It’s a movie that’s as fun to watch as it is funny. But the real appeal of Big Hero 6 isn’t its action. It’s the central character’s heart.

At times a case study in How to Be an Ally, the film is accessible by intention. Yet it remains raw, vulnerable and joyful, even when things get messy, as it charts a road map to empathy and acceptance — the real destination that awaits at the end of their cross-country odyssey.

Tim Burton remains the Wizard of Odd with this eye-filling if problematic confection.

The volatile, unbridled emotion of Mommy — its sheer life force — makes up for its structural weaknesses, giving viewers an often breathtaking glimpse of a director who, like his own adamantly unconventional protagonists, is fairly bursting at the seams with spiky, headstrong brio.

Lee has kept the bones of McBain’s and Kurosawa’s versions, but he’s made his own movie, occasionally for worse but mostly for better.

With its sophisticated psychology, its brilliant story structure and its riveting performances, The Duchess of Langeais feels very new, even if everything about it is old.

The movie has an unhurried pace, lulling the teens — and by extension the audience — into occasional complacency with the regular rhythms of each chugging train.

The relationship is the best thing about the film, which otherwise feels hopelessly sad and tawdry.

Before it takes an appalling turn for the vicious, The Silent Partner seems an uncommonly clever and gripping suspense thriller. Even after the story threatens to self-destruct, you fight the impulse to suffer a major letdown, for the sake of the swell nerve-racking time you've been having up to that point.

The movie's chief value is to preserve Phoenix at the height of his wary physical grace, which recalls a young Marlon Brando.

A blithely unfunny, low-budget comedy from director Barry Levinson.

Two hours and six minutes has never seemed so much like two and six-tenths seconds. It's pure pulp metafiction.

The movie attempts to paint too large a canvas.

She Said takes a story we thought we knew and gives it new, utterly shattering life.

There's a refreshingly unusual spirit at work.

Documentary about rock history's biggest heavy metal band is -- variously -- serious, funny, frustrating and touching.

A taut, mostly well-crafted race against the clock that combines the time-loop conceit of "Groundhog Day" and the postwar paranoia of "The Manchurian Candidate."

Beast sounds like a straightforward erotic mystery thriller, but that atmosphere is at times overshadowed by Pearce’s exploration of British classism, bullying and bigotry.

Nicolas Cage delivers what may his best, most nuanced performance yet in the gritty, hypnotic and deeply moving Joe.

Writer-director Radu Jude’s fascinating, cynical dramedy “Bad Luck Banging or Loony Porn” careens between lowbrow humor and highbrow philosophy, resulting in a film that is as frustrating as life itself; it’s a perfect mirror of our times.

In giving equal weight to all subjects, “Older” flirts with triviality.... But Fegan punctuates some commonplace observations with more peppery ones.

At times tedious but ultimately beguiling, Song of Sparrows morphs from a sly dramedy about running a household into a fable about two ways of life (urban and rural) that can't coexist.

The result is a movie of deceptive lightness and powerful sweep. And what makes it truly work is the presence of Kervel, a first-time actor whose Anna is disarmingly self-assured and sweet. Without her, nothing else matters.

It’s a movie that, to put it in terms that the film’s screenwriters might appreciate, is Thor-ly needed.

The film and the ticktock of recovery it follows are at times difficult to watch. At the same time, watching feels almost necessary in an age when mass shootings seem to have become all too common.

By the end of this troubling film, the cognitive dissonance that it highlights — between the theoretical glorification of the illegal Mexican drug industry and its actual cost in blood — is jarring. It’s an important film, but Narco Cultura is also maddeningly hard to watch.

The writing (by Bill and Cherie Steinkellner) has a non-sentimental appeal for that young preteen (and early teen) crowd that fancies itself too cool for kiddie stuff.

There are pieces of a great movie here, but they never quite come together in a way that allows a gifted filmmaker to take flight.

Riklis has made a powerful film, but can a powerful film change anything about the fatalistic culture of powerlessness that is felt throughout Palestine and Israel? The irony of Lemon Tree is that what it achieves adds, in the end, to the sense that nothing can unravel this mess.

At its best, Queen & Slim isn’t just a crime drama but a nuanced portrayal of family, legacy and self-preservation — how they’re distorted by trauma and history, and how they thrive despite the near-constant threat of annihilation.

The acting is superb, particularly from the three principals.

It resides in that cinematic middle ground of not-bad, not-great, just okay.

It's a grab bag of small delights -- and that includes a workmanlike performance by Toni Collette -- but it never quite amounts to a full load.

It's a brutal, demonic film with a grip like a vise; it grabs you early, its fingers around your throat, and never lets go.

Unrelentingly grim, unremittingly gross and unforgivably unattractive, 28 Days Later is an orgy of troubling images and bestial sound effects.

Sharp, wildly funny social satire behind the profanity and potty jokes.

Betts has put together a talented acting ensemble, and the performances are, for the most part, uniformly good and subtle, particularly among the actresses who play the young novices.

The film deepens and grows more thoughtful — and, yes, sad — as its spotlight on the need for human connection — at any age — comes into focus. The stories of the four people at its center show Villagers to be more than statistics.

Riddled with labor rhetoric, this coal-dusted tragedy wavers between well-acted propaganda and historical burlesque. Rambo's reactionism seems almost subtle by contrast.

A frustrating update. Take away the comedy and you're left with a pallid version -- a sort of Reader's Digest condensation -- of the original.

Georgian writer-director Zaza Urushadze avoids histrionics or moralizing, relying on a strong cast that expresses the film’s central argument about war’s absurdity largely through taciturn action, not words.

There’s an air of “High Noon” to Török’s drama, which features an intrusive sound design, including Tibor Szemzö’s jarringly contemporary score and sound effects that include the ringing of a clock tower, buzzing flies, rumbling thunder and noisy birds — which transition from pleasant tweets to ominous caws of crows by the climax.

Things happen in On the Rocks, but the caper-flick high jinks viewers expect to ensue never come to full, cockeyed fruition.

Its story -- and eerie allure -- comes from our evolving perception of Jackie (Kate Dickie), a surveillance operator in Glasgow, Scotland, who spends long days and nights monitoring the screens.

A spiritually enriching testament to the human capacity for change -- and surely Spike Lee's most universally appealing film.

With Palm Trees and Power Lines, Dack has created a haunting portrait of how trust is manipulated and abused; the trust she builds up with her characters and audience, however, remains steadfast, resulting in a film of disarming candor and power.

Sean Penn sings a powerful and poetic hymn to America with Into the Wild, his sweeping, sensitive and deeply affecting adaptation of Jon Krakauer's best-selling book.

About a musical genre not known for quiet contemplation, “Rumble” asks us to be still for a moment and to listen to the heartbeat — at once familiar and newly strange — that pumps the lifeblood that flows through the songs this country is known for.

This is a film that encapsulates the anxiety of the present moment, complicated by friendships that lean, at times, toward outright hostility.

Without its animation, A Scanner Darkly would have made a fine cautionary tale about drug addiction, paranoia and institutional treachery in a police state. But with a technique that turns the existing live action into a two-dimensional cartoon, the movie goes one -- maybe even 10 -- better. It becomes its own living, breathing metaphor.

Once The Iron Claw populates its first half with peppy needle drops, seaty training montages and brotherly bonding, the pivot toward death and heartache becomes all the more wrenching.

Red Cliff is a dichotomous beast: The computer-generated imagery that makes so much of it possible is served up in heaping, state-of-the-art portions, but the results occasionally border on the cartoonish. At the same time, Red Cliff is a classic tale that gets a classicist's treatment.

(Stamp and Fonda's) polar-opposition in acting styles and temperament, their cultural differences and their pop-cultural synergy come together with almost delicious cacophony.

Autism aside, writer-director Rachel Israel’s debut film is a fairly typical, low-budget New York romance, complete with an excursion to Coney Island. What distinguishes it are Israel’s empathetic characterizations — she’s known Polansky for 15 years — and the winning performances, not only by the leads but also by the supporting players.

Turns out to be one of the most transportingly romantic movies of the year, one that finds the most stirring emotion in struggle rather than in ginned-up melodrama or easy resolution.

The combined impact of these scenes, augmented with Robinson’s lecture — which, while deeply informed and informative, is anything but dull or academic — makes for a powerful one-two punch.

If anything, it's worth watching as yet another example of Lynch's extraordinary collaboration with Dern. It may be overstating things to call her performance heroic, but it's nothing if not brave, as she dares to embody Lynch's most brutal impressions of Hollywood -- not as a dream factory, but as the place where dreams come to die.

This is the rare military drama that conveys both the graphic physical effects of war and its lingering psychic cost.

Down in the Delta is as savory as a slowly stirred gumbo, a heartfelt saga of family and forgiveness directed by America's best-loved living poet, Maya Angelou. The spices are plentiful and the taste complex, but there's nothing fancy about this cultural icon's down-home cooking. [25 Dec 1998, p.C01]

Frantz contains revelations unrelated to the manner in which it protects, and then peels away, its central mystery. Ultimately, it addresses the question: Why go on living when life itself betrays us?

In this engrossing and ultimately inspiring examination of ideals in action, the team behind The Fight wind up illustrating a cardinal rule of nonfiction filmmaking: When it comes to humanizing even the loftiest principles, a documentary lives or dies by its principals.

Creadon and his editor, Douglas Blush, add verve to an otherwise talky exercise by cutting Wordplay as if it were a puzzle itself, with Across and Down camera moves and blocks of black space. A visual pun altogether worthy of those being filled in on screen.

Like Father, Like Son grows on you, subtly and over time. Just as with the unexpected realignments forced on its characters, it may be difficult to fall in love with the movie, but eventually you do warm up to it.

Filmworker is a tribute to the unsung artisans, assistants, best boys and girl Fridays whose indelible contributions make movies not just possible, but magical.

The movie is a stunning example of collaborative fidelity and artistry directed by Karel Reisz, and its impact may be heightened if one is in the dark as to the plot of its literary source, Robert Stone's Dog Soldiers. Suddenly you find yourself in the grip of an overwhelming cinemate and melodramatic undertow, at once thrilled, astonished and dreadfully uncertain of where it may set you down. [09 Aug 1978, p.B1]

Subtlety isn’t the strong suit of Queen of Katwe. But beneath the hackneyed aphorisms, there’s a thrilling story worthy of our attention.

Filmmaker Kirsten Tan riffs on the tropes of both the buddy film and the road trip movie in her absurd yet subtly observed feature debut Pop Aye.

A fascinating experiment that, if the viewer is willing to surrender to Haynes's sometimes hermetic meditations on Dylan's life, heartily rewards the investment.

Malkovich and Sinise, who worked together in Chicago's Steppenwolf Theatre (which Sinise co-founded), are touching and pleasurable together. Malkovich's portrayal of big, simple naif Lennie will attract the most attention, yet he is remarkably restrained, skirting the dangerous fence between verisimilitude and sheer ham. But Sinise, in the quieter, caretaking role, achieves at least as much.

Design-wise, the “Inside Out” characters are Pixar’s crudest work, with the blocky colors and stiff hair of a creature in a TV commercial for insecticide. Blown up to the big screen, they just look worse. Narratively, however, the film’s portrait of Joy is beautifully complex.

The Australian director John Hillcoat makes an audacious, unsettling American feature debut with The Proposition, a revisionist western that brings its own brand of sanguinary honesty to the genre.

The dance between authenticity and storymaking works beautifully.

A deceivingly simple film, one that grows in power in retrospect, as the cumulative impact of so many quiet moments makes itself felt.

It's the latest and one of the best entries in a genre whose highest philosophical expression is the whiplash realization that the universe doesn't play fair.

I had some trouble with the plot, but I'm not the only one -- so did the screenwriter.

In Milan Kundera's novel, "The Unbearable Lightness of Being," the characters are pawns on a complex, philosophical chessboard with Kundera's didactic commentary accompanying every move. In his adaptation, director Phil Kaufman films the pawns, even many of the moves. But without Kundera's connecting presence and voice, the result is closer to Chinese checkers than chess...Very attractive and watchable checkers, sure

King of Comedy aggravates the problem it's supposed to illuminate. Far from clarifying the nature of a creepy social pathology, the movie assumes an attitude of smug, unjustified superiority toward every character in sight and the cockeyed spectacle of pop culture in general.

It’s an unexpectedly charming diversion — a studio film turned inside out, with the stars sent out to pasture and the worker bees front and center.

For the most part, Creed III is a matter of clear, straightforward storytelling, with a well-balanced variety of action, feeling, character development and fan-pleasing callbacks. It’s a good movie.

The production numbers in “Wicked” are garish and cluttered, but they have snap and a pleasing sense of unified mass movement; their effect on the eyeballs is somewhere between an assault and a massage.

This is a must-see film, not just for the primer it offers in how foodways, farming practices and larger environmental forces are crucially connected but for its dazzling imagery of nature in action, both by way of breathtaking close-ups and sensational aerial shots of the farm and its environs.

It transfixes, not with artifice or cheap sentiment, but with a strange alchemy of gloom and light.

Much of the film’s appeal is from the quiet determination of the patriarch Sung, unflappable under the stress, and the family and community who rally around him.

How great can an epic be, when it takes 30 years, including a whole sequence devoted to World War I, for Jean to realize he could be a little nicer to his wife? This is for diehard Francophiles and literate-movie fans only.

Although the cast is uniformly fine, Hoffman shines in a role that demands not showmanship, but a kind of complexity and contradiction that can be rendered only through the kind of dull character details that he excelled in, accumulating them from the inside out.

Suffice it to say that, in addition to celebrating the energy, enterprise and idealism of America’s postwar generation, Spaceship Earth provides a sobering primer in how some dreams die, and others are strangled mercilessly in their cribs.

There are few cinematic pleasures as satisfying to behold as an actor in a role that fits him like a Savile Row suit. Richard Gere offers just such gratification in Arbitrage, a silky, sophisticated Wall Street thriller that finds the actor utterly in his prime, wearing his age and accumulated emotional wisdom with warmth, charisma and nonstop appeal.

Somersault faces the difficulty of representing a girl's unspoken desires and anxieties, a challenge Shortland rises to with terrific skill and aplomb.

The Princess and the Frog invite viewers to see the world as a lively, mixed-up, even confounding place, to recognize essential parts of ourselves in what we see, and to say: This is what we look like.

The story, held at well-mannered arm’s length by Piani, never gets too messy; even Agathe’s deepest psychological issues — a phobia that makes travel difficult and, later, the explanation of its traumatic roots — are handled with efficient, unfailingly discrete politesse.

An infectious (in a good way) documentary.

This brilliantly naive, low-budget shoot-'em-up presents every action as if it were brand spanking new.

Deeply absorbing and moving with the caffeinated speed of Smith's own feisty campaign, Can Mr. Smith Get to Washington Anymore? is at once a celebration of small-d democracy and an elegy to it, a portrait that will surely inspire and infuriate viewers.

There are early warning signs that “World” isn’t going to end well. But Fastvold, a Brooklyn-based Norwegian actress and filmmaker making only her second effort behind the camera, never gins up the sentiment, the melodrama or even the sensuality.

This knowing, low-budget comedy will appeal to men, who'll recognize their behavior, but also to women, who'll see it as goosing the gander.

This slight but insinuating documentary by Abbas Kiarostami...will do nothing to advance or detract from the reputation of the acclaimed Iranian filmmaker.

There's no denying its surreal, hypnotic effect.

Despite the quirky trappings, Something Wild is often as tame as its star couple.