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.