It would have been easy to focus on the eroticism of horses, who, let's face it, are beautiful creatures to look at even for the nonzoophilically inclined, but Devor shows the animals only sparingly. For him, what's most interesting is what the horses represent to the men who (gulp) love them: the wildness and purity of nature itself.

Pirates is OK, in patches even better.

To suggest that a lone, brave soldier could have set things right with a little amateur sleuthing seems like cinematic wish-fulfillment, an insult both to the intelligence of viewers and to the troops.

This is one of Penn's punishing, single-dimension performances, and it seems to be even more whiningly masochistic than what's called for in the script.

I can't think of a movie this long that has left me so starved for a movie.

In a film of more prepossessing style, the glaring leaps of logic might be easier to overlook, or at least there’d be more incentive to do so, but the cellphone is Soderbergh’s enemy as well.

Any irregularity in tone becomes a part of the movie’s intentionally rough, imperfect surface — a formal strategy I might find interesting if I could make head or tail of what the movie that’s using it is trying to say.

Bogdanovich has been so smooth and loving in his directorial attentions that he has forgotten to give the tragical farce proceedings any terrible momentum.

This is not to say that it is bad writing, shooting, or acting: It would need to be more ambitious to be bad. It is simply the most mundane sort of behavior presented in the most mundane sort of way.

Given how efficiently World War Z has delivered jolts and screams over the course of its sleek 116-minute running time, it’s easy to forgive this rushed and slightly muted finale.

A climactic twist that's among the stupidest I've ever seen-almost up there with another Costner movie, "No Way Out," and "The Life of David Gale."

It doesn't entirely gel, but few directors could explore the collision of the ego and the outside world with such sympathy or purpose. It's possible that the NC-17 has never been used to such PG-13 ends.

The talk sounds a little canned – an adult's foggy reconstruction of what it was like to hang out – but, for a while, Linklater is able to extract odd momentary glances and giggles from the actors to freshen it up.

Mostly, the jokes and the recurrent attempts to tweak the superhero genre serve as a reminder that somebody else has already done it better. Sure, Megamind is pretty good. But why settle for less when you the best is already available on DVD?

It's a clever setup for a spoof of the espionage thriller, but despite the film's intermittent pleasures (Pitt's gum-snapping dolt chief among them), the result is oddly airless.

Matrix Resurrections is a movie interested in collapsing binaries: the ones between man and machine, between digital and “real” life, between past and present, and of course, between genders.

If Boiler Room isn't an especially challenging movie, it's still a damn good melodrama -- a boilermaker.

Shutter Island is an aesthetically and at times intellectually exciting puzzle, but it's never emotionally involving.

So brutal a negation of the popcorn aesthetic is liable to be mistaken for artistic courage. A grindingly slow pace, a quarter-baked plot, a semidocumentary focus on the lives of the working poor: It's enough to make you whimper "Matt Damon" in defeat.

Ultimately, if you are a big enough fan of the first Devil Wears Prada to have ever texted a friend (or in my case a daughter) that viral video of Bowen Yang flawlessly lip-synching the “cerulean” speech, this sparkly sequel provides a satisfying balance between nostalgic callbacks and intelligent updates to suit a more contemporary, if sadder, media landscape.

They may make for clunky religious parables, but the Narnia books--and so far, the movies based on them--are wonderful as stories about childhood and its loss.

It’s galling for a movie that costs so much and takes up so much cultural space to try to do so little, but it’s a familiar disappointment, like the dull ache of a tooth that only bothers you when you bite down on it wrong.

Unfortunately, that sharp-eyed domestic comedy is dwarfed by the far less well-written supervillain crime plot that surrounds it.

Even with her stinko lines, Weaver has never been as flabbergastingly gorgeous and charismatic. She's tall and lean and meteor-hard, and you can almost believe there's really acid in her blood, and that no alien in its right mind would mess with her.

The first truly countercultural apocalypse fantasy.

This is ho-hum, straight-to-video material. And yet, even at its most crawlingly linear, Jackie Brown is diverting. If nothing else, I was diverted by the director's gall at stretching out those vacuous scenes.

You don’t go see a 2014 Godzilla reboot for the delicate character shadings and plausible story structure. You go to watch a giant radioactive lizard whale on stuff, and on that score, Godzilla does its work.

The pleasure of watching McConaughey strut, preen, and menace his way through this Southern-fried black comedy (at least I think it's a comedy) isn't quite enough to save Killer Joe. The whole movie has something tonally off about it, not to mention a theatricality that works against it in a way Bug's didn't.