A gentle, charming movie and really a parent's dream: a kid's movie that doesn't involve action sequences or explosions. Yet you wish the filmmakers had adhered to Mr. Quimby's no-nonsense point of view and found a way to make this family slightly less squeaky-clean.

Declaration of War is about being under siege from illness, but there is light at the end of the tunnel. This modern-day Juliette and Romeo find their own tragedy, but are not poisoned by it.

Mamma Mia! Here We Go Again is terrible. And irresistible. How a movie that’s almost not even a movie can be both of those things at once is one of the mysteries of filmgoing, and one of its puckish pleasures.

My Old Ass is a bit crazy. It’s also winning, in the gentlest, sweetest way.

The picture is sometimes wayward and unwieldy, its dialogue creaky and awkward, like an amateur’s attempt at scrimshaw.... But in a movie climate rife with superhero reboots and rehashings of childhood favorites, it’s a small marvel that In the Heart of the Sea exists at all.

I don't want to oversell You Kill Me. It is not going to leave you breathless with laughter. But I don't want to undersell it either. For an hour and a half it exerts its own preposterous reality, making you believe it -- and like it.

Motion capture, which transforms actors into cartoon characters in a vividly animated landscape, is the technique Spielberg has been waiting for - the Christmas gift, or senior-citizen birthday present that he's dreamed of since his movie childhood.

The Boys in the Band is anything but a relic. This version, produced by Ryan Murphy and performed by the same cast that appeared in the play’s 2018 revival on Broadway, is like an unusually strong telescope, giving us a clear and vivid view into a not-so-distant past.

The full-bodied performances of Merad and Darroussin give everyone - everyone with an indulgence for old movies about old values - a reason to see this Well Digger's Daughter.

Fredric March, ably assisted by Miriam Hopkins and Rose Hobart, is magnificent as Hyde, and he gives Jekyll a stilted Victorian elegance which, being a little false, makes Hyde's existence seem more credible.

With a welcome mixture of juice and grit, the movie dramatizes the lingering conundrums of young people in the time of the Vietnam morass.

But the film is keyed to Posey's performance: perfectly brittle, faultlessly false. As the most toxic of this family of vipers, she creeps and stings, and no one dares look away.

The film may be manipulative in its construction, and cliché-ridden in some of the incidents it recounts, but it has a good, large heart.

Persona (the ancient Latin word for mask) is too deliberately difficult to rank with Bergman's best. But in an era when the director who dares to repeat himself is rare indeed—when the cinematic world is full of one-shot wonders, Bergman's consistency is itself refreshing.

This loose retelling of Carlo Collodi’s weird and often unsettling 1883 fantasy novel (the screenplay is by del Toro and Patrick McHale) is a little too long, and hammers away too eagerly at its central idea: that fathers who expect too much of their sons can do untold emotional damage. Even so, del Toro’s creation is clever and lively and just strange enough to keep you guessing what’s coming next.

A brisk and entertaining indictment of the Bush Administration’s middle East policies before and after September 11, 2001.

An agreeable time-waster for the onlookers and its star. The Rum Diary isn't a corrective to Johnny Depp's kid-centric career, more like a vacation from it, in a resort where the visitors are strange, the natives are restless and the flow of alcohol endless.

We should hail a movie that recalls creepy political thrillers of the mid-'70s, back when some films were made for grownups and the comfortable catharsis of a happy ending was not required -- think of the panoramically cryptic worldview of "The Parallax View" and "Three Days of the Condor," and of course, "Chinatown."

It all sounds absurd and simplistic, but I dare you to watch the joyful delirium of the big dance number, set to an old Fred Astaire tune called "Things Are Looking Up," and not to feel an unexpected sense of rosiness. This movie may contain endorphins.

The picture could use a little more dramatic tension; in places it goes a bit slack, losing its way on the path to its conclusion. Even so, its refusal to push the usual buttons is one of its finest qualities. Back-alley scare stories serve their purpose, but Call Jane has something else in mind. This is a story about women getting the job done when they have no one to rely on but one another.

The genius of Ghost in the Shell is that you don’t have to care about cyborg-anything to enjoy it. In fact, you’ll probably enjoy it more that way.

Bringing Gonzo to his senses gives the Muppets briskly economical opportunities to satirize government, media excesses and cult sci-fi's more tiresome tropes.

The slight but captivating indie-comedy The Kings of Summer has the ragtag look and feel of a movie made in some teenager’s basement

A slim but likeable little romantic comedy that feels like a sweeter cousin of HBO's Girls.

If it isn’t a great movie, it’s at least a fascinating and thoughtful one, an even-handed film that doesn’t need to resort to extremes to paint an accurate picture of what America and the world are up against right now, in terms of one particular past and possibly future president.

It’s one of those movies you watch not necessarily for its whodunnit complexities, but for the pleasure of watching a group of actors having fun, in a storybook English-countryside setting complete with happy, well-kept flower beds and cemeteries dotted with gravestones both ancient and new.

So a tip of the hat to A Good Old Fashioned Orgy, a frequently very funny movie about planning and executing exactly what the title describes.

This is a story about a seemingly unforgiving landscape that’s actually giving back every minute, once Rona reopens herself to its windswept language.