Little Boxes doesn’t manage to summon as much unique insight into prejudice as screenwriter Annie Howell and director Ron Meyer probably expected to achieve. But what keeps their movie watchable is that Lynskey, Ellis and Jackson are completely believable as a loving family unit.

Chasing Trane streamlines the story of the jazz saxophonist, but it does so in a way that doesn’t feel like cheating. Scheinfeld’s approach is to give the viewer the forest, point out a few trees and get out, confident that those trees will inspire the viewer to spend more time in the forest.

Those who don't know anything about the tale going in (a category that included me) might be gobsmacked by what happens. The order of events doesn't stick to any established commercial movie template. What happens feels as random yet eerily inevitable as life itself.

The Fate of the Furious distinctly drops the level of quality in this series for the first time this decade.

The film's short-comings are especially upsetting since Schwarzenegger is actually rather good in the film, and proves once again that, despite a severely limited range, he knows how to brood.

This is a modestly scaled B-movie by one of the best genre filmmakers of our time, Walter Hill, that has enough skill and personality going for it to make it worth checking out, even if it doesn’t quite live up (or down, depending on your perspective) to its borderline sleazy premise.

If Gifted works for you as it did me, it’s mostly because of the cast, but also the way the story unpeels.

Every time that Mine threatens to come apart under its own pretensions (which is relatively often), Hammer does something subtle and believable to ground it.

Salt and Fire is fundamentally bad, in its filmmaking and expressiveness, whether there is any meaning to a parrot quoting Nostradamus or not.

Ends up being an emotionally empty, thematically ill-defined, and listless affair. It is never able to communicate the complexity of the woman at its center.

While Smurfs: The Lost Village may not be better or more entertaining, the acknowledgment that it is aiming solely for the kiddie audience this time around at least makes it slightly more palatable than its predecessors.

Knowing how it all ends is the main problem with a lot of gambling movies, and Win It All is no exception.

A fascinating and fastidiously complex study of one man’s moral choices at a crucial juncture in his life, Cristian Mungiu’s Graduation is a thoroughgoing masterpiece which offers proof that Romania’s cinematic upsurge remains the most vital and important national film movement of the current century.

This movie feels as if somebody woke from an intense nightmare, decoded it and realized it was rather unsubtly working through some of their unresolved issues, then brought it to Judd Apatow and said, "Here's your next comedy."

The comedy is bigger, the supporting players are wackier and the antics move to the bouncy beat of an incessantly perky soundtrack.

Despite the care put into the story and its heavy themes, Live Cargo has no emotional impact.

Nighy is never less than splendid.

It’s a beautiful, captivating piece of work that gets off to kind of a rocky start but achieves remarkable momentum toward an emotional, powerful ending. And you won’t see a better-looking animated film all year.

This cockeyed, oblique attempt to get closer to the worldview of David Lynch — one of American cinema’s finest oddities — is a compelling slice of cinephile inquiry.

The entire thing feels like it's happening underwater, sound distorted, movements impeded. A lot happens, but without any urgency inspiring it.

Johnson keeps it all moving at a decent clip, though, with the help of Michael Penn’s score. And she photographs Powley and her mesmerizing blue eyes so lovingly that it’s hard not to find her adorable—even when she’s being awful.

Full of dazzling images that suggest a rich, profound narrative the film is never able to achieve.

Cézanne et Moi is at its most intoxicating whenever it looks and acts like a landscape painted by its title 19th-century French artist.

The effort is noble, to give Bishop a chance to tell her story, however compromised its framing and end product might be, but it leaves a lot of unanswered questions.

No wonder the lean, 79-minute running time of All This Panic is not a liability: Gage makes each minute boldly and deeply matter.

Much like any child, even a supposedly surefire nugget of an idea requires careful nurturing. In this case, The Boss Baby often tries too hard and succeeds too little.

In spite of some compelling performances and a consistent mood, the film fails to ground any of these aesthetic flourishes in story or emotion.

The small but wonderfully rich details of the film invite us in: the trembling of a wrinkled cheek, the arch of an eyebrow, the flicker of a candle, and especially the superbly evocative sound design.