As awe-inspiring as this footage is, it’s every bit as amazing to envision how the filmmakers had to prepare for framing these moments with impeccable precision.

In a movie year in which I’ve had to see both “Clown” and “Trash Fire,” the bar for worst of year is pretty low. I suppose that Pet, for me at least, completes a trifecta of sorts.

Only really comes alive when cars are being used as battering rams and computer-generated explosions proliferate like fireworks.

It's a movie lost somewhere in the middle: too weird to be believable, not weird enough to be memorable.

With The Duelist, Rodnyansky is taking a more commercial turn, one that depends less on art-house refinements than on plush production values, action-movie tropes and a couple of stellar lead performances.

Arthouse horror flick The Eyes of My Mother actively alienates viewers by presenting episodes in a woman's life from a post-human, God-like perspective. Sometimes. Usually. Probably?

Man Down is a bad film, but it’s made even worse by the taste it will leave in your mouth regarding its silly handling of a very serious issue.

Pollard’s choice to end with a stirring a capella number by Son House still provided the uplift needed to fight another day.

In each of her films, Hansen-Løve has the patience to wait for what Henri Cartier-Bresson called “the decisive moment,” the moment where something "small," something detailed and specific, reveals the universal. Things to Come is full of such moments.

There are two movies in Jackie, Pablo Larraín's film about Jackie Kennedy (Natalie Portman) immediately before, during and after the assassination of her husband, President John F. Kennedy. One of these movies is just OK. The other is exceptional. The first one keeps undermining the second.

Incarnate is such a pointless bit of hackwork that it almost makes the recent horror dud “Shut In” seem focused by comparison.

The ending, while not inapt, also delves into a realm of cinematic overstatement that the movie had up until that time been careful to avoid. While disappointing, it doesn’t wholly mitigate the power of what has come before. This is an engrossing and unnerving film.

For its own part, Bobby Sands: 66 Days doesn't reclaim its subject's humanity.

Nothing can give shape or closure to Cave—and that's OK. Watching him continue his ongoing search for existential answers is comfort enough.

The film is not so much tone-deaf as old-fashioned, emerging from a more innocent time (say, three weeks ago) when "politics as usual" actually had some meaning.

Always Shine is an immersive nightmare of merging, over-identification, and projection. Its strangeness (and I yearned for more strangeness) is part of the fascination.

The makers of Evolution may dazzle viewers with an intoxicating visual style, but they never lose sight of Nicolas' humanity. Do not miss this film.

What the movie is very good at revealing and expanding upon is how this reluctant actor became such a masterful one.

Let’s just say if you are human, there is no way that Lion won’t move you.

Particularly in its portrayal of Thurman, who here isn’t so much misunderstood and unloved as he is dumber than a bag of rocks, this sequel actively devalues the compassion-on-the-knife-edge-of-misanthropy that distinguished the original in favor of a mainstream gross-out cartoon. The market demands nothing less, apparently.

It's a mess, but a glorious one, and it's so clearly the expression of one artist's vision, seemingly immune to studio notes, that when you find yourself wondering "Who on earth could this possibly be for?" you realize that it's a compliment. As an entertainment, Rules Don't Apply deserves an extra half-star for audacity.

Moana would have been enormously entertaining regardless of when it came out, but its arrival at this particular moment in history gives it an added sense of significance—as well as inspiration.

While it may not quite be the modern-day “Casablanca,” it is nevertheless a grandly entertaining stab at old-fashioned storytelling...buoyed by smart and stylish filmmaking, a good performance by Brad Pitt and an even better one from Marion Cotillard.

The kind of lush historical drama that Hollywood might have made in the 1930s but these days unsurprisingly owes its existence to foreign producers and, most especially, a renowned literary source.

I Am Madame Bovary plays out as a comedy, a lampoon of the incompetence and laziness of government officials.

The Take is just really lousy.

This is one of those “based on true events” movies that give you the distinct feeling that the true events deserved better.

Blood on the Mountain is wide-ranging across time, driven by talking heads and select footage, but it nails the human element at its core.