It’s tougher than it looks to sidestep revenge movie shortcuts and formulaic payoffs while keeping matters engaging. But Saulnier does it. Off-kilter and fresh, Rebel Ridge may frustrate crude expectations, but its satisfactions are many.

The film is certainly clever enough to hold an audience's interest throughout, though in the end it's a victim of its own ambition. As a moral investigation, it's shallow and ultimately ludicrous.

It's the most tension-producing movie out there right now -- in the best way, it's almost unbearable.

This is a moderately but consistently entertaining film, with but one extraordinary thing about it, which is Saoirse Ronan in the title role.

A sexy, moody comedy that plays like a dreamy comic novel.

The film doesn't leave the audience with a moral. It just leaves a sense of having been in the stimulating company of passionate people -- all of them in the arts or on the fringes of that world, all of them struggling to make something intense and amazing out of their lives.

This is a movie made by and for adults, and adults should consider seeing it.

You’ll see lots of movies in 2023, and you’ll forget most of them. But Carmen is so sincerely passionate and peculiar that you’re bound to remember it.

Sister Act 2 doesn't challenge Goldberg, but it's a marvelous showcase, nonetheless, for one of the screen's most likable personalities. [10 Dec 1993, p.C1]

This is not comfortable comedy.

A heartfelt effort, if at times a bit heavy-handed.

If “The Jungle Book” is like taking a trip to Disneyland, then “Mowgli” is a hike straight into unknown woods with nothing but some duct tape and a Bowie knife.

While the sequel to "Night Watch" is an imperfect film, it's always interesting.

Mortal Kombat II is a sterling example of an action movie that starts out dumb but gradually becomes kind of awesome — and a little bit smarter.

Jerome and Lopez build an undeniable chemistry that powers the movie, and it wouldn’t work at all unless Jerome wasn’t excellent as well. He is.

A clever look at con artists and their games of deception.

Not surprisingly for a movie of this type, there are lots of scenes of violence, including hand-to-hand combat. The fight choreography is exceptional. In the “John Wick” movies, the violence seems almost like a ballet. Here the fighting is just as intricate, but it also seems like actual fighting, and Hemsworth seems like an actual person who’s doing it.

A one-woman show.

The filmmakers investigate, but can't answer every tough question. There are so many people who could be potentially taking advantage of these players, it's hard to sort out the wrongdoers.

I Am Greta does show why she is a powerful voice. The key to her appeal is her honesty and her “innocence,” or as some would say, naivete.

Hawke is the movie's revelation.

Using movie clips, animation and news footage, Ascher creates his own alternate universe in A Glitch in the Matrix and explores phenomena such as the Mandela Effect, a real-life wonder in which masses of unconnected people claim to “remember” something that is simply not true.

It's a drama with elements of black comedy and suspense, European in feeling but American in attitude. Just for fun, it's set in 1949, an era of glamour, of Hitchcock and of husbands even more clueless than they are today.

An austere rural landscape, festering hatred, class tensions, terse dialogue - these are common currency in indie movies these days. Shotgun Stories uses them all, but manages to stand out from the crowd.

With a sense of eccentric macabre that recalls Roald Dahl and Charles Addams, The Willoughbys arrives on Netflix with a winning, eclectic energy that should have kids — like the animated moppets in the film — bouncing off the walls. In a good way, of course.

It’s still an unusually good picture and worth the time (though you could skip the last 30 minutes and still get all you’re going to get from it). But if only writer-director Ruben Ostlund (“The Square”) had figured out a graceful way to end his movie at, say, the 100-minute point. He’d have had something extraordinary.

When Danny takes off his collar for the last time, Besson's plan becomes clear: You may have paid for an hour and a half of escapist entertainment, but he just provided something much better.

Perhaps the greatest gift of Tick, Tick … Boom! is that it rejects the false narrative of the artist’s one big shot, the make-it-or-break-it moment. Jonathan might keep hearing a timer ticking down in his head, but he has to learn that the singular event of his arrival as an artist is a myth.