We have this movie--full of acceptant, sidelong glances at human quirkiness--to delight us.

The Road to Guantánamo is his (Winterbottom’s) most unsparing statement yet of war's brutalizing effect on both the prisoner and his jailer.

It’s LaBeouf’s performance as his father that haunts the movie. He’s hateful, but even within the context of this upbringing-as-horror-show, LaBeouf locates crystalline reflections of the better man his father might have been. His performance both exorcises a demon and makes peace with it, which may be a better gift than his father deserves. But then, it’s the giving that counts.

The beauty of Brett Morgen’s velvet-and-facepaint collage Moonage Daydream is that it doesn’t try to be definitive. Instead, it’s a glide through Bowie’s career, hardly complete yet somehow capturing both the spirit and the genius of this most enigmatic and alluring artist.

The result is a film consistent narratively, confident stylistically and abounce with the quaint quality that animated both the hero and his times, something we used to call pep.

It has the wiggy energy of a workplace that might sometimes drive you crazy, but is never boring. This is a great workplace comedy about the ways in which people who seem to be holding you back can also, sometimes, be the ones pushing you forward. Crawling under your desk gets you nowhere. It also means you miss all the fun.

These characters don’t always behave as we want them to; they feel lived-in, not written, with flaws and attributes that chime with things we see in our family, our friends, ourselves.

A film worthy of being displayed on a screen eight stories high.

Cool, shiny, handsomely made and, in its compelling-repelling way, mordantly funny.

Realistically, it’s probably not possible to dance your cares away. But the determination of these girls makes you believe in it.

Knightley, in a performance as crisp as the corners of an envelope, makes McLaughlin’s perseverance—and the pressures she faced as she also tried to be a good wife and mother—deeply believable.

At two hours, the film version is a third the miniseries' length, requiring severe compression by screenwriters Peter Straughan (The Debt) and Bridget O'Connor, which they've accomplished smartly.

If Stigter’s film is at times somber, it’s more often ruefully poetic.

Love Excalibur or hate it, but give Boorman credit for the loopy grandeur of his imagery and imaginings, for the sweet smell of excess, for his heroic gamble that a movie can dare to trip over its pretensions— and still fly.

Gadot is simply marvelous. Physically, she’s bold and commanding. But there’s a sweetness about her too, as if she and Jenkins understand intuitively that Wonder Woman can’t just be blandly awesome. She's got to be able to feel wonder too.

There’s nothing jarring or upsetting about Marcel the Shell With Shoes On; it deals very gently with the realities of death and loss. But its quiet tenderness feels expansive regardless, proof that good things really do come in small exoskeletons.

Black Bag succeeds on its chilly wit, and on the cool, nervy appeal of its two stars. Blanchett strides through the movie with lioness grace; Fassbender makes George’s robotic use of logic seem like an aphrodisiac.

Boldly entertaining.

The film's pleasures are simple and obvious: an original plot, lots of slapstick and a lead performance by the Bushman N!xau, who registers every absurdity with the aplomb of an aboriginal Buster Keaton.

Without insulting modern Africa, Naked Prey writes the wild poetry of its past in raw colors.

Marvin's Room, the 1991 Scott McPherson play, filmed by Jerry Zaks, is an old-fashioned weepie of noble mien with many bright moments and a superb cast.

The Wave, with the exception of a few overwrought moments, is low on sadism and high on humbling. We’re all at the mercy of nature’s power. It’s the Whatever we can never outrun.

Like Space Odyssey itself, the ambiguous ending is at once appropriate and wrong. It guarantees that the film will arouse controversy, but it leaves doubt that the film makers themselves knew precisely what they were flying at. Still, no film to date has come remotely near Odyssey's depiction of the limitless beauty and terror of outer space. In this 2-hr. 40-min. movie, only 47 minutes are taken up with dialogue. The rest of the time is occupied with demanding, brilliant material for the eye and brain. Thus, though it may fail as drama, the movie succeeds as visual art and becomes another irritating, dazzling achievement of Stanley Kubrick, one of the most erratic and original talents in U.S. cinema.

School Life is a bit woolly in its pacing, but the picture’s easygoing structure is part of its charm—it mimics, perhaps, the passage of time at Headfort itself.

This very patient film reaches out and unshakably grips us.

Enigma is not for everyone, but the thoughtful (and the historically minded) will find it an absorbing and extremely well-textured experience.

A good-neighborly, Technicolor whimsey that has made Walt Disney one of South America's favorite North Americans.

It feels as if it has been recovered from a time capsule, and what larger meaning it may have is anyone's guess. But it is way cool -- and funny -- in ways that more expensive comedies trying harder rarely are.