Whatever this universe is, you're inside it, with your mouth open, wishing that all sporting events could be this exhilarating, that all human bodies could work this way, that all simpleminded movies could be this mindfully empty-headed.

The Slums of Beverly Hills never gels, but it has a likable spirit, and it's exceedingly easy on the eye, with lots of pretty girls and wry evocations of '70s fashions and decor.

The Hateful Eight is bold, gorgeous, verbally clever, morally repellent, and, in some way I am still struggling to put my finger on, possibly somehow evil. Any movie that inspires mixed feelings that intense can, I suppose, be said to have done its work on the viewer. But I’m not sure the work The Hateful Eight performed on me was what the filmmaker intended or that it’s an operation I would consent to again.

It's an exquisitely crafted period picture that keeps promising more and more as it goes along--smarter ideas, richer themes, spookier plot twists--and keeps delivering on every promise, right up until the rug-pulling and overly hasty final sequence.

It's on the verge of being really good...his narrative peters out without a decent payoff. It's a testament to the rage and anxieties that he has brilliantly tapped into that he can't get away with a subdued conflagration and a lame twist at the end.

To paraphrase the novel's famous last lines, it's not often a story comes along that can make for both a great book and a wonderful movie. Charlotte's Web isn't both.

Howard might be a major actor. His DJay, though, is a major character in search of a major author.

A sturdy piece of work, an old-fashioned conversion narrative with some high-tech zip.

More diverting is the increasingly desperate forensics the FBI resorts to in order to build a case against Jewell, though it’s not always clear which tactics are simply thorough, now outdated, or flagrantly illegal. But Richard Jewell has so little to say about its time period or how the culture has shifted that it ends up exposing the relative quaintness of its concerns.

The movie is a generic paranoid espionage fantasy, but its proportions are refreshingly correct. It moves quickly, adroitly, and without fuss.

It doesn’t matter that the plot is predictable, because it’s merely a means for getting from one precise (and hilarious) musical parody to the next.

The movie gets right so many of the little nuances about combat and Army life.

Maggie’s agonizing zero-sum struggle to balance a life of military service and a steady relationship with her son feels fresh, raw, and real — even if the conflict it enacts is as old as the transition between The Iliad and The Odyssey, between the horrors of the battlefield and the difficult journey home.

Sitting through its 2 hours and 30 minutes is like gorging on tapas: You wind up both overstuffed and unsatisfied.

When every character is always operating at maximum loathsomeness, it can be difficult to recalibrate your disgust-o-meter. I suspect this sense of moral vertigo, and the resulting nausea, is part of what Cronenberg is after, but his skill at evoking those states in the viewer doesn’t make the experience of watching Maps to the Stars any less sour.

Pitt can mock his absurdly good-looking younger self in part because he knows he’s got something more valuable now: the kind of magnetism that mere attractiveness can’t compete with.

With Wick—the best Reeves role in years, and the best existential actioner since Drive—Reeves fans have found something that should cheer them up, too.

Whereas the original was a work of speculative science fiction - a chin-stroking fable about evolution in the nuclear age - this revisiting of the Planet of the Apes myth is an animal-rights manifesto disguised as a prison-break movie.

My chief complaint is that these mutants are a little--well, vanilla. I wish the X-Men had a touch of kinkiness to go with their weird abilities.

It comes by its screams honestly, earning them with incremental, at times agonizing gradations of old-fashioned, what's-that-noise-in-the-hallway suspense.

The movie can’t compete with the Missions: Impossible and Fast and Furiouses for visual spectacle, so what it offers by way of compensatory heft is a tangled plot full of double-crosses and hidden identities, combined with a ponderous gait that suggests that more than the mere world is at stake.

I can’t say that this austere, beautiful movie satisfied my impatient desire for answers. (It seems, in fact, to be a rebuttal to that desire.) But I’ll be thinking about Kumiko’s journey for a long time.

The needless cruelty of the criminal justice system feels like a world begging for more sense-making, but Just Mercy only sees its characters as heroes, victims, or obstacles, not as rational beings who might have their own reasons to knowingly commit terrible acts. Cretton’s desire to focus tightly on McMillian’s case makes sense, but he accidentally makes the white malefactors in the town more fascinating for their villainy.

The movie’s soulful self-seriousness, like that of its liquid-eyed hero, can occasionally slip into self-parody. But this movie confirms my "Blue Valentine"-based suspicion that the 38-year-old Cianfrance is one to watch. He’s capable of coaxing tremendous moments from actors, he knows how to move a camera, and as this over-laden but never boring movie shows, he’s willing to operate from a place of risk.

A brainy weave of satire and fantasy.

The film spends too much time wringing its hands over the all-too-evident fact that journalism is in crisis, when it could be documenting that crisis from the inside.

Am I the only one who finds the substance of this movie repulsive?

What a shock when George Lucas finds his footing and the saga once again takes hold.