To his credit, Kore-eda avoids oversentimentality in a narrative that could easily have indulged in it. Yet the unhurried pacing and minimal dramatic tension — even when an important character makes an appearance midway through the story — feels unsatisfying.

"Farewell to Europe” is a little like Zweig himself: smart, overly fastidious and remote to a fault. By avoiding Zweig’s inner life, his eventual collapse seems all the more perfunctory.

Written and directed by Richard Brooks, the picture is more style than content, but what style.

Beneath the sylvan trappings is a whodunit as riveting as any.

As cinema, Spy is content to cater to its own conventions, hit the required marks and earn a few laughs along the way. As a cultural bellwether, it does something bigger and more important, without ever italicizing that fact.

Fresh and rainbowy as a midday Hawaiian sun shower.

Nader haters may not be mollified, but An Unreasonable Man, like its subject itself, is a one-stop civics lesson no one should miss.

It’s a richly engrossing drama, so long as you understand that it’s aiming for the head, not the gut.

But don't let a little gore, misogyny, factbusting, counterfeit hipness and screenwriter David ("Streamers") Rabe's public disassociation from the project get in your way. Enjoy Penn's actor imitations. Or Fox's raspy earnestness. Or scorer Ennio Morricone's sentimental mortars. Or a bafflingly anticlimactic final sequence in which veteran Fox appears to come to terms with himself with the help of an Asian woman and a dropped scarf. Is that what you call a wrap?

If the movie is any indication, Chevron would have the public believe there was no Amazon at all -- something people might be willing to believe, were Berlinger not sticking Crude in their faces.

The movie is a tremendous accomplishment, especially considering that the cast had never seen cameras before — much less movies — yet still agreed to star in the drama. Their performances are as stunning as the setting, and that’s truly saying something.

It isn’t easy to explain the appeal of the “John Wick” movies, and they are inarguably not for every taste, but there is a purity to them that transcends their barbarity and has something to do with the central character.

McAdams again proves she has real comedic chops that this island, and Raimi’s direction, have only sharpened.

For its frequently painful contours, there’s an abundance of pleasures to be had in Belfast, Kenneth Branagh’s irresistible memoir about growing up amid the Troubles in Northern Ireland.

A timely reminder of AIDS; we've largely forgotten we're in the midst of a crisis. But the movie isn't all cautionary, or at all preachy.

A briskly paced computer-animated entertainment that uses the format to maximum effect, the way "Avatar" does.

This is a great liberal movie, which is to say, it will be loved most passionately by great liberals, and despised by the conservatives it contemptuously fails to notice.

This is a lean, cruel film about the ethics of photographing violence, a predicament any one of us could be in if we have a smartphone in our hand during a crisis.

Like a gel cap in a sip of orange juice, the psycho-pharmacological thriller Side Effects goes down easily, even if its long-term impact turns out to be barely dis­cern­ible.

Flawed and uneven, but vigorous and imaginative, The Stunt Man is a brash, whirlwind action comedy about the paranoid uncertainties of a fugitive who takes refuge with a movie company on location. [24 Oct 1980, p.B1]

This movie should have blown us out of the water. Instead we catch ourselves occasionally thinking the unpardonable thought: "OK, sink already."

But for all Oceans does to please the eyes and ears, it does nothing to engage the brain.

The best films teach you how to watch them within the first few minutes. Blindspotting is no exception. The film gets off to an exhilarating start, with split-screen images of Oakland, Calif., unspooling to the tune of a soaring aria.

Dick, whose films include a revealing expose about the movie industry's film ratings board, has created yet another galvanizing call to action with The Invisible War.

Surprisingly effective re-creation of a Latin American Bing and Bob on the Road to History.

Finally, one of our finest actresses has been given material that calls on her to utterly transform herself — vocally, physically, seemingly existentially — and prove how gifted she’s been all along.

More than a testament to the power of cinematic storytelling as food for the human spirit, The Wolfpack also is a portrait of a family that has had to rely on each other to survive.

At times, the film seems pat in its portrayal of modern Judaism struggling to maintain tradition in a changing world. Tonal shifts are problematic, with a maudlin score that evokes television melodrama giving way to quirky, sped-up sequences that treat family drama as light hijinks.

A hugely absorbing social drama that is, by turns, excruciating, sad and sardonic.

Visceral to the point of overkill (and beyond), a berserk blizzard of kinetic images, it doesn't even give you time to be scared.

If the film’s pace is sometimes as awkward as its hero, and the story a little thin, it still brims with authentic life and affection for the characters (even the dubiously attentive Katrin).

Earnest if emotionally unsatisfying documentary.

Where the movie succeeds-and succeeds wonderfully-is when it stays a heartbeat away from politics. For two-thirds of the movie, it's an involving, boxing saga and romance.

That the two stars are married in real life is part of the movie’s genius and certainly key to why “Together” is as outrageously funny as it is scary.

Ozon has said the American drama “Spotlight” inspired his sober, methodical approach. The similarities between the two films are obvious, but there’s a crucial difference: While the 2015 Oscar-winner focused on investigative journalists, By the Grace of God is primarily concerned with the victims.

Rich Hill doesn’t just make you feel like you know these boys; it makes you care about them.

As a writer, Baumbach loves smart, glib talk, and he has a sharp ear for fast-paced, overlapping dialogue; as a director, though, he prefers long takes that allow his characters to work out their feelings.

Crisply photographed, thoughtfully acted and often refreshingly amusing, “Civil War” injects doses of much-needed fun into a genre of filmmaking that’s become mired in dour pretentiousness, when it’s not ridiculing its own excesses in such meta-snark exercises as “Deadpool.”

What makes My Mom Jayne remarkable is how Hargitay manages to move forward from the big reveals. This isn’t just a fact-finding mission for her, but a long-overdue reckoning.

The story manages to put a smile on your face from time to time, despite the gloom of its humor. It avoids happily-ever-after almost as strenuously as it works to remind us: You’re not in Hollywood, hon, but Hampden.

One of the great strengths of Finding Vivian Maier is the filmmakers’ willingness to gently thread ethical inquiry in and out of the film.

In this mesmerizing, revelatory and deeply compassionate film, viewers are left with an indelible impression of girlhood at its most precarious and indomitable.

They're enough to elevate the film above its somewhat by-the-numbers plot and add a little juice to its slightly sluggish forward momentum.

Has to be one of the must-see films for any student of Hollywood fame and infamy.

Astute and entertaining documentary.

Very, very funny, in that morbid sort of way that makes you laugh even as you shudder with horror.

Beaufoy and Cattaneo handle this potentially racy material with an engaging balance of good taste and outright slapstick.

Takes both its characters and the audience to the depths, but it's a journey Kidd redeems with wit and fluency and, ultimately, a deeply persistent humanism.

Demonstrates what writer-director Levinson does best: evoke the sights, smells and atmosphere of his youth with intelligence, humor and a keen sense of social perspective.

May, at times, be deadpan to the point of stiffness, but it's far from dead.

Whether they're navigating a recently flooded Prague or the pristine waters of a Tuscan swimming pool, the fiends and angels who populate Beauty in Trouble are like so many scorpions explaining why they sting the fabled frog trying to help them: "It's my nature."

This is an impassioned movie, made with conviction and evangelical verve. It's also hysterical and overbearing and alienating.

What Mayor lacks in terms of wiki-esque biography it more than makes up for in immediacy and exquisite timing.

Although Whitney follows a familiar structure, Macdonald infuses it with artful editorial choices, marking the chapters of Houston’s life with brief but vivid montages of the times in which she lived.

It's brilliantly acted. But best of all, it's brilliantly made.

Days of Future Past is, in itself, as intoxicating as a shot of adrenaline. It’s what summer movies are meant to be.

Both grimly naturalistic and infused with classical values at their most thoughtfully composed, Land of Mine is epic but deeply intimate; elegant but tough.

Manzoor has created a world that feels at once very real — multicultural London, a blend of modernity and tradition — and very, very unreal. The story is a sci-fi and kung fu stew, with a mad-professor plotline that’s more than a little hard to swallow. Fortunately, the candy-colored sweetness of the sauce — a feminist story that is at heart about sibling love — makes all the hoo-hah go down a little easier.

Yelchin’s performance — grizzled, neurotic — is sadly on-the-nose, making us feel as if we’re watching the last act of a troubled young man.

Put in terms that Bob (and perhaps only Bob fans) can understand: This movie may not be the Meatsiah — beef tartare inside a medium-well burger inside beef Wellington — but it’s pretty well done.

Not since the heyday of Frank Capra, perhaps, has there been a movie that so seamlessly combines screwball comedy with get-out-your-handkerchiefs heart. Peggy Sue Got Married isn't about solving life's problems, it's about accepting them, in a world where love doesn't conquer all, but conquers enough. And in the hands of director Francis Coppola, that message makes what could have been merely a delightful lark about time travel into something much more.

Bring Her Back is close to, but not quite, a triumph of style over substance — foreboding, unnerving and ultimately very gooey in ways that linger like the aftermath of a bad dream yet lack the nightmare cogency of truly great horror.

It's in this final chapter that the director states his message, which is handled so lightly, almost incidentally, you might miss it. But it's a profound one. For what the girls learn is that the way to get what they want -- no, need -- isn't by hoarding something, but by letting go.

Like a miniature universe made entirely of millions of tiny plastic bricks, The Lego Batman Movie looks and feels like it could only have been put together by a roomful of mad geniuses, moving in a ballet of well-choreographed creativity: It’s simultaneously epic and humble.

A Prairie Home Companion tries to embrace the spirit of that longtime radio series but suffocates the very qualities that make the original show so special in the first place.

It's tasty enough, and probably good for you, but at 73 minutes, the film is hardly a very filling entree.

Monica is moody, slow-moving and stronger on style than characterization, yet Lysette and Clarkson endow it with feeling. This is a broken-family drama that culminates not with shouted recriminations or smashed crockery, but with baths, massages and gentle kisses.

Microbe and Gasoline doesn’t reinvent the wheel, but it just might ride four of them into your heart.

While the younger Van Peebles certainly looks the part, Baadasssss! never feels like anything more than kids playing dress-up.

Amy Schumer proves her cinematic bona fides in Trainwreck, a strikingly assured feature film debut in which she proves herself as authentic an actress as she is deft as a writer.

The story it tells is conventional, chronological and straightforward. And that’s enough. With a story this charming, who needs bells and whistles?

Startling, dreamlike, frustrating, funny — Karan Kandhari’s debut feature, “Sister Midnight,” is an absolute original.

A psychic journey deep into the very fabric of Iranian (and by extension, all) life.

Hilarious, touching and wonderfully dyspeptic.

It's of an odd genre: a formally scripted (by Tony Grisoni) feature with a musical score that adheres totally to journalistic accuracy and willfully ignores formula, melodrama and uplift. It's a real down-lift.

Stone's film is a case study in cultural analysis that aims at too much and achieves too little.

The movie may or may not be entirely true to Brontë, but it is surpassingly, and often deliciously, Brontë-esque.

Remarkably entertaining.

Swinton is elegantly comic, but also strangely cartoonish.... A funny and forthright screen presence, she is the foil for the stately pace and the opulent sets -- the most ravishing since "Bram Stoker's Dracula." There is only one conclusion: Potter, the little smarty-pants, is pulling our cross-gartered gams. She's having us on with this spoof of the prissy masterpiece theatricality.

The title of When Lambs Become Lions could refer to any of its subjects: One way or another, everyone involved is endangered and fighting for survival.

Origin, Ava DuVernay’s audacious, ambitious adaptation of the equally audacious and ambitious book “Caste,” operates on so many levels at once that the effect is often dizzyingly disorienting. But hang in there: Viewers who allow themselves to be taken on this wide-ranging, occasionally digressive journey will emerge not just edified but emotionally wrung out and, somehow, cleansed.

Peace Officer piles up evidence of outrageous excess, provoking what is likely to be a response, from its audience, that is far less measured than that of its main subject.

As a family-approved document, In Her Own Words is celebratory rather than probing, critical or comprehensive.

[A] sometimes fascinating, often convoluted, movie.

As we’ve come to expect with this director, “A House of Dynamite” is itself an act of professionalism, from the calmly ruthless editing by Kirk Baxter to Volker Bertelmann’s ominous score to the way the many pieces of the film’s narrative puzzle snap together.

Kennebeck may be a newcomer to feature filmmaking, but her grasp of the material is accomplished.

Omar feels as trapped and enmeshed in hopelessness as the vicious political cycle it depicts.

Maurice succeeds because [Merchant/Ivory's] trademark flatness is appropriate for the subject.

Based on the ingenious novel "Red Dragon" by Thomas Harris, it keeps the nerves racing on fear-fuel until its oddly anticlimactic climax. [15 Aug 1986, p.N29]

With Titane, Ducournau joins the crowded realm of elevated horror, to increasingly outlandish and alienating effect.

The great strength of McQuarrie is that, even when he’s leaning into the laughs, he plays it straight — he doesn’t sacrifice inviolable core values in the name of escapism, whether in the form of smart writing or superb production aesthetics.

The animated comedy-adventure has a sweet and very modern message, plus strong characters. More important, the movie blends the music-minded mentality of yore with the more recent ambition (thank you, Pixar) of truly appealing to all ages.

The most cinematic of the three films. It tells its story in stark, often wordless scenes.

Cinema at its most intellectually honest and morally necessary.

Life, Animated makes fascinating points, about the power of cinema, about meeting our loved ones where they are and, as Ron says, about who gets to decide what constitutes a meaningful life.

Among the joys here are the supporting players, each with well-defined stories and quirky personalities. Cheryl Hines (HBO's "Curb Your Enthusiasm") and Shelly play fellow waitresses searching for their own happiness, and good ol' Andy Griffith is memorable as the curmudgeonly diner-owner who takes a shine to Jenna.

Like his other films, this one takes an admittedly slender thread of an idea — one that would make a perfectly good premise for a four-minute comic sketch — and stretches it to almost the breaking point, and sometimes beyond, twisting and intertwining it with other nonsense along the way, just for the heck of it.

Though it takes place in the recent past, at a time when the Bhutanese people were still getting used to such American imports as James Bond movies and “black water” (Coca-Cola), the film has something important to say about the promise and the perils of the present.