It’s easy to smile at The Thursday Murder Club, with its veteran performers chewing the scenery and still having the teeth to do it. Does that sound ageist? It might, if the charms of this lighthearted, star-studded confection weren’t all about its main characters being advanced in years and still as sharp as an insulin injection.

This flamboyantly operatic anti-war film takes getting used to, though it leaves you with memorable images of madness, both poetic and military.

Of all the funny things in Thank You for Smoking, and there are many, the most striking is Robert Duvall's absolutely mirthless laugh.

With enough suspense, action and violence for crime-thriller fans and enough Idris Elba for Idris Elba fans, Luther: The Fallen Sun needn’t have a message as well. But here it is: Tell Alexa to get out of your house. And take Siri with her.

A leisurely and quite lovely drama that honors the conventions of gothic ghost stories without the slightest stain of self-irony.

I paid steadfast attention, both to the actress, a performer of unusual versatility, and to the character she plays, a caged -- and cagey -- bird who sings because she's too stubborn to cry.

For a film filled with jagged shards of glass, and sometimes shot kaleidoscopically, through the windows of houses or cars, Bee Season is carefully, almost relentlessly, intended. That said, the script, by Naomi Foner Gyllenhaal, touches on themes that rarely make it to the big screen.

Mr. Gaffigan’s feel for his perpetually disappointed character keeps us invested in him while Mr. West devises some insightful moments and a climax whose emotional content nearly matches its tricksy element.

Mr. Shinkai has marshaled more themes than he knows how to organize, but his film feels fresh and urgent. Star-crossed lovers are old news. Hodaka and Hina are cloud-and-rain-crossed, the hero and heroine of a tale of love in a time of climate change.

Ms. Kunis, a petite brunette, plays Rachel, a hotel receptionist by day and a party girl by night (and day), with a sparkling smile, a seductive voice that can sharpen to a rasp and a quick wit that suggests withheld knowledge. Good for her in a sex farce that lets so much hang out.

Where Dark Horse shines brightest is in its portraits of individuals, and of a town raised up from the depths of economic despair by the promise of one of its own making good.

If Human Flow has a chance of breaking through the noise and clutter of the media surround, it’s not because the demands Mr. Ai’s documentary makes on our attention are modest; just the opposite. This movie, a testament to the power of seeing, provides a long and uncommonly vivid look at a human crisis that’s changing the face of our planet.

The film is long and sometimes harrowing, but also enthralling.

Smartly directed, deftly edited, with a cast of performers who all get a chance to show what they can do.

Expert dramatists know how to develop suspense from the intricacy of details even when the end result is known to the audience, and Mr. Frears does so in the rousing final third of the film.

It’s a fascinating documentary about ragtag political activists making fundamentally serious mockery at a high level of media savvy. It’s about jujitsu as performance art — turning an opponent’s outrage to one’s advantage; about deadpan as dramatic technique, and about the damnedest strategy you could imagine, summoning up Satan as a champion of religious freedom.

The film's power also lies in the honesty of its observation. Though Gyuri survives unfathomable horrors, he can't forget them and, in the end, doesn't want to. They're the only history he has.

World War II is often called the “last good war,” which has also meant that it was the last global conflict out of which the studios could make an unabashedly heroic movie. Fury is not that movie. And because it is not, it provides a few psychic disturbances beyond its shocking gore, burning soldiers blowing their brains out, children hanged from trees by the SS and imminent rape.

It's no classic, but you don't need to be a cultist to get in on the tawdry fun.

In the absence of internal logic, external style and emotional intelligence carry the day.

Instead of creating the kind of texture and narrative flow that allows characters to reveal themselves gradually and fully, the film devotes increasing attention and lots of clumsy plotting to the question of litigation—can anything be gained by making someone pay for an irretrievable loss?

The filmmakers aren't out to make a crisp action fantasy like the vigilante movies of the 1970s. Their disaffected man has no specific enemy or at least not one that he acknowledges; modern life is his enemy. This realization hits him one day and he begins to act on it, spontaneously. He's an existential vigilante. [25 Feb 1993, p.A12]

An extremely good-natured, upbeat recounting of the infamous Bobby Riggs-Billie Jean King “man vs. woman” match of 1973.

Lots of Sicko stands as boffo political theater, but its major domo lost me by losing his sense of humor.

Reining in his famously discursive dialogue, and designing a clean, punchy plot, Mr. Allen limits himself to suggesting one big point with one big twist, which he makes emphatically, even wickedly.

Smart, funny and authentically terrifying. It's a comedy that explains how network television succeeds in being so horribly awful.

Taken strictly as drama, the film is tartly written and superbly acted, at least until it takes that polemical turn in its final stages. I’ve seen and heard enough about Trump to actively, if ineffectively, avoid content relating to him, but most of The Apprentice held me in thrall.

What MTV's "The Real World" would be like if its characters admitted they were simply aspiring actors. Garage Days is more clever, more compelling and genuine.