It’s like watching a first-rate standup routine transformed into fiction, or in this case auto-fiction, as Rock has more on his mind than just making us laugh, offering up a witty celebrity satire that doubles as a love story set during one long and eventful New York City day.

Facing the physical challenges of depicting Hawking’s disability, Redmayne pulls it off with enormous grace and endurance.

The toll the disease takes on the life of a brilliant linguistics professor is superbly detailed by Julianne Moore in a career-high performance, driving straight to the terror of the disease and its power to wipe out personal certainties and identity.

Laura Wade’s adaptation of her hit play, Posh, has sacrificed much of its savage comedy en route to the screen, and while the dark drama is never dull, its portrait of upper-crust entitlement run amok is seldom surprising either.

Though it abounds in the kind of sardonic humor intrinsic to life’s absurdities, the film is rarely laugh-out-loud funny. In a nutshell, quiet desperation prevails.

Both a powerful allegory for post-war regeneration and a rich Hitchcockian tale of mistaken identity, Phoenix once again proves that German filmmaker Christian Petzold and his favorite star, Nina Hoss, are clearly one of the best director-actor duos working in movies today.

A classically helmed biopic that brings nothing new to the genre, but benefits from handsome craftmanship and solid performances by Tobey Maguire as the Brooklyn boy wonder, and Liev Schreiber as his longtime Russian nemesis, Boris Spassky.

It was a given that this meeting of two iconoclastic directors would yield something far more unfettered and instinctive than conventional bio-drama. But the result borders on incoherence, providing few startling insights for aficionados and minimal illumination for the uninitiated.

A modest film made with an authenticity that commands respect.

[A] handsomely produced if occasionally rather old-fashioned feeling period drama, which plays like a soap opera in which the characters just happen to have better manners and finery.

Blending fiction with documentary and exquisite film craft with playful improvisational freedom, Andrei Konchalovsky delivers what might be the most captivating screen work of his post-Hollywood career with The Postman's White Nights.

Like his erratic protagonist, Gilroy doesn’t always know when to settle down or call it quits, and the film’s constant shifts of tone can grow tiring, even if the action as a whole never gets boring.

[Aubrey Plaza] adds something different to Hartley’s usual hijinks, making for a crime dramedy that’s ostensibly quirky, but also short, sweet and quite moving.

Jason Reitman's new film skillfully navigates through the personal melodramas of many characters with a nice sense of balance and a sharp appreciation of generational differences.

Unfortunately, Barthes brings nothing new to the familiar story.

A deeply satisfying pop biopic whose subject's bifurcated creative life lends itself to an unconventional structure.

The problem is that the romance as depicted is just not interesting enough to sustain realistic treatment. It's sweet but a tad dull. The two characters lack dimension, and their stereotypical situations seem entirely generic.

Winslet’s mix of grace, gumption and private sadness is the chief reason to keep watching, but she deserves a more dynamic film.

What might have looked intriguing on paper appears to have been largely pared away in the artsy mannerisms and loaded silences of Brit director Daniel Barber’s self-consciously elliptical treatment.

The sunny, soap-and-water characters and thoroughly upbeat message may not be the stuff great films are made of, but in Jackie & Ryan the modesty of the story, the simple story-telling and honest emotions all come together in a satisfying whole.

The idea is original enough to pique curiosity, and the small cast, led by Alba Rohrwacher and the up-and-coming Adam Driver of HBO’s Girls fame, digs gamely into the material, but something is missing.

The story's acceleration from anxiety to panic to hellish chaos is expertly managed, but more impressively, so is the control of internal narrative logic.

Niccol weighs the human toll on both aggressor and target with intelligence and compassion, while questioning whether technological warfare is inevitably destined to be an unending cycle.

Instead of complex personalities and dilemmas, we mostly get clichés.

It’s an impressive debut, an ambitious project pulled off with confidence.

This graceful, deeply affecting movie has a soulfulness and sweep that mark it as a step forward for Hansen-Løve.

Visually ravishing, emotionally wise, and kinky as a coiled rope, writer-director Peter Strickland’s third feature The Duke of Burgundy is a delight.

Rahim has a great face but isn’t given enough opportunity to make it clear to audiences what his character is going through beyond the most basic emotions.