sidestepping truth.

There's nothing like a film about wayward passions to remind you how differently people feel things.

Harrowingly straightforward.

Chung is a patient filmmaker who works in small sequences that accrue imperceptibly into something grander.