If you see Okja, and I hope you do, stay for the final credits. It’s not often that a stinger scene pops up at the end of a movie, not to pre-sell the inevitable sequel, but to leave you with something to think, wonder, and worry about.

As brilliant and grotesquely funny as Dr. Strangelove is, the neglected Fail-Safe is the more mature and damning take on the nuclear enterprise. It feels like it could have really happened, and it’s terrifying as a result.

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.

When you watch Waitress, you're also watching a meta-movie about Shelly's brutal end, and the spirit that bursts from every corner of this overcrowded movie is so genuinely warm that trashing it feels like panning a so-so baton-twirling performance at the church talent show.

I found The Skeleton Twins merely entertaining, but I’d love to see these two actors team up again, Tracy-and-Hepburn style, and make a string of movies together — maybe some that would venture further into the post–rom-com territory this one begins to explore.

Though it has its share of voice-over exposition and comic stock footage, the film's real purpose is to aggregate individual health-care horror stories into a portrait of the profit-driven and (literally) inhospitable place our country has become.

Apart from Theron and Christina Ricci as her lover, there's nothing in Monster that rises above the level of doggedly well-meaning, although the film is worth seeing for the acting and as a sort of palate-teaser for Broomfield and Churchill's documentary.

Tabloid is the perfect movie for that night when you can't decide whether to see something low- or highbrow. It's seamlessly and satisfyingly both.

Sumpter nails the first lady’s air of warm but reserved composure and the slow, careful way she enunciates her words, as if putting an extra measure of thought into choosing each phrase.

For most of Wild, we’re alone with Cheryl’s stark aloneness with herself. That’s a fine place to be.

In typical Jonze fashion, the film is loose and anarchic yet deceptively well-controlled, its fourth wall always in varying states of permeability.

Wrenching new documentary about returning veterans, may not single-handedly reverse the trend of ignoring Iraq docs in theatrical release, but it should.

May not be the single best movie I've seen so far this year--though it's certainly a contender for the title--but it's without doubt the most surprising.

As for Bardem: How can I do him justice? He is normally the most robustly physical of actors, with a plummy voice and an insolent sensuality. To see him immobile, ashen, his hair gone, de-bodyized: It's agonizing.

A minor-key ghost story with major jolts.

The world is not so full of beauty that one can wave away Mary’s visual majesty, especially now that its hand-drawn style is nearly a thing of the past. But the flaws in its writing are harder to overlook.

At the end of Inception, I hadn't lived through the grueling emotional journey Nolan seemed to think I had, but I'd seen a bunch of cool images and admired some technically ambitious feats of filmmaking.

I mean Serenity no disrespect when I say it's enjoyably junky.

The Last King of Scotland never rises to the standard set by Forest Whitaker's fearless (and fearsome) performance as Idi Amin.

Hanks and Zemeckis (and writer William Broyles Jr.) are so intent on making an epic of the spirit that they can't bring themselves to acknowledge the comic, narcissistic side of their desert island fantasy. And so on simple, human terms, the picture gets all gummed up.

This film is a curiously paradoxical achievement: a visual and aural marvel that is also a crashing bore.

The movie is mechanical, but machines can be elegant, even inspired.

Quite pleasant.

Araki is trying to work from the inside out; and he captures feelings about sexual exploitation that I've never seen onscreen--not all of them negative.

My only problem with Mongol is that--how often in life do you get to write this sentence?---Genghis Khan is a little too nice.

The music ties together all the pretty pictures, gives the narrative some momentum, and helps to induce a kind of alert detachment, so that you're neither especially interested nor especially bored. Perhaps that's a state of Buddhist enlightenment.

Munich is the most potent, the most vital, the best movie of the year.

The script, co-written by director Wash Westmoreland; his late husband, Richard Glatzer; and Rebecca Lenkiewicz (Disobedience), is fun, delightfully sharp, and at times surprisingly tender.