In an irony, Godard’s certainly aware of (after all, he constructed it), Goodbye is noteworthy for being shot in 3-D, a calling card of the cookie-cutter Hollywood movies it couldn’t have less to do with.

Sandburg’s "The Prairie Years" is a source behind The Better Angels, a gorgeous look at the raw, wooded Indiana of the early 1800s and a dreamy study of the boy Lincoln who was destined to leave it behind.

Rosewater is far too eager to please to play tough.

Terry produced some of the happiest sounds in the history of jazz; Keep on Keepin’ On keeps the smiles coming.

Over all, the movie is just funny enough to make you wish it were much better than it is.

Even if you were never the sort who cared what goes on behind others’ closed doors, the Hawkings’ drama is catnip. And if you’ll excuse the pun, you could say it was only a matter of time before Hollywood came calling.

The documentary of the year may also be its most hair-raising thriller.

The pitch on Dear White People is that it’s “Do the Right Thing for the Obama generation,” which is both an oversell and a disservice to Justin Simien’s witty satire about race relations on a fictional Ivy League campus.

Consider it a more family-friendly "Guardians of the Galaxy," with the added kiddie appeal of a big, inflatable windbag to laugh at and love.

While it’s technically eye-popping and intricately structured, Interstellar is at its most fascinating when it struggles hard to communicate those things we human beings call “emotions”. Instead, we get something like a freeze-dried approximation of Steven Spielberg at his most sentimental.

The creepiest haunted Hollywood movie since "Mulholland Drive," David Cronenberg’s Maps to the Stars is working an even deeper graveyard groove than David Lynch did.

There are those trying to position "Gone Girl" as the date-and-debate movie of the season, but it isn’t half the unsettling thriller Force Majeure is.

Throbbing musical crescendos and flickery flashbacks abound but apart from some outlandish plot machinations, nothing here is good or bad enough to be memorable.

Horns is allegorically cluttered, unsure of its tone and outrageous with its snakery in a half-serious supernatural thriller about good, evil and redemption in a garden of Eden.

The trouble is that absolutely nothing about the movie feels like news.

Whiplash is an intense, unmelodious, highly amped and probably unrealistic drama set in the fictionalized Schaefer Conservatory in New York.

Yes, at its best, Birdman soars, swoops and flutters with life and invention, but it parrots more than it speaks. You long for a writer as reliably, elegantly witty as Tom Stoppard, whose dramas are typically “backstage,” or if not Stoppard, at least a verbal speed-puncher like Armando Iannucci, or if not Iannucci, someone as relentlessly inventive and obsessive as Charlie Kaufman to make you feel like somebody is trying to say something, rather than a writing team filling in the intelligent-sounding words to support the boisterous performances and the virtuosic camera dance.

It is harmless, frighty fun for teenage audiences, but adults will leave theatres with their bejeebers intact.

John Wick is the most blatant attempt to establish a character’s name recognition since the Angelina Jolie actioneer "Salt."

The Great Invisible is a dense, disturbing look at the effects (personal, political, economic, ecological, macro, micro) of the disaster.

Barnaby puts a mythic frame around a grim history, shaping it in a way that feels always like a creative adventure, not a duty.

The title comes from prosecutor Ferencz, who compares his work to that of the 16th-century astronomer Tycho Brahe, who said he watched the sky so future generations could use him as their foundation.

Rudderless is humane and almost entertaining. A crucial late plot development disrupts the predictability, instigates a third act and provides reason for watching.

Here’s how good an actor Bill Murray is. He does such a bristly, entertaining turn as a boozy curmudgeon in St. Vincent, that he saves first-time director Theodore Melfi’s obvious dramedy from sliding into a burbling sinkhole of schmaltz.

A film as lithe and seductive as its lethal main character.

The movie’s compromised tone, wavering between emo introspection and rom-com cuteness, is awkward in all the wrong ways.

Sparks’s preposterous approach has crystalized into cliché.

Fury is a war movie with balls of steel and marbles for brains.