Invigorating and annoying, Lola could use a dose of Ritalin. Best to take this 76-minute riff on alternate destinies as an antidote to Europe's minimalist art-house cinema and to enjoy Potente's sweaty radiance.

Me, I'm of two minds about a movie that wants to be a nail-ripping thriller and a statement on an artist's unholy communion with her role. It's reminiscent of older, better movies.

Your enjoyment of Black Bear will depend on your tolerance for cerebral game-playing for art’s sake. But if the movie is sometimes a little too hung up on its somewhat tortured premise, it still offers some subtle, dusky pleasures. Chief among them is Plaza’s performance.

For every moment of raw, affecting insight there are zillions of milliseconds of Kaufman’s proving what a tortured smartie he is. I’m Thinking of Ending Things must have been arduous to make, and it’s excruciatingly tedious to watch.

Walt Disney has for so long parlayed gooey sentiment and stark horror into profitable cartoons that most moviegoers are apt to be more surprised than disappointed to discover that the combination somehow does not work this time. The songs, by Peggy Lee and Sonny Burke, are naggingly reminiscent of other tunes, but none of the cartoon creatures—except, possibly, a whistling beaver playing a bit part—have a fraction of the lovable charm of those in Disney's earlier fables.

There is not a cheap note or a careless image, not an easy judgment or a forced emotion, in the 2 hr. 43 min. of Bird. It permits a man's life its complexity. It invites us to experience the redeeming grace of his music. And with its passionate craft, it proclaims that Eastwood is a major American director.

A wry and moving look at a time in life that tends to get short shrift in U.S. cinema.

There’s no way to put a positive spin on Parkinson’s. But how we handle the cards we’re dealt is everything, and Davis Guggenheim’s remarkable documentary Still: A Michael J. Fox Movie reminds us that a person stricken with a disease doesn’t become that disease.

On an informal Richter scale of movie terror, Play Misty for Me registers a few gasps, some frissons and at least one spleen-shaking shudder. A good little scare show, in other words, despite various gaps in logic and probability.

It’s worth seeing A Different Man for the two performances at its heart, given by Adam Pearson and Sebastian Stan.

There’s nothing exactly like it: It has a bracing, melancholy energy all its own.

Its thoughtfulness somehow shines through its heavy-duty stylistic quirks. And it has a breezier, more relaxed vibe than either of July’s earlier movies thanks to one glorious, effervescent performance: when Gina Rodriguez appears, she turns the picture around — it begins to truly breathe — and she carries it along straight to the end. If you see Kajillionaire for no other reason, see it for her.

Top Gun: Maverick, directed by Joseph Kosinski, is a much better film than its predecessor was, and much better than it needs to be overall.

Although 3 Faces is far from Panahi’s best work, it’s still a solid primer on how much a skilled filmmaker can achieve with very few resources.

A technical knockout. [29 June 1987]

Airplane! is a splendidly tacky, totally tasteless, completely insignificant flight, a gooney bird of a movie that looks as if it could never get off the ground and then surprises and delights with its free-spirited aerobatics.

If a movie can be elegant and brutal at once, this one is: the dissipating smoke from the grenade hangs in the air, a pinkish-gold mist; polka dots of sunlight stream through a scattering of bullet holes in a door.

It is the movie's often awesome imagery and a bravely soaring choral score by James Horner that transfigure the reality, granting it the status of necessary myth.

Elegantly made, romantically doomy, curiously affecting movie.

At the end, the movie tops itself with comic outtakes, undoubtedly the funniest finale of any cartoon feature. “Antz” may have amused viewers with its sidewise wit, but as a comprehensive vision of computerized moviemaking, Pixar's dream works. And when A Bug's Life hits its stride, it's antastic.

After Yang invites us to think about big questions that might normally invite melancholy. Yet somehow, Kogonada pulls off the opposite effect. His movie makes us feel less alone, part of a network we can’t fully comprehend from our place on Earth.

With Gloria Bell, Lelio revisits a story he’s told before: It’s a close remake of his 2013 Spanish-language film "Gloria," starring the superb Chilean actress Paulina García. Both films are terrific, but with Gloria Bell, Lelio may have buffed out a few rough edges; the new picture feels subtler, more shimmering.

Blue Jasmine is the 77-year-old auteur’s first flat-out non-comedy in a quarter century — since "Another Woman" and "September" in the late ’80s, and back to "Interiors" in 1978. Like those more somber studies, this is a portrait of a woman in extremis. But a view from afar: Allen observes Jasmine’s allure and disease without penetrating her soul. That makes for a movie that is both intimate and disinterested, as if Jasmine were a flailing insect in a barren terrarium.

If the film is just as strange and endearing as its glowing protagonist -- and it is -- that's because the director and co-writer (with Mignola) is Guillermo del Toro, 43, who has the wildest imagination and grandest ambitions of anybody in modern movies.

Good Luck To You, Leo Grande—from Australian director Sophie Hyde, with a script by Katy Brand—is the first great movie, in a long time, for the invisibles.

This is a tale of redemption and transcendence, of the hunchback of London Hospital, of the noble phantom who want to go to the opera, of Beauty and the Beast. In Treves' account, though, the Beast was a Beauty. In Lynch's hands, so is this film.

Very moving film.

The Freshman is no small thing. Well, actually, it is a small thing. But to a moviegoer deafened by and reeling from the rolling barrage laid down by the early summer's big box-office guns, the determined modesty, the unsprung affability of Andrew Bergman's comedy are precisely what make it treasurable.