As in other recent female-driven raunchy comedies like “Bridesmaids,” “The Heat” and “Spy,” the force is strong in this one.

The ethereal essay provides a bounty of poetry, in the form of a measured narration by international treasure Tilda Swinton, and an extensively labored assembly of 200 black-and-white film clips.

The film ultimately runs up against the limitations of its own nature.... But it’s still an exhilarating ride, filled with archetypal characters with plausible psychologies, melodramatic confrontations fueled by soaring emotions, and performances that can be described as good, period, rather than "good, for 'Star Wars.'"

The film has no flow, no rhythm, and absolutely no reason to be 119 minutes. And then there’s the broad racism and misogyny of the piece.

American Hero is an obnoxious rock star moment, with images of Americana that have apparently been lost in translation by an outsider British director.

The melancholy that falls over this chapter is hard to shake but its tempered slightly by the love Gomes has for his characters, bad habits, ingrained sadness and all.

In surveying this setting, one might think Almost There is a documentary about impoverished, elderly folks who have sadly fallen through the cracks in the system. Instead, it’s an uncomfortable journey through the later life of an artist, a warts-and-all look at the filmmakers’ process that fails to get past its most troublesome wart.

Boy and the World is dazzlingly colorful and alive, often resembling a more elaborate version of the kind of childlike drawings you probably have stuck to your refrigerator door right now.

I kept thinking one thing during most of Don Verdean: What would Christopher Guest do with his company of ace ad-libbers with such material? And the answer suddenly came to me — probably toss it in the trash and start all over again.

Body feels downright old-fashioned: a thriller with tension that doesn't stem from gore, jump scares, or other cheap shock tactics, but rather a creeping dread that grows with each red herring, and slow-burn plot twist.

And this is ultimately what damages In the Heart of the Sea more than anything else: it is so very many different things, but they all feel detached from each other, almost like a bunch of self-contained mini-movies stitched end-to-end, with the framing device serving as needle and thread.

It fails to provide the sorts of human inter-connections and deep revelations for which director Mitch Davis seems to be striving.

For anyone who adores Smith—which is pretty much everyone these days—they will have quite a satisfying ride with this crusty grand dame behind the wheel.

Catnip for writers and humorists of all stripes, Wolchok’s film provides delightful breakdowns of various cartoons, examining the comedic rhythm of their design and detail.

An incredibly refined emotional experience, the splattered emotions on its dirty canvas nonetheless the product of a specific, deeply felt directorial vision.

It really is quite a movie: entertaining and engaging, but also mortifying; a good alternate title might be "American Horror Story."

A drama in which belief is reduced to well-meaning but inert treacle.

The bad behavior on display, instead of emerging organically from the characters, seems frequently chosen from a menu of sorts.

Corbijn, as has been his custom in directing features, goes for mood and feel rather than narrative momentum, although his scope is clearly hemmed-in by the production’s budget; there’s not much here in the way of effective ‘50s-New-York evocation. But the actors and their exchanges ring true, and by the time the film reaches its lonesome conclusion, the resonances are eerie.

An action espionage tale vaguely in the Jason Bourne mold, MI-5 does indeed play like a TV spin-off, but one in which the filmmakers said to their team, “Listen up, all! We’re now doing the cinema version. What can we do to make it cinematic?”

It’s a film that’s tempting to dismiss because of its bleak, misanthropic viewpoint on the world, but that would be discounting the quality of the filmmaking and the riveting performance at its center.

The film has more in common with 1930s screwball (films filled with obvious coincidences) than the more clunky, often-humorless films that pass for "rom-coms" today.

Part one of "Arabian Nights" has many wild components and even though they adhere to their own set of aesthetic principals, they make for a strange two-hour movie (which is why it’s best to watch it with parts two and three).

Far from a perfect film. But Wenders is trying to do new things within the confines of a pretty standard European art-film scenario, and the viewer can see he’s not approaching the material as though it’s rote; he’s really trying to use the camera to get through the feelings of loss the characters suffer.

Aat some point, every character in Youth falls out of love with the way of seeing the world. That kind of anti-epiphany is major—not on a universal, but rather a personal scale.

If you’re not already somewhat familiar with Shakespeare’s tragedy, this incarnation isn’t about to go out of its way to provide much context or explain why certain characters matter. But in an intriguing contrast, while the scale of the battles and the scenery is enormous and awe-inspiring, some of the more famous moments and lines arrive in understated fashion in intimate spaces.

Despite the occasional rough patches, there are still some things about Krampus that I did like quite a bit. Although the humor is not always successful, I liked the fact that Dougherty played the material in a relatively straight manner and resisted the urge to go for a more campy approach throughout.

Mood is ephemeral, but it helps establish point of view and orients us in the dream-space of the film. With all of the things that Christmas, Again (written and directed by Charles Poekel in his feature debut) does well (and it does almost everything well), the most striking thing about it is its evocation of an extremely specific mood.