The parents are the casualties of Mills' misplaced sincerity, which makes Thumbsucker the quintessential misadapted head-scratcher.

Tarantino's radical rewriting of the war's ending is audacious and perversely enthralling. But if Inglorious Basterds were about something more than the cinematic thrill of watching Nazis suffer, it could have been a revelation.

The heat [Chow] conjures between his leads never rises above a low boil. That’s because Chow never bothers to pretend as if the romance really matters —it’s merely an excuse for a parade of blisteringly clever comic set pieces.

Babel has great expectations for itself: It wants to be a movie about big ideas and big emotions at the same time. Aided by gorgeous locations and classy trappings (cinematography by Rodrigo Prieto, theme music by Gustavo Santaolalla), it succeeds for the most part.

This movie is a freaky little swamp thing.

It's a rollicking children's entertainment, gorgeously animated and wittily cast, and also an unusually astute exploration of the complex bond between mothers and daughters, a relationship that's often either elided or sentimentalized in children's literature and film.

Portman’s voiceover performance is full of conviction, but I wish that Eating Animals gave us different models of vegetarianism than she and Foer, a diminutive actress and a bookish Brooklynite, respectively.

It's a textbook example of a well-crafted movie, beautifully shot, impeccably acted, and structured like an elegant three-act play. So why does the movie feel as pleasantly deadening as the midcentury Connecticut suburb where it takes place?

Though the movie's at least 20 minutes too long, it's deeply satisfying, full of old-school buddy banter and the kind of action sequences that make you burst out laughing at their sheer audacity.

A truly unformulaic comedy of lust and greed, a farce that seems to write itself, slap-happily, as it goes along.

Lion goes again and again where you expect it to, delivering little more than the awards-season equivalent of "Homeward Bound."

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.

The low-key best performance in the movie comes from Owen Campbell, who sneaks up on us as a peripheral God’s Promise resident, but his quiet and then fierce turn is stifled by the movie’s perfunctory mechanics. No one can quite rise above them.

The movie, sorry to say, can’t quite keep up that swagger. Instead, Rocketman mostly proceeds with studious fidelity through the stations of the rocker biopic, with only a few formal tweaks to the formula.

Gallo’s movie is terrific, an original and disarming vision of a life that's all skids.

There are so many leaps back and forth in time, so many twists and countertwists and double fake-outs, that we keep losing track of who (including ourselves) is supposed to know what when.

Nearly every scene builds to some kind of climactic jump scare.

When a movie wrenches you with the deaths of children then leaves you with nothing to take home but your confusion, it can make you thirsty for the blood of directors.

Sour and mostly feeble, with a depressingly curdled worldview. It bears no resemblance to Allen's surreal, open-ended comedies.

Blockers is about as funny and heartfelt as studio comedies get (which isn’t meant as a backhanded compliment), while smart and insightful enough to double as a guide to raising teenage girls.

There’s something unseemly about singling out this story, about the seemingly narrow scope of racism and how easily it can be undone. Green Book decries those cultural pockets designed to make white people feel good, often at people of color’s expense. But that’s about all it does, too.

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.

Because it pulls off the tricky feat of combining multiple pre-existing Marvel franchises into a reasonably entertaining and tonally coherent whole, The Avengers will likely be hailed as a kind of thinking fan's superhero film, the way Whedon's recent "Cabin in the Woods" functioned as both a horror movie and a critique of same.

Above all else, Venus in Fur is a sharp, sexy comedy (adapted by Ives and Polanski from a translation by Abel Gerschenfeld) performed by two superb and superbly in-tune actors, and directed with a sure hand by a filmmaker who’s clearly not cowed by the challenge of blowing up a two-person chamber piece for the screen.

A feminist sitcom tricked up with garish violence and garrulous hit men.

Even when you're able to guess the next calamity, it's still a shock in its ejaculatory intensity. The Farrellys never throw in the towel. Pretentious Sundance independents could learn a lot from such pistols.

The mundane becomes absurd, and the hilarious turns to hilariously gruesome. Sometimes that humor underlines the characters’ struggles.

The movie says that the rebellious spirit that generates art can also consume and destroy -- that there's no undangerous way to ride the tiger.