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.