LaBute achieves a bracing originality by observing human folly as a means to understand rather than condemn. Love or hate his films, LaBute is one of the most challenging filmmakers to emerge in years.

This is still star-driven, big-screen goofiness writ large, something to be consumed with popcorn and a crowd, and that fact its hitting U.S. screens during the summer dog days couldn’t be more welcome. You just might want to wear two masks in the theater.

Thompson, Kaling and up-for-anything director Nisha Ganatra spin comic gold.

It’s not exactly the second coming of Walk Hard, though it’s the best Weird Al movie since UHF [cue laugh track and maybe a Whoppee Cushion sound effect] — and like Al himself, it still hits each beat with an infectiously goofy exuberance.

What’s missing is history. What’s missing is a sense that men like this really lived.

Theron has already showed her talent for bringing a deeper dimension to action as Furiosa in "Mad Max: Fury Road." Here, the actor reveals the toll that living forever is taking on Andy, who took a year off to heal emotional scars before her reluctant return to battle.

The film is most riveting in its early scenes, when Soderbergh's digital cameras locate germs everywhere – don't touch those peanuts!

Director Andrew Currie is better at laughs than scares, but he can’t sustain either as Fido runs out of steam in the final stretch. Till then, it’s fiendish fun.

Hallelujah isn’t a definitive, life-spanning doc on Cohen’s life, nor does it claim to be, but the tale of “Hallelujah” serves as a metaphor for Cohen’s life.

Holmes nails every laugh without missing the dramatic nuances. She makes April and her movie well worth knowing.

If you've had it with all that feel-good holiday sludge, hook up with the combustibly nasty Bad Santa. It could become a Christmas perennial for Scrooges of all ages.

Does this sound like rock heaven? It is.

Whether the climax, which veers close to magical realism and even closer to cloying, undoes the good will its built up will defend on the filmgoer. But for a long while, the tour these unlikely dreamers take you on is worth the trip. Samuel Clemens would have approved.

Is this vulnerable Madonna the real thing or a ploy to ingratiate herself with film audiences who’ve found her chilly and strident? You be the judge. But there’s no denying that Truth or Dare is at its raunchy best when Madonna is kicking ass instead of kissing it.

This may be the first film in which mutual attraction is commodified by cold, hard business talk.

There’s a lived experience pulsing at the center of this slice-of-life tale, which helps guide it over some of the more generic elements and weaker patches, especially when things threaten to detour directly into poverty-porn and/or Amerindie miserablism territory.

You leave impressed that Anderson can still manage to do what his does best without succumbing to self-parody here. The blueprint may be familiar. But it’s still a pretty foolproof plan.

Cedar Rapids had me smiling at hello.

The creative workaround does drop you into the middle of the shady-as-hell action in a way that, say, recordings playing over a close-up of a grainy photo does not. But it also starts to become more than a little distracting, and you find yourself tuning into the performances instead of the particulars of the case.

The film falls prey to its own smoke and mirrors. It is less subversive than it aspires to be, and more emotionally real than than the filmmakers seem to realize.

Pucci is an actor to watch: He rides this spellbinder without softening the truths that plague the thumbsucker in all of us.

For anyone professing true movie love, there's no resisting it.

Dragon errs by trafficking too much in what made Bruce Lee sell instead of what made him tick.

The melancholy attached to the impermanence of life and love suffuses this film, making it memorably haunting and hypnotic.

In the year's richest, most complex and ultimately most heartbreaking film, Inarritu invites us to get past the babble of modern civilization and start listening to each other.

Any resemblance between this Bad Lieutenant and the 1992 Abel Ferrara landmark is purely in the head of the dude who thought up the title.

a bang-up ride that means to wring you out. Mission accomplished.

A rousing, gorgeously animated good time.

God’s Creatures is a quiet movie, but its emotional drift is violent; Watson and Franciosi are particularly effective at giving us women being swept up into the currents.

DiCaprio is in peak form, bringing layers of buried emotion to a defeated man. And the glorious Winslet defines what makes an actress great, blazing commitment to a character and the range to make every nuance felt.

Gets the action job done and you better believe that Bruce is still the man.

The whole thing takes on a level of fractured fairy-tale storytelling that nods to both the Brothers Grimm and the father-figure Cronenberg.

A hypnotic movie of harsh truth and healing compassion. It sticks with you.

Nicholas Meyer deftly mingles fish-out-of-water comedy and touching romance with discreetly gory danger.

The young star, maturing nicely past the boyish enthusiasm he showed in "Slumdog Millionaire" and "Marigold Hotel" films, enters a new phase of his career with fierce commitment. Lion is one from the heart.

A subversively entertaining documentary.

It's the classic American tale of the family man triumphant, and Howard makes sure that it hits you right in the heart.

What a shame that this well-meaning look at the absurdity of gay conversion camps — it won the Grand Jury Prize at Sundance this year — lacks the teeth to make its points stick.

The film owes its success less to shock value than to sheer cinematic inventiveness and Egerton’s total immersion in the role.

Wayne Kramer, who co-wrote the scrappy script with Frank Hannah, makes a potent directing debut and strikes gold with the cast.

Given the assault of devilishly clever plot twists that buzz-bomb your brain like a two-hour binge of quad-shot lattes, Duplicity goes down as too smart for its own good.

The Painted Veil has the power and intimacy of a timeless love story. By all means, let it sweep you away.

It works enough of the time to deliver on the promise of bad dreams.

The movie steps lively with buoyant humor and palpable sexual tension, but keep an eye out for the dark places.

You'll laugh till it hurts at Cold Souls.

It’s funny — as is a lot of this eager-to-please, all-over-the-place movie — thanks to the dry snap of Moran’s dialogue and Feldstein’s exhilarating performance.

Tuesday makes a strong case for death as a natural, if not the most natural part of life. It makes an even stronger case, however, for Julia Louis-Dreyfus being one of the greatest actors working today.

An intriguing stab at modern Hasidic horror — we smell a burgeoning subgenre — The Vigil will feel like well-trod ground to anyone who’s seen a few supernatural thrillers; only the neighborhood has changed.

The Woodman has recovered his common touch. On him, it looks good.

A meditation on the racial and class conflicts at the heart of the American character.

The actors make it unique and unforgettable.

But fantasy elements aside, this Disney movie has the one essential that makes a nature documentary fly: a thrilling sense of wonder.

The Dry is solid and appreciably sad but, for all the virtues of its rough symbolism and intriguing backstory, almost too jampacked with discovery for its own good.

Don't get me wrong – the movie lays on the raunch, and there are more gut-busting laughs than you can count. But no one gets objectified or patronized.

Green Book is a movie about class as well as race, and Farrelly rightly refuses to paint a pretty picture.

Come for the way this film twists a disaster-movie premise into sociological commentary while still bringing the weirdness. Stay for how Kircher and Duris embed a father-son story into the fantastical elements, and transform a far-out tale of genetics run amuck into an elegy about the pain of letting go.

The reason that Boy Erased hits you like a shot in the heart can be found in Jared’s relationship with his parents. Kidman brings stirring compassion and a growing strength to a woman who learns about herself the more she learns about her son. And Crowe is magnificent as a believer who can’t quite storm the barricades his faith erects around a true reconciliation with his son.

The Avengers has it all. And then some. Six superheroes for the price of one ticket... It's also the blockbuster I saw in my head when I imagined a movie that brought together the idols of the Marvel world in one, shiny, stupendously exciting package. It's "Transformers" with a brain, a heart and working sense of humor. Suck on that, Michael Bay. [10 May 2012, p.74]

Stimulating entertainment, as rigorously challenging and painfully funny as anything the Coens have done. But it's necessary to meet the Coens halfway. If you don't, Barton Fink is an empty exercise that will bore you breathless. If you do, it's a comic nightmare that will stir your imagination like no film in years.

Anderson packs the film with atmosphere spiked with intrigue. And Hamm gives his role a James Bond-meets-Don Draper appeal, tossing off one-liners with a weary insouciance. His scenes with Pike give the movie a resonant power it wouldn't otherwise have.

As ever, Freeman delivers miracles; he's as good as it gets.

Messed up as it is, you can't tear your eyes away from this explosion of brutal sounds and images.

Sensational, sicko fun -- you won't believe your eyes -- and just the thing to shake up the creeping conservatism that is draining the vulgar life out of pop culture.

It wants to be a slasher, but it isn’t reckless enough. It wants to be funny, but it only has two jokes, and it repeats them ad nauseum. It wants to be tense, but it takes advantage of almost none of the tension that this scenario and its McMansion setting have to offer.

Yes, The Piano Lesson hits a few bum notes. Its melody nonetheless remains intact.

Like Kathryn Bigelow's "Detroit," set half a century ago, Chon's Gook uses the past to speak to a tumultuous present. Chon has created a hardass yet hypnotically beautiful film that snarls and sparks to incite, not a fever in the blood, but an urgent conversation about what makes us human. Godspeed.

Blue Story is a 91-minute assault of sound and image that leaves no doubt about the vicious cycle of gang violence it presents. Prepare to be wowed.

As something that seeks to confuse and delight you in equal measures, this is seven courses of absurdity, served with a side of tongue in cheek from a trio who know what they’re doing, even if you’re not always sure what that is.

First-time director Peter Care crafts something darkly funny and touching from a coming-of-age fable that might have drifted into formula without deeply felt performances from Culkin and Hirsch and dazzling animation from Todd McFarlane (Spawn) that brings the boys' comic fantasies to jolting life.

By the time these two comedians are served dessert, they’re bickering over Coogan’s level of fame regarding a fake eulogy and trading celebrity impersonations. Fourth verse, same as the first. Only the scenery has changed.

Despite a gimmicky premise, Chronicle fuels its action with characters you can laugh with, understand and even take to heart.

Yes, the sets and costumes elicit swoons, but it's the peerless Sondheim score, however truncated, that makes this Woods a prime destination.

At first glance, you might mistake What They Had for one of those well-meaning family dramas about what to do when your mom is diagnosed with Alzheimer’s. But that would discount the exceptional accomplishment achieved by debuting director Elizabeth Chomko, enlivening her scrappy script with a cast of actors who truly are as good as it gets. You laugh as much as you cry, which means you believe in the movie’s truth.

The whole thing is a blast, which doesn’t mean you don’t sense that the stakes are high or that the tension between this threesome isn’t threatening to smother a great creative collaboration in the crib.

To try and wrap your head around the plot of Predestination can only lead to madness. Don't get me wrong: The movie itself is a trip. Just jump off the cliff and go with the Spierig brothers, Peter and Michael, as they whoosh into the labyrinth of their own fervid imaginations.

Peck has long cratfed impeccable, politically charged fictions, docs, and docudramas, whether it’s his 2000 biopic on Patrice Lumumba or his peerless portrait of James Baldwin (the aforementioned I Am Not a Negro). With this latest magnum opus, the Haitian filmmaker has given us not just an invaluable, iris-out look at our present moment but the scariest movie of 2025 by a wide margin.

Tenet sweeps you away on waves of pure, ravishing cinema.

Eyes sees what it wants to see, but it's a riveting glimpse.

The funny and touching result is worth cheering for.

You can feel the heat that ignites this gripping tale, and the humor and humanity that root it in feeling. Sayles knows how to use his social conscience: He lets it rip.

It's a wild, whacked-out wonder. Coenheads rejoice.

Long after the dance-movie thrills are in the rearview and before the images turn themselves upside down — before the movie becomes a literal danse macabre — you find yourself impressed by the fact that he’s not out to recreate a bad acid trip. He’s trying to create his own bad trip sans the drugs. And the fucked up thing about it is: You end up wanting to go along for the ride.

The story is stock, but thanks to the behind-the-scene fire wranglers, you can practically feel the heat.

Co-written by Selick and Peele, Wendell & Wild has a nagging tendency to throw a lot at you and simply cross its slender, skeleton-ish fingers that even a little of it coheres and sticks.

Douglas never makes a false move, delivering a tour de force in human weakness.

Dull title for a juicy, fact-based caper movie that's full of surprises I have no intention of spoiling.

Taking it's framework from classic fairly-tale characters like Cinderella, the British story of Little Voice is one of compassion, humor and music.

A movie of potent provocation and surging humanity that ranks with the year's best.

There’s no contrived digital sleight-of-hand in Spider-Man: Far From Home that can match what Holland does: He makes the MCU feel new again.

A mesmerizing erotic odyssey.

Berg's unquestioning faith in law and order could have used, well, a little questioning. But there's no doubt about the worth of the movie as a well-earned tribute to the heroes and victims of a tragic event that may have just made Boston stronger.

In a multiplex filled with empty New Year vessels (take that, Kangaroo Jack), this holdover grabs you hard.

Green made the wise choice to be funny in telling his sad story.

Are we always still in high school in our heads? 21 Jump Street thinks so. And Hill and Tatum are just the crazy-ass comedy team to prove it.

Mamet is on his game, and that is a sight to see. No con.

You can tell there’s a voice and vision behind Selah and the Spades, one that’s likely to come into its own after some seasoning. It might seem like faint praise to throw a “watch this space” sign on top of what is indeed a more-than-impressive first movie.

Spends too much time covering ground well known from the headlines. But the scenes of the couple at home with their children and friends are uniquely fascinating, if not, in Wilson's words, "very 007-ish."

Mellencamp has made an admirably unfussy movie that sneaks into your heart with the hypnotic power of a song.