As a viewing experience, the film is by turns heartrending and stultifying, but mostly stultifying.

The most Stillmanesque Stillman movie yet. It's about a mood, part wistful, part sardonic. It's about a time of life, about repartee, about the vivid character saying the unexpected thing.

Call it Buñuel meets Blumhouse, a film that is flawed but so full of ideas that it doesn’t matter.

Ridley Scott gives it the grand treatment, 157 minutes worth, but in the end, it doesn't stack up as the portrait of an era (the 1970s, in this case) or an important tale of a criminal mastermind.

Things isn't linear, and it isn't all that lively. But it captures the experience of some modern women, and it feels from the heart.

Might have been about the rise and fall of a family of gifted children. That would have been the typical way to approach the story. Instead, it's something rare -- a movie about people who have already fallen, whose best days are behind them.

There are moments that are too macabre and outlandish, but Gilroy steers the movie just this side of farce, just this side of Chayefsky, and keeps it all within a realistic framework. At times watching, you might wonder how he’ll keep the story going, how he’ll top himself. But he does.

Sure, it’s overly simplistic and not altogether historically accurate but if anyone is looking for a well-made, action-fueled popcorn movie, “The Woman King” sure beats a Wikipedia page every day of the week.

Well made, but it's a talkfest that wears its stage origins on its sleeve.

Often the most exalted of filmmakers — like Terrence Malick, Ingmar Bergman and Alfred Hitchcock — have the ability to communicate their consciousness, so that you get the feeling that you’re inside their head, or they’re inside yours. Anderson has come close to doing that before, but this time he really does it.

These people seem real, even if their primary motivations are ideological. Perhaps more than they intended to, Goldhaber and the actors make the political personal. That’s a triumph of craft over appetites for destruction.

Best in its first hour, when it concentrates on the politics and the specific horrors of Panem. It becomes more conventional in the second half and loses steam, but it's always heading somewhere.

Ayoade is well known to British viewers for his role as a coddled nerd in the sitcom "The IT Crowd," so it's fair to expect laughs from his directorial debut feature. But much depends on your mind-set; U.S. audiences could have trouble with the movie's less-than-sunny worldview.

As Marguerite, Frot is a completely open vessel, ready to receive the muse that cannot come. She has a childlike quality here, but she also seems (and this is both funny and sad) very much the mature artist.

Violent, disjunctive and exhausting, it's a dark fable that illustrates with startling images the strong, seductive pull of evil.

For pure laughs, for the experience of just sitting in a chair and breaking up every minute or so, Superbad is 2007's most successful comedy.

The film holds us rapt not through narrative suspense but through the eerie and demanding spectacle of profound moral courage, of a powerless good person in collision with absolute evil.

Deneuve has fun with her best role in years.

Taken together, “X” and “Pearl” make for a compelling double-feature showcasing blood-spattered homages to different eras of film.

At any given time, a different character will seem to be the movie’s focus. But as long as we recognize that love’s transformational power is the real subject, there can be no mystery about the movie’s intentions or how it’s unfolding.

The film is so pitch perfect and realistic, it seems you are there with these people, watching their lives unfold before you as it happens.

The film is energized by the naturalness of its characters and the way in which it plays a game of mixed signals and double illusions.

This thriller is so expertly -- and perversely -- poised that audience members may find themselves secretly rooting for the duplicitous Ripley.

[Streep] isa pleasure to watch -- and to marvel at -- every second she's onscreen.

Not so much a documentary as a rambling interview, almost all done in animation.

The film’s strongest point of view is that big-time football has become a precious way of life and induces a religious fervor that can warp the judgment of even well-intentioned people. It’s not a groundbreaking thesis, but we still get a fascinating tour of a town that may never be the same again.

In a sense, Jacobs has made a movie about sex that’s not about sex at all. We often hear about “sexual sublimation,” but The Lovers depicts the reverse, which is probably more common, in which sexual adventure becomes the most available substitute for cherished lost dreams.

Uncertainty is a genre trope this director is particularly gifted at manipulating. So many horror films are incoherent due to a lack of good writing; if anything in McCarthy’s script isn’t fully clear, it’s in the same manner that life itself fails to make sense.