Despite the increase in seriousness, the film's mood is buoyant, as it's impossible not to root for these appealing if flawed youngsters.

Night Moves, which shows her at her best and worst, also shows two roads, right and wrong, that Reichardt can choose to pursue. As someone who likes this filmmaker even when I don't like her movies, I hope she takes the harder road.

Edge of Tomorrow covers familiar ground with unexpected wit and economy, and the result is a thoroughly entertaining sci-fi fantasy.

It's nothing you'd ever want to put yourself through twice, and yet it's effective in the moment. Shrewdly prefabricated and yet lovingly assembled, it is, in short, the most beautifully made cynical thing I've ever seen.

Then there's the acting, particularly that of Sam Shepard, as an old ex-con without much in the way of limits.

The Dance of Reality may not succeed, but it may hold some interest to cinephiles as a relic of a kind of extravagant, overheated personal cinema that doesn't exist anymore.

The Grand Seduction slowly brings its story into focus and then sneaks up and becomes quite funny.

Maleficent imparts a feeling of enchantment. Here is a world that's strange and beautiful.

An inventive and caustic comedy that really does look like the thing it's mocking.

Ida is a rarity, a film both intensely grounded in painful historical reality and genuinely otherworldly.

It's hard to argue with the movie's basic point. Dr. Robert Lustig of UCSF sums it up in three words: "Sugar is poison."

Will serve mainly to reassure his countless admirers that Ai has recovered his defiance and ingenuity: a heartening message, but one that may be lost on those still unacquainted with his true case against the Chinese state.

An astonishingly beautiful, irresistibly grim movie.

For those willing to overlook its few slips into heavy-handedness, Corpo Celeste tells a compelling story of a 12-year-old girl thrust into a strange new world.

Klapisch still gets these characters to sneak up and make us care about them - though it might help if you remember them from when they were young.

Audiences will walk away thinking, "What was that?" But they will walk away thinking.

Badly made and poorly written, Blended is a rehash of Adam Sandler's 2011 comedy "Just Go With It," only without Jennifer Aniston and without laughs. It not only gets the big things wrong. It gets the small, easy things wrong.

Most important, there is an emotional undercurrent in this installment that the earlier films only aspired to. When for a brief moment, the younger Charles Xavier meets the older, there is the sense of time's mystery - and also of the long, magnificent slog of a purpose-driven life.

Many of the individual scenes are compelling, with a gritty tension that recalls "The Wire" and other good television. But too many of the attempts at "The Sopranos"-style comic drama fail.

Chef is the best thing he (Favreau) has ever done, as writer or director or actor. It's the sort of thing of beauty that filmmakers are ultimately remembered for.

Nothing in the story feels specific to that California city, or emblematic of it.

Miserly on food porn but not on prefab characters, it's well short of a cinematic feast.

How could a little story like this get stretched to 124 minutes? It's at least 30 minutes too long.

What's particularly weird about Godzilla is that for long stretches, all it shows is destruction.

Offers some memorable stories, but it simply tries too hard.

As a documentary, it is very much what it set out to be - a celebration bordering on propaganda. Yet enough slips through to keep it interesting.

Taken as a whole, the movie is far-fetched and even faintly ridiculous; and yet, in the moment to moment, it's compelling and truthful.

Belle isn't a perfect movie; in some ways it's obvious. But even if it's not true to history, it's true to that painting and worthy of its inspiration.