Becomes increasingly unwatchable -- not just bleak but punishing, as if the director wants to fry your circuits along with his characters'.

It's just too bad the end result isn't a better movie.

Though not a direct adaptation of "The Talented Mr. Ripley," the movie plays like a 2017 version of the psychological thriller, and not since "Clueless" took on Emma has a film so cleverly updated a pre-existing plot for the mores of the present day.

This is more than just the predictable story of who Ginsburg was and who she has become. It’s also a monument to the formal written legal legacy that transcends her own life story and changed a nation.

There are times when Dafoe's accent strays into Billy Crystal Yiddish, but the notion of Vlad the Impaler aging into a finicky old Jew has its own kind of piquancy.

It's too bad that halfway through, Collateral turns into a series of loud, chaotic, over-the-top action set pieces in which the existentialist Mann proves he's lousy at action.

This is a movie that sends you out shuddering, chuckling nervously, wanting to tell the people in line for the next show, "It's the feel-bad movie of the year!"

Grbavica is a surprisingly vibrant, at times even joyous, study of the way life goes on even after the most intolerable suffering.

If nothing else, Training Day is a gorgeous pedestal for Denzel Washington.

Creepily entertaining.

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.

No wonder Hawke was so hot to pass the script onto Linklater. He's superb, by the way.

Girls Trip more than delivers what its audience is looking for.

The elements in A Walk on the Moon, which is directed by the actor Tony Goldwyn (the bad guy in "Ghost") and written by Pamela Gray, feel miraculously right.

Streep, who has long enjoyed playing women endowed with more than the average supply of gusto, makes the character’s delusional faith in her own talent so infectious that we ache at the thought of Florence’s impending humiliation even as we prepare ourselves to laugh at it.

Jones and Redmayne are both superb as a devoted but imperfect pair of headstrong people trying, and sometimes failing, to treat each other with care and respect.

The wonderfully versatile Brewer, who’s in virtually every scene, pulls off essentially three “characters”: Alice, Alice as Lola, and Bizarro Lola. It’s a bravura performance that flits between several realities while keeping the film grounded as the plot twists make narrative leap after narrative leap.

McQueen clearly wants to broaden the archetype of stiff-upper-lip Englishness into something more inclusive. It’s a worthy message, but one that sometimes seems to take precedence over the characters and story rather than emerging organically from them.

Although it’s technically about saving the world (again), Shazam! plays out at eye level, grounded by the belief that who people love and where they feel they belong is stakes enough. If that violates the exigencies of franchise filmmaking, so be it.

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

Went down like a slice of warm pecan pie topped with two scoops of Ben and Jerry's Bovinity Divinity.

What the film does have is coruscating anger, impish wit, and a breathtaking style.

Transcends its murkiness and eats into the mind. Cure is what ails you.

A marvelous feat of re-imagination.

The movie is satisfying, though -- at least by the standards of that depressing phenomenon, the superhero "franchise."

It’s all captured vérité-style by the filmmakers, who, like everyone else in this utterly sweet production, display great affection for the totally foolish theater kids (of all ages) who inhabit this world.

While Morris isn't interested in exonerating anyone, he clearly sympathizes to some degree with the MPs and deplores the military's fall-guy strategy, which punished these seven soldiers as exemplary "bad apples" while leaving all higher-ranking officers untouched.

Despite the movie's many flaws, the two leads' genuine rapport is enough to give the audience a solid contact high.