The film is smutty-mouthed and jumpy and free-associative, and Allen does everything but hurl his feces at the audience. The result is more rambunctious--and more fun--than any movie he has made in years.

The French Dispatch is a movie made with such deliberate, patient skill, and such brio, that its meandering structure and oddly low emotional temperature come off as intentional choices rather than errors of artistic judgment. Even if it’s not my favorite flavor of Wes Anderson licorice, nothing is there by accident.

Has spasms of silliness that thaw things out delightfully. Davis plays Vartan's girlfriend as an irrepressible, sexed-up brat, and gives every line a little hop, skip, and jump.

Bachelorette places a trio of women front and center who are so irredeemably loathsome, it's kind of refreshing. At least until a conventional third-act redemption undercuts some of the movie's sharpest insights and funniest jokes.

Just beneath this movie's gleaming high-end surfaces beats the heart of a classic screwball comedy.

Private Life is certainly very good at shivving its characters at close range and gutting these dyspeptic, privileged white people when they deserve it. Save for Sadie’s charmed fate, I can’t fault Private Life for nailing what it sets out to accomplish. But its cultural narrowness, however well-expounded, also left me wondering about the trials and tribulations of all the other couples in that waiting room long after we’d seen the last of them.

The movie is never quite pop enough to get audiences hooting and hollering and quoting favorite lines, nor smart enough to inspire passionate post-movie debate. Scene by scene, the film is unassailably well-crafted. But there's something oddly dull, even respectable, about Scott's adherence to the rules of gangster-film grammar.

A trifle in both senses of the word: a feather-light, disposable thing, and a rich dessert appealingly layered with cake, jam, and cream.

Gleefully pushes everyone's buttons...and that manages to exploit our own racial discomfort and envy in ways that leave us hungry for more.

Despite the preponderance of (PG-rated) snogging, there are pleasures to be found along this movie's meandering path.

The best way to watch isn’t with oohs and aahhs. It’s with laughter, savoring the beauty and the absurdity of each elaborate spectacle. Each movement is a joke, and death is the ultimate punchline.

There’s plenty to enjoy about Materialists, from the sparkling indie soundtrack (Cat Power! Harry Nilsson! John Prine!) to the flattering rose-hued glow of Shabier Kirchner’s cinematography, to Lucy’s enviable working-girl wardrobe.

A jolly mess of a movie. Overplotted, choppy, and contrived, it nonetheless has a curious vitality that makes you wonder where McDonagh will go next.

Was The Adventures of Tintin a movie that I personally vibed with? Not really. It felt overstuffed and busy, its charm a little calculated, its outsized budget a tad too ostentatiously on display. But it's a rollicking yarn told with scads of invention and energy, not to mention a technical marvel of the first order.

Pete's Dragon is a gentle, understated family adventure, one that feels notably unlike the simplistically sentimental product the Disney imprimatur might lead you to expect.

What makes this an important film is the way it puts you in that landscape and in those shoes, so that you almost understand how ordinary human beings can be impelled to do inhuman things.

Boyle's skill at wringing physical and emotional reactions from his audience is impressive; watching 127 Hours is, as intended, an experience of grueling intensity.

Hoffman has wedged the play into a weirdly inapposite setting, has stupidly cut and even more stupidly embellished it, and has miscast it almost to a player. And yet the damn thing works: Shakespeare staggers through, mutilated but triumphant.

The best thing about Seabiscuit is that it will make a lot of people hungry to read the book. They've seen the pretty pictures; now they'll want to enter the world.

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

The comic high point in Shaun of the Dead comes when Lucy Davis, from the great BBC sitcom "The Office," teaches the band of survivors how to lurch like zombies so that they can pass among the undead.

Its structure is repetitive, but each scene begins with a joyous blast of comic energy...A hoot.

At times this multiple-plot meander through the glorious labyrinth of the Eternal City can feel aimless, even lazy. But in the film's best moments, that willingness to wander works to its advantage.

Billy Bob Thornton's performance is--there's no other word--beautiful.

It's so courteously deferential to its source that it never really comes alive as a movie...Even so, Nair has a gift for directing actors and a feeling for the immigrant milieu of the novel that make The Namesake a rich, if not completely satisfying, pleasure.

Overlong at nearly two hours but still a sharp and amusing and subtle piece of filmmaking.

Like the singer's gnomic comments to the press, the movie can be maddeningly slippery; like his music, it's fierce, thrilling, and unapologetically itself.

The mother of all conspiracy movies.