It’s a humanist crowd-pleaser with just enough historical heft to count as something more than a small family drama, and it’s also a deeply personal labor of love that, even if it never quite knocks your socks off, seems too sincere and too beautifully crafted to hate.

Lee views these mortal fools with a sorrowful detachment. He's a sort of clinical humanist, editorializing only by what he leaves out. The downside of this method is its impersonality, which limits our involvement. The upside is its lack of cheap sentiment, and its clarity.

Fences functions as a faithful—sometimes doggedly faithful—record of a remarkable ensemble performance of one of the great works of American drama. Granted, it’s never exactly a great movie, but given the chance to see actors of this caliber tear into material this rich, you would be foolish to pass up the chance.

It lacks the fevered sincerity (and the political timeliness) of Romero's original, but it's tightly scripted, cleverly cast, consistently scary, occasionally funny--everything you could ask from a well-made and completely unnecessary remake.

It would have been easy to focus on the eroticism of horses, who, let's face it, are beautiful creatures to look at even for the nonzoophilically inclined, but Devor shows the animals only sparingly. For him, what's most interesting is what the horses represent to the men who (gulp) love them: the wildness and purity of nature itself.

I like my SpongeBob a little less lumbering, a little more free-associational, without that big, heavy anchor of a story structure to weigh him down.

It's at once a gangster movie, a buddy comedy, and a meta-fictional exploration of the limits of both genres - and if that sounds impossible to pull off, well, McDonagh doesn't, quite. But the pure sick brio of Seven Psychopaths takes it a long way.

It demands to be seen, for Drew Barrymore, who is at once the dizziest and most magically poised comedienne in movies today.

It's unapologetically theatrical.

Focusing the camera on Vega, an openly trans actress (apparently Chile’s first), allows A Fantastic Woman to tell a different, richer kind of story and allows us to process the subtleties of her performance without always having to evaluate the success of the underlying transformation.

Eastwood's furthest venture yet into the comic possibilities of his flintier-than-thou persona.

American Sniper is by no stretch a critique of the U.S. involvement in Iraq; Eastwood leaves larger questions of politics and policy entirely outside the frame of his story, an approach not uncommon in modern war films of any political stripe.

The movie is very beautiful, with a shambling pace and slow fade-ins and fade-outs; and when it works there's a tension between its characters' scuffling small-talk and its majestically ruined rural setting.

The silliness is more than made up for with moments of stillness and quiet connection between characters learning to need each other in lovely ways. And most of all, there’s the glorious landscape.

It's too bad Baumbach's movie is already shot, edited, and up there on the screen, because after a few rounds with a red pencil, it could really have been something worth watching.

It doesn’t help that the plot is tortuous, and the resolution is an inarguable letdown. And yet! Mitchell’s ambitions, observations, and moods make the picture a dippy blast, like a hallucinatory trip that definitely goes on too long but is well worth the insights and surprises.

It's square, stiff, and in places cheesy; it's also authentically harrowing -- and blood-showered, blood-drowned.

Squirmily funny documentary.

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.

When Contact finally comes alive, it leaves you frightened and thrilled and emotionally overwrought, as only a child can be. The rest is pandering.

It's a question of whether or not the movie speaks to your secret, unregulated, inherently ridiculous experience of identification and desire--not who you should be, but who you are. Does the warm blood of a teenager still flow beneath your icy grown-up flesh?

Thanks to a witty, fast-moving script (also by Famuyiwa) and a sensitive performance from the newcomer Moore, Dope helps us see how a young black man coming of age in America faces complications unforeseen by the smugly entitled high schooler played by Tom Cruise all those years ago in "Risky Business."

They've made a movie about trickery that neatly tricks its viewers into laughing, then screaming, then laughing again.

Like "Spartacus," this movie is engaging because it's actually about something: the love of learning, the clash between science and religious faith, and the grim fact that political change often proceeds on the foundation of mob violence and genocide. Agora engages more effectively with this kind of big historical idea than it does with human drama.

You don’t go see a 2014 Godzilla reboot for the delicate character shadings and plausible story structure. You go to watch a giant radioactive lizard whale on stuff, and on that score, Godzilla does its work.

It’s an important corrective to many contemporary and historical accounts of Hollywood, reinstating the queerness that has too often been straight-washed out of them.

Who knows whether Snakes will have--forgive me--legs, but it's more than awesome enough to assure opening-weekend euphoria.

It's the most thorough portrait yet of the world according to White.