An admirably balanced, wide-ranging look at the phenomenon of Somali high-seas piracy.

Don’t think too much about the plot; it’s about as water-tight as a corporate-pension scheme. All three stars deliver exactly what you expect from them — nothing more, nothing new — but their onscreen familiarity is a strange comfort in itself.

[Ridley Scott's] second film in as many months, after The Last Duel, is uneven, overlong and completely over the top, and has characters and plot turns that Marvel and Pixar would reject as ‘a bit much’. The good news is that it is undeniably a proper drama and, for the most part, wildly entertaining.

There is so much talent behind and within Nia DaCosta’s provocative adaptation of Henrik Ibsen’s Hedda Gabler that it’s easy to embrace as an inventive artistic experiment.

Like some of the ’50s and ’60s biker flicks it homages, The Bikeriders runs out of gas in a predictable final reel that never quite delivers the promised heartache. Still, it’s an intelligent and strikingly photographed film, a journalistic but romantic snapshot of a moment in time lost forever.

The movie is nostalgia, pure and simple, unfettered by examination. Even its title is fuzzy and vague.

This aesthetically undistinguished yet still engrossing documentary follows the emotionally charged lead-up to the vote on Question One, a 2009 Maine referendum that put the marriage rights of gay and lesbian couples on the state ballot.

Fanning manages to bring soulfulness to a character who mostly reacts to others; you just wish the whole movie were, well, jazzier.

The new film sometimes feels too snazzy in its jittery cinematography, but the stunts make it through the budget upgrade intact.

This reverential, sentimental and occasionally bittersweet film only erratically illuminates his (Eric Kandel) ideas. Rather, Petra Seeger prefers to honor Kandel’s boyhood remembrances as a Jew in Nazi-era Vienna.

When Ma breaks bad, it breaks bad hard, with some real wince-inducing moments of bodily harm.

Keshishian's record of the 'Blonde Ambition' tour is memorable not so much for the live footage (electrifying, but brief), nor for the few risqué moments contrived to provide hype, but for its study of the loneliness of stardom and the ties of family.

It's undeniably humanistic; resourceful and well managed, however, are a different story.

MacFarlane may need to jettison his adolescent belief that cramming every moment with two winks and a zinger exponentially ups the gutbusting, however, before he can hit his real artistic stride.

Its trump card, of course, is Zellweger, who blows through the film in a gust of jittery energy, wounded ego and half-buried star quality. The transformation is startling.

If the film occasionally bumps up against the limitations of its "Spellbound"-like template, its refusal to ignore the social issues outside of the classroom proves it's more than simply a novelty human-interest story with impressive knight moves.

Younger audiences will see "The Fault in Our Stars’" Shailene Woodley once again excelling in an emotionally tricky role: Kat, a 17-year-old blooming into her wild years while reckoning with an increasingly unhinged mother, Eve (Eva Green, crazy-eyed and just this side of Faye Dunaway).

Workman’s study, complete with a fawning sit-down with Steven Spielberg, feels slightly awestruck: The films certainly deserve it, but you’ll want more of Welles’s Illinois schoolmate, rolling her eyes when the subject is described as “humble.”

Ziba’s relationship with her unwaveringly affectionate mother (Narges Rashidi) is genuinely touching, a rejection of the austere immigrant parent stereotype.

Hitchcock matches the play's compassion for women suffering in the face of feckless men, especially in the film's powerful final shots. [07 Oct 2010]

It’s the kind of two-hander that relies solely on the chemistry of the actors, both of whom banter, parry and bum rush their way through various left turns with grace. Their pas de deux almost makes up for this threadbare tragedy’s no-win endgame. Almost.

Shots of the kids and their friends running around unfamiliar environments have the fantastical qualities of Spike Jonze's "Where the Wild Things Are," minus the forced whimsy.

Ultimately, the returns of the film's premise can't justify a nearly two-and-a-half-hour squirm. The savagery is honest, raw and hardly entertainment.

Washington has the quiet authority, and Fuqua the stylistic chops, but the story they’re telling becomes more predictable as it goes along. Once it’s over, you won’t necessarily be itching for an Equalizer 3.

How can a movie so steeped in post-Katrina imagery eschew even the smallest comment about social responsibility? Maybe that was deemed too earnest, a decision that makes zero sense when a twinkling score is ladled on like instant pathos. Real people aren't beasts, nor do they require starry-eyed glorification. Bring your liberal pity.

Point Blank fires nothing but blanks in the end, dealing in increasingly ludicrous plot twists and one fizzle of a finale.

The film strikes the right balance of outrage, hopefulness and despair, compellingly arguing the case that a profit-driven, racially motivated collusion exists between Big Pharma and the U.S. government.

Shot when the director was 91 and finished just before he died in March, Alain Resnais’s third adaptation of an Alan Ayckbourn play is his gentlest attempt at using the artifice of theater to affirm the reality of imagination.