At over two hours and forty minutes long, with repeated scenes of bone-crunching violence and a maddeningly unrelenting percussive score by Hans Zimmer, The Dark Knight Rises is something of an ordeal to sit through.

Given Fawcett’s trailblazing achievements — and Gray’s choice to film in difficult circumstances deep in the Colombian jungle — the film is oddly restrained.

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.

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.

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

The second hour, though, strides toward its impressively unstinting resolution with magisterial confidence. With the characters finally stripped of the hardness they’d been forced to wear, their raw selves glisten in the sun until it’s time to wearily tie the carapace back on.

Blue Moon feels like the more major entry in the director’s filmography, if only because it marks a new epoch in his ever-evolving partnership with Hawke.

Despite the preponderance of (PG-rated) snogging, there are pleasures to be found along this movie's meandering path.

Best in Show has an uproarious wild card in Fred Willard, who plays a hack commentator convinced that he's the most amusing fellow on television

This Much Ado About Nothing — while perhaps not an adaptation for the ages in every respect — is as bracingly effervescent as picnic champagne.

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.

Anderson must have needed that bonkers third-hour climax because there was nowhere to go short of spontaneous combustion.

Bronstein expertly infuses the audience with Linda’s negative emotions, as if we were the ones hooked up to a feeding tube. But as I wrote just last week in a review of Benny Safdie’s first solo-directed feature The Smashing Machine, I’m not sure that simply being drawn into a troubled protagonist’s frenetic mental state constitutes the highest aim of cinema.

Del Toro has made a version of the story that’s indelible, but not definitive.

A conspicuously dumb joke nearly ruins a scene, a couple of storylines don’t go anywhere, and the ending simply feels like the film running out of steam. But Sorry to Bother You is so smart and so potent for so long—and so inventive yet thoughtfully measured in its use of the absurd—that the flaws simply give way. You don’t remember the endings of dreams, after all—just the parts that left you in a pool of your own sweat.

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.

After two hours and 20 minutes of flamboyantly repulsive variations on this well-worn theme, even the strongest-stomached and most feminist of viewers could be excused for muttering, We get it already.

The director's beautiful detachment suggests a kind of cowardice.

Shows the dying tremors of a generation, and you might feel as if you can see every molecule, every atom give up the ghost.

Though Logan Lucky’s funny and committed cast (also including Dwight Yoakam, an underused Katherine Waterston, and a barely there Hilary Swank) provides a steady supply of good-sized laughs, this film struck me as underachieving on several fronts.

At times, the picture evokes such stylized musicals as "The Band Wagon"; at others, it seems to whirr every kung-fu movie ever made into the most luscious action smoothie you'll ever imbibe.

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.

But Cate Blanchett ... ahhhh. She doesn't impersonate Katharine Hepburn, she channels her.

It’s such an original and idiosyncratic expression of its creator’s vision that sometimes the movie seems not to have yet made it all the way out of his head and onto the screen.

What it lacks in originality and narrative momentum — even more than Nemo, Finding Dory is in essence a loosely connected series of comic-suspenseful chases, bookended by heart-tugging moments of family separation and reunion — this new movie makes up for in psychological acuity and sensitivity.

It's hard to think of another American film with this range of moods: satirical, sometimes hilarious, yet suffused with a sense of loss and riddled with the kind of violence that makes you recoil and lean forward simultaneously.

Much of the film’s power comes thanks to Moss, who after stealing Listen Up Philip unleashes the most vigorous, visceral performance of her career.

Paddington is a wonder: warm, gentle, well-acted, funny without being stupid.

I don't know what Pollock is supposed to be about, but as it stands—by default—it's the most blood-freezing Jewish-mother nightmare ever filmed. Pollock would give Woody Allen the willies.

It's not hard to forgive this series its lack of innovation, because it manages, for long stretches at least, to be something few serial-killer dramas ever are: really, really good.

There are a lot of stale -- and nefarious -- clichés in 8 Mile, but most of the time they're overwhelmed by the pulsing, grinding, hopped-up camerawork and the soulful star turn of Eminem.

The Ghost Writer is a triumph: elegant, accomplished, and (this is the hardest part to admit) occasionally even wise.

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.

On American screens, at least, there is an almost shocking dearth of honest stories about European colonialism, one of the greatest forces to reshape the globe in the last half-millennium, and Kent’s humanist revisions of the rape-revenge and Western genres represents a visionary attempt to rectify this. It may not always be easy to sit through, but we’re nonetheless lucky to witness it.

It’s well worth seeing, both for its merciless anatomization of the country’s post-Ceausescu social order and for Gheorghiu’s stupendous central performance as a mother so monstrous she makes Medea look like a pushover.

The film isn’t about abortion, or even really about Sage. It’s about grief and the importance of moving on. When Sage forces Elle to ask others for help, Elle has to let down her defenses and allow her loved ones to see that her misanthropy is mostly an act.

The tone is tongue-in-cheek, with teeth gritted so hard you can taste just a hint of blood.

Nunez's movies go places, but with no acceleration.

You don't need to be an exploitation fanboy to appreciate the energy, imagination, and spirit with which Rodriguez and Tarantino pay homage to the cheapo cinema they love.

Cooper’s sophomore film far outshines the common run of contemporary biopics in its artful construction and attention to emotional nuance.

A surprisingly fresh didactic comedy that preaches the hollowness of glamour and status and the American cult of winning.

Like the space mission named in its title, Project Hail Mary pulls off a seemingly impossible task, combining big-budget Hollywood spectacle with small-scale craft. The story it tells, of two lonely but intrepid problem-solvers bridging the huge cultural distance between them to collaborate on addressing a shared cosmic threat, is unabashedly humanistic and hopeful, not to mention timely.

Lee has managed to again make a movie worth debating, wrestling with, and maybe even hating, depending upon how you feel about him as a director.

Wherever these two love-crazed lesbians’ poorly-thought-out plans take them, we’re along for the dizzying ride.

Girls State’s most engrossing characters don’t wind up being those who prevail, but those who persist, who dust themselves off and find a way to keep going forward.

Calvary gives Gleeson ample opportunity to explore his talent for anchoring a movie, making it deeper and richer than the script and direction might otherwise allow.

From an aesthetic and technical perspective, her achievement is laudable, but there’s something underfurnished about this movie, a lack of historical, intellectual, and thematic richness. For all its elaborate design and carefully calibrated mood, it comes down to the tale of a randy fox in an impeccably preserved Greek Revival henhouse.

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.

I wanted to fall under this movie’s spell as if watching one of those early 20th-century immigrant melodramas — instead, it felt like visiting a meticulously appointed but too-tidy historical museum.

For a movie about the policing of borders, couldn't this one have policed a firmer one, between credibility and incredibility? Between seriousness and self-seriousness?

Each stop is ever so slightly better than you remembered. Not another teen movie, indeed.

It is not a superhero flick as we have come to know the genre but a road movie and a Western, one that plays with the myth of the aging cowboy.

There may be deeper, more intangible fears buried beneath this rowdy, raucous thriller’s grody surface—luckily, you won’t have time to stop and ponder them while you’re being chased by a supersized zombie wielding a severed head.

When the groom's enormous procession fights its way through the hard rain and muck to the bejeweled bride, Nair's chaos downright sparkles.

The movie is surprisingly moving in its focus on the character who’s often felt like the show’s biggest drag.

The case could be made that The Disaster Artist is a little too sunny for a movie about a clearly damaged man whose lifelong drive to create something beautiful only led to his becoming a symbol of grand-scale failure. But in addition to making me laugh, hard, at a time when cathartic laughter is all but a medical necessity, this portrait of the artist as a not-so-young weirdo struck me as peculiarly moving.

The Bill Cunningham captured here is a puckish, eightysomething man with electric energy and a wish to devour all of New York through his camera lens.

The movie has become a kind of highway-safety film for the rock community.

Throughout this terse, entertaining parable (it won the grand prize at this year's Cannes Film Festival), the Belgian-born writer-directors Luc and Jean-Pierre Dardenne ("La Promesse," 1996) immerse you in the sensations of Rosetta's life.

For all its tasteful spareness and eerie, diaphanous mood, Blue Caprice feels, in the end, insubstantial. It’s a true-crime story that illustrates little about the crime in question and a character study whose characters, even when haunting, remain stubbornly opaque.

Has the note-perfect melancholy of a classic young adult novel.

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.

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

The best Spike Lee movie to come along since 1992's "Malcolm X." It's also the first Spike Lee movie since "Malcolm X" to star Denzel Washington, and just as Jimmy Stewart and Alfred Hitchcock brought out the best in each other, Denzel and Spike need each other like vermouth and gin.

Dolemite Is My Name delivers on titties, funnies, and kung fu, all mixed up in a syrupy nostalgia that makes the picture’s feel-good populism go down easy. It’s only when the credits roll that you might notice there was little there but froth.

The film’s scruffy, smartass band of brothers, along with Gunn’s light directorial touch, make for an invigorating breather after too many summer weekends of hammer-wielding superheroic solemnity.

The miracle of the movie is the Bolger sisters, who are so direct and matter-of-fact that they hardly seem to be acting. But their simplicity is radiant.

Fukunaga's vision of Jane Eyre is refreshingly un-Gothic. Though all the story elements are in place for a thunder-on-the-moors-style gloomfest (and though there are, in fact, several thunderstorms on moors), this film is low on Romantic atmospherics and flooded with natural light.

The comic high point in Shaun of the Dead comes when Lucy Davis, from the great BBC sitcom "The Office," teaches the band of survivors how to lurch like zombies so that they can pass among the undead.

A grim, twisty international conspiracy picture that challenges the audience on every level, political and aesthetic. The aesthetic part is a bit of an obstacle, though. I can't remember a time I had as much trouble--at a movie I admired--just figuring out what the hell was going on.

Edel's clear-eyed and exhaustively researched account is unique in its refusal to either romanticize or villainize the terrorists. It's a study in the seductive appeal, and inevitable failure, of the attempt to bomb one's way to a better world.

For all its flaws, Dreamgirls is what this holiday season needs. It's a big, fat, luscious movie in which no one is tortured, murdered, or mutilated (honestly, how many recent films can you say that about?).

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.

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

The downside to all this stylishness: that A Very Long Engagement is Amélie Goes to War.

Might be the most perversely agreeable stalker picture ever made.

As simply a genre exercise, Rebel Ridge would be exquisite work, but what elevates the film even further is its rare intelligence and conscience.

Soul Kitchen is sprawling, undisciplined, raucous, occasionally crass-and so full of life you forgive it everything.

Like the thread it’s based on, it’s easy to rush through, even if does visit some darker places. It’s only if you pause for a moment, and linger on it, that you might wish there were more.

Midnight Special eventually sputters to a conclusion that confuses vagueness for ambiguity. The most compelling questions it leaves behind don’t have to do with its plot but with its creator: How much time should a young director have to make good on his potential?

The Guest isn’t here to deliver an earnest social message about the state of veterans’ affairs. Instead, the way good horror movies do, it channels our collective fear, guilt, and rage by creating a monster.

With its restricted one-night timeframe and a setting that rarely expands beyond the walls of the firm, Margin Call can feel like a dramatized version of those ubiquitous 2008 news photos of white men staring in horror at numbers on a screen. But in its best moments, this film reminds us that every one of those pictures contained its own story of compromise, corruption, and ruin.

While it’s a character portrait of a morally small man, Listen Up Philip doesn’t feel like a morally small movie.

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 fun both to watch and to talk about afterward, and it possesses the elusive rom-com sine qua non: two equally appealing leads who bounce wonderfully off each other.

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

It's not a flawless adaptation, but it's a gutsy and deeply affecting one: The filmmakers manage to jazz up Smiley's tempo without losing her melancholy tone; and they find a way--without being untrue to the book--to make the stubbornly recessive protagonist seem a dynamo on the screen.

The whole thing vanishes pretty quickly from memory once it’s over. But for that hour and a half of fluid, kinetic filmmaking, you are putty in the hands of Steven Soderbergh, a reliably pleasurable place to be.

Steiger got the best actor Oscar for his masterful, Method deep-dive portrayal of Gillespie, a man just smart enough to know he's neither as talented as Tibbs nor as ignorant as the people around him. His jaw always working a wad of gum, his beady eyes darting, his blood pressure stroke-level as he spits out orders, he manages to play big without ever splitting the seams of his character.

There's something old-Hollywood about Slate's dizzy-dame charm, and at the same time, something very modern about her unapologetic ownership of her own sexuality.

King Richard is a Will Smith vehicle, through and through.

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

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

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.

In Mother, Brooks has essentially made the missing psychiatrist scene of Modern Romance into a feature. There’s no doctor, mind you, and the character’s string of failed marriages is barely dramatized. But the thrust of the film is frankly therapeutic.

This is a rhythmless, stupefying work. A person with no discernible pulse ought not to be directing a movie about disco.

The movie is never quite pop enough to get audiences hooting and hollering and quoting favorite lines, nor smart enough to inspire passionate post-movie debate. Scene by scene, the film is unassailably well-crafted. But there's something oddly dull, even respectable, about Scott's adherence to the rules of gangster-film grammar.

Hackman gives the con-man lines a simple, straight-ahead urgency that makes the man first hilarious and then, as the pleasures of human company are withdrawn and his resentment begins to bubble up, inexplicably touching. This is a great performance.