In a comedic bildungsroman like this one, it’s apt to have doubts about the hero early on, but you’re not supposed to want to throw him out of a high window. I did, and I never quite recovered from that feeling.

Pilgrimage is the kind of movie one fears is going out of style forever. A historical action drama, serious in tone and intent but also invested in delivering movie-movie thrills.

Bonello knows exactly when he's said just enough, and that makes the experience of watching Nocturama more engaging.

The Glass Castle is at odds with itself. Maybe that contradiction is by design. Maybe it’s inevitable, given the emotionally complicated terrain it treads. But the result is a film that never quite clicks tonally and doesn’t do justice to its harrowing central story.

The film is very smart, most of all because it resists the urge to devolve into a sentimental redemption narrative. This is a daring comedy with a very sharp bite.

This is a movie that doesn't merely tell a gripping, important story, but reminds us that the storyteller and the storytelling matter just as much.

Let’s look on the bright side. The running time is barely 90 minutes. And there are but three fairly amusing characters who save this inferior attempt at family entertainment, at least for me.

A truly effective genre flick. It’s not perfect, but it’s damn closer than anyone would have predicted.

It’s one of those rare movies that makes you feel edgy, conveying its protagonist’s dilemma in ways that prey on your nerves and emotions more than just relaying a night-from-hell anecdote.

Wolf Warrior 2 lectures you, pummels you, and then expects you to cheer.

Though undoubtedly a flawed enterprise, After Love is a formal wonder, due to the efforts of Lafosse, photographer Jean-François Hensgens, and production designer Olivier Radot.

The dimension of humanity only buttresses the humor.

A film so obedient to current academic fashions in both politics and cinema aesthetics that it ends up feeling both contrived and a bit dishonest.

The heroes of this film are, in other words, selfish, but never in a venal, or ugly way. They're human, and they do what they must to face each successive challenge they're confronted with.

This is the kind of piece that needs to move 100MPH from first scene to last for you to overlook its flaws. It slows down for too long to recommend the ride.

It’s about both fellatio jokes and falling in love all over again, but it’s so rushed and the characters are so underdeveloped that the film feels frustratingly slight.

It’s a movie that only begins as a commentary on doping in sports and becomes something greater about the dangers of being a whistleblower, especially when the whistle blows on Russia.

This movie shows how Fitzmaurice was able to direct the picture — scheduling the shot so that he could efficiently marshal his energy was a big part of the process, as of course was the “eye gaze” computer.

Sheridan drops us in and we know this place immediately; his storytelling is meaty but efficient, and his pacing moves along at a steadily engrossing clip before ultimately exploding in a startling blast of violence.

Watching the film is almost like feeling the muscles in your eyes shift, as you look up from reading a book to stare out at the ocean.

Kidnap isn’t schlock, it’s garbage.

This isn’t just a mediocre movie — although it is most definitely that — it is a wasted opportunity to fulfill the promise of that opening line from 35 years ago.

A soul-stirring, foot-stomping and inspirational step beyond most in that its final showdown is only the beginning of a path towards a brighter future for the participants.

Whenever the movie reaches for poetry it lands somewhere in a chain drugstore's greeting card aisle, trying to choose between one that shows an adorable child laughing in a Photoshopped field of sunlit daisies, one that tries for gallows humor but isn't really that funny, and a third with a quote about mortality and wisdom only seems thoughtful because it's written in cursive.

A melodrama with an interesting trick in its tail, but I don’t think that director Garcia pulls the trick off as well as she might have. The movie is sumptuously shot by Christophe Beaucarne; every frame is robustly picturesque. But the story could have used a little less “Under the Tuscan Sun” and a little more “All That Heaven Allows.”

Penn’s own humanitarian work is well-documented, including raising millions of dollars for Haitian relief efforts. Clearly, his intentions here are genuine. But his execution is laughably pretentious.

Not even Hunter, who eventually wears out her welcome, can keep Strange Weather from going off the cliff.

Various characters populate Person to Person, but they rarely register as actual people. And while some of their storylines intersect throughout the course of a day in New York, they rarely connect in ways that have actual meaning.