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.