It has a loping, lowkey charm and doesn’t require too much of your attention, and the plot is predictable enough that you could miss substantial chunks of it and not lose your way. You’re in the passenger seat, and it’s a nice ride as long as you don’t care where you’re going.

Despite across-the-board bravura performances (especially by Philip Seymour Hoffman and Paul Giamatti as dueling campaign managers), The Ides of March somehow remains static and lifeless, like a civics-class diorama.

Like the boys, Montiel's first film is rough and uneven, with more energy than it knows what to do with. But it still manages to feel fresh and authentic, perhaps because it's so deeply autobiographical.

The laborious title of an even more laborious Cockney action movie that some people think is the cat's pajamas crossbred with the bee's knees.

Although Dolan has called it by far his most accessible film, Tom at the Farm is hardly paint-by-numbers.

Say this for actors: Too self-centered to be embarrassed, they can be existential heroes of a (moronic) sort.

Long Shot feels like something new, too — a brogressive rom-com that mixes inconvenient boners and aerodynamic cum with extensive observations about sexism and a rare romanticization of the male helpmate.

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.

Whannell commits to making a science fiction film plugged into the moment in which we’re living, and making grim projections of what might be around the corner.

Private Parts is so riotous that you almost don't remember how unfunny Stern can be on his radio show.

Its unthwartable tempo of quips, gags, cameos (Sly Stallone!), and loud noises rarely feels grating if only because of how loving it feels toward its characters and soundtrack, and how respectful it is toward the limits of its audience’s appetite for superheroic universe-building.

Though at times Rosewater is clearly the work of a first-timer still finding his voice, Stewart is indisputably a real filmmaker.

Seems to suffer from low self-esteem. Why can't this movie see that it doesn't need a hulking meta-narrative apparatus to make us care about its story? It had us at hello--or would have, if not for the excess of high-concept trickery.

The new movie of Selena's life ponderously carves each element of the myth in stone, as if this 23-year-old were a bust to be included on Mount Rushmore.

Whether or not this one is really the last in the series, Final Reckoning is a noble exemplar of a dying breed: the big, dumb, fun action blockbuster with a bona fide movie star at its center, putting it all on the line—and hanging on for dear life—just to keep us at the edge of our theater seats.

While it’s frequently moving and occasionally thrilling, the gears sometimes grind audibly on the shift in between.

The baby-faced Thomas Sangster nearly steals the show in the much smaller role of Paul McCartney.

The Darjeeling Limited (Fox Searchlight) struggles to open out from the beautiful, stifling world inside Anderson's head. But like in his last movie, The Life Aquatic With Steve Zissou, Anderson makes the mistake of keeping its protagonists trapped for too long aboard a means of conveyance.

It has a gritty feel and a tight, methodical, one-thing-after-another tempo.

If Giamatti's particular brand of sad-eyed misanthropy floats your boat, you'll enjoy Barney's Version, an overcrammed and galumphing movie that nonetheless provides a bracing jolt of pure, uncut Giamatti.

I suppose it's too much to expect Pirandellian stature from the madness of Chuck Barris -- but that's about the only thing that would have made this mixed-up ego trip work.

Rich, finely judged, gorgeously acted movie.

Essentially a solemn, splintered meditation on lost love: a movie about personal space, in space.

Carlos Cuarón's screenplay is rambling and unstructured but full of vibrant dialogue. As in "Y Tu Mamá También," the insults the two leads hurl at one another are creatively filthy.

After a year of Trump, it’s hard not to feel nostalgic for a president seen backstage working on his Greek pronunciation.

One of the best documents of live performance that I've ever seen, a rehearsal diary that's more intimate and immediate than a traditional concert film.

Where are we? What is this empty, science-fiction-like space in which luxury goods and women who resemble them are ceaselessly rotated in front of our eyes? Oh, it's Hollywood.

With his live-action retelling of Cinderella, director Kenneth Branagh accomplishes a wonderful bit of spellwork: He manages to de-toxify Disney’s flagship fairy tale without overcorrecting away its prettiness, sincerity, or charm.