Of the two attempts, I still prefer the one from my childhood.

Most of Lindon’s fellow-actors are nonprofessionals who do their real-life jobs onscreen, and the intrinsic fascination of their performances—and of the world of work itself—opens exotic speculative vistas.

But Byrne, who has lacked good movie roles of late, is marvellously grave.

There is much to savor here, especially the unforced performance of Judah Lewis — one more recruit to the terrific roster of younger actors who are streaming into the movies. Yet the film lacks the courage of its affliction.

The whole saga, complete with shootings and a car chase, is cooked up for the film. Meanwhile, when it comes to those with whom Davis worked so fruitfully to forge what he calls “social music,” we get nothing of Dizzy Gillespie or John Coltrane, say, and only the odd glimpse of Gil Evans (Jeffrey Grover).

Linklater barely puts a foot wrong, and he shows that a movie about happiness can be cogent and robust, rather than sappy or wispy; and yet, for all its gambolling mischief, Everybody Wants Some!! leaves us with plenty to rue.

When I first saw the movie, at a festival, it wavered on the brink of the precious. That changed on a second viewing. Most of Francofonia now seems tender, stirring, and imperilled.

The winner, on points, is Wonder Woman (Gal Gadot), who crashes the party and leaves them both dumbfounded, not least because she has the wit, and the wherewithal, to confront evil while wearing a conical bustier.

The movie offers a more insightful view of the music business than of Baker’s art.

Oddly, the effect of that imbalance is not just to heighten the charm of the film but to render it more credible: the course of true memory never did run smooth.

Yet Nichols’s movie, though smudged by its dénouement, is not wrecked, and already I am desperate — with a Roy-like yearning — to return to it, and to revel anew in its group portrait of those who are haunted by the will to believe.

The glaring absence of political chatter doesn’t mar Treitz’s achievement: he has made an instant-classic Western.

The story...opens out into a dazzling multigenerational array of characters, as well as a panoply of trenchant themes.

The pleasures of the design fade along with those of the pat and callow drama.

Zootopia, like its heroine, is zesty, bright, and breakneck, with chase scenes and well-tuned gags where you half expect songs to be.

There are treasures in Knight of Cups. It’s worth seeing just for the underwater shots of dogs as they plunge, mouths laughingly agape, into a pool to grab a tennis ball.

Either hour alone would be a wry, incisive, quietly painful drama, set at the intersection of art and life, about foregrounded action and the weight of personal history. Together, the two parts make a radical fiction about the crucial role of imagination in lived experience. Hong’s narrative gamesmanship reveals agonized regret.

The filmmakers keep to the surface of the bluntly rowdy story while conveying apolitical layers of regret and exasperation, in wanly comic and affectingly melodramatic action alike.

This is a scary movie and a serious one, because it lures us into the minds, and the earthly domains, of those who are themselves scared, night and day, that they have forfeited the mercies of God. It takes an original movie to remind us of original sin.

The movie is memorable and draining, but “Full Metal Jacket” it is not.

The ambition is laudable, but Tim Miller’s movie, far from seeming reckless and loose-limbed, comes across as pathologically calculated, measuring out its nastiness to the last drop.

The first film scored a few palpable hits, but the new one barely makes the effort.

A comedy, and a scintillating, uproarious one, filled with fast and light touches of exquisite incongruity in scenes that have the expansiveness of relaxed precision, performed and timed with the spontaneous authority of jazz.

The whole thing appears to have been designed by some crazed Oedipal wing of the N.R.A. And what are the aliens known as? The Others. I rest my case.

Put the evidence together, and it’s no surprise that this poor little movie fires blanks. It never wanted to be a Western at all.

Ingeniously, Coogler has transformed “Rocky”—the modern cinematic myth that, perhaps more than any other, endures as a modern capitalist Horatio Alger story of personal determination and sheer will—into a vision of community and opportunity, connections and social capital, family and money.

So acclimatized are we to action flicks, and to onscreen conflicts teeming with soldiers, that it’s refreshing to find a film that concentrates on hanging back and reversing out of harm’s way.

Seldom, it is fair to say, does Kaufman just want to have fun, but as he lifts the spell of his gloom a surprising beauty breaks through.