If Abrahamson were as gifted with a camera as he was with his cast (he inspires subtlety even from the tiny Tremblay), Room could have been truly worthy of the astonishing performances that provide its foundation.

Steve Jobs the movie is a lot like Steve Jobs the person: astonishingly brilliant whenever it’s not breaking your heart.

The film quickly abandons any sort of broader cultural interest in favor of a typical womb-to-tomb, warts-and-all examination of recent history’s most visionary CEO.

Strikes an intelligent balance between funk-scored pride and a more universal story of activism threatened by in-fighting and accidental celebrity.

Evans and Eve are always charming, but Brooke’s real-world problems ring false in a story held together by chintzy fatalism and the logic of a first draft.

The question of winning Ann sexually takes on an ugly character, and the film dumbs down fast. This is how the world ends: not with a bang but a wimp.

The ensemble cast is excellent: Rhys Ifans lays it thick on as a spiteful thespian who’s chasing Arnold’s wife, while Jennifer Aniston plays the world’s angriest therapist (Bitchy Is Beautiful is her new book). As a comedy of errors, this is fluffy fun, packed with in-jokes for the film lovers already in line.

An open wound, Moss is terrific, yet Queen of Earth feels a touch brittle and precious, like the swirly pink-hued script Perry employs for his end credits. It’s a movie about not getting over it, as oppressive as that sounds.

The Mend finds the truths that bind families together, but it knows that everyone has to hack their own path to get there.

Confining its view to the narrow corridors of China’s train system—soon to be the largest of its kind in the world—The Iron Ministry vividly speaks to the country’s impossible vastness by focusing on its tiniest and most transient details, cobbling them together into a captivating mosaic of life in motion.

At the end, the door is left open for a sequel, but Agent 47 doesn’t feel like a character who’s got what it takes to be a franchise hero. He, and the film, are lacking in personality.

Would that Grandma had given rascally Sam Elliott more time to express his magnificent unease as Elle’s old flame, still wounded by her own choices. Single-handedly, he saves the film from its cutesy instincts.

[An] enormously fun late-summer surprise.

No Escape takes pains to pause for some unconvincing speechifying about Western meddling abroad, but its showbiz racism gets an infuriating pass.

Artless and unpleasant, this is the kind of late-summer swill that gives August a bad name.

Unfortunately, this austere allegory for the difficult process by which kids start to think for themselves only hints at the turbulence of its characters, who are kept at too far a remove for us to feel their growing pains.

There’s way too much inside-baseball money talk here, when a simpler plot—one about a band whose apocalyptic vision comes to pass—would have been plenty.

A movie that gives Streep her most emotionally blocked character in years, without caricature.

Focusing on the personalities rather than the historical context, directors Robert Gordon and Morgan Neville illustrate how both men’s lives were changed by the debates, and how neither could let it go even decades later. The result is perhaps better suited to TV than the big screen, but it’s a timely, thoughtful piece of work.

These charmless characters are meant to learn that spending time with each other isn’t so bad, yet surviving 100 minutes with them is one of the great cinematic endurance tests of our time.

The truly mystifying thing about the movie is how desperately it caters to Gen-X junk nostalgia without bothering to think that maybe those Reagan-era kids have grown up a bit.

Trainwreck, about a commitment-phobic NYC writer, is the funniest film of the summer — outrageous and out to make you think.

A vividly told but crushingly literal dramatization of an event that’s in every psych textbook published during the last 40 years, Kyle Patrick Alvarez’s new film is compelling and useless in equal measure.

Like a "Raging Bull" that’s been clocked one too many times in the head, Antoine Fuqua’s blood-simple boxing melodrama is so loaded with obviousness, it gets more pained groans from the audience than the guys in the ring.

It all feels pretty familiar: the tortured genius, the younger woman, the plot taking a suffocating turn, murder as an existential debate, the world increasingly closing in on our antihero. But there’s something sloppy and sluggish about Irrational Man, even by Allen’s uneven standards.

Horse Money is an ordeal, but you’ll be glad that Costa was there to help Ventura’s words find their way through the cracks.

A saturated picture that courses with the raw energy of found footage while still feeling artfully composed, a movie that punches with the skittering violence of dubstep but careens through L.A. with the unbridled freedom of bebop jazz.

After several tedious jump scares and boneheaded escape plans, a bag over your head won't seem like such a bad idea. Or the noose.