Appeal lies on the bright, shiny surface of its ostensibly simple plot, and in its rat-a-tat-tat language, which often sounds like Mamet-visits-Spyne.

The heroes are two hit men, and the tone is often absurdist. But the film is also very funny and surprisingly affecting.

Birdy is refreshingly complicated: She’s obnoxious but lovable, entitled but sweet

Mr. Wang’s honest self-appraisal yields a richly detailed film.

Anyone who doesn’t have a grand time watching Shaun the Sheep Movie is suffering from a fractured funny bone that needs to be reset.

The film's power is undercut by its narrow geographic focus, which seems to associate bullying with conservative or working-class areas in red states. The filmmakers could easily have found similar cases involving the children of urban sophisticates.

Lost in Paris is nonsensical by design, a comedy of the absurd that’s always entertaining and occasionally pure.

Don’t Think Twice really shines as an improv procedural, a film that celebrates, in illuminating detail, the skills and anxieties of this showbiz subgenre.

The most daring part of this wonderful film, which was written and directed by Jeff Nichols, is its calmness. Momentous events move at a human pace while Richard and Mildred Loving — a matchless pair of performances by Joel Edgerton and Ruth Negga — try with varying success to comprehend what’s happening to them.

Mr. Haynes, a notable stylist whose work is sometimes tinged with surrealism, was an improbable choice to direct this material, though a fine one, as it turns out. Like Rob, the film isn’t flashy, but it is honorable, admirable and improbably stirring.

Still, one needn’t be British to feel the epic loss and grief of 1917, thanks to some very committed performances, the intimacy achieved by the movie’s style and camera — the cinematographer is the celebrated Roger Deakins — and Mr. Mendes’s obvious devotion to what he’s doing.

After countless films in which immigration plays a central role -- one of the earliest was Charlie Chaplin's 1917 silent classic "The Immigrant" while one of the best, Jan Troell's "The Emigrants," has never migrated to DVD -- you'd think the canon was essentially complete. Yet this visionary work adds to it by combining harsh realities with magic-realist fantasies.

Breathes new life into a familiar story: coming of age in high school.

This is more than a respectful remake; Let Me In is quietly stylish and thoroughly chilling in its own right.

What We Do in the Shadows has nonmedicinal virtues that many large-scale movies lack: unflagging energy, entertaining inventiveness, sustained ridiculousness and even, dare I say it, a spasm of eloquence in Deacon’s twisted tribute to the frailties of the human race.

His story is instructive, as well as chilling and occasionally hilarious -- a brief, probably foredoomed career during which a would-be Orson Welles, playing shamelessly to the camera, draws from a bottomless cesspool of hubris, bile and rage.

Apollo 11's mission was a singular chapter in the story of mankind; The Dish finds a whimsical, winning way of telling it anew.

In the title role, Sydney Sweeney must be relieved to be giving people a reason to discuss her acting. She’s excellent in the role, small and vulnerable yet tough and fierce, a pink-clad dynamo who is nevertheless beholden to others.

Herb and Dorothy, a documentary by Megumi Sasaki, grows on you just as its subjects do.

Mr. Wiseman’s film shows us, without telling us, that American cities continue to be laboratories for rebirth and innovation. The spirit of this one is embodied in its mayor, Marty Walsh.

Has its flaws, but it's better, as well as darker, than the first. It's also longer, by nine minutes, but hold that protest to the Kidney Foundation; the time flies, albeit in fits and starts, like players on a Quidditch field.

This lively little film, a comic take on Shakespeare's tragedy, is really entertaining.

All the more remarkably, then, this flawed but startling biopic stars another performer, Chadwick Boseman, who fills Brown's shoes with a dynamism that transcends imitation.

The main thing about Cedar Rapids is that it makes you laugh-often and out loud.

It’s full of music that makes the case for its subject’s pre-eminence—he played with the intensity of a highest-category hurricane—and has an interesting slant on the issue of cultural appropriation; Butterfield was white, and the blues he played were, and remain, indelibly black.

In the end, though, the success of American Gangster doesn't flow from the originality of its ideas, or its bid for epic status, as much as from its craftsmanship and confident professionalism. It's a great big gangster film, and a good one.

Calls to mind Lubitsch's "Trouble in Paradise" and beguiles all the way from the parade of umbrellas decorating the opening titles to the closing credits.

It's spectacular, to be sure, but also remarkable for its all-encompassing gloom. No movie has ever administered more punishment, to its hero or its audience, in the name of mainstream entertainment.