Ballard makes a simple, deeply affecting emotional associations between Amy, her father, the geese, and the absent mothers and cinematographer Caleb Deschanel bathes the action in an appropriately magisterial beauty.

The disconnect between Wild Canaries’ two modes is sometimes too wide, making the movie come across either as a sloppy mystery or a scatterbrained melodrama. More often, the mix keeps the film lively and unpredictable.

It’s modest, scrappy, and resourceful, a low-budget comedy that makes the most of a central setting and a cast packed with gifted improvisers.

Muscle Shoals’ story has needed telling, and Camalier packs that telling with memorable stories and music—though the film sometimes substitutes admiration for investigation, paving over conflicts and moving on to the next amazing piece of music to get recorded in town.

Matti’s primary order of business is regularly serving up tense, stylish action sequences, and he proves more adept choreographing those than sorting out the convolutions of his parallel plotlines.

The film retains much of what worked about the first film, and it brings a similarly smart, patient, visually striking approach to the gags.

Willow Creek does everything a little bit better than others of its kind. It’s a little wittier, a little more insightful, a little more imaginative, a little scarier.

Don Jon is a continuously entertaining and fitfully provocative first-time effort from the longtime actor.

The characters occupy homes where nothing is ever out of order, but Barthes creates a sense of unease that never lets up, and a suggestion of chaos underlying all the neatly arranged possessions in the Bovary home.

Strongman is a heartrending character study of a man blessed with superhuman strength, but defeated and overwhelmed by the everyday bullshit of life.

Zero Motivation never stops being sharply funny, and there’s scarcely a hint of didacticism in its depiction of female soldiers who are essentially treated as a secretarial pool, so bored that they have to invent tasks to perform and create melodrama from scratch.

It isn’t a terribly intimate portrait of Haldeman, Ehrlichman, Chapin, or Nixon, but it is revealing in its own right, as a fascinatingly warped and aged Polaroid of an epic life that’s grown more compelling with the passage of time.

What Queen And Country has going for it that admirers of the original will appreciate—and that total novices can enjoy just as much—is how skillfully Boorman takes major historical events and filters them through small, personal moments.

The original musical holds up well, and Marshall and Condon’s adaption doesn’t wreck it.

It’s all flawed, and distracted, and conceptually messy, prioritizing color over common sense and energy over consistency. But as an afternoon’s diversion for a handful of misbehaving kids—both within the movie, and within the movie theater—it’s authentically winning.

The Inevitable Defeat Of Mister & Pete is a raw, often moving coming-of-age story.

Interstellar often seems afraid to let any development go unpacked and uncommented upon, except for a handful of points that dive into the action and expect viewers to catch up. The film is at its best in these moments, when it’s unafraid of challenging storytelling, particularly since Interstellar never has trouble finding visuals to match its heady concepts.

Even with Boris Karloff providing a lighthearted introduction and sign-off, Black Sabbath is fraught with fatalism.

Time Is Illmatic is a documentary worthy of its subject. It’s no masterpiece, but it’s a strong, substantive look at an album whose greatness was apparent immediately, but that’s still grown in stature since its release.

There are moments when Big Wednesday strains under the weight of Milius’ ambition, but they’re balanced with lively authenticity and a brisk lack of sentiment.

More than the first Magic Mike, XXL is a loose, shambling party bus—or party organic fro-yo food truck, to be more exact—and everyone’s having a great time. These are entertainment professionals, after all, and the audience is in good hands.

It’s mostly a collection of surreal moments, headed nowhere in particular. But Moore milks a lot of the ironic potential out of his milieu.

Thankfully, Big Men doesn’t have heroes or villains. It’s a deep dive into an endless pool of moral and political ambiguity in which very little is clear-cut, except that the desire for wealth and power.

Paddington is a charmer, portrayed as a little guy whose unflagging goodness makes it easy to forgive his clumsiness. That’s the one detail from Bond’s book any adaptation has to get right, and this one nails it.

Neeson’s latest effort, A Walk Among The Tombstones, is slightly more subdued than his average shoot-’em-up, but no less gruffly satisfying.

It’s ambitious, drug-infused, psychedelic, and fractured in strange and interesting ways.

The movie’s only real drawback is that its singleminded approach sometimes omits crucial information.

Gondry’s latest demands a high tolerance for whimsy, and will undoubtedly prove anathema to his skeptics. Yet for those willing to abandon logic, suspend disbelief, and give themselves over to Gondry’s crazy, deeply immersive world of play, the result is a wildly inventive head film that’s mood-altering and mind-expanding in its own right.