Clemency is slow and without much suspense. The real question isn’t whether this person or that person will be executed, but whether Bernardine will go to pieces, and yet with a performance like Woodard’s at the center, that’s all a movie needs.

As a child, I worried about nuclear war. It never occurred to me that I should have been worried about a nuclear accident.

Gladstone (“Under the Bridge”), Oscar-nominated for Martin Scorsese’s “Killers of the Flower Moon,” is the heart and soul of “Fancy Dance,” which in other hands might have been a noirish thriller. But writer-director Erica Tremblay has something else in mind: a finely crafted drama about a woman and her niece who are unwilling to let the hopelessness of her situation define her.

Not the kind of movie anyone will remember at Oscar time. But no one who sees it will forget it.

The Aviator has a hole in its center, and Scorsese fills it the only way he can, with spectacle. He makes The Aviator colorful and entertaining from beginning to end. There are worse things.

There’s a French saying, “In love, there is always one who kisses and one who offers the cheek,” and usually, the more interesting story belongs to the one doing the kissing. In A Secret Love, that’s Pat.

Till confirms Chukwu as an actor’s director and should establish Deadwyler as a major presence in movies.

When it's not awful, it's dull.

A potent and troubling meditation on the state of Western society.

Each shot is its own little miracle.

Abuse of Weakness is 20 minutes of a great movie and another 85 minutes of nothing much.

Porter’s film is undeniably skewed to the pro-choice position, although she does interview antiabortion advocates as they protest.

A bleak, at times fascinating but strangely inert Chinese animated film.

The film’s thoroughness is a virtue or a problem, depending on one’s point of view.

Every so often an obviously talented person makes a bad movie, and that’s what we have in Nope. The talent is there, the movie is dead on the screen.

The sequel is filled with crowd-pleasing action, adventure and characters — sometimes too many characters. But it rises above its crowded narrative with an intense emotional core, taking a protagonist whose affliction had been played mostly for comedy, and exploring the emptiness and loneliness of her plight.

An old-fashioned prisoner-of-war movie that becomes much more because of writer-director Werner Herzog's admiration for the remarkable true story of its protagonist, Dieter Dengler.

Human Flow is often like seeing a travelogue of the world, juxtaposed with a desperate sea of humanity in search of a better — and safer — life.

Don't little ones have enough to worry about without ecological concerns popping up in family entertainment? Happy Feet should have stayed light on its feet.

Powerful and surprisingly timely.

The image that finally lingers is one shown repeatedly: a close-up of fingers gently pressing a piece of fish onto a handheld oblong of rice, painting it with a single brushing of sauce and laying it on a plate, after which the preparer steps back. We're left to contemplate the pristine creation and envy Jiro's lucky customers.

Longlegs is a conjuring of dark, poetic cinema where the devil is definitely in the details.

There are several excellent performances, including Wayne Hapi as Potini’s hardened brother. But Curtis is the most memorable part of The Dark Horse.

The Gift stretches things a little too much for it to be a first-rate thriller. Still, among second-rate thrillers, it’s one of the best.

With a zippy soundtrack and breezy editing style, Every Body comes off as an up-to-date declaration that being intersex is something to be celebrated. In the end, we can’t help but share in the enthusiasm.

The true soul of the New York mob is portrayed in Donnie Brasco, a first-class Mafia thriller that is also in its way a love story -- perhaps director Mike Newell's best.

The director is barely a kid, yet this is such a ferociously accomplished, beautifully nuanced and endlessly surprising film, you'd think the guy had been directing for decades. [13 June 2010, p.Q25]

Obviously, no one should wish all films were shot like this. But the approach suits this story and these characters, and that’s all it had to do.