The parents are the casualties of Mills' misplaced sincerity, which makes Thumbsucker the quintessential misadapted head-scratcher.

Tarantino's radical rewriting of the war's ending is audacious and perversely enthralling. But if Inglorious Basterds were about something more than the cinematic thrill of watching Nazis suffer, it could have been a revelation.

The heat [Chow] conjures between his leads never rises above a low boil. That’s because Chow never bothers to pretend as if the romance really matters —it’s merely an excuse for a parade of blisteringly clever comic set pieces.

Babel has great expectations for itself: It wants to be a movie about big ideas and big emotions at the same time. Aided by gorgeous locations and classy trappings (cinematography by Rodrigo Prieto, theme music by Gustavo Santaolalla), it succeeds for the most part.

This movie is a freaky little swamp thing.

It's a rollicking children's entertainment, gorgeously animated and wittily cast, and also an unusually astute exploration of the complex bond between mothers and daughters, a relationship that's often either elided or sentimentalized in children's literature and film.

Portman’s voiceover performance is full of conviction, but I wish that Eating Animals gave us different models of vegetarianism than she and Foer, a diminutive actress and a bookish Brooklynite, respectively.

It's a textbook example of a well-crafted movie, beautifully shot, impeccably acted, and structured like an elegant three-act play. So why does the movie feel as pleasantly deadening as the midcentury Connecticut suburb where it takes place?

Though the movie's at least 20 minutes too long, it's deeply satisfying, full of old-school buddy banter and the kind of action sequences that make you burst out laughing at their sheer audacity.

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

Lion goes again and again where you expect it to, delivering little more than the awards-season equivalent of "Homeward Bound."

Howard manipulates audiences without guile, jerking tears, piling on catastrophes, smoothing out dissonances, making bad characters badder and good ones gooder--and clearly believing that this is wholesome. At what he does, he's peerless. I wish I had more respect for what he does--and for myself the next morning for surrendering.

The low-key best performance in the movie comes from Owen Campbell, who sneaks up on us as a peripheral God’s Promise resident, but his quiet and then fierce turn is stifled by the movie’s perfunctory mechanics. No one can quite rise above them.

The movie, sorry to say, can’t quite keep up that swagger. Instead, Rocketman mostly proceeds with studious fidelity through the stations of the rocker biopic, with only a few formal tweaks to the formula.

Gallo’s movie is terrific, an original and disarming vision of a life that's all skids.

There are so many leaps back and forth in time, so many twists and countertwists and double fake-outs, that we keep losing track of who (including ourselves) is supposed to know what when.

Nearly every scene builds to some kind of climactic jump scare.

When a movie wrenches you with the deaths of children then leaves you with nothing to take home but your confusion, it can make you thirsty for the blood of directors.

Sour and mostly feeble, with a depressingly curdled worldview. It bears no resemblance to Allen's surreal, open-ended comedies.

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.

There’s something unseemly about singling out this story, about the seemingly narrow scope of racism and how easily it can be undone. Green Book decries those cultural pockets designed to make white people feel good, often at people of color’s expense. But that’s about all it does, too.

Still, to me, Boy Erased feels mostly honorable and fit for its mantle. Whether a great movie about the gravity of gay conversion might ever be made is a trickier, and for now still unanswered, question.

Because it pulls off the tricky feat of combining multiple pre-existing Marvel franchises into a reasonably entertaining and tonally coherent whole, The Avengers will likely be hailed as a kind of thinking fan's superhero film, the way Whedon's recent "Cabin in the Woods" functioned as both a horror movie and a critique of same.

Above all else, Venus in Fur is a sharp, sexy comedy (adapted by Ives and Polanski from a translation by Abel Gerschenfeld) performed by two superb and superbly in-tune actors, and directed with a sure hand by a filmmaker who’s clearly not cowed by the challenge of blowing up a two-person chamber piece for the screen.

A feminist sitcom tricked up with garish violence and garrulous hit men.

Even when you're able to guess the next calamity, it's still a shock in its ejaculatory intensity. The Farrellys never throw in the towel. Pretentious Sundance independents could learn a lot from such pistols.

The mundane becomes absurd, and the hilarious turns to hilariously gruesome. Sometimes that humor underlines the characters’ struggles.

The movie says that the rebellious spirit that generates art can also consume and destroy -- that there's no undangerous way to ride the tiger.

The tedium of Into the Woods’ second half has less to do with the downbeat subject matter than Marshall’s clumsy direction.

At 93 minutes, Chronic felt unbearable to sit through, at once intimate and difficult, boring and acute. Its tone aspires to the numbness of a limb pinned for too long under a heavy weight.

A somnolent load of wank.

A hilarious, poignant, lovingly ironic celebration of (Tammy Faye Bakker's) rise and fall and her refusal to be broken.

If you like postmodern gimmickry and modern dance, and are OK with sitting through nearly 10 minutes of staged talking-head interviews, glum stoner talk about abortion, nausea-inducing filmmaking, characters whose motivations don’t make sense, horror, exploitative child death, and a quasi-coercive lesbian make-out—but just don’t care to be reminded “Drugs! Are! Bad!”: Leave 89 minutes in. Or don’t come at all, because Climax really isn’t about anything more than that.

Far From Home, which brings back Homecoming director Jon Watts and screenwriters Chris McKenna and Erik Sommers, sometimes strains to match the intensity of the all-out battles in its dialogue scenes, and there are too many exchanges where characters reel off a dozen overlapping half-jokes in the hopes that you’ll come away with the feeling something funny was said.

Wahlberg may have succeeded in singlehandedly cracking the case and bringing the perpetrators to justice but — like the film itself—he fails to find meaning in the wreckage.

At its best, 25th Hour is a melancholy tone poem -- But the movie is also muddled by its own ambitions. There is simply no connection between the themes of Benioff's screenplay and 9/11, and every time Lee over-inflates the story, he loses its real pulse.

For all the film’s best intentions — and a finely tuned performance from the ever-better Woodley — for me The Fault in Our Stars never entirely found its way out of Sparks territory.

21 Jump Street isn't a wild, fresh reinvention of the movie-cliché-spoofing genre - this isn't "Airplane!" we're talking about - but it's also not a drearily overfamiliar retread of it.

If only the results weren't so respectably dull.

Kill Bill is about nothing more (or less) than its director's passion for the mindless action pictures that got him through adolescence. It isn't sex without love: It's an orgy with just enough love.

A package of cinematic Pop Rocks, a neon-hued, defiantly non-nutritive confection that nonetheless makes you laugh at its sheer bold novelty.

Moore’s overarching points hit home with such force that sweating the details would be like picking fleas off a charging grizzly.

For all the familiar joys and comforts this holiday movie provides—maximally decorated homes, Christmas carols, a slapstick scene at a skating rink—its commentary on the agony of living in the closet, or loving someone who is, stakes out some entirely new territory.

Though the subject matter sounds depressing, Crazy Love has an infectious, even bouncy tone.

Intimacy doesn’t answer the question, which makes it all the more tantalizing: This is an emotional puzzle movie.

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.

Compliance examines, among other things, how misplaced faith in authority can lead to abuse on a systemic scale. It's a deeply moral movie about the failure of morality, as grueling to watch as it is necessary.

Star Trek Beyond may not go where no Trek has gone before, but it’s that very fidelity to the show’s original values that will keep fans trekking to the box office.

Powerful and then some.

It's Schoenaerts' magisterial presence that carries the film. In between bursts of convincingly horrific violence (including a fight in an elevator that makes Ryan Gosling's in "Drive" look like a schoolyard tiff), Schoenaerts also shows himself capable of moments of great subtlety and delicacy.

It's full of moving (and surprisingly ungross) filmed deliveries, including those by Epstein and Lake themselves. Unfortunately, the movie is also a propagandistic brief on behalf of the home-birth movement that's so selective in its presentation of information that it makes Michael Moore look like a fat lady in a blindfold holding a pair of scales.

Director Gary Ross' adaptation, co-scripted by Collins herself, isn't quite as crackingly paced as the novel, but it will more than satisfy existing fans of the trilogy and likely create many new ones.

Breezy, brief, and often a howl.

I left the film moved to tears, and still feeling like something huge was missing.

I could go on about the beautifully detailed production design, the fresh performances from unknown and often nonprofessional actors, blabbety blah. But praising the movie's craftsmanship seems less urgent than communicating the overwhelming experience of watching it: the clammy, claustrophobic dread of being trapped in a torture chamber.

The Borat sequel’s best moments are when it turns from mockumentary to straight-up doc, finding Americans who look past Borat’s bushy mustache and try to connect with the human behind it.

Was The Adventures of Tintin a movie that I personally vibed with? Not really. It felt overstuffed and busy, its charm a little calculated, its outsized budget a tad too ostentatiously on display. But it's a rollicking yarn told with scads of invention and energy, not to mention a technical marvel of the first order.

Even in the film's weaker stretches, the fierce presence of Tilda Swinton made it impossible to tear my eyes away.

While the film is deliberately crude in some respects — Park once described his aesthetic as making sure that, no matter how carefully sculpted his clay figures were, he always left the thumbprints showing — it’s fastidiously detailed in others, dancing between broad humor and subtle, almost subliminal gags as it plays out the conflict between Neanderthals and their evolutionary successors.

Depp's performance as Bulger is as strong, and as energized, as anything he's done on screen for years.

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 Slums of Beverly Hills never gels, but it has a likable spirit, and it's exceedingly easy on the eye, with lots of pretty girls and wry evocations of '70s fashions and decor.

The Hateful Eight is bold, gorgeous, verbally clever, morally repellent, and, in some way I am still struggling to put my finger on, possibly somehow evil. Any movie that inspires mixed feelings that intense can, I suppose, be said to have done its work on the viewer. But I’m not sure the work The Hateful Eight performed on me was what the filmmaker intended or that it’s an operation I would consent to again.

It's an exquisitely crafted period picture that keeps promising more and more as it goes along--smarter ideas, richer themes, spookier plot twists--and keeps delivering on every promise, right up until the rug-pulling and overly hasty final sequence.

It's on the verge of being really good...his narrative peters out without a decent payoff. It's a testament to the rage and anxieties that he has brilliantly tapped into that he can't get away with a subdued conflagration and a lame twist at the end.

To paraphrase the novel's famous last lines, it's not often a story comes along that can make for both a great book and a wonderful movie. Charlotte's Web isn't both.

Howard might be a major actor. His DJay, though, is a major character in search of a major author.

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

More diverting is the increasingly desperate forensics the FBI resorts to in order to build a case against Jewell, though it’s not always clear which tactics are simply thorough, now outdated, or flagrantly illegal. But Richard Jewell has so little to say about its time period or how the culture has shifted that it ends up exposing the relative quaintness of its concerns.

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

It doesn’t matter that the plot is predictable, because it’s merely a means for getting from one precise (and hilarious) musical parody to the next.

The movie gets right so many of the little nuances about combat and Army life.

Maggie’s agonizing zero-sum struggle to balance a life of military service and a steady relationship with her son feels fresh, raw, and real — even if the conflict it enacts is as old as the transition between The Iliad and The Odyssey, between the horrors of the battlefield and the difficult journey home.

Sitting through its 2 hours and 30 minutes is like gorging on tapas: You wind up both overstuffed and unsatisfied.

When every character is always operating at maximum loathsomeness, it can be difficult to recalibrate your disgust-o-meter. I suspect this sense of moral vertigo, and the resulting nausea, is part of what Cronenberg is after, but his skill at evoking those states in the viewer doesn’t make the experience of watching Maps to the Stars any less sour.

Pitt can mock his absurdly good-looking younger self in part because he knows he’s got something more valuable now: the kind of magnetism that mere attractiveness can’t compete with.

With Wick—the best Reeves role in years, and the best existential actioner since Drive—Reeves fans have found something that should cheer them up, too.

Whereas the original was a work of speculative science fiction - a chin-stroking fable about evolution in the nuclear age - this revisiting of the Planet of the Apes myth is an animal-rights manifesto disguised as a prison-break movie.

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.

It comes by its screams honestly, earning them with incremental, at times agonizing gradations of old-fashioned, what's-that-noise-in-the-hallway suspense.

The movie can’t compete with the Missions: Impossible and Fast and Furiouses for visual spectacle, so what it offers by way of compensatory heft is a tangled plot full of double-crosses and hidden identities, combined with a ponderous gait that suggests that more than the mere world is at stake.

I can’t say that this austere, beautiful movie satisfied my impatient desire for answers. (It seems, in fact, to be a rebuttal to that desire.) But I’ll be thinking about Kumiko’s journey for a long time.

The needless cruelty of the criminal justice system feels like a world begging for more sense-making, but Just Mercy only sees its characters as heroes, victims, or obstacles, not as rational beings who might have their own reasons to knowingly commit terrible acts. Cretton’s desire to focus tightly on McMillian’s case makes sense, but he accidentally makes the white malefactors in the town more fascinating for their villainy.

The movie’s soulful self-seriousness, like that of its liquid-eyed hero, can occasionally slip into self-parody. But this movie confirms my "Blue Valentine"-based suspicion that the 38-year-old Cianfrance is one to watch. He’s capable of coaxing tremendous moments from actors, he knows how to move a camera, and as this over-laden but never boring movie shows, he’s willing to operate from a place of risk.

A brainy weave of satire and fantasy.

The film spends too much time wringing its hands over the all-too-evident fact that journalism is in crisis, when it could be documenting that crisis from the inside.

Am I the only one who finds the substance of this movie repulsive?

What a shock when George Lucas finds his footing and the saga once again takes hold.

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.

The mere phrase "Brad Pitt as Jesse James" makes for a kind of mini-reflection on the evolution of celebrity culture. It's a shame that The Assassination of Jesse James never goes much deeper than that tag line.

Anyone who can credibly threaten to steal a movie from Anthony Hopkins has seriously got it going on. Fracture may be remembered as the movie that brought Ryan Gosling into the mainstream.

A pandering, debased, generic little nothing of a movie. And I'm still trying to figure out why I loved it so inordinately.

Byrne, who played a tightly wound control freak to perfection in "Bridesmaids," here gets a chance to bust loose. In a late sequence where she frantically spearheads a multipart mission to bring down Delta Psi from the inside, Byrne makes you wish someone would write a big, broad, raunchy comedy just for her.

At any rate, this movie’s insistent and unapologetic commitment to its own weirdness is evidence that the 79-year-old writer-director, like the ever-mutating human specimens he loves to imagine, is nowhere near done evolving.

For me the biggest disappointment of The Unbearable Weight of Massive Talent—a likeable if lightweight comedy that’s more than worth seeing for Cage’s and Pascal’s touching bromance and its Nick-confronts-Nicky fantasy sequences—was that it didn’t go even further with its central doppelgänger conceit.

Black Widow is too long, too loud, preposterously overplotted, and slightly headache-inducing—all arguably features and not bugs when it comes to big tentpole blockbusters. But walking out of it I felt like summer had finally—finally!—begun

Beatty made a film with visionary elements but without a guiding vision.

Zobel and Modi have crafted a thoughtful narrative about the experience of navigating and attempting to accommodate others' personalities.