A fine, inventive '70s period piece about friendship, first love, and growing up to face the hard lessons of life.

Chronicle is full of smart writing that isn't too smart.

Johnny Depp, in bushy eyebrows, sinister mustache, and a suit and hat of fur, may be too cartoonishly lascivious for his own good as the wolf who pursues the girl in the scarlet cape to Grandmother's house. But then he gets to croon the couplet, "There's no way to describe what you feel / When you're talking to your meal." Delicious.

Grand, glorious, gigantic and gorgeous. [13 Apr 1936, p.6]

Succeeds royally at building a sense of apocalyptic dread. It isn't quite so successful at sustaining that mood, and Fessenden resorts to blurry images of totemic spirit forces and stampeding moose specters to get where he's going. And where exactly is that? To a place designed to scare the bejesus out of us planet-pillaging consumers.

Amalric's performance is comically moving in the manner of silent actors, and the film is beautifully wrought with moments of enchantment. Alas, Chicken is a movie that begins with a crescendo and doesn't sustain its lyricism.

Rings true for the most part, and explores human nature - leashed and unleashed - in ways that resonate.

It's a tale of survival and kitsch that will win you over.

Devilishly delightful.

Solitary Man is a wafer-thin film with a river-deep, mountain-high performance from Douglas.

Feels both absolutely of the 1970s and absolutely fresh.

As Greene, Don Cheadle - explosive because you've never before seen this model of actorly restraint - is a one-man fireworks show in Talk to Me, Kasi Lemmons' rollicking, resonant portrait of the real-life ex-con who improbably became a civic icon.

A startling, powerful biopic.

Even the Rain strikes a deep and resonant chord.

The value and uses of spectacle become part of the story in Far From Home, which can be read as a bit of playful in-house MCU criticism of CGI fatigue.

A dazzling documentary.

If you’re looking for great, realistic action, it’s just the thing. Berg is a masterful action director, and his Patriots Day is every bit as engaging and exciting as "Lone Survivor" and "Deepwater Horizon."

It could have been more taut, could have been harder, but 25th Hour still resonates with power and poetry.

Maybe it's generational: In a movie about teens, it's the teens who should rule. And they do. With certainty. With laughter. And with tears - buckets and buckets.

At turns horribly funny and simply horrific, Piven's film suggests our therapeutic age has reduced us all to psychic cripples who resort to emotional exhibitionism in lieu of honest self-examination and self-expression.

Whatever you call 21 Jump Street, this potty-mouthed and drug-laced reimagining of the 1980s TV show has one of the highest laughs-per-minute ratios since the "Naked Gun" films.

One of the problems with the way Mamet resolves Mike's predicament is that it's ridiculously implausible - even in the context of a far-fetched fight story.

By detailing the allegiance between Tutsi Muslims and Christian Hutus, and the fatwa issued by a Muslim leader forbidding his followers to participate in the massacres, the film is hopeful rather than horrific, even as it describes events of impossible savagery and hate.

Watts gives a deep and Oscar-worthy performance here, displaying the steely composure that made Plame a valued NOC (non-official cover operative).

For a comedy about autoerotic asphyxiation, epic deception, and shameless exploitation, World's Greatest Dad is a surprisingly sweet and tender affair.

Though not blessed with a cinematic eye, Wells is a gifted storyteller who gets nuanced performances from most of his actors.

Given the filmmaker's privileged perspective of hindsight, to not consider the real-world repercussions of their theater, to not connect the dots between 1968 and 2008 is a squandered opportunity.

The film treats the ensuing issues of conscience and compromise with subtlety and warmth.

A clever feature-length cartoon just as entertaining as the hit Nickelodeon series on which it is based.

Structurally and narratively amputated, Volume 1 retains head and guts but loses its heart and gams to the second installment. Maybe Tarantino figured that Thurman's legs, as long as the Mississippi, were sufficient to carry this half of a movie.

It's the dynamic between the three leads, Rawlins, Sives and Henderson - and the young McKinlay, who's like a miniature Shirley Henderson - that is this oddball and bittersweet story's pulsing heart.

A ridiculously entertaining romp based on the graphic novels of Bryan Lee O'Malley and directed, with mash-up mastery, by Edgar Wright (Shaun of the Dead).

Fear(s) of the Dark, a French production, interweaves the shorts, linking the segments together thematically, and narratively.

Despite its title, The Exploding Girl is an oddly tranquil experience.

McAvoy is charismatic, funny, and on the mark. Hall and Eve are both just right in their roles - bringing depth and detail to what could have been caricature parts. And if Starter for 10 takes a turn into foolhardy tragedy, it doesn't linger too long there.

It's a study in human behavior, describing how a self-confessed "emotional wreck," through accident and ambition, talent and temperament, became a star.

A disconcerting experience.

A tiny jewel of a film.

Seething, searing tragedy of unmannerliness.

Tender but never sappy, Monsieur Ibrahim brings two people of vastly different age and background together in ways that are touching, and telling. It's a small, glowing gem.

A high-energy chase, but in this spirited action comedy Yaguchi still finds time to allow the romance between lovers on the run to blossom at its own pace.

A taut, understated minimalist masterwork.

"Capote" is serious, deep and unadorned in the manner of the 1967 movie adaptation of the writer's true-crime novel "In Cold Blood." And Infamous boasts the high-gloss frivolity of the 1961 film version of Capote's "Breakfast at Tiffany's."

There is plenty in Star Trek Beyond for diehard Trekkers to enjoy, and director Justin Lin (Fast & Furious) guns the action sequences.

What gives North Country urgency is that it's about how a man comes to understand that it's bad for him and for his community to deny his daughter privileges and prerogatives he'd grant his son.

Richly informative and fascinating.

Yelchin and Jones are up to the challenge of suggesting much by doing little.

An intensely intelligent, well-written, and mature exploration of the unwritten rules women have to follow if they want to succeed in high finance.

It also smells very much like a movie with money on its mind - not altogether successfully balancing its loftier ideas with a sense of superficial whimsy and Vegas-meets-Wizard of Oz production design.

Informative, funny, sad and intriguing.

A light and extremely likable comedy -- just what the doctor ordered right now.

Possession, humiliation, jealousy, revelation . . . they're all painted in light, swift strokes by the veteran director and his two stars.

In A Somewhat Gentle Man, a deadpan comedy best described as the Coen Brothers Norwegian style, Stellan Skarsgard is colorless and oddly configured, like a potato fallen from the sack.

As entertaining as it is exasperating.

Part biography, part idol worship, Bhutto is a bullet train through South Asia, chronicling its subject's 54 years, a period of unrest in her nation and family.

As directed by the stupendously talented and aggressively eccentric George Miller (creator of Mad Max and producer of the first Babe), Pig in the City is far busier and faster than the original, which was directed by Chris Noonan. This has some benefits. [25 Nov 1998, p.D1]

In the end, Ficarra and Requa take all the formula ingredients and blend them into a satisfying - and tasty - concoction. "A Midsummer Night's Sex Comedy," meet "All's Well That Ends Well."

I've rarely encountered such pure poetry of action as in the opening minutes of Deepwater Horizon, director Peter Berg's exciting and emotionally wrenching thriller.

As he's done in such otherwise diverse pictures as Lone Star, City of Hope, and The Secret of Roan Inish, in Limbo writer-director Sayles circles down into a community of friends, colleagues, strangers - and shows what happens when paths cross, and sometimes double-cross. [04 Jun 1999, p.03]

David Ayer, the writer of "Training Day," director of "Street Kings," writer/director of "Harsh Times," does not make movies about princesses with witchy curses, about yuppie commitment-phobes, about talking plush toys. His territory is narrow, but he owns it: cops, in Los Angeles.

The heart of the matter - and the viscera - is the action, and one man's determination to survive. Apocalypto is primal.

Its dabs of dark comedy and stabs of gore, still rings with a sense of the real. It's electric-charged.

And if there's a problem with Tintin, it's that it's too big and booming.

Peter Glenville's staging of the material is the opposite of cinematic, but the pleasure of these two extravagantly gifted actors at the top of their game - their diction! their conviction! their beauty! - is enormous.

Unexpectedly fresh, alive, and vibrant - and wonderfully traumatizing.

With Sarandon in the title role, Scafaria has a winner: The actress tackles Marnie headlong, with heart and soul, trolling the fancy outdoor shopping mall for products to buy and for people to intercept and hang on to.

It's giving nothing away to say that Munro makes it to Bonneville, and breaks the record - which apparently still stands - on his two-wheel contraption.

The imagery is uniquely that of Oshii, who deserves a place in the pantheon of visual artists.

A wise, wistful study of hope and dread.

At a certain point, The Homesman will take you by surprise. By the end, a ferry ride across the Missouri River, it will take your heart.

Fragmented, dreamlike, a whir of memories and misery, We Need to Talk About Kevin is unsettling, but also somehow unnecessary.

As Beetlejuice and Edward Scissorhands reminded us, Burton always has been more absorbed by what his audience sees than by what his movies say. It's part of his unique talent as a filmmaker, but it leads him to ignore the flaws in the structure of what is, after all, supposed to be an exciting adventure film.

Easily the best computer-animated feature to come from Hollywood in a long while, Monster House is also one of the weirdest. A creepy-crawly, freak-show Halloween yarn.

Black Mass, a down and dirty crime drama based on the exploits of Boston gangster James "Whitey" Bulger, is thrilling for a number of reasons.

A thrilling, gorgeous actioner about a massive tsunami that wipes a tourist town off the map.

Bittersweet and funny.

Kari's film, witty and sad, is a spare, small thing, but Noi has a poetry about it, and a poignancy.

It's an action movie that's also an intellectual-action flick.

An epic work of self-indulgence and smug riffing, stringing together tropes from TV and screen westerns and closed-room whodunits, The Hateful Eight announces itself with all the pomp and circumstance of a mid-century cinema spectacle.

A comedy that belongs back on the drawing board.

The less said about the twists and turns The Illusionist takes, the better. Suffice to say, Eisenheim's masterful deceptions do not stop when he exits the stage.

Like "Hope and Glory," Boorman's Queen and Country finds exhilarating comedy in places usually reserved for drama, violence, loss.

A perfectly lovely, if uninspired, movie that suffers from following on the trotters of "Babe," the one about the piglet advocate of barnyard brotherhood.

What's a fish-lover to do? For starters, know where your fish comes from. Don't consume endangered species. After watching this film, you may never want to eat fish again.

There are no belly laughs here, only rueful chortles about the confederacy of chuckleheads that calls itself the entertainment industry.

A weird fusion of blaxploitation and American indie, built on a template of old-style, follow-your-dream Hollywood drama. But it works - sometimes magnificently.

Actresses such as Maglietta are why movies were invented: You never get tired of her mercurial personality or of her infinitely compelling face.

Odd, and awkward in places, but its lyricism and power stay with you.

Damon, starring in his first full-fledged action pic, brings a determined bearing and believability to the proceedings.

Miracle really isn't about the game. It's about the game as metaphor for united we stand.

Popstar gets to satirize not just music, but also celebrity culture in a way that a movie such as Spinal Tap never could - because, well, the internet and 24-hours news cycle didn't exist in 1984.

Michelle Williams is a beautiful moper.

Directed with an easygoing grace by Campbell Scott, has the feel of a coming-of-age novel.

Iceland is beautiful. Really, really, really - really - beautiful. That pretty much sums up the new feature film Land Ho! That message is the film's alpha and omega. Its raison d'être. Its soul and its being.

A quiet, modest chamber piece more like "Moon" than "Star Wars."

Monaghan is stronger still. This is a performance that deserves to be noticed. She is crushingly good.

Where so many Holocaust documentaries remember the past and preach not to repeat it, Shanghai Ghetto remembers the past and teaches the relativity of experience.

A sly, richly modulated, emotionally engaging, and brutally honest film.