Even the film's missteps (the score, by Barrington Pheloung, is cringe-inducing) can't stop this meditation on love -- Martin calls it "Jane Austen for the twenty-first century" -- from melting into heartbreak.

Lee's technique is impeccable, but he's chasing more inner demons than one creature feature can handle. No wonder the audience cheers when TV Hulk Lou Ferrigno shows up for a cameo. It's a reminder of a time when it was easier being green and a Hulk could just get pissed off and bust shit up.

Kitano is a riveting spectacle. So's the movie.

If many male stars of a certain age are destined to become late-act action heroes, we hope this is Vaughn's "Taken," and his particular set of skills will continue to involve dishing out such graceless, effective hurt.

Cool stuff. Cool movie.

What makes it delicious fun is Posey, a party girl for the ages.

Writer-director Jacques Audiard (A Prophet) probes the psyches of two people in crisis. His hypnotic film means to shake you, and does. Schoenaerts reveals unexpected layers in Ali. And Cotillard delivers a tour de force of unleashed emotions. She's astonishing.

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

Hopkins and Mirren are acting pros in stellar form. There's no way you want to miss the pleasure of their company in a movie that offers a sparkling and unexpectedly poignant look at how to sustain a career and a marriage.

The stunts dazzle until you miss the low-key charm and cost-conscious inventiveness of the original. Desperado is best when Rodriguez lets his playful side cut through the blare of a born filmmaker indulging his first chance at high-end Hollywood fireworks.

There's only one star in this movie: Everest. Kormákur couldn't shoot higher than base camp, around 14,000 feet, without sickening the actors. But a crew traveled to the top to get footage, while much of the climbing was shot in the Dolomites. No matter. You watch Everest and you believe.

The good news is that Coogler puts his own stamp on it. You can feel this fine indie talent stretching his wings in the mainstream.

Christopher Plummer steals the show without resorting to camp as Nicholas' wounded and wounding Uncle Ralph. It's a great performance and a reminder of Dickens' grandeur. This Cliff's Notes of a film, though lively fun, only hints at that.

Lurie has crafted a different kind of thriller, one with a mind and a heart.

The result is inspiring, which isn't something you associate with this series.

The thrill of the film is watching Ant-Man and the Wasp team up and raise hell together. Rudd is a winning combination of sass and sincerity. And it's a kick to watch Lilly break out and let her star shine.

My advice? Just go with ParaNorman. There's magic in it.

The film offers few answers about Fischer's descent into derangement. But you watch Maguire and slowly, with pity and terror, you understand.

Director David Gordon Green and screenwriter Peter Straughan sometimes stumble over this vast terrain of self-serving scoundrels (Trump trumps anything they can make up), but the laughs keep firing.

Sloane is a nasty piece of work. Yet Chastain draws us in, making us see what the character keeps inside by the sheer force of her fireball performance. There are times when Miss Sloane plays like a pilot for a TV series. No knock on that. If Chastain stars, I'm in.

Leatherheads is most on its game when it's in the game, and in the zone of Clooney's no-bull affection for the faces of his actors.

As a thriller, The Recruit is merely an entertaining ride. But remember: Nothing is what it seems. It's the subtext -- two actors from different generations faking each other out with skill and affection -- that counts.

Following his surprisingly subtle work in "Sleeping With Other People," Sudeikis again shows real skills as an actor.

You could call it an Aussie "Dreamgirls." I'd call it a blast of joy and music that struts right into your heart.

Foster keeps the party hopping, although more dark humor would have helped before she winds it down with sentiment and bromides.

This mesmerizing mind-bender ought to prove two things: (1) Robert Pattinson really can act; (2) Director David Cronenberg never runs from a challenge.

Molly's Game bristles with fun zingers, electric energy and Sorkin's brand of verbal fireworks – all of which help enormously when the movie falters in fleshing out its characters.

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.

It also addresses questions of aging and neglect that Hollywood likes to run from. Langella, who's played everyone from Dracula to Nixon onscreen, is giving a master class in acting. Enroll now.

Because Allen hasn't lost his knack for slapstick with a sting, Anything Else hits its mark more often than not.

It's a winner. And not just for oenophiles. Director Randall Miller, who co-wrote the script with his wife Jody Savin, keeps the plot brimming with spirit and wit.

Potent if hardly evenhanded documentary.

With House of Gucci, you get a jumble of stories jockeying for screen time, and then you get a supernova blazing at the center of all of it that burns everything superfluous away. If the film is remembered for anything, it’s for being Exhibit A as what a great actor she is. Forget Gucci. Long live the house that Gaga built.

While there’s nothing on the level of Pearl‘s climactic monologue or credit-roll close-up, Goth still turns this revenge-of-the-final-girl parable into superior flashback pulp.

The acid comedy of Grant's performance carries the film. It helps also that newcomer Hoult is that rare child actor who mercifully underplays the pathos of his role.

How sexism, toxic masculinity, complicity, and not-so-borderline criminal behavior is baked into the music business gets pecked at but never fully unpacked.

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.

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.

Even when Light of My Life feels like it’s straining under the heaviness of its storytelling, there’s something about the way he guides us to an inevitable endgame that suggests the filmmaker knows what he’s doing. It’s not a pretty picture he paints here. But it makes you want Affleck to keep picking up that brush.

The expression here is one of shared humanity regardless of background, gender identity, race or creed. The common language being used here is cinema.

Irresistibly silly.

The movie comes not to bury this legend but to praise him. Inhuman endurance or not, you worry it may end up having to do the former regardless.

Seen more as a complement to that actual interview than a forensic breakdown of the story behind it, the movie succeeds in showing viewers that, even in this age of clickbait and quick hits, the slow and steady professionalism of real journalists attempting the Quixotic quest of practicing real journalism can still bring down a giant.

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.

Ignore the film’s foolish framing device and Halston emerges as a fascinating study of a fashion artist who allowed women to live an idealized vision of themselves.

A top cast, guided by actress Bonnie Hunt in her directing debut, mixes comedy and corn with savvy.

We have plenty of information about the idea of the Notorious B.I.G., but Biggie: I Got a Story to Tell offers a rare look at the actual human being behind the legend.

It’s a messy movie about messy lives, occasionally in ways you wish it wasn’t. But The Iron Claw is also a story of redemption that’s less about pinning down opponents and much more about breaking cycles.

Smash acting debut of Combs, who brings ease and charm to a crime lord.

This much-beleagured cinematic universe has finally hit upon a winning film, and one that will be forever tainted.

There are times when Skin can seem naïve and manipulative, almost in the same breath, which takes the film perhaps too long to get its bearings. But Bell is the binding force that locks us into Widner’s tumultuous journey.

The actors, working from a script by Sachs and Mauricio Zacharias, and swept up in Sachs’s characteristically perceptive, subtle dramatic style, make the whims and wills of these people feel consistent and predictable, which is to say, true to life.

They turn what could have been an acting stunt into an intimate and compelling study of bruised emotions.

There’s a genuine sense of admiration for these two middle-aged characters emanating from behind the camera, and you get the feeling that Walker-Silverman, a young filmmaker with a handful of shorts to his name, isn’t that interested in too-cool-for-film-school showboating.

The wow factor of Ready or Not helps you jump the hurdles of any plot predictability.

Jordan, working from a script he conjured up with Ray Wright, is in it for suspense tinged with laughs. But with these two dynamo actresses front and center, this nail-biter keeps you riveted.

It’s a moving-picturebook, drifting from hazy barrooms to muddy-track brawls to working-class homes and haunts, and with an eye on the cumulative effect of so much vintage cool on display.

Come for the snickering, it seems to say. Stay for the unexpected lump in your throat.

The primary goal of this entry is to establish a new team of heroes. The secondary aim is to stop what’s undeniably been a downward spiral. It succeeds in that respect at the very least. Don’t call it a return to form so much as a much-needed, extremely welcome return to a winning formula.

Who needs iambic pentameter when you have Jet Li around?

Near the end, Hill boxes himself into a sentimental corner that takes a little off the film’s edge. But before that, Mid90s bristles with fun, feeling and the exhilaration that comes with risking life’s hairpin turns.

The natural world gives us the resources to live. It also gives us viruses. And while some characters seek to chart aspects of nature and others wish to pay loving tribute (and offer sacrifices) to it, the most resonant notion from Earth‘s characters is that nature is a living, breathing, and undeniably aggressive entity. How Wheatley translates this notion into a bounty of Pagan paranoia is what makes the film undeniably his.

It’s moments of blunt, borderline-brutal honesty coming directly from the source that make this whole endeavor such a necessary counterpoint to all of the mythology that’s sprung up around Love ... [But t]here are a number of questionable choices that the doc makes in terms of aesthetics.

The Brink, Alison Klayman’s insightful and often unnerving look at one of the most divisive figures in recent memory, isn’t a particularly fun or easy watch.

It's visual magic, and director Barry Sonnenfeld, who followed his MIB high with the lows of "Wild Wild West" and "Big Trouble," revels in it. He doesn't so much direct MIBII as load it with cool stuff and flit around to whatever takes his fancy. As summer escapism goes, you could do worse.

The new Count moves with the smooth, plastic efficiency of a TV miniseries. Inspiration and originality may be in short supply, but the movie gets the job done.

As a horror movie, Talk is cheap thrills, done cleverly and with an abundance of voltage. As a proof-of-concept for what these gents can do, given some time and a couple extra gallons of Karo syrup, this is a hell of an introduction. Hands down.

It’s Pixar’s E.T., played out in reverse.

A sense of injustice runs like a toxic river through Everett’s film, an affront to homophobia through the ages, even our enlightened one. In the end, The Happy Prince makes its strongest mark as a heartfelt salute to Wilde from an actor and filmmaker who was born to play him.

Please welcome to the stage Anne Kendrick, Genre Auteur!

And while the action-set pieces and stand-offs and Raya–ders of the Lost Ark sequences are indeed thrilling, it’s the buddy-comedy aspect that actually makes the movie come alive.

It’s actually exciting to watch a star whose stock-in-trade has been arrested development flourish in a mature midlife period. Now he seems to be setting up future Sandler generations for success. Bat Mitzvah is about a girl growing up. But her dad seems to be doing some of that as well.

It's all part of the joke. Soderbergh may have created a bit of a mess with Full Frontal, but it's a playful and scrappy mess.

The idea of the boiler room as a Y2K gladiator ring for disenfranchised youth provides a proactive new twist.

As a traditional, accessible, familiarly-structured crowdpleaser, Boogie, in its modest, far-from-flawless way, challenges them to enjoy one as well.

Blethyn's solid-gold charm turns Saving Grace into a comic high.

It’s a memory piece, evoking a specific time, place, and political crisis in a way that is indelibly, achingly personal.

For a long stretch, Italian Studies turns this trip down memory-loss lane into a low-wattage livewire, an unpredictable stroll into the unknown. Its hero will slowly, eventually come back around to remembering her life before the reset. The movie itself, however, is unforgettable from the jump.

This is Kidman’s show. She neatly negotiates every twist the script throws at her, even when the plot slams into too many dead ends. This is a movie star who knows how to stay the course, no matter how twisty, tangled or down and dirty it gets. She’s dynamite.

Imagine a feature-length episode of Succession that treated the final season’s villain, GoJo CEO Lukas Matsson, as its main character and then multiplied him by four, and you’d have something like Mountainhead, Jesse Armstrong‘s caustic, corrosive satire of Silicon Valley mega-royalty run amuck.

Call it RBG: The Early Years.

The movie is moving — the source material has been hanging around since 1883 for good reason — but del Toro’s better at the violence and the dark irony, better at revealing the ways in which this story was already sort of twisted.

You can’t accuse Day One of playing its safe by regurgitating the same ol’ shocks and ahhs. And while it may not fully satisfy that primal urge that drives us to summer movies in the first place, it’s still breathes fresh air into a series in danger of becoming rote and stale.

Beasts puts its audience on cruise control, easy and painless. It makes the toy aisle look pretty good.

What takes Arctic to the next level is Mikkelsen’s stirringly expressive face. Known for playing villains — the dead-eyed 007 nemesis Le Chiffre in "Casino Royale" and the title killer in the TV series "Hannibal" (2013-2015) — Mikkelsen invests Overgård with a bracing humanity that you root for every step of the way.

Ronan (Lady Bird) and Robbie (I, Tonya) were both nominated for a Best Actress Oscar last award season, and even when the pace of the film falters, these two performers hold you in thrall. That’s royalty.

What’s dredged up by every bit of the film’s fabric and style is a sense of isolation.

Blue Jean manages to take an ancient anti-LGBTQ+ law and use it to foster a story of personal liberation. But it also knows that when your basic rights are threatened, no matter who you are or how you live or who you love, everything most assuredly is political.

His House is a strong debut, and exciting — even as its horrors risk redundancy as the film wears on — for its uncanny merging of political experience and the usual, perilous haunted-house thrills.

It’s a clever mash-up conceit that director/co-writer Christopher Landon and his cast milk for all its worth, none more so than the two leads.

Imagine "Invasion of the Body Snatchers" for the age of antidepressants — that’s Little Joe, the seventh feature (and first in English) from Austrian provocateur Jessica Hausner (Lourdes, Amour Fou).

Sound of Metal understands the importance of immersing you in this brave new noiseless world and giving you a compelling Virgil to guide you through it, but its real strength may simply be its powers of observation.

It may be a bit of a stretch to call what Brügger delivers here a documentary, exactly — it’s a “true” crime story with an emphasis on the quotes.

Like a particularly concise, purposefully elliptical short story, The Woman in the Yard quickly milks this beguiling, WTF-is-going-on-here? scenario for all the dread it’s worth, while not necessarily being in a hurry to fill folks in on the full 411 regarding this sticky situation.

It’s best to look at All That Heaven Allowed less as a Rock doc and more as a chronicle of Hollywood’s system of subterfuge and suggestion, all built around protecting and/or punishing those who preferred the company of their own sex.

Any argument that one doesn’t need a new spin on the Douglas-Turner black comedy is rendered more or less moot by the way [McNamara] sets up Cumberbatch and Colman with such gleefully profane, razor-sharp barbs.

Kudos to Wilson (how has she not won an Emmy for her brilliant work on The Affair?), who builds what seems at first like a peripheral character into the defiant soul of the movie.

The plot is too implausible to rank with "Unforgiven," but, oh, what a fun ride.