It's scary to have to puzzle out a plot line scene by scene -- scary and exhilarating, at least for an hour.

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.

Anything Else feels driven. It's like a rant from a therapist's couch--angry, unmediated, free-associational, unleavened by sentiment or compassion. And it's something else that Allen hasn't been lately: funny.

Justin Lin, who's now directed three movies in the Fast series, knows how to choreograph and edit an action sequence so that it's more than an onslaught of chopped-up images and grating noise.

Bogdanovich has been so smooth and loving in his directorial attentions that he has forgotten to give the tragical farce proceedings any terrible momentum.

A stylish, ingeniously constructed bit of hokum, a sparkling trinket of a movie that's as implausible as it is irresistible.

It's Depp as Barnabas that holds the movie together. The story may be less than coherent and some of the minor characters washouts, but when he's on-screen, there's energy and humor and that foppish sex appeal that (as in the first Pirates of the Caribbean movie) reminds you why you once liked Johnny Depp.

For the first hour of Night Watch, a dark, arresting, and unrelentingly weird thrill ride out of post-Soviet Russia, one feels lost. Not bad lost, as with a densely clotted mess like "Underworld: Evolution," whose mythopoetics land in the viewer's lap in concrete chunks; but good lost, exhilarated lost, like what am I watching?

Match Point starts out crisply and deliciously, but in the end, it's a chess problem crossed with an ethics exam.

Duchovny is rather endearing and Driver's absolutely enchanting.

As powerful as Foxcatcher can be scene to scene, there’s something maddeningly indistinct about it at times, as if the details that would make it all make sense remain somehow inaccessible to us.

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.

As a lifelong aficionado of sprawling, dopey disaster movies with plenty of character back story—your Poseidon Adventures, your Twisters, your Titanics—and as maybe the world’s biggest fan of Emmerich’s 2012 (2009), I was naturally inclined to enjoy Moonfall, and I did, though maybe with not quite as much glee as I vibed with the fevered conspiracy theories and lovingly preserved world treasures of 2012.

This is one of those roles where casting can't help but trump acting. Like Elizabeth Taylor as Cleopatra, Angelina Jolie IS Mariane Pearl--and that marquee-size "is" gets in the way, not of her performance, but of our ability to suspend disbelief and watch it.

It is silly, sure, and it has its contrived moments. (There’s a big chase scene in a maze meant to resemble a dungeon crawl in a way that one only finds in movie adaptations of toys and board games, of which I am sorry to say this is far from the first.) But it is also eminently sincere.

Though the film immerses us in the details of Senna's life and the world of Formula One for 104 thrilling minutes, we leave still wondering both who Senna was and how Formula One racing works.

To his great credit, Villeneuve has followed through on the task he set for himself in Dune’s moody, enigmatic, and expansive first chapter: He now returns to the world he so painstakingly established, ready to orchestrate the grand-scale conflicts that are about to tear it apart.

Every detail of staging, movement, and utterance is studied, affected to the highest degree, while the lust, anger, malice, and grief are wildly, shockingly real.

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.

Cinematically, Doubt is something of a dud. But if it remains a play, it's an ingeniously structured one, with smart, thought-provoking words spoken by fabulous actors, and how often do most of us get to see one of those, whether in three dimensions or two?

This kind of "one crazy night" tale relies on drum-tight structure to work. Without it, The Hangover sputters to a sentimental halt. Still, it's worth staying for the closing credits.

Uneven, ludicrous, but--oh man!--fun to watch.

People who dismiss Moore and G.I. Jane out of hand are wrong, because she makes a memorably tough heroine and the movie is solid fun, even, in places, quite intelligent.

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.

Even in a film so sumptuous, with such tender performances, Eve manages to distinguish herself. It’s the kind of turn in a film that could lead the way to a long-lasting career — if not for Eve, then for others like her. “She is here, ready for her next big project,” Henry says. “I don’t think people consider cows as leading characters, but that may change after this movie.”

The wispy insubstantiality of The Runaways can't be blamed on its cast--Fanning, Stewart, and Shannon are all good in their roles, even if their range is never tested. Ultimately, maybe it's OK that there's not much below the surface of this great-looking but shallow movie.

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

Married Life is a tony, well-upholstered vehicle that glides smoothly toward its destination—but despite an unnecessary and overly sentimental coda, that destination isn't necessarily where you thought you were going all along.