It's rich, but slow, and children younger than eight (like mine) might get restless. But this big kid was lost in admiration.

There is a long and honorable tradition of broad intermarriage comedies (from the Romans to Abie's Irish Rose to La Cage aux Folles), and this one comes at least shoulder-high to the best. It has been directed by Joel Zwick in a happy, bustling style and acted with madcap ethnic relish.

Even if this Superman remains an anomaly in the superhero-movie cosmos, the discovery of the winningly un-macho David Corenswet—without a doubt the best Superman since Christopher Reeve, who like Corenswet was a hunky Juilliard graduate with a bashful, dimpled smile—is enough to lift this new version of the long-beloved character into the sky.

Feels more like The Bill Clinton Story than "Primary Colors" (1998). It's a paean to naughty boys who dream of potency and become enraptured by their own scams -- a great American archetype.

I pretty much loved this movie from start to finish - risible implausibilities, insufficiently explained premise and all. An admirably spare survival thriller, The Grey (nice title!) abounds in qualities that are rare in movies of its type. It's quiet, contemplative, and almost haiku-like in its simplicity.

Fey's comic gifts mesh with Wiseman's first-hand research, and the wit becomes dazzling.

The Mustang, "The Rider," and "Lean on Pete" all end on fragile notes of hope for their central figures, even as their futures remain uncertain. The horses, notably, are less lucky. Equine counterparts in horse movies serve a variety of functions, but mostly as proxies for the heroes’ struggles and signals of their ultimate nobility. That is more or less true of The Mustang, and the movie’s final scene is a hair too literal in that respect.

A giddy ballet in which the women whirl around a still, clueless man.

This is a movie about battling evil that pauses to ask what evil is and whether it’s necessary to understand its nature in order to defeat it.

It's one of those zeitgeist-tapping romantic comedies that feels like a generational marker, a "Tootsie" or "The Graduate" for the 21st century.

Represents a course-correction for Disney's multibillion-dollar princess franchise: It attempts to celebrate the virtues of hard work and pluck, even if the movie itself can feel at times like a lesson rather than an enchantment.

The heart of the film is the father-son bond, but Chadha, a filmmaker long preoccupied with the inner lives of Desi-British girls and women, also gives Javed’s sister (Nikita Mehta) a lovely reveal. If a couple of segments droop in their strict adherence to Manzoor’s biography, it’s certainly forgivable. This movie won’t blind anyone with its innovation, but it’s got plenty to dazzle and delight.

It advances no cutting-edge ideas and pushes no cinematic boundaries. But watching it at a moment when the majority of the population is moving leftward while our institutions are held hostage by a far-right minority — and when police violence continues, unchecked and unprosecuted, in the streets — provides the vicarious pleasure of watching a bunch of hyperarticulate progressives speak truth to power, and it feels pretty damn good, even if they do all talk a lot like Aaron Sorkin.

This 21st-century installment of the Mary Poppins story depends perhaps a bit too much on our lasting goodwill for the first one. But it also provides enough pleasure on its own to leave us hoping it won’t be 54 years until that familiar prim figure makes her next appearance through an opening in the clouds.

The movie got me where I live, but I think that even non-Park Slope real-estate owners will have a blast at Duplex: It's one of the most unnerving slapstick extravaganzas I've ever seen.

For people who enjoy coming out of movies unsettled, a little riled up, bursting with questions, and spoiling for a debate, see Elle.

Though the ending makes it clear that this movie’s purpose is largely to set up future Mortal Kombat movies, it still stands well enough on its own, and it benefits from not looking as cheap or as cheesy as its 1990s predecessors.

Though its story may sound formulaic on paper, please take my word for it: Monsieur Lazhar, written and directed by Philippe Falardeau, is a sharply intelligent, deeply sad, and not remotely sappy film about both teaching and collective grief.

The world according to Mann is loud, dangerous, morally ambiguous, and more than a little greasy, but during the hours you spend there, there's nowhere you'd rather be.

It finds a way to make the play's rich, dense literary language (just before the climactic battle, one character accuses another of "breaking his oath and resolution like/A twist of rotten silk") sound as terse and urgent as the dialogue in a tightly plotted action thriller.

A sharp-witted, visually layered, gorgeously designed, meticulously directed piece of formula pablum.

My chief complaint is that these mutants are a little--well, vanilla. I wish the X-Men had a touch of kinkiness to go with their weird abilities.

An obligatory setup for a sequel slows down the final moments, but until then, Tomb Raider feels like a perfectly paced trio of espresso shots, with a shot of adrenaline to the heart as a chaser.

Extract seems destined to do minor business at the box office but achieve a kind of immortality as a cult DVD, to be quoted from at parties and passed around to friends. Which may be just fine by its creator--as Beavis and Butt-head have taught us, snickering with your friends in front of the television can is one of life's great joys.

The neat thing about Jonathan Parker's modern-day Bartleby (Outsider Pictures) is that it brings out all the vaudeville undercurrents in Melville's dark tale and turns it into a surreal tragi-sitcom for our own era.

Mopey, draggy, and absurdly self-important, the movie nonetheless twangs at some resonant affective chord. This viewer, at least, was catapulted back to that moment of adolescence when being mopey, draggy, and absurdly self-important felt like a passionate act of liberation.

Whatever this universe is, you're inside it, with your mouth open, wishing that all sporting events could be this exhilarating, that all human bodies could work this way, that all simpleminded movies could be this mindfully empty-headed.

The revelation of Hateship Loveship is the casting of Kristen Wiig, who effortlessly makes the shift from comedian to straight dramatic actress in a role full of potential ego traps that she never falls into.

It's fun to see actors doing what they do and to see them through the eyes of a director.

It's an elegant, civilized, and deeply liberal piece of craftsmanship, with the sort of social conscience you rarely encounter in a modern American thriller.

Man on Wire brings back a time when the towers were still symbols of aspiration and possibility.

Blue Ruin is a Clint Eastwood vigilante fantasy with an anti-Clint at its center—small-statured, round-faced, nervous Dwight (Macon Blair), whose burning desire to avenge the long-ago murder of his parents doesn’t make him one whit less terrified of actually doing it.

This is a movie that traffics in deep hindbrain emotions: fear and rage and lust and, above all, the pure animal drive to go on living.

The great strength of Michael Clayton is that it's no "Erin Brockovich." Rather than a populist tale of class-action triumph, the movie is a grim vision of legal and ethical compromise at the top.

The result is a movie that’s sad, but not at all unbearable — in fact, that’s oddly inspiring.

When the system is rigged, trying to do the right thing wears a man down.

I say give The End of the Tour a try. Ponsoldt’s gentle, talky road movie is a sort of Gen-X update of "My Dinner With André": A movie of ideas that, far from being the pompous screed that category might imply, actually contains interesting ideas — and what’s more, allows its characters’ perspectives on those ideas to remain in productive tension with one another.

There’s a striking similarity in how American Dharma and "Fahrenheit 11/9" end, with the confident prediction that a revolution is coming, if it is not already here. Moore and Bannon are talking about opposite insurgencies, but they both see a country on the verge of explosion. Moore wants to light a match, and Morris wants to snuff one out.

Blockers is about as funny and heartfelt as studio comedies get (which isn’t meant as a backhanded compliment), while smart and insightful enough to double as a guide to raising teenage girls.

The Woodsman should be pretty intolerable, but the writing-line by line-is heartfelt and probing, the direction gives the actors room to stretch out, and the performances are miraculous.

Moonrise Kingdom is fun: a gorgeously shot, ingeniously crafted, über-Andersonian bonbon that, even in its most irritatingly whimsical moments, remains an effective deliverer of cinematic pleasure.

A sturdy piece of work, an old-fashioned conversion narrative with some high-tech zip.

Perhaps more than any of the M:I directors so far, McQuarrie understands the unique properties of this singular movie star — his ascetic intensity, his sometimes-scary moral certainty, his always-scary drive to excel. The result of their collaboration is a briskly paced and witty reminder of why we go see summer action movies in the first place.

Like "Anvil!," Sacha Gervasi's 2008 documentary about two lovable, bickering metalheads, Beats, Rhymes & Life is a music documentary with a buddy-movie heart.

Impressive and heartfelt.

Spielberg has an effortless-seeming knack for creating compositions that are not just lovely to look at but integral to the idea or emotion he’s trying to express.

Something between a love story and a religious morality tale. The hauntingly ambiguous last scene, in which Lorna finds a place of temporary respite from the economic forces that have determined so much of her life, may be the saddest happy ending I've ever seen.

Its visual splendor more than makes up for its intellectual poverty.

It has been sexed up, opened out, and finished off with a disappointing bang-bang climax, but it's still good fun.

The film has a kamikaze comic spirit that's spectacularly disarming.

The whole movie is like that: gleaming, but with a whiff of the charnel house. Dirty Pretty Things doesn't quite cut to the bone, but it gets as far as a couple of vital organs.

I could quibble with the conventionally romantic ending and a couple of small but not-so-cosmetic alterations, but on the whole, this is just how I'd always imagined one of my favorite comic novels should look and sound.

Admirable and wondrously strange--as well as gorgeous, funny, dreamlike, mesmerizing, squirmy, and occasionally annoying.

The Farrellys have set themselves the awesome task of arguing passionately for the non-importance of appearance while at the same time making relentless sport of it. The happy news is that they pull it off: In Shallow Hal, they've contrived a deeply humanist gross-out comedy.

To undertake a thriller of this length and scope with no prospect of a morally satisfying resolution, Fincher must have been a little nuts himself. We'll see whether audiences used to the tidy one-hour cases on "CSI" and "Law & Order" will follow him down Zodiac's murky, twisted, and ultimately dead-end street. It may not sound like it from that description, but it's a hell of a ride.

I don’t know how long the boys can keep tapping the well of their surreal imaginations before they become exhausting. But I do know that The Treasure of Foggy Mountain made me laugh so hard I missed a number of jokes.

The film is marvelous fun on its own terms -- I laughed all the way through it.

Happy People's images of the Taiga, while often breathtaking, come from the standard visual language of nature documentary: in between interviews with villagers, cutaways to icicles hanging from branches or dawn breaking over an expanse of snow. It's Herzog's inventive use of voice-over that elevates the film above an extremely well-researched episode of "Nature."

Obviously, this sort of taboo-flouting imagery isn't for everyone, but Park's vision is all of a piece.

For all its gritty genre elements, Hit Man is at heart a cozy hangout movie, a minor but thoroughly enjoyable entry in the Linklater canon.

At its best, the movie evokes that blend of thrill and terror that comes from mixing two chemicals together without being sure that an instant later you'll still be standing there in one piece.

The ultimate praise given to sports movies is always, "Even if you don't care about sport X, you'll care about these characters," and that's certainly true of Undefeated (I don't, and I did).

Despite the movie's many flaws, the two leads' genuine rapport is enough to give the audience a solid contact high.

A truly unformulaic comedy of lust and greed, a farce that seems to write itself, slap-happily, as it goes along.

Nostalgia may buckle you into A Thousand and One, but the ride you take is one of emotional turmoil, beauty, love, and terror. Yes, terror.

This is not to say that Gravity is a masterpiece: Unlike Cuarón’s extraordinary "Children of Men", it doesn’t quite pull off its ambitious effort to combine formal inventiveness, heart-pounding action, and intimate human storytelling. But it succeeds thrillingly at the first two of those categories, and only misses the mark on the last because it tries a little too hard — which is certainly a welcome respite from the countless sci-fi thrillers that privilege the human story not at all.

What keeps Babygirl from feeling preachy or self-serious is the film’s sense of humor and playfulness when it comes to matters of sex.

It's both fractured and fluid, with a helter-skelter syntax and a ceaselessly infectious backbeat. Beyond that, it's a blast.

The majority of Fury Road’s effects were done without using CGI, but even so, the onslaught of action is so fast-paced and overpowering there’s little time to appreciate Miller’s analog artistry, and the feeling of being inside a video game—a sinking sensation familiar from less carefully orchestrated action movies—sometimes takes over.

The movie has an intriguing wild card in Bess Armstrong as an ex-prostitute turned Zen masseuse. I'm not sure if she's meant to be brilliantly evolved or an idiot -- or if the actress is really good or really, really terrible. But her chemistry with Forster is terrific.

The chance to see the 83-year-old Hopkins in a role that forces him to confront the tragic fact of human mortality, and his own eventual demise, with such rigor, curiosity, and vulnerability would have been reason enough to send audiences to see The Father, even if we weren’t also witnessing the birth of a major film director in Florian Zeller.

Burton's overall restraint is a welcome surprise. Shorn of his usual camp trappings, the director evokes a sadness beneath every uneasy smile he draws from the audience.

Avengers: Endgame throws in plenty of laughs along the way. In fact, in the long stretch between its appropriately somber opening chapter and an emotionally grueling finale, it may be the most lighthearted and character-driven Marvel movie since the giddy comic entry "Thor: Ragnarok." Endgame consists almost entirely of the downtime scenes that were always secretly everyone’s favorite parts of these movies anyway.

Days of Future Past is the kind of extravagant production that sweeps you up in a sense of mythic grandeur even as you struggle to follow what’s going on.

It's the feel-good movie of the year.

The animating humanism of Scott’s film is irreducible. It’s a wry tribute to the qualities that got our species into space in the first place: our resourcefulness, our curiosity and our outsized, ridiculous, beautiful brains.

In its portrayal of black athletes and their families navigating a system that both depends on them and abases them, High Flying Bird is a low-key act of subversion that just happens also to be a sleek, entertaining drama.

A House of Dynamite...is a feel-bad movie, but a precise and well-constructed one, with a capable and charismatic ensemble cast that delivers the script’s grim message with many not-unpleasurable jolts of adrenaline.

Written and directed by Wisit Sasanatieng, a commercial director making his first feature film, Tears of the Black Tiger is a technical and aesthetic marvel.

The movie is a generic paranoid espionage fantasy, but its proportions are refreshingly correct. It moves quickly, adroitly, and without fuss.

Gojira is no masterpiece, but it has the power of a masterpiece: It's the most emotionally authentic fake monster movie ever made.

A gratifyingly slick and fast-moving Flemish thriller, directed by Erik Van Looy, with superb acting.

Certainly the most genteel film Cronenberg has ever made, with period costumes worthy of Merchant/Ivory, no gore, and very little physical violence. But A Dangerous Method doesn't feel like a wimp-out or a sell-out at all. It's a fiercely thoughtful film, a movie of ideas that understands how powerful ideas can be.

Like Someone in Love is a movie that never quite lets you through to the other side of the glass, but it’s dazzling to watch whatever drifts by on the surface.

Even if you’re not transported by every minute of the film’s story, though, del Toro creates such a sumptuous visual world that it’s impossible to take your eyes off the screen.

A brainy weave of satire and fantasy.

This is the kind of movie that often racks up more than a few walkouts but also makes for passionate postscreening conversations.

That rare mainstream cop thriller that refuses to telegraph its outcome in the first 15 minutes or, for much of its running time, to tell you how to feel about its protagonists.

Part road movie, part coming-of-age story, and part noir police procedural, the quietly confident Fancy Dance marks the feature debut of Erica Tremblay, a documentary filmmaker who also wrote and directed episodes of the FX series Reservation Dogs.

Return to Paradise doesn't boast many surprises. It's straight-on, morally uncomplicated. Emotionally, though, it's dense and twisty -- and smashingly potent.

The Fallout doesn’t need fanfare or gore to make its point: In its starkness, the film is undeniably striking and reveals no matter how much healing takes place after a tragedy like a school shooting, its devastating impact will persist.

Barbarian doesn’t feel the need to signal that it’s better than genre clichés by constantly winking at them, nor does it deploy them with the punishing determination of David Gordon Green’s Halloween movies. But Cregger has thought about why they work, and he keeps paying them off in unexpected ways.

The documentary cannot be called muckraking, as the muck has already been well-raked, but Gibney's recounting has a touch of playful sadism that I quite enjoyed.

1917 doesn’t solve the problem that was posed 100 years ago by the historical convergence of modern warfare and modern image-making technology. No movie can provide a final answer to the question of what it means to film a war. But Mendes’ stunningly crafted entry in the genre will now become a part of a long history of imperfect representations of that unrepresentable conflict.

Beat by beat, Mamet turns out an immaculately staged, crisply paced, and elegantly acted movie. It's also a tad bloodless, but you can't have everything.

The 39-year-old Spanish director has made a bait-and-switch movie that won’t stop switching, a high-wire act he pulls off through sheer creative onslaught.

It’s largely a showcase for two commanding performances from Moss and Stuhlbarg. Stuhlbarg might just have the edge.

Like a film noir siren Gone Girl is beautiful, sexy, and fascinatingly mean — a nasty but estimable piece of work.