Jonathan Levine’s night of debauchery and hugs hits a sweet spot of inoffensive offensiveness.

This film leaves you with the thrill of a good fight fought hard. It’s a scrappy, absorbing tribute to the pragmatic value of compromise, carefully proffered in pursuit of a greater good. America’s candidates would do well to take a page out of this doc’s book.

The film's final moments, in which we discover the source of the film’s intrusive, patronizing voiceover, are simply vile. The result is like stuffing yourself with Christmas pudding: sweet, glutinous, a bit too much.

The 33 makes shameless lunges at religious imagery via ghostly auras and this-is-my-flesh apportioning of daily rations. It feels tacky, and only late in the game does Riggen find the script’s most interesting idea, about unwanted celebrity. Miner story, major fail.

Cynthia Nixon commits wholly to her role’s maternal patience and scattered mental decay, but it’s Abbott who really dominates James White.

By the Sea is a so-so film, but its meandering stretches of decaying glamour make it about 10 times more interesting than most Oscar bait.

Unlike recent, sharp-witted examples like The Lego Movie and Paddington, there’s zero interest in mocking or freshening up the material—think what Wes Anderson might have done with this—thus dooming the movie to nostalgic types only. It trudges along like that black, jagged stripe on our hero’s yellow polo: up and down, scene by scene.

Trumbo goes for a tone that’s more scrappy and inspirational, as this ousted ex-A-lister enlists his kids as couriers, builds a network of collaborators and wins two Academy Awards undercover.

An absolute eye-opener, this unusually rich sports portrait should be seen on the biggest screen you can find.

Ultimately Miss You Already feels like chick lit for the big screen: a frothy, contrived confection with careful doses of sexy, silly and sad. But those sad bits will get you in the end.

The dueling dirty tricks zing half the time.... But subplots involving naive volunteers getting their hearts broken feel like strands from a less ambitious movie.

Based on Amy Koppelman’s 2008 novel, I Smile Back can’t shake its slightly tired structural similarities to other drug dramas, and there’s an obvious imbalance between Silverman’s mighty commitment and the movie around her.

In combining video, surveillance footage and her own 8mm family memories, Heart of a Dog quickly accesses a realm of ideas that vault it far higher than mere sentiment would allow.

For all of its innumerable pleasures, however, The Forbidden Room can feel like too much of a good thing—premiering at Sundance, Maddin’s latest plays like a robust film festival unto itself.

From its mundane beginnings to its melancholy closing grace note, Microbe and Gasoline is such a wonderfully touching film because it remembers the urgency of wanting to get older without growing up.

The frustratingly artless He Named Me Malala is but the latest of Guggenheim’s paeans to the global need for education

This spry, sharp and relentlessly clever middle finger to censorship is Panahi’s boldest act of defiance to date.

Gifts of civility small and large mark Steven Spielberg's latest film, a deeply satisfying Cold War spy thriller that feels more subdued than usual for the director—even more so than 2012's philosophical Lincoln—but one that shapes up expertly into a John Le Carré–style nail-biter.

Recreating the crime for The Walk, director Robert Zemeckis does a crackerjack job with the thrills and a so-so one with the laughs (at least the intentional ones) and skips the deeper magic altogether.

A sweet, shambling, supremely enjoyable road movie about two compulsive gamblers of very different stripes.

The movie’s ideas run out quickly, but De Niro is easygoing, and The Intern is indulgent good fun. Just don’t go in expecting nutrition.

Tirola’s punchy timeline hits the breaks at the ’80s flameout, wobbling in its handling of self-destructive editor Doug Kenney. But until the defunct Lampoon starts magically reappearing in your mailbox, this excellently titled pic will do nicely.

Bringing optimism, nerd-itude and a touch of crazy to his character's solo ordeal—at one point, scraggly Watney calls himself a “space pirate”—Damon is the key to the movie’s exuberance.

This is a brutal movie that finds unusual freedom in limitations, as do wiry bassist Pat (Anton Yelchin) and bleach-blond concert attendee Amber (Imogen Poots), who both turn out to be pretty handy with weapons. Chalk it up to their killer instincts.

Delicately placed on a sonic bedrock of chirping birds and distant traffic, Cemetery of Splendour is a whisper of a film that can only cast its spell if you let your breathing slow and give yourself over to the urgency of its spectral dimension.

The movie ultimately feels both too glib and too hermetically sealed to resonate beyond its chaotic interiors.

There’s no pleasure in trashing a film as humanistic and well-intentioned as Freeheld, but just because anyone would agree with its message doesn’t mean this glorified Lifetime movie does a worthy job of conveying it.

A bizarre, conflicted mess, horrifying when it’s trying to be funny, oddly appealing when it turns the screws.