Lacking a solid narrative beyond the worsening marital crisis, this humor-flecked domestic drama ends up relying heavily on directorial tricks such as splashes of magic realism, giving it a self-satisfied air that quickly becomes grating.

A film I admired, but didn’t especially like, The Revenant is a master class in craftsmanship, marrying the ethos of 1970s Hollywood, with its beaten-dog heroes forever roughed up by a brutal system, to the technological prowess of today’s digitally obsessed blockbusters.

iIt is clear that it would have benefited from black-and-white cinematography. And the melodramatic musical soundtrack is annoying and unnecessary.

Director David Gordon Green (“Our Brand Is Crisis”) generally skips feel-good cliché to chronicle Bauman’s struggle with being painted as the face of never letting the terrorists win.

A remarkable attempt to portray what might turn soccer-playing boys into fanatical murderers.

The story is something of a trap: Both irresistibly poignant and an invitation to wallow.

You might not want to watch all of "The ABC of Love and Sex Australian Style," "Turkey Shoot" or "The True Story of Eskimo Nell," but the clips on view in "Not Quite Hollywood" are a hoot.

No, this film by director/co-writer Gillian Robespierre just isn’t funny, and the mismatched leads aren’t even interesting together.

Though Iris is extremely well-acted and beautifully photographed, some audience members may find themselves agreeing with Bayley's frustrated complaint: "I've never known who you are."

The musicians' stories, while quite entertaining, add up to a somewhat confusing chronology. Still, they're good enough that you wish Justman hadn't resorted to those tacky TV-style re-creations that mar so many documentaries these days.

Highly entertaining documentary.

The bright palette of Reality is an obvious way to underline the hero’s unraveling, but it looks good, and it works.

The highlight of this package of 12 recent animated shorts from around the world is Australia's "Ward 13."

Gorgeous surroundings don't make up for sulky, feuding travel companions.

Richard is flawed, never villainous or heroic, and rarely follows his own fervent advice to be humble. You leave in awe of what he accomplished, but not admiring the whole man. Few biopics dare to have layers anymore.

Whatever sophisticated point Decker and screenwriter Sarah Gubbins aim for here is undone by its pretentious academic characters, whose arrogant droning would make you switch seats if you were next to them at a coffee shop.

Everyone knows about the Holocaust, but few today have heard about what was infamous as the Rape of Nanking, when 200,000 residents of what was then China's capital were massacred by invading Japanese troops.

Calm down, “Black Swan” guy. Viewers will survive; some may find, as I did, scenes he intended to be terrifying as ridiculously over-the-top. But Mother! is undeniably a wild, memorable ride. It’s a Rorschach test of a movie to interpret however you like.

Most of the best gags are in the early going and the film seems ever more stretched and thin as it goes on. It would have made a brilliant eight-minute sketch, though.

A real nail-biter of a monster movie. The question is: Who’s the monster?

Gorgeously photographed by Peter Suschitzky, A Dangerous Method presents a vivid portrait of pre-World War I Europe that's at a considerable remove from the types of madness usually seen in Cronenberg's films.

It contains no poetry. It simply conjures up a horrible feeling -- and then sits back awaiting congratulation.

Denzel Washington dazzles in his best screen performance to date as Frank Lucas.

You'll laugh, you'll cry -- the year's best movie.

Mud runs over two hours, climaxing with a shootout that belongs in a different movie. It’s a rare misstep in an art-house movie that will pull mainstream audiences along as inexorably as the Mississippi River. Go see it.

In his own twisted way, Lou is just as much a bloodsucker as Dracula, in a horror story that this tabloid veteran can attest is not as far removed from reality as you might assume.

What a refreshing break from what usually constitutes an epic nowadays — mixing Ant-Man and the Hulk.

A master class on turning a talky, one-man play into a visual delight.

Yes, it’s the middle chapter and feels like it, but it’s never dull.

The excruciating and the hilarious mingle nearly to perfection in this marvelously visualized and deeply felt British film.

While the premise (inspired by the true story of tune-challenged American socialite Florence Foster Jenkins) could be as cruel as “Carrie,” Frot’s would-be diva is achingly sympathetic.

Super-vulgar, ridiculously sophomoric, horribly nasty and so hilarious you’ll probably squirt Diet Coke out of your nose within the first 20 minutes.

Sophie Scholl is a powerful story. But it's a little annoying how men become beside the point when the focus is on emotion. Sophie did no more or less than her brother, but he's ignored for nearly all of the movie because it's easier to stir up compassion - it's easier to manipulate the audience - when the subject is a woman.

This intriguing film is the best variation on "Vertigo" since Brian DePalma's far more polished "Obsession" (1976), which ranks with the best Hitchcock knockoffs of all time.

This film of mistaken identity, murder, class envy and (bi)sexual tension doesn't live up to its own promise.

Uniformly excellent performances keep this destabilizing tale ticking, yet one can't help wishing Hollywood had combined this cast and these timely themes with a little bit of imagination to come up with something fresh.

Writer-director Debra Granik has found a star, and wisely builds every scene around Farmiga's character.

It’s all a delightful mess, executed with a deft touch by Jacobs.

To really pull off Greenberg would require a lead performance from a master actor. The actor it stars is . . . Ben Stiller.

The result is a finely plotted, stylishly photographed and brilliantly acted whodunit that clocks in at 2 1/2 hours but never seems long.

Low-budget triumph.

Like warriors themselves, you will be left to sort through a jumble of emotions: pride and sorrow, bitterness and gratitude. [09 Feb 2007, p.43]

Overlong, poorly paced and woodenly acted film.

OK, it’s no Frozen — a Let It Go only comes around once every couple of ice ages — but it’s nonetheless a heartfelt and joyful take on a good old dysfunctional family.

Frank’s work is phenomenal, but his longtime editor and collaborator Laura Israel seems determined during the course of her documentary never to give you a moment long enough to contemplate it.

Hits one out of the park.

It's actually the surprisingly compelling plot and the often hilarious dialogue that keep you watching this tale of passion and murder in a Samurai militia unit - not the beautiful scenery or the elegant color palette.

There's style and panache to spare. Mournful jazz adds to the mood.

Seems to exist solely to drive this observation home in the most heavy-handed way.

Hilarious sweet and sour David Mamet comedy.

Mistress America never falters in its case study of a complicated female friendship.

It's truly inspiring to watch Fred Knittle, 81 and tethered to an oxygen tank, perform a riveting solo of Coldplay's "Fix You" after his singing partner dies shortly before the show.

By the end I was getting a bit antsy from the rambling script and direction.

A thoughtfully conceived and tastefully executed tribute to a venerated author.

If Michael Fassbender wears a giant papier-mâché head for most of a film, is he still mesmerizing? Happily, yes.

Gritty visuals and a strong central performance elevate the routine crime story at the heart of Sweden's Easy Money, a sort of mash-up of "Goodfellas" and "The Great Gatsby."

Maggie Gyllenhaal goes from caring to creepy in this Netflix release.

Ends in magnificent fashion, with skyscrapers bowing to Beethoven's Ninth. It's a stirring ending to a sweet movie.

Someway, somehow, it’s the funniest movie to hit theaters in a long time.

Hilarious from first frame to last.

A thinking man's buddy movie.

If the documentary has a star, it's pony-tailed AES exec Piers Lewis, who had the impossible job of getting Georgians to actually pay for their electricity.

Moves in a predictable path that includes some remarkable coincidences.

This small movie carries great allegorical weight as it echoes the Manson Family, the long list of failed utopian communes that culminated in Bolshevism and the one-child policy that in China has prevented the births of untold numbers of girls.

Despite copious full-frontal female nudity, House of Pleasures isn't mere sexploitation. Rather, it's a gorgeously filmed portrait of a bygone era, with painstaking attention to period detail. On the downside, the movie is overlong.

The film’s reckoning, when it comes, is fully as heartbreaking as it should be.

It’s photographically yummy, heaving with sun-dappled vistas and four-star dining. The boys float around a bit in the sea and enjoy homemade pasta while trundling out their impressions of, say, Marlon Brando.

The film is almost worth seeing just for the extraordinary scene in which a stark naked Mortimer has her movie star lover (Dermot Mulroney) deliver an exhaustive critique of her body's flaws.

Some of the plot twists don't really stand up to close scrutiny, but the sometimes over-the-top Joy Ride plows through them with such joyful glee, you don't really care.

There is much sadness in this finely wrought drama, winner of nine prizes at the Israeli Academy Awards, but the family's hard-won escape from emotional lock-down is ultimately uplifting.

Should please die-hard fans as well as viewers who have never heard the band and its anthem, "Kick Out the Jams."

Shot through with ’60s London energy, illuminating on several fronts and featuring bits of many great Who tracks, the film is nevertheless a mess that should be taught in film schools to illustrate how not to edit a documentary.

Nothing salacious, and no dropped bombs here. Stan & Ollie portrays the pair less as hot-headed collaborators than a bickering married couple.

What follows is a hilarious, slam-bang series of chases and battles that cross "Gremlins" with "Assault on Precinct 13," the two most prominent of many genre films quoted by Attack the Block.

If you’re going to invest three hours watching a movie about a convicted stock swindler, it needs to be a whole lot more compelling than Martin Scorsese’s handsome, sporadically amusing and admittedly never boring — but also bloated, redundant, vulgar, shapeless and pointless — Wolf of Wall Street.

As this eye-opening documentary shows, the suits who run MLB are the real bad guys here, treating the aspiring ballplayers as so much sausage.

It’s only a matter of time before someone turns Louise Osmond’s crowd-pleasing documentary, about people in a working-class Welsh mining village invading the snobbish “sport of kings,” gets turned into “The Full Monty” on four hooves.

This year's actress to watch is Elizabeth Reaser, who delivers a tour de force as a determined German mail-order bride who comes to 1920 Minnesota in Ali Selim's captivating indie Sweet Land.

If nothing else, the mere sight of two popes drinking brews and watching a soccer game together is one of the more surreal things you’ll see at the movies this year.

It's a bit less good than McCarthy's earlier films -- Jeffrey Tambor has a large, superfluous role that abruptly disappears, and Ryan, a fine actress, makes a less than entirely convincing spouse for Giamatti. This one is a crowd-pleaser nonetheless.

Cheung and Nick Nolte seem unlikely co-stars, but co-star they do in Clean, giving gritty performances under the direction of Frenchman Olivier Assayas.

Call this a profile in courage.

Worth seeing for McTeer's touching, funny and richly detailed performance, which should put her on the map in Hollywood.

A major disappointment, The Cider House Rules pales by comparison with the gutsier, more full-bodied adaptation of Irving's "The World According to Garp."

Leconte turns up the erotic heat in the most gorgeously photographed black-and-white film since Wim Wenders' sublime "Wings of Desire."

Meanders along in a confused, confusing way for what feels like hours.

Dr. Godard drops and quotes more names than you’d find in a week’s worth of Page Six, but lots of luck figuring any of this out before dozing off. The good thing about Goodbye to Language is that you’ll wake up with no side effects, albeit your wallet will be $12 lighter.

The climate-change documentary Time To Choose makes the disaster movie “The Day After Tomorrow” look like a model of judiciousness and restraint.

Anderson’s film is told via a prologue and three episodes that bring to life the quirky publication’s stories. They just barely engage the audience as we watch the director’s entire mobile phone contact list show up for about 15 seconds each.

When Gilliam is finally forced to admit defeat, it is nothing short of heartbreaking - for audiences, too, as the few shots that made it into the can hold such promise.

Overflows with psychological intrigue, something often missing from such offerings.

Jack Black gives the performance of his career in the title role of Bernie, under the pitch-perfect direction of his "School of Rock'' director, Richard Linklater, who expertly crafts a black comedy with a deceptively sunny surface. It's the best movie I've seen all spring.

By the time two hours had dragged by, I felt a lot like I had sat through a five-hour wedding.

Part political thriller, part National Geographic travelogue, Tom Peosay's documentary is a distressing look at China's 50-year repression of the people of Tibet.

By refusing to consider that Dickens and Ternan ever brought each other any happiness, the movie is more Victorian in its attitudes than even some Victorians were.

Reitman directs with an empathy for mothering that never shies away from its darker side.

There are several adorable musical numbers that make excellent use of Adams. Segel's dancing is . . . well, he reminded me of a huge star: Big Bird.

Perhaps this year’s timeliest film — as well as, unfortunately, one of the hardest to sit through.