For a movie that was in so many ways about a country mouse (bunny) coming to the big city and finding endless varieties of wildlife, both upright and shady, the “Zootopia” sequel spends too much of its time away from its mammalian metropolis. Even Nick Wilde — no longer scheming, more in touch with his feelings — doesn’t feel quite so wild now. The fun caper spirit of the first movie is alive enough to carry Bush and Howard’s film, but you can’t help feel like sequel-ization also means domestication.

For an actress who’s hustled to get to this point, “One of Them” days is perfect platform for Palmer, scrappy and unstoppable.

Where Haynes excels is in teasing out the personal and professional connections that mingle throughout.

Bruce Beresford had directed a flawless cast in a fascinating tale of court martial injustice during the Boer War. [19 May 1981]

In some ways “The Dig” feels like its own artifact too, like a lost Anthony Minghella film made 30 years ago and buried until now.

Heder, who adapted her screenplay from the 2014 French film La Famille Belier, makes crucially effective decisions throughout, but none more important than the casting, with three extraordinary deaf actors playing the deaf family members.

It’s not a perfect film — the first half sags a little, the jump in Bobby’s career is jarring and some soliloquies land with a thud — but name us a perfect rom-com. This one has what the best have: heart, good faith and good old fashioned love. Welcome, “Bros,” to the canon.

A film like this should give life to its characters and reveal essential truths beyond the book-report versions of their existence. But Ammonite keeps you at a distance on a rather vacant, but beautiful, journey.

It’s quite a riveting and though-provoking journey, with compelling and nuanced performances all around, and, although it is quite serious, not without moments of levity.

It’s one of the freshest college movies in years, a nano-budget breakthrough of rare sensitivity that announces more than one new talent.

Most impressive is that DeYoung has not created a collection of connected “SNL” skits. Each part cleverly feeds to another, with echoes throughout the script.

Brittany Runs a Marathon starts comically; its first moments, with Brittany working as an usher at an off-Broadway theater are its funniest. But it grows increasingly earnest. That’s part of the movie’s charm but also what leads it a little off track.

The tone shifts radically from one moment to the next, and humor is a regular companion to mayhem, pain, even violence. That brings us to the wild and harrowing ending. It’s an ending that may not be expected — well, it’s definitely not expected — but Fennell has said it was the truest way to end a real story of female revenge, not a comic-book version.

Love, Simon is a universal story, even if you’re not a gay teenager. The challenge of figuring out who we are and standing comfortably in that identity might begin in high school, but often lasts a lifetime.

In an extremely physical, committed, even exhausting performance, Pattinson takes what could have been an unwieldy mess and makes it much less, well, expendable.

By bringing the migrant crisis into a horror-film realm, His House has forcefully captured the traumas of the refugee experience. The grounded performances and pained faces of Dìrísù and Mosaku offer no easy answers.

Eventually, the movie does seem to get where it’s going. A scene between Alice and Roberta touches upon issues of literary ownership and artistic license that haven’t yet been fully mined. It’s a bit late in the game. But the ride has been pleasant.

The story here is simple and heartfelt. It’s a coming-out tale, but with the twist that the person coming out is 32, a decade (or even two) later than in most stories we see.

[An] absorbing new documentary.

Hanson and Nilsson deserve credit for accurately portraying this grim period. [30 Mar 1982]

[Ronan] gives one of her finest performances in a two-hour study of addiction that is poignant, sometimes beautiful but always painful to watch — and would likely be too draining if not for the luminous presence at its core.

It’s a perfectly crafted cocktail of vision, talent and script that will leave your mind spinning for days.

It’s the movie’s own power trio of Barrino, Brooks and Henson that makes “The Color Purple” one of the most moving big-screen musicals in recent years. Each in their own way transforms suffering into exhilarating portraits of survival and strength.

All these elements, wacky or not, come together in a charming mishmash that adds something ultimately very important to the childbirth comedy genre: the message that childbirth is profound, yes, and full of wonder. But also, like life, it can be funny — and a bit of a mess.

Queer is best when it’s a character study of Lee, who in Craig’s hands is charming, selfish, arrogant, abrasive, foppish and sometimes unable to read a room. It’s a million miles from 007, even if Lee carries a pistol.

Though I’ve been apprehensive about the flamboyant severity of Lanthimos’ movies, I found “Bugonia,” a chamber-piece gut punch, hard to shake.

Orion and the Dark is about fear and overcoming it but this movie directed by Sean Charmatz has too much junk clogging up the vision.

What makes “Bridget Jones: Mad About the Boy” especially enjoyable, then — and the best since the 2001 original — is not that Bridget finds a way yet again to triumph over doubts and obstacles. It’s that she still makes us care so darned much.