Killing Them Softly possesses a modicum of swagger and style, even as it perpetuates some of the crime genre's more tedious cliches, from slow-motion savagery to facile cynicism.

Weird and wonderful, zigging where it should zag and zagging where it should zig, this wildly imaginative flight of fancy strikes an admirably poised balance between whimsy, screwball comedy, social satire and generous meditation on the foibles and highest aspirations of human nature.

Like so many other rob-the-mob movies, the plan seems pretty far-fetched, and the ending isn't much of a surprise. But if you like your films sprinkled liberally with sex, violence and humor, then you're bound to like Bound.

With Hawkins’s alternately elfin and flinty performance at its center, The Lost King winds up being a paean to amateurism and unconventionality.

The real question is whether the film moves the "Brideshead" ball down the playing field in any meaningful way since the acclaimed miniseries. And I'd have to say that it doesn't so much advance it as it shrinks it into a golf-ball-size nugget.

Though it captures many sharp, stark details of life in poverty-stricken Kazakhstan, Schizo's momentum is so measured, it nearly lulls its audience to sleep.

What Polar Bear really lacks is hindsight. It is a little girl’s valentine to her father, without the benefit of bittersweet wisdom that comes with age.

True Believer is a thriller about moral rejuvenation, and there's not much wrong with it that another actor in the lead wouldn't cure.

Cloverfield is a relentless, I-thought-my-eyeballs-were-bleeding exercise in visual disorientation.

The story can shift from uproarious to heartbreaking in the span of a scene, but Cheadle, in his feature directorial debut, controls the tone like a veteran.

It’s engaging and watchable, even as it marches toward a seemingly suicidal climax. Yet the complex dynamic between Wardaddy and his men is far more fascinating.

In addition to all the rollicking, ribald humor, Tamara Drewe also has a couple of flashes of darkly comic violence. In a literary sense, it's poetic justice, really. Punishment meted out for bad behavior.

Nadja has some delicious qualities. Most delectable of all is Elina Lowensohn as Nadja, the brooding daughter of Count Dracula, an otherworldly being with ebony lipstick, lusciously dark eyebrows, a dark hood and a great accent to match.

You won't be disappointed, and you will be deeply, quietly moved.

Billed as a romantic comedy, the movie is certainly funny, but it's also as darkly disturbing as any this year.

A sumptuous period drama.

The Road possesses undeniable sweep and a grim kind of grandeur, but it ultimately plays like a zombie movie with literary pretensions.

The geological equivalent of an albatross around the neck. It's another of those Warner Bros. productions that are heavy on star iconography and production values but AWOL on story.

It's cool but not too cool, and cute but not too cute. A neat trick considering its overexposed avian cast.

This taut political thriller, set amid the soulless office architecture of K Street, has an ostensibly liberal bent, but its antiheroine’s Machiavellian methods turn the film’s subject away from its cause, portraying lobbyists and politicians in a dark light.

Where it succeeds best is not in describing how Luzhin got broken but how love fixed him, albeit temporarily.

You don't have any idea what's going to happen next. You're not caught in a movie, so much as a narrative stratagem.

The only reason this dilemma has any import is thanks to Bardem, who almost single-handedly drags the film along.

It's a fascinating story but not so fascinatingly told.

Overall, the movie is cloddishly composed, with awkward zooms and theatrical blocking. This is one of those movies where characters speak in asides to the audience; Nunn has reinvented the proscenium arch.

The key question the film raises: Is what happened to the Tipton Three an outrage? It allows us to draw our own conclusions strictly on an eye-of-the-beholder basis.

It isn't as sad a movie as "Joan Rivers: A Piece of Work," another behind-the-mask documentary. It's funnier. But it's just as illuminating.

Fortunately, the maudlin moments are offset by fine performances, flashes of humor and a visual sense that’s more astute than the script.

Like the mix tapes that obsess its main characters, Nick & Norah's Infinite Playlist builds into something of infectious joy.

The second half of this nearly two-hour film is a pure delight — fast-paced and funny and filled with special effects and humor as great as any recent Marvel movie, with the possible exception of “Guardians of the Galaxy.”

It’s a joyless, surpassingly dour enterprise, but one that fulfills its mission with Katniss’s own eagle-eyed efficiency and unsentimental somberness.

Moore’s latest movie is funny and touching, and it has a lot to say about what we settle for as Americans citizens, and how much better our lives might be if we raised some hell.

Jensen positions Men & Chicken as a fablelike ode to humanism and tolerance, but his obsession with brutish sexuality and mean, slapstick humor makes that claim feel unearned and glib.

At a time when the country is engaged in fresh debates about the fragile relationship between privacy and national security, this particular chapter seems worth revisiting.

Unfortunately, this loosen-up-Sandy-baby allegory, full of heavyhanded sexual/mythic symbols is more of a poetic nudist's delight than a movie. Its characters (from fussy Grant to voluptuous MacPherson) are only mildly appealing. Writer/director John Duigan, maker of the charming Flirting, took a recent tumble with The Wide Sargasso Sea. He has yet to regain his footing.

It’s a sweet and savory morsel of storytelling, drowning in a puddle of special-effects sauce.

As compelling as Warner’s story is, Crown Heights never quite takes hold cinematically. It’s a procedural whose central protagonist remains necessarily passive and something of a cipher, despite the wellsprings of emotion that Stanfield manages to tap simply by gazing balefully out a cell window.

Considering how firmly the image of Popeye is fixed in the minds of all spinach-bred Americans, it's daring of the film to open by showing the character in its familiar cartoon form. But Robin Williams so utterly captures the Popeye idea as to justify this, and Shelley Duvall is such a perfect Olive Oyl that it will always be difficult to imagine her impersonating a human being. [19 Dec 1980, p.20]

It has as much of an ax to grind as the humorless and misguided bureaucrats it mocks.

I can only bestow this adaptation of Joanne Harris's bestselling novel with such faint praise as "pleasant" and "mildly disarming."

To see seemingly reg'lar guys utterly stripped of dignity and defense is cruel enough, but crueler still is the laughter that you cannot seem to stop from rupturing your lungs and aorta.

Like its protagonist’s fleeting relationships, the film never completely connects.

The Hedgehog is a treat: a movie that's smart, grown-up, wry and deeply moving. Best of all, this is accomplished with the lightest of cinematic strokes. It sneaks up on you, without grandstanding, melodrama or outright jokes.

The Fall is often an affectionate caricature itself, but one of astonishing beauty, featuring two heartfelt performances from Untaru and the tender, often mordantly funny Pace. They're perfect foils for Tarsem's gorgeous tone poem to cinema as a medium of magic and miracles, stories and lies.

Features a handsome production and terrific performances.

By turns sweet, sad, funny and poignant, We Have a Pope is the story of a man who doesn't want to be God's representative on Earth.

Coleman and Thomas are unusually sympathetic embodiments of a father and son, and they have some moments that are legitimately stirring. Cloak & Dagger is never as adept or perceptive as you'd like it to be, but it's got what members of the critical fraternity traditionally characterize as a little something.

Everyone is convincingly miserable, and audiences are likely to follow suit.

Had the filmmakers resisted the temptation to politicize their material they might have made a great war movie. They might also have thought to give us some indication of the strategic significance of the hill. As it is, they've managed to create a deeply affecting, highly accomplished film.

The movie is jampacked with jokes, sight gags and set pieces guaranteed to appeal to the audience's sense of the preposterous.

As a showcase for Murray’s proven rapport with his audience, St. Vincent occasionally threatens to become a self-congratulatory victory lap. But as a celebration, it’s a chance to revel in the Murray personae — wiseacre, hipster, humble man of the street and hell of a nice guy — that has allowed him somehow to reach mass-media stardom while retaining his own idiosyncratic niche.

This anti-feminist parable is both a labor and a pain.

At times, The Man Who Sold His Skin plays like a cultural parody, but its aim is dead serious, and more sobering. The pathos and tragedy of the global refugee crisis is its target, not the pretensions of the international art market, and it, from time to time, delivers a sting.

Cradle Will Rock is left in mid-rock, as it were, its energy squandered, its sense of history confused, its sound and fury ultimately signifying nothing.

Harris and Mortensen may not have the combined star power to push Appaloosa to the level of popularity of last year's "3:10," but the film is every bit as enjoyable, and, for traditionalists, more measured.

Without a clear narrative, the story recedes in the face of the movie’s stylized violence — which is, admittedly, glorious, even brazen.

A drama about strong, giving, funny women, Fried Green Tomatoes seems plucked from the same patch as the play-turned-movie Steel Magnolias. It's not exactly a successful hybrid, but you could get a craving for it anyway.

As charming as it is instructive.

Everest gets several things right, but it fails to find a way to make the average viewer relate to the people on the mountain.

Downton Abbey is eye and ear candy of the highest order: rich and delicious, but not especially nutritious.

For its flaws, Blood Diamond is a gem, if only for being an unusually smart, engaged popcorn flick.

Vaughn can motormouth like a machine gun, spraying men, women and children with manic, rat-a-tat outbursts of toxic insincerity. It's often dirty, yes. But it's also manic and inspired.

It offers a sort of Chinese food poignancy, the kind that may seem satisfying at the time but ultimately leaves us hungering for more, for something authentic.

Isn't juvenile, it isn't even infantile. It's prenatal!

The movie, alas, is shackled somewhat by Waugh's original, pedestrian plot, which is too full of discrete incidents and slow to form an overarching story.

In the end, Stage Beauty is in over its mediocre head.

The documentary makes an effective and rather chilling case that there is an almost unbroken chain between Adolf Hitler and Saddam Hussein.

For the most part, The Other Guys is seriously silly stuff, in the best sense.

The movie’s focus on good vibes and high times leaves little room to contemplate the more human story. Regardless, the movie is good-natured and an enjoyable watch. If Myers really just wanted to show his appreciation, he went above and beyond.

Ironically, Call Me Lucky, a worshipful new documentary profile of Crimmins by comic-turned-filmmaker Bobcat Goldthwait, has a little too much reverence for its irreverent subject.

Take a powerful, revealing nonfiction book, sift through it for its most cliche'd elements and turn it into a terror film and you've got The Serpent and the Rainbow.

This may be catnip to a kiddie audience that, these days, would seem to know no other world. But it's hard to think much of a movie whose only point of identification with its audience is its utter superficiality. [05 Aug 1986, p.C10]

The most perfunctory and least imaginative of the recent cycle of horror melodramas, Motel Hell may be credited with a fleeting wry touch, but it wears out its welcome by running a minimum of ghoulish stunts into the ground. [25 Oct 1980, p.F4]

If The Traitor proves anything, it’s that an 80-year-old filmmaker can still pounce.

Director Robert Zemeckis has created a hodgepodge of amateurish, pie-in-the-face humor. The six young stars are untalented, unattractive and about as believable as characters from a Laverne and Shirley episode, and for a solid hour and a half they run around bumping into things. [28 Apr 1978, p.19]

At nearly 2½ hours, the movie is fun to watch until it’s not, and then it becomes a chore.

Lathan, who was such a live wire as the aspiring basketballer in 2000's "Love & Basketball," gives this movie an alert, glamorous presence.

For anyone with a taste for the stylized violence and self-aware cartoonishness of the John Wick films — a taste for blood and mayhem that comes closer to corn syrup than most cinematic carnage — Nobody is a brutal treat.

The main problem with Patriot Games, though, is that the inevitable confrontation between Ryan and Miller takes forever to materialize. In the interim, Noyce gets bogged down in the mass of technical detail -- the inside-CIA baseball -- that is such an integral aspect of Clancy's books. On the page, Clancy's research is impressively exhaustive, and if by chance you become bored, you can always skip ahead. But a movie doesn't afford us this luxury. Some of what we're shown about the inner working of the intelligence network is fascinating, but sometimes it can become an irritating distraction. You just want to cut to the chase.

[A] captivating and meticulous new film by Alex Gibney.

A lovely, amazing, wonderfully provocative film.

Much of Greenland features chaotic crowd scenes. The real disaster is how quickly mankind descends into dismaying depravity.

The Mountain is what it is, and any attempt to recapitulate its meaning in some other form (like — ahem — a movie review) is a fool’s errand. With that in mind, it is probably best to set this thought down, and leave it with you: The Mountain is not for everyone, but it is, most emphatically, something else.

Lanthimos and his company still dare to find a bracing, disconsolate farce in our brief and helpless thrashing through life. For that, most people will never forgive them.

For all its awkwardness and mawkishness, Santini deserves the shot. It has an authentic core of family drama and humor that could stir a large public. [03 Oct 1980, p.C1]

If Ready Player One is tedious at times, it’s also oodles of fun at others.

In the end, It Could Happen to You is a lot like the cop and the waitress: sweet, naive, not too smart, but likable. In this pyrotechnic summer of "Speed," "Blown Away" and "True Lies," that's got to count for something.

Paltrow is pretty commanding, even if Madden pushes things toward airlessness by keeping the camera so tight.

Although the movie is moving and even funny in many places, it's also overextended. And composer John Williams's syrupy score practically oozes from your ears on the drive home.

All in all, Jack Goes Boating is an auspicious -- if slightly ostentatious -- debut by Hoffman, one of today's greatest actors. Maybe next time his performance in front of his camera will be as subtle as his performance behind it.

A sadly dull and unimaginative outing.

You don’t have to understand the lyrics — or even like the music — to find We Are X entertaining, even, at times, moving.

The Lodge isn’t a perfect treat. But for those who like their movies dark and disturbing, it does the trick.

Barely adequate as a pictorial rendering of the book, the movie still thrives on the rousing nature of this unlikely but enthralling epic. [08 Nov 1978, p.C1]

Its arresting visual design aside, Cafe Society is upper-middle-late-period Allen, a modestly diverting ditty that will never go down as one of his greats. (But, as most can agree, Allen at his most middling is still better than many hacks at their best.)

Needs more than happy thoughts to get off the ground.

It’s impossible to dismiss von Trier as merely a hype-monger. He’s too damnably good a filmmaker for that. Watching Nymphomaniac is to be reminded of his superb skills in creating vivid worlds and characters on screen.

Gattaca may be all done up in new-fangled notions, but underneath all the guff about designer babies, it rests on a notion that was a staple of the original "Star Trek" series.