The movie nearly killed him (Gilliam). Yet the victory isn’t just that he finished it, but that he’s fashioned something so magnificent in its messiness. He should be proud as well as relieved. The impossible dream is dead. But long live The Man Who Killed Don Quixote.

Should you want to spend 90 minutes watching Nazis get shot, stabbed, gutted, blown up, run over, and beaten with a variety of inanimate objects, in the most violent and gory manner possible, this war movie is the answer to your pulp-cinema prayers.

Still, the moments that hit hardest concern Leo’s relationship with Ahd (a very fine Eric Bernard), another male hustler who claims he’s only “gay 4 pay.”

She Said doesn’t pretend that wrongs have been righted once and for all. It just wants to pay tribute to two people stood up to a Goliath and took him down not with one good shot but a million tiny cuts and a lot of hard work.

Wicked may take great pains to recreate the musty Britain of the 1920s, but don’t be fooled by the cloche hats and frilly frocks. The female rage that powers every frame of this comedy didn’t go away when that decade ended. It’s regrettably more recognizable and still more righteous today one century later.

Halloween Ends is a curious and mostly effective mix of slasher antics and dramatically straight-faced themes. It’s a good enough slasher to provoke laughter in some of its grimmer moments, because the deaths are that ridiculous and the targets are sometimes, unfortunately, a little deserving.

Old isn’t trying to be fashionable, low-fi, artisanal horror of the kind that seems to be setting the tone for the genre in the indie world. This is, instead, a credibly old-fashioned movie in some ways, a creature feature with something more diffuse than a “creature,” per se, a monster movie in which the monster is an unlucky pairing of longitude and latitude.

Hackman and Freeman will pin you to your seat.

[Eichner] wanted to make a gay rom-com. It isn’t a huge leap, however, to say that he’s both entertaining a mass audience and leaving his own mark on a long, storied history of fighting to be seen and heard — to tell stories that have been dismissed or neglected or suppressed. Mission accomplished.

It’s a tough, achingly tender film that refuses to trade in false hopes or cheap sentiment. That truth is what makes Beautiful Boy hard to take and impossible to forget.

Director Doug Liman -- the hip skipper of "Swingers" and "Go" -- makes all the familiar dirty business seem fun and almost human. In these dog days, Bourne earns what passes as high praise: It doesn't suck.

If this pitch-black comedy seems perilously close to falling apart under the weight of its creator’s ambitions and near-camp aesthetic (a common problem with even the best of Dupieux’s work), it also comes at a type of delusional alpha dudes in the most gleefully caustic of ways.

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.

While the movie also offers a much-needed context of the “Satanic panic” of the ’80s and ’90s — backwards messages and heavy metal and Dungeons & Dragons, oh my! — as well as vintage afternoon-TV handwringing and glimpses of organizational in-fighting, it’s these scenes of folks engaging in real political showdowns by any ridiculous means necessary that give the movie its sense of currency.

Chase has delivered something that walks the tightrope between social melodrama and fan service, and that sometimes teeters on the edge of falling. But he has also given us the foundation for the moment when a man from New Jersey will wake up one morning and get himself a gun.

There’s no doubting its power. This film will take a piece out of you.

The movie isn’t always on such sure footing. But that’s almost appropriate: a messier movie trying to reckon with a messier range of feelings.

War Game concentrates a lot on the “how to” part. But it also says a lot about how eerily easy and how horrifyingly relatable the “why” of it all is.

It’s all a very by-the-books music biopic, which the sole exception of which species is singing about manufacturing miracles and angels contemplating his fate.

The movie may want you to see the best of us in the dingiest of places. But you’re as delusional as Mikey Saber if you think it will avert its eyes from showing us the worst of us as well.

You’ll laugh, you’ll cry — sometimes at the same time. But love or hate Jojo Rabbit, it’s damn near impossible to shake.

It’s a surprisingly good sports movie that wants little more than to be a surprisingly good sports movie, one that knows it’s working with creaky triumph-of-the-underdog clichés but is willing to do a full-court press to sell them.

OK, the plot is inane, Val-gal-speak is a clichT, and Heckerling was more incisive covering similar hormonal ground 13 years ago in "Fast Times at Ridgemont High." But there's still wicked good fun to be had.

What gives this pulpy creation such a savory flavor and lasting bite isn’t just the puncturing of romantic clichés cemented 24 frames per second over decades, or the low-hanging-fruit pokes at society’s reliance on technology taken to extremes. It’s the way it makes you suddenly start questioning the whole notion of finding your soulmate if, given the opportunity, you can just purchase them and pay on installment.

There’s a whole other movie happening within Good Fortune‘s attempt to Aesop-fable its way to some moral about a modest life being a more fulfilling one even if you’re forced to live in your car. And when Reeves gives you a glimpse of that story, in which someone truly learns that humanity is both painful and blissful in equal measures, and anchors it all with a truly divine turn, well — you feel fortunate that get to witness that.

There are many elaborate lessons on life and how to live it in Soul, though its best may ironically be its simplest: Look. Listen. Learn. Enjoy. You may not turn the film off with an answer to what a soul is. But you may find yourself wondering if you’re forgetting to occasionally connect with your own.

Fans have been patiently waiting for the screen version of Wicked for decades now, and it’s safe to say that their faith will be rewarded. It’s also obvious that as much as this is still a tale of two witches, each blessed with equally beautiful voices, there’s a very clear standout here that’s lifting this occasionally leaden jazz-hands-extravaganza up to higher ground.

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.