Strickland has the courage of his convictions and maintains a tight focus on the proceedings while allowing the occasional feather of humor to float down on the pillow.

The tone -- deadpan, wistful, silly but never stupid -- is just right and puts What We Do in the Shadows next to "This Is Spinal Tap" as a mockumentary that shows its subjects as human -- in this case, inhuman -- in their hopes and fears.

What matters in '71 is the action, and the look on O'Connell's face when he emerges from a shed into the Belfast night.

The music they made is timeless, and Denny Tedesco deserves credit for giving them the credit they deserve and for working through the music rights issues that delayed a theatrical release for seven years.

The movie is slow, dreary, clumsily staged, and lacks a compelling lead.

Brittain's life and literary output are worthy of celebration, and there's no better time that the centenary of "The War to End All Wars" to commemorate its bloody folly. It's a shame that Testament of Youth does both in such a bloodless way.

Without passing moral judgments on either group, Cartel Land provides a vivid illustration of the dangers inherent whenever a government fails to meet its citizens' needs to the extent that they take matters into their own hands.

It's a sad story, and Asif Kapadia's documentary tells it without narration or commentary. Instead there's a brilliantly edited succession of interviews and performances and news footage that glides through her charmed, doomed life.

Once goateed, acerbic Kingsley vanishes from the screen, he takes any smidgen of life with him.

Aloft reminded me of the work of another Latin American filmmaker, Alejandro González Iñárritu, who made somber, constipated dramas such as "Babel" and "Biutiful" before loosening up and conjuring the lunatic profundity of "Birdman." Llosa has the intelligence and directing chops — Aloft looks fantastic — to do wonders, but she should take a cue from him and warm up by just chilling out.

Terminator: Genisys isn't so much a sequel or a reboot but a piece of fan fiction come to ludicrous, big-budget life. Even for an unnecessary entry in a series of movies about indestructible time-traveling robots and genocidal computer networks, it's pretty silly.

Magic Mike XXL might be a good time on a summer evening, a one-night stand best forgotten before the sun rises, but it is not a good movie. It's boring, repetitive and lunk-headed.

Me and Earl is smart and appealing, but it spends way too much effort saying "I'm not like that" when it really is.

Although it treads water for the final fifteen or so minutes, the movie is brisk and engaging enough that it still doesn't feel overlong.

Maybe it's too early to say MacFarlane can't make a movie. He's still young, he's compulsively creative. He'll keep getting more chances. He could figure it out, but I don't think I want to watch him try.

Dope has energy and smarts and a heart in all the right places.

Inside Out expands the possibilities of animation. It's also a hilarious ride that delights the eye, the mind and the heart.

Despite the solid performances (Roberta Maxwell as Jude's mother is the exception), the one-note intensity wears you down, until a shocking coda wraps things up. It turns out that being trapped in a bathroom together is nothing compared to being trapped in a marriage, or a nearly two-hour movie, with a crazy person.

Despite familiar elements, including the classic family-versus-work conflict faced by almost every movie cop in history and the equally hoary discovery of corruption among Michel's colleagues, The Connection remains tense and believable.

It turns out bigger is not better. Bigger is louder, you bet your pounding eardrums it is, but it's not smarter. More teeth aren't sharper. They're dull, and so is Jurassic World.

It's a welcome change from a conventional birth-to-now biography, somewhere between the straight narratives of "Ray" and "Get On Up" and the fractured, Cate Blanchett-in-sunglasses, Richard Gere-on-horseback meta-fable "I'm Not There."

Everyone is in top form. Pearce, the Australian who's elevated everything from "L.A. Confidential" to "Mildred Pierce," sinks his gleaming teeth into the comic aspects of Trevor and doesn't let up. Smulders, now part of the Marvel universe, is edgy and fun. Corrigan is best of all.

A bit too familiar, and at times gentle to a fault.

A recent article in Film Comment magazine praised Saint Laurent for avoiding "banal psychologizing," but Bonello avoids any insight into his subject's state of mind, banal or not.

Some of the combat scenes work, including a kitchen-set hand-to-hand battle that's one of the movie's highlights, but more often they feel superfluous at best.

It's like watching a high-school football star trying to squeeze into his old uniform after a decade: funny at times, but kind of embarrassing.

Run! Run for your lives! Get out of this theater now! Two hours is a terrible thing to waste!

What's really offensive, to Hawaiians and mainlanders alike, is that after more than 50 years Hollywood can't make a better Hawaii movie than Elvis did. At least he could sing.