Clooney brings raw intensity to his role; his scenes with McElhone are rooted in a fierce romantic yearning.

Forget the title; the film barely works itself up into a half-hearted trot. It isn’t even howl-worthy in its campiness or badness, with one notable exception.

Luna and García Bernal display the kind of chemistry that makes you overlook the clichés in the script by first-time director Carlos Cuarón. Sometimes good-natured fun is enough.

Within its small, darkly funny range, Trust is an exceptional film that stays alert to the mysteries of love.

Pulls you in, challenges your prejudices, rocks your world and leaves you laughing in the face of an abyss. It's alive, all right. It's also an uncompromising American classic.

What chills most about The Final Year is how unprepared Team Obama was for the victory of Trump and the ease with which many of its hard-won policies could be unraveled. Was it blindness, hubris or a combination of both?

Watching his struggle is illuminating, unnerving and unforgettable.

As in "Lost in Translation," Coppola keeps an eye out for the broken places. That's when Somewhere is really something.

What this sequel really seems to be suggesting is that there is nothing scarier than an unstable pop star in 2024, poised on the edge of a public meltdown captured by a million cellphones and consumed by scandal-hungry social-media addicts. When it comes to possessing your soul, a supernatural demon can’t hold a candle to show business.

The time shifting raises questions the movie never answers, but it's hard not to enjoy the ride.

Barbershop: The Next Cut is stagey, often simplistic and it talks too damn much. But, hell, the talk has flavor and snap and a real-world sense of a community in crisis. Not bad for an escapist romp.

A chronicle of a media phenomenon, a reality-TV landmark and a psychological nightmare packaged as entertainment, The Contestant is the type of documentary where you’re aware that what you’re witnessing is 100-percent true, and you still can’t quite wrap your brain around what you’re seeing.

Hartley's debut deserves heralding; he combines a rigorous social conscience with the exuberance of fresh comic thinking.

Count Cinderella as a dazzling dream of a movie from director Kenneth Branagh, who can leap from the Bard (Henry V) to the boffo (Thor) with no apparent sweat.

Alice may be a minor work in the Allen canon, but when its grace notes manage to be heard above the whimsy, they ring true.

Don't think you can take another Hollywood version of Sherlock Holmes? Snap out of it. Apologies to Robert Downey Jr. and Benedict Cumberbatch, but what Ian McKellen does with Arthur Conan Doyle's fictional detective in Mr. Holmes is nothing short of magnificent.

The result is something you won't see coming. Don't look for sweet and embraceable. This movie is not afraid to show its claws. Like the spirited teamwork of Kazan and Dano, Ruby Sparks is honest, deep and true.

You cheered Jack Black in "School of Rock," now give it up for Paul Green in the real thing.

Until an ending that flies ruinously off the rails, A Simple Favor is raunchy fun that offers an unexpected take on the twists and turns of female friendship.

There’s so many sharp jabs here, so much well-honed Hitchcockian 101 technique on display, that you can’t dismiss this exercise in horror as social-rage sugar pill.

Lazin's remarkable achievement is to catch Tupac in the act of discovering himself. It's something to see.

Undeniably affecting, but you leave it wanting more.

Wonder is an emotional wipeout, that's for sure, but Chbosky handles it with such tenderness and delicacy, you won't hate yourself (too much) for giving in.

The movie has a tossed-off, caught-on-the-fly exuberance that works like a charm.

Relentless suspense allows The Girl Who Played With Fire to hold you in a viselike grip. But it's the performances of Nyqvist and especially Rapace that keep you coming back for more.

The Wind does indeed blow a hell of a chill through you, though that has less to do with thing that bump in the night than in the psyche.

Fresh comic thinking spices up this smart cookie of a satire from director-writer Paul Weitz (About a Boy). He makes it sexually provocative and subversively hilarious.

May lack the mythic pow of the 1984 original and the visionary thrill of T2, but it's a potent popcorn movie that digs in its hooks and doesn't let go until an ending that ODs on apocalyptic hoo-ha.

Meryl Streep -- at her brilliant, beguiling best -- is the spice that does the trick for the yummy Julie & Julia.

McGrath's script is faithful: fierce when it needs to be and devilishly funny.

A whole summer of fireworks packed into one movie. It doesn't just go to 11, it starts there.

Here's the funny thing: Despite all the Captain America rah-rah in costume and indestructible shield, the movie is at its best when the story sticks with skinny Steve.

A warmly hilarious movie about family members and their secret hearts.

There is such clarity of vision here, a rare feat from a first-timer, that it feels as though it was crafted by a seasoned pro. The script is tight and full of humanity, never falling into the trap of being too earnest, and blends some genuine comedy with sequences of pathos and heartbreak. Everything feels grounded without an ounce of pretension.

In an era of dumb farce, Something's Gotta Give is something special.

Stylishly shot on the high-def cheap, runs 77 potently sexless minutes. Its subject isn't erotica, it's commodities trading.

You leave the f--ked-up funhouse of Sausage Party thinking: Did I see this movie or hallucinate it? I mean that as high praise.

The special effects vacillate between defiantly shitty and endearingly resourceful, and Carpenter and O’Bannon's sense of humor covers a similarly narrow ground between Loony Tunes goofiness and dorm-room stoned.

This one belongs with the leaders of the scare pack. Isn't it time that we give Romero his due? It's hardly an accident that Stephen King, Quentin Tarantino, Guillermo del Toro, Simon Pegg and Wes Craven recognize Romero as a master. He is.

Leigh’s visceral staging, especially in the climactic moments — brilliantly shot by his longtime collaborator/cinematographer Dick Pope — brings home the significance of a 200-year-old bloodbath that still speaks urgently to the disenfranchised.

The film is talky and often stilted. But Eastwood’s compassion for the character, warts and all, feels genuine. His performance, like the movie, is a high-wire act that remains fascinating even when it falters.

Michael Gerbosi's script might have reduced Crane to a clueless cliche were it not for the bruised humanity that Greg Kinnear brings to the role. Kinnear is dynamite.

A two-hour search for a pulse... A miscalculation from a prodigious talent who has forgotten that you squeeze the life out of romance when you don't give it space to breathe.

This is not a reinvention of the wheel, just a rotation of the tires. For a story that started with a young man trying to follow in huge footsteps while blazing his own path, it might be unfair to play the compare game here. Yet Creed II does not give us anything but another, slightly superior Rocky sequel. It wins on points. Just don’t expect a knockout.

Ben Is Back ends up becoming into a penetrating look at how addiction wrecks lives from both sides of the parent-child equation. It’s unflinching and unforgettable.

What happens to the film's title character — and the audience — shouldn't happen to a dog.

The radiant Barrymore energizes Cinderella with a tough core of intelligence and wit.

Like Apple founder Steve Jobs, Kroc – who died in 1984 – had a genius for marketing the talent of others. Is that a lesser gift? Not in these United States. Not then. And not in the age of Trump. Set more than a half century ago, The Founder proves to be a movie for a divisive here and now. Step right up. You might just learn something. God help us.

Mulan emerges as a curious act of market negotiation. It is a perfectly fine movie; it will no doubt be meaningful for children, especially those who could afford to see more of themselves onscreen in heroines like Mulan. But its cast, its attitude, its overall eagerness to please — all benefits, one would think — don’t add up to a good movie. They add up to a blueprint of the movie this ought to be.

For a movie that continually asks its main character to recognize where dreams end and delusions begin, you wish it knew when to heed its own lessons.

Fast Five will push all your action buttons, and some you haven't thought of. So what if you hate yourself in the morning.

It works far better as a free-floating vibe than a movie, which can be read as a backhanded compliment or a sign of surrender.

Blood splatters, heads explode, and McDonagh takes sassy, self-mocking shots at the very notion of being literary in Hollywood. It's crazy-killer fun.

It’s a blockbuster that, with a few whirring movements and a half dozen clicks and beeps, transforms itself into something meant to be watched by actual thinking, feeling human beings. For once, there really is more than meets the eye.

Olmos is unsparing in depicting the dark side of human behavior. His in-your-face style stresses the urgency of a situation most of us choose to ignore. Though powerful, the film is sometimes preachy; there's a sense that information is being disseminated instead of dramatized. But it's hard to believe anyone will remain unmoved by American Me or its final shattering image of human desolation.

Mara is funny, fierce and altogether wonderful, even up against an irresistible costar.

Emma Watson is sensational as Nicki.

Guided by the fierce, fully committed performances of Driver and Bening,The Report is a bristling reminder that truth still matters. Naïve? Maybe. But, damn, do we need it now.

There is no all-caps ACTING here. Instead, Lawrence dials in to an uncomfortable numbness that tamps everything about Lynsey down, and thus keeps the performance at a recognizably human, rather than headline-friendly social-drama level.

In the context this documentary provides for the cult classic, it makes you want to see "Showgirls" again regardless of whether you belong to that cult or not.

Lumet has a reputation for speed, and when a film doesn’t engage him, as in Family Business, the result seems rushed, sloppy. But in Q&A, with all the actors perfectly cast and on his wavelength, he works wonders. Nolte is electrifying.

There is devilish fun in this look into 1990s white-collar crime. But the jokes are the kind you choke on.

A ghost story in which superior camerawork, costumes and production design work together to put the audience in a trance. It's tough on actors not to get swallowed up in the scenery.

Cyrano may sometimes feels like its struggling to find a way to say something new about a beloved, centuries-old work of art, one that’s been updated and deconstructed and reconstructed ad infinitum. Once the sex-symbol movie star starts whispering in its ear what to say, however, and how to act, and why it’s the well-spoken sadness of it all that makes it so swoonworthy — those are the moments that make this musical positively sing.

Mortensen and Isaac, expertly exchanging the faces of loyalty and betrayal, are both outstanding. Is the film too old-school for short attention spans? Maybe. Rest assured that Amini's shuddery endgame is well worth the wait.

For special effects alone, there's no problem: They're spectacular. And there's no faulting Mark Rylance, a newly-minted Oscar winner for Spielberg's Bridge of Spies, whose motion-capture performance as a 24-foot giant is both subtly nuanced and truly monumental.

The acting is dynamite, notably by Dillon and Newton in their shocking second encounter. Despite its preachy moments, the film is a knockout.

What Hooper has crafted is a work of probing intelligence and passionate heart.

Bateman's dazzling deadpan can raise tired zingers to raucous life with only a throwaway eyebrow lift. And McAdams takes to comedy with a natural actor's grace and precision. Talk about fun company. They're it.

Gordon-Levitt won't take safe for an answer. So Don Jon tends to stumble as it finds its feet. Still, you leave this movie feeling had at instead of had. The experience is elating.

The Pangs deliver enough shivery scares to keep you up nights. Eyes wide shut.

Writer-director Gurinder Chadha juggles all the angles with flair and fairness. Like Nagra and Knightley, the movie is a sweetheart.

Nolan directs the film exactly like a great trick, so you want to see it again the second it's over. I'd call that wicked clever.

Spurlock says he's not selling out, he's buying in. I'm buying into Spurlock. As ever, he makes you laugh till it hurts.

You’ll want to see this for Zellweger’s bravura turn alone. It’s one of the best performances of the year.

It’s all very exciting when it’s not completely exhausting. At least you can’t say Wonka is a generic legacy-property cash grab.

Blanchett burns on a high flame, and Redford finds the wounded dignity in Rather.

Sherrybaby is the kind of pretend-arty Sundance thing that gives indie cinema a bad name.

Landline never finds its emotional footing. Amid all the shouting – and these folks really go at it – there's a void where a soulful core should be.

The laughs come and go, but Ferrell makes NASCAR his bitch funny. Funnier. And more fun. And then the fun skids to a stop. You know how it goes: Plot gets in the way.

It's hard to turn a stoner comedy into a franchise – those require a little too much follow-through. But Cheech & Chong pulled it off with the immortal trilogy of Up in Smoke, Cheech & Chong's Next Movie and Nice Dreams. And like the Godfather and Star Wars trilogies, this one peaks with Chapter Two – with some help from Pee-wee Herman. "Man, if you had a second brain," says Cheech, "it would die of loneliness, man."

Basing a teen film on Romeo and Juliet? It'd had been done. Replacing a Montague and a Capulet with a San Fernando Valley shopping-mall habitue (Deborah Foreman) and a sensitive Hollywood punk (Nicolas Cage)? Now we're talking.

As in all of his movies, Malle exhibits in Pretty Baby his characteristically detached, skeptical, lucid, moral — not moralistic — attitude toward life.

The film, sometimes talky and overemphatic, is also literate, erotic, brutally funny and touched by brilliance in its quartet of live-wire performances.

Pieces of a Woman largely belongs to the woman on the verge of a nervous breakdown at its center, however, and it’s Vanessa Kirby who gifts the film with The Performance.

Undeniably thrilling and troubling...Dazzling, era-defining.

Reality tv, welcome to the multiplex. If "The Hills" went back to high school and developed wit, perception and a conscience, it might play something like Nanette Burstein's wallop of a doc.

There’s a secondhand feel to the way this gangster movie delivers the goods. Carlito’s Way is haunted by a ghost from De Palma and Pacino’s past — Scarface.

The heart of Jackass - the adolescent drive to bash body and soul into the symbolic brick wall of maturity - remains pure.

Dissenters who see this film as a wallow in self-absorption aren't paying attention. Baumbach is acutely attuned to the droll mind games of smart people who only think they're impervious to feeling.

Baumbach overreaches in White Noise. The movie is unsuccessful because its various energies eventually begin to feel mismeasured.

It’s a movie that stumbles every so often, overplays its hand numerous time, and relies on an oddball true-story premise and 1000-watt star power to pave over some of the rougher spots. It would also give you its coat if you needed it without asking, and the big takeaway from Roofman, we’d argue, is its emphasis not on sympathy for the “devil” here but a palpable sense of empathy for everyone involved. Given the scarcity of this particular quality today, that’s no small feat.

The movie belongs to Moretz, whose sensational performance will be talked about for years. Her scenes with Cage, who wears a Batsuit and uses a voice borrowed from Adam West, are a hoot.

Ferrara’s blend of toughness and lyricism turns this visionary crime film into something stylish, seductive and haunting.

The plot is flimsy, but director Mark Waters (Freaky Friday) trusts Fey's tart dialogue to carry the day. Wise man. Fey subverts formula to find comic gold. She's a brash new voice in movie comedy. Boy, do we need her now.

The movie's soul is with Huffman. Speaking in a low voice, her posture as stiff as her vocabulary, her eyes a pool of sadness and hope, she turns this small, resonant film into a cry from the heart.

The show belongs to Geoffrey Rush in a note-perfect performance as Harry Pendel, the tailor.

The grand becomes grandiose and the lyrical turns bombastic.