Hope Springs knows happy endings are provisional. What this exuberant gift of a movie offers Kay and Arnold is a renewed appetite for life. And that never gets old.

There's more killer suspense and shocking intimacy in this one-of-a-kind documentary than you'll find in a dozen thrillers. You'll laugh hard and cry too.

Trouble enters only when the script overcomplicates things in the end. Until then, especially in a growling dogfight, director Francis Lawrence (Constantine) keeps you squirming.

Jarmusch makes it a feast that plays like a haunting concept album.

If you wanted to get the scoop on the when, where and how the Bishop Sycamore scandal happened, BS High is a good primer.

Most movies stress the agony of art (think of Kirk Douglas' Van Gogh in "Lust for Life"). Schnabel's exceptional film honors his friend by showing the act of creation as a natural high.

With the smashing Jones giving us a female warrior to rank with the great ones and a cast that knows how to keep it real even in a sci-fi fantasy, Rogue One proves itself a Star Wars story worth telling.

François Ozon’s Summer of ‘85 — which adapts the YA novel Dance on My Grave, by Aidan Chambers — is moving but contained affair, aflush with overwhelming feeling but also distant from that feeling, probing but not always revealing, sensuous and charismatic but not always easy to like.

It's a tender love story that never goes soft on its provocations. It's a defiant cry from the heart.

The temptation is to wish that Wright had simply made a horror movie set in the Sixties, that he’d streamlined things a tad more and simply kept his revisionist look at the Carnaby-and-cocktails glamorous life in that bygone moment. But he’s after something a little bigger, and if Last Night in Soho comes across as being stuck in a tonal interzone, you have to admire how Wright is so intent on drawing a line between then and now.

What Shelton fails to provide is a coherent structure; the film is wearyingly repetitive. The boys do the same hustle and hurl the same racial epithets as our goodwill dribbles away.

Ninety minutes of being buried alive with Ryan Reynolds: Didn't we all suffer that in "The Proposal"?

Is there anything less shocking than a movie that thinks it's shocking? See White Girl and discuss — and you should see it, if only for the all-stops-out performance of Morgan Saylor.

Simplicity -- four-square, not sappy -- is rare in film. James C. Strouse had it in his script for Lonesome Jim. As writer and first-time director, he gives Grace Is Gonethe quiet power to sneak up and floor you.

It would be unfair to fully explain Tigertail‘s last act, though you may be able to figure out where this gentle, heartfelt tale is going to wind up. All you need to know, really, is that it ties everything you’ve seen together, the title takes on new meaning and the film exits on what is, for my money, one of the single greatest last shots in recent memory.

The new Body Snatchers is the most graphic of all, featuring more overt violence and decomposing flesh than the other two films combined. But it sorely lacks the focus and resonance of its predecessors.

Paddington in Peru sticks to its franchise’s overarching script, delivering exactly the kind of affection, silliness and gentle heartstring-plucking you now expect from the series.

It's watching Cecil open his eyes, in Whitaker's reflective, powerfully understated performance, that fills this flawed film with potency and purpose. Striving really does bring its own glory.

Is the movie any good? At the dawn of the twenty-first century, when art is defined by commerce, this question is beside the point.

Mike Nichols' haunting, hypnotic Closer vibrates with eroticism, bruising laughs and dynamite performances from four attractive actors doing decidedly unattractive things.

The haunting, heart-piercing Elah isn't perfect. It's something better: essential.

Chastain (a nifty match-up with Mirren) is a live wire, and her scenes with Csokas and Worthington have a spark the later scenes lack. No matter. The Debt holds you in its grip.

The lack of`cheeseball overload is refreshing. I could tell the good lie and say the movie is perfect. It's not. It's often earnest to a fault and fearful of its deeper, darker implications. Still, you won't leave The Good Lie unmoved. Its heart really is in the right place.

Hungarian director Istvan Szabo (Sunshine) overplays his hand and traps Bening in a role that's all emoting, no emotion.

It's all true – but so what? American Made may be fact-based but that doesn't stop it from feeling monumentally generic, like you've seen it all before (Blow, Sicario, The Infiltrator, War Dogs, TV's Narcos ... the list goes on).

His (Chase) ardent, acutely observed debut makes him, at 67, a filmmaker to watch.

A hack would have turned Frank and Sam into overnight sensations. Instead, the writer-director recognizes the compromises that reality forces on dreams – and this soft breeze of a movie emerges as a scrappy surprise that's hard to shrug off.

What an astounding actress Annette Bening is. And she’s at her very best in Film Stars Don't Die in Liverpool playing Gloria Grahame.