It's not fierce, it's not angry, it's not radical, it's polite and what might be called "life-affirming." But it does have a couple of attributes most movies don't.

It's the sort of movie that can make normally well-read and intelligent viewers feel stupid.

Damning legal brief against the former secretary of state.

Like the novel, the film is occasionally overwrought and overwritten.

Will probably appeal only to the most committed of Leigh fans.

The only thing wrong with Bowling for Columbine is Moore himself.

An engaging, modestly amusing, sometimes laugh-out-loud hilarious comedy of manners in which the usual millennial excesses are skewered, from the invidious hellhole of social media to the mendacities of online dating.

Unfolds as a series of meticulous tableaux vivants, but like those parlor pastimes, it lacks physical verve and a compelling emotional charge.

Stone creates a riveting marriage of fact and fiction, hypothesis and empirical proof in the edge-of-the-seat spirit of a conspiracy thriller.

Say this much for Fennell: She is incapable of pulling punches. Even when they’re swaddled in the puffiest, fuzziest of gloves, her blows land with gut-wrenching force.

The film’s structural shortcomings will matter less to most viewers than the personality of the central character, Michal.

Well-made and likable, without any major missteps. It’s also just a little bland.

The movie is an intellectual puzzle, the outcome of which is never in doubt. Its minor thrills come not from not knowing what will happen, but from watching the cagey choreography of two acrobatic minds.

Some movies prove so eye-opening that a viewer may feel the urge to recount the story, start to finish, to friends and acquaintances. Crime After Crime is that kind of film.

The movie is a joyless, inconclusive affair. By not making Orton either a homosexual hero or a working-class hero, avenues that were both open to them and that lesser minds might have traveled down, the filmmakers have shown great intellectual taste. But it's not the kind of taste that's illuminating. Ultimately, they seem not to have known exactly what to make of their subject.

Director Walter Lang does almost nothing to cinematize the show, but that's all right; King and I works fine as an act of theatrical preservation, and at some strange level the story, even with its abrupt ending, still has power. [27 Feb 1992, p.D7]

At its worst, which ends up being most of the time, the movie traps us in art-house pretentiousness, as we're obliged to follow the yearnings and abstract corruptions of the urban zestless.

A full-throttle fantasy, about as heady a movie experience as it gets.

The film is most interesting when it uses Gold to tell the story of Los Angeles’s diversity, rather than the story of the most important stomach in Los Angeles.

There is an obliqueness to In Bloom. Writer Nana Ekvtimishvili, who directed the movie with Simon Gross, doesn’t spell things out, and the complete story never comes into focus... But when the truth is so troubling, sometimes part of the story is more than enough.

By the time the film is over, the movie has degenerated with a jaundiced vengeance. Fosse's sour, grandstanding cynicism imposed an intolerable burden of self-pity on his talent, our compassion and the tradition of the backstage muscial.

A surprisingly lush, well-produced film.

The performers bring freshness to what could have been cliched roles.

Although nowhere near the class of its equine hero, is quite a satisfying ride.

Pontecorvo's pointed 1969 drama of the politics of war feels surprisingly timely.

It’s [Bong Joon Ho's] first film since “Parasite” became the first foreign language movie to win a best picture Oscar in 2020, and while it’s not his best work, “Mickey 17” is still a great deal of acrid fun. In the bargain, you get three great performances from two very good actors.

It's actually quite satisfying, in a weird, magical-realism sort of way that manages to disturb and confound as much as it appeases the romantic.

A clever slice of regional noir that carries a gale-force punch beneath its modest, soft-spoken trappings.

Happy End, for its part, signals a return to form for the director, who here makes a stark departure from the sweet tone of “Amour” — perhaps his most mainstream work — in favor of the vinegary outlook on life manifested in such films as “Funny Games,” his 2007 horror movie about violently psychopathic home invaders, and “The White Ribbon,” his 2009 pre-World War I period piece about, among other things, child abuse.

A gorgeously photographed storybook.

The picture that emerges is fractured, making for a portrait that’s as fascinating as it is baffling.

It is an engrossing tale, full of betrayal and chicanery, and it casts the Egyptian political-military complex and the religious hierarchy as riddled with corruption.

Risk raises deep misgivings about its subject and its maker. But it’s still queasily, compulsively watchable — and probably necessary, if only as a cautionary example of how ethics, objectivity and agendas come into play in nonfiction filmmaking.

It takes us someplace, yes, but the trip is just this side of transporting.

By the end of Invisible Beauty, it’s obvious from all the accolades that [Hardison] made a difference in the lives of a new generation of Black models.

Phantasm will not be remembered as a masterpiece of the horror genre, but it sustains a gauche, hokey, desperately improvisational charm.... It entertains through a half-facetious juvenile gusto.

An engaging and touching valedictory to one of the most pivotal figures of the 20th century.

Nine Days is, in the end, meant as a wake-up call: a bracing splash of fake seawater in the face that somehow, against all logic, feels like the real thing.

It’s also a telling personal moment, because it opens the door to a discussion of Wallace’s struggles with depression and suicidal thoughts.

The much ballyhooed movie, far from great and far from short (2 1/2 hours!), is still great fun.

At 46, Shinkai still has plenty of time to convince us of his gifts. Weathering With You may not reach the heights of “Your Name,” but it still achieves something impressive: It tells a story that, without sugarcoating the environmental challenges that lie ahead, manages to end on a hopeful note.

The movie, which is based on the Lowell Cunningham comic book series, throws out some wonderful implications, but they’re frustratingly few and far between.

The director, who is the son of filmmaker David Cronenberg, seems to have inherited some of his father’s worst excesses, which are here unleashed in a manner that is sophomoric, fetishistically violent and hyper-sexualized.

Spiritually aware documentary.

Thanks to Rock's running monologue, combining scathing humor with trenchant observations, the film manages to be side-splitting even while making its most poignant points.

In the end, it's primarily a brain teaser, obtuse and ultimately limited in its emotional impact.

Costner (with Michael Blake's screenplay) creates a vision so childlike, so willfully romantic, it's hard to put up a fight.

Close kin to Fatal Attraction, but more earnestly told, it is a cautionary treatise on the wages of fooling around in the office (death for her, despair for him). But mostly it is a solid whodunit, driven by subtext and the intensity of Ford, Greta Scacchi as the predatory other woman and Bonnie Bedelia as the wronged wife.

The Outrun is a recovery drama lifted above the genre’s necessary clichés by the star’s prickly, incandescent presence. It’s also boosted by the film’s setting in the stark Orkney Isles in the north of Scotland and by Fingscheidt’s poetic approach to time, place and chronology.

Emphasizes action and eye-popping visuals over emotion.

A colorfully macabre stop-motion animation comedy that embraces the sociopolitical allegories of George A. Romero's zombie pictures and reworks them into a feature-length episode of "Scooby-Doo."

A funny thing happened while watching Luce. With only a half-hour or so of the movie left to go, it suddenly occurred to me: I wasn’t sure what the movie was actually about. Or, more accurately, it was about so much that, at the point where most films are starting to wrap things up, this one felt like it was still just setting the stage.

The film as a whole is a little like one of those inflatable love dolls -- a reasonable facsimile, but nothing like the real thing.

But if the modestly budgeted film (loosely based on journalist Michael Nicholson's factual narrative, "Natasha's Story") lopes along a formulaic, often heavy-handed track, its pictures and subtext make a powerful statement. [9Jan1998 Pg. N.41]

Knappenberger’s documentary is smart and focused, homing in on a recurring theme of independence.

The acting ensemble has a believable, brotherly chemistry, especially Teller and Taylor Kitsch, playing a troublemaker who initially teases Brendan brutally before the two warm up to each other, forming an adorable bond.

Good old-fashioned movie storytelling that steadily builds, over the course of nearly three hours, to a white-knuckle conclusion that satisfies on nearly every level.

It does exactly what its subject didn’t do: toe the line.

A fascinating, funny and informative documentary.

As Ravel puts it, the disproportionate influence of money on elections isn’t a Democratic or Republican problem, but a “gateway issue to every other issue you might care about.” Dark Money makes the case, as well as any film can, that she’s pretty much right on the money.

Possibly without meaning to, the younger Wexler has made a superb examination not of professional cinematography -- really, who cares? -- but of the eternal bad business between fathers and sons.

Surprisingly smart, graphically faithful live-action adaptation of the Mike Mignola series

There are no surprises in Sleepless, and the audience is ahead of the characters every step of the way. But people seem to like it that way. And, hey, it works like a charm.

Violette mostly avoids the pitfalls associated with movies about writers by limiting the scenes of Violette scribbling furiously in a notebook.

Betting on Zero makes such a strong and effective case that the company does, in fact, engage in shady business practices that it’s likely to leave viewers in a state of Documentary High Dudgeon (that brand of cinematic outrage that is not entirely unmixed with a pleasurable feeling of moral superiority).

Propelled by a lyrical, pulsing soundtrack of Colombian rock, hip-hop and bolero, Days of the Whale is less a character study, or even a love story than a vibrant study in swirling perpetual motion.

Slick, silly and often extravagantly pretty, it’s a pastiche that threads a tricky needle, conveying the dual nature of cinema as an enchanting art form and a ruthless, rationalized industrial practice.

Though much of "Candy" is a clumsy sprawl, there's more than enough human spirit in the tank to keep it going.

At nearly three hours long, and told with the book’s peripatetic structure, moving from nightmare to nightmare, The Painted Bird is not for the faint of heart.

In the end, The Color Purple manages to find a sweet spot between tragedy and entertainment. But is that really the best way to honor Walker’s vision?

What might have been just another anodyne promo piece or solipsistic valentine instead becomes a funny, eccentric and finally deeply poignant depiction of art, family, ­self-sabotage and the prickly intricacies of brotherly love.

There are many periods when the two men are traveling and you feel the need to fast-forward the movie to another scene. This is not a great comedy but it's a string of funny highlights.

A dead-on sense of how rich kids live and talk today, a sense of the melancholy of a dysfunctional family, and some great dark laughs.

Glazer and Rabinowitz’s script can be patchy and manic, but it does its best work showing the contortions women undergo to prove their support, especially in today’s “yaaaas queen” era where everyone is a goddess.

As happens with many time-travel films, this one ultimately paints itself into a bit of a narrative corner.

A great performance does not necessarily make for great tragedy, and Christine remains mired in the minutiae of its portrait of a doomed, bitter young woman.

There's nothing "wrong" with this movie but it feels like warmed-over business as usual.

A logistical wonder, a marvel of engineering, and relentlessly, mercilessly thrilling.

The casting coup here is Benedict Cumberbatch, who exudes steely resolve and silken savagery as a villain on the cusp of becoming a legendary nemesis.

Famuyiwa reminds viewers not to believe — or worse, internalize — the hype, and he provides a great deal of cheeky, infectious fun in the process. Put another way, Dope is the bomb.

A book that got under the young Guadagnino’s skin, about the ache to merge with a forbidden lover’s body and soul, has become a film that uses the play of light on a screen to hint at the light we carry inside ourselves and that only the queer know we share.

Brown seamlessly blends the emotional, intimate stories of people with bigger pictures, using the explosion as the starting point for a ripple effect that just keeps growing.

It’s a viciously smart and disturbingly funny abduction tale, primarily confined to a grubby basement but with a purview that extends from the inner sanctums of the memory to the outer reaches of the galaxy.

We get Albert’s side of the story, and that’s clearly problematic. How much faith should we put in the account of someone who tells such massive whoppers? That question constantly hovers over Jeff Feuerzeig’s documentary, which is by turns fascinating and unseemly.

Worse yet is the insincerity of the film's central performances. Too cool by half, Glodell, Wiseman and Dawson speak every line as if it had air quotes around it. In fact, the entire movie feels as though it has air quotes around it.

What’s true in Pakistan turns out to be universal: Misconceptions can prove as dangerous as any disease and are even harder to eradicate.

[A] well-told tale.

Blade goes for the carotid while offering a classic look and a comic-book story. It’s part Kurosawa, part “X-Men,” part “Ichi the Killer.”

The acting is straight out of '50s B movies. The exposition is clumsy, the sound track corny, the denouement silly. Then again, who said bad taste was easy? [13 Apr 1987, Style, p.b4]

Considering that any one of those elements could have scuttled its fragile mix of drama, comedy and life-and-death stakes, 50/50 beats the odds with modest, utterly winning ease.

All too often the plot feels calculated rather than organic, the result of a time-tested formula rather than genuine innovation.

Spielberg has created an appropriate showcase for the magnificent creature that emerges, one that recalls the great movie horses of yore in a story guaranteed to pluck, grab and wring viewers' hearts, but thankfully not break them.

This is a very sweet movie to watch, the pleasant cinematic equivalent of light summer reading.

As long as it stayed mainstream dirty it was okay, but when it got into perversions the American Psychiatric Society hasn't even named yet, it left me behind.

Enhanced by a wicked sense of humor, Will Gluck's movie does what Hughes did best, showcasing characters with personality who make you wish you had them on speed dial.

For every misgiving The Eagle Huntress invites, it offers inspiration in equal measure, taking the audience on a beautiful, thrilling journey to a part of the world that is still largely inaccessible. And it introduces them to a young woman who gives bravery a bracing, unforgettable face.

Nothing about El Camino makes a case that we are necessarily better off with it than without it, or that some great hole has now been filled. It turns out we were fine with the idea of not knowing exactly what happened to Jesse; that way, we could always hope the best. Now that we know, dare we ask for a little more? Or leave it be?

You may not enjoy The Mother (I certainly didn't), but it's a movie so heavy on truth, its spell cannot be denied.