Pressure Cooker may not get the royal, Conde Nast-magazine hype accorded that upcoming Julia Child movie (starring, who else, Meryl Streep), but it merits a place of honor at the table.

Escapes is an eccentric portrait of a not especially eccentric — or even terribly interesting — subject: Hampton Fancher.

A funny, affecting movie about growing up in the shadow of a formidable mom.

Doesn't pack the punch of Schrader and Scorsese's career-best collaborations ("Raging Bull," "Taxi Driver").

The French originals are always much breezier, the characters more genuine and the actors subtler even if the situations are just as silly.

A sweet, even delectable diversion from the more explosive cinematic fare of the season.

The film lacks the very imagination it touts, along with another trait that it links to exceptional athleticism. That’s obsession.

Unfortunately, for all its good music and admirable vocal impersonations, Walk the Line slides -- very, very slowly -- downhill.

The relationships feel contrived, less a drama than an exercise in cuteness.

There is a quality of enchantment to When Marnie Was There that can’t be faked, and that the studio behind this animated feature is justifiably famous for.

Visually stylish surrealist drama.

Tender, observant coming-of-age comedy.

British documentarian Mark Cousins’s The Storms of Jeremy Thomas is a fine introduction to the 70 or so films produced by the titular London-born impresario. It’s barely an introduction at all, however, to Thomas himself.

It is fascinating to watch the writers in “Obit” strive to do right by their subjects, warts and all.

The movie is inspiring and tragic, and, directed by street artist One9, it’s captured in an artful, emotional way that will speak to an audience beyond rap fans.

A sort of romance noir -- spruced up in pressed white linens -- this British-made film is elegant, uncompromising and oh-so- veddy nasty.

The filmmakers invite the audience to get close enough to feel the pain without having to relive the depths of the real-life horror.

With its easy pace and genial company, “My Donkey, My Lover & I” is a journey worth taking, even if, at the end of the day, there’s no cozy French inn waiting for you.

The story itself never wavers when it comes to portraying the truth.

In Truly, Madly, Deeply comparisons with "Ghost" are inevitable. But this British production, starring Juliet Stevenson and Alan Rickman, takes a wide berth around the kind of button-pushing found in "Ghost." It presses with lighter fingers.

It’s crazy and ridiculous at times. But I can’t help agreeing with Assaf, who observes, of his companions’ rescue plans, “I like it. It has the logic of a dream.”

It’s a treat to watch an actress at the top of her game, flexing her interpretive muscles in a showcase that is inventive and thought-provoking.

It practically celebrates convenience of plot, over-the-top acting and follow-the-footprints dialogue, but mostly it is a salute to sequins and sashay. With just a hint of sarcasm.

Insightful, free-roaming but tautly constructed.

This is pretty much a feel-good film for committed fans and moviegoers looking for some spectacular combination of travelogue, athleticism and slo-mo grace.

Mulan may be exotic, but it's hardly a risky enterprise, what with its sentimental show tunes, wholesome morals and plucky teen heroine.

Hang in there and Despicable Me turns into an improbably heartwarming, not to mention visually delightful, diversion.

While the movie is best viewed as an examination of a specific place and time, it also can be seen as a celebration of a larger, more generic cultural phenomenon that one might call creative foment.

Donald Cried succeeds on its own modest terms, but watching its title character can be painful. This is not a movie for people who’d just as soon forget their own teenage mortifications.

The Year of the Everlasting Storm doesn’t end with catharsis, but even insects may have something to teach humanity: to endure the best way we can, however minuscule we may feel in the face of an incomprehensible world.

A film that is by turns darkly comic and disturbing, both sensations brought into vivid, caustic relief by the film's mesmerizing star.

The film also suffers from erratic pacing and half-baked reveals, but at its best, it throbs with raw, human, horrific honesty.

All Jimmy wants is for his life to return to normal. But Price and director Barbet Schroeder haven't done a very good job of letting us know who this guy is—or even what normal is to him. Schroeder also shifts back and forth between a tone of earnest homage to the mood and feel of the classic thriller to one that sends up the genre, laughing slyly behind its back.

The Kill Team is expertly edited, at one point overlaying interviews with the men who participated in the war crimes with B-roll of infantrymen milling about, weapons in hand. And it’s all set to a brilliantly spare and evocative soundtrack. It’s a beautiful way to lose faith in humanity.

This movie has all the same elements as other Grisham fare: raw young lawyer trying to make it in the South; helpless client treated badly; sleazy, star-chamber villains. Wake me up when the last-minute surprise witness comes out of her hidey hole to turn the case around.

The documentary’s resulting mix of intimate portrait and raw street warfare proves visceral, dynamic and sometimes upsetting — although Sharp and Bwayo say they excluded the most horrific footage.

Mikhalkov's 12 breathes and floats.

It’s just a giant missed opportunity to be something more.

Welcome to “The Batman,” yet another lugubrious, laboriously grim slog masquerading as a fun comic book movie.

Unfortunately, the drama operates on a see-through, easily shatterable metaphor: the frigidity of the WASP soul. [17 October 1997, p.N32]

A thoroughly engrossing take on a familiar scenario.

Many of the scenes, already badly written, fail to fulfill their screwball potential. Real Genius should be applauded as a higher class of passage movie. But despite its enthusiastic young cast and its many good intentions, it doesn't quite succeed. I guess there's a leak in the think tank. [9 Aug 1985, p.19]

It's not a great movie, but Yu Nan's performance is superb without being showy or melodramatic.

Absorbing, inspiring and terrifically entertaining, Undefeated earns its title: It's a winner all the way.

Screenwriter Michael Goldenberg and director David Yates have transformed J.K. Rowling's garrulous storytelling into something leaner, moodier and more compelling, that ticks with metronomic purpose as the story flits between psychological darkness and cartoonish slapstick.

Fed Up isn’t so much a warning to the ignorant shopper or a tip for the unimaginative chef as it is a rallying cry. It succeeds in firing up the choir. Whether it will convert the complacent is an open question.

Smashed never really rises much above the level of a dramatic public service announcement. That's not so much because of its tone, but because what it's announcing isn't exactly news. Alcoholism is a disease. Alcoholics aren't bad people. Quitting is hard.

Paradise may not change anyone's ideology, but it should convince some that, but for some deeply divisive views of religious morality, people are pretty much the same on either side of the holy fence.

Alan Paton's haunting novel is brought rather splendidly to life in this moving production.

Absolutely refuse to make predictable patterns in the sand. Instead, they set their characters loose.

Riveting, gracefully constructed film.

Writer-director Kirk Jones III keeps the movie resolutely brisk and light, twisting mildly this way and that but never detouring for long.

Too bad the plot held no surprises and the acting no revelations. No actor could be said to stand out and the movie never acquires much tension or momentum.

The potential for hokum is there, but Duvall and co-star James Earl Jones capably avoid the sticky pitfalls of Tom Epperson and Billy Bob Thornton's sugar-cured script.

And that's the moral of this story. Or one of them, anyway. Clash's success is shown as the result of a combination of talent, gumption, pluck, misadventure, supportive parents, following your dreams, luck and, yes, love.

Monument Ave. is a cinematic dead-end street that is not without its gloomy, gritty thrills -- assuming, that is, that you're not in the market for a hero or even the slightest feather of that thing called hope. [09 Oct 1998, Pg.N.49]

Viewers may get the sense that The Imitation Game leaves Turing’s essential mysteries intact, but they will nonetheless find even the most public contours of his story ripe with drama, excitement and deeply affecting resonance.

London Road comes across as no more than tabloid karaoke.

Classy fare, with posh settings, gorgeous scenery and lots and lots of polishing from director John Madden ("Ethan Frome") and writer Jeremy Brock.

Can a script exploring some truly deep questions about human sexuality and emotions be any shoddier and wooden?

Director Jonathan Demme has nailed one with this playful, but dangerous, gangster farce.

Combining the best of fantasy and somber reflection, The Water Horse is a lovely ride.

Director Rodrigo Plá, working from a spare yet jangly screenplay by Laura Santullo, steadily builds suspense, craftily calibrating subtle shifts in perspective that allow us to alternate, seamlessly, between impartial observers and, as it were, active participants.

In this immersive, often deliciously sensuous documentary portrait of the late opera star Maria Callas, viewers are treated to another rise-and-fall story of a great but tortured artist, this one punctuated by the occasional real-life bed of roses and pleasure cruise.

Not since "Ghostbusters" have the spirits been so uplifting. [30 Mar 1988]

Doesn't need the passage of time to become a classic. It's one already.

Energetic and slickly done, but also somewhat soulless.

Grim, yes, and great viewing.

It's a movie of deft impressions and telling human moments. Whether or not those impressions and moments add up to anything is almost beside the point.

I would rather have a more interesting group of desperate people to spend my post-apocalyptic time with.

The brawling itself is every bit as inventive and exhilarating this time around... The script and acting, however, prove less successful.

It remembers to have fun. It’s a kick to watch — often literally — and the kind of popcorn movie summer is made for.

Like most mysteries, this one relies heavily on coincidental discoveries, even if they arrive via Gmail or FaceTime, rather than more traditional means. But the plot’s contrivances are less problematic than the movie’s insistence on maintaining its artifice even after it becomes a hindrance.

An enigma inside a conundrum inside an escargot shell, the French puzzler La Moustache will delight some people even as it annoys others.

"Eat the rich” might be a popular theme this movie season, but The Menu takes the idea to extremes that finally overpower the palate.

Seems to go sideways as often as it goes forward. Altman can't help noticing things more interesting than the story.

When the pair’s natural curiosity and humor seep into the film, their scrappy enthusiasm is infectious.

It's a sweet-natured family drama in which years of effort are rewarded by a brief moment of glory. Its corny, cartoonish finale makes "Rocky" look like "Bullwinkle." Still, you'll have to forgive the lump in your throat and the tear in your eye.

The movie is as visually inventive and wildly eccentric as the Coens' earlier movies, but it lacks the emotional maturity and moral clarity of 1996's "Fargo."

As a satire on Tobacco Inc.'s outrageous ability to market carbon monoxide as the elixir of life, this movie should be packing more nicotine.

Written and directed by “A Quiet Place” scribes Scott Beck and Bryan Woods, “Heretic” builds suspense through ideas and argument, allowing both sides to score points when it comes to organized religion.

Despite the vastly improved visuals, the new film is just as soft-hearted — and, unfortunately, just as mush-headed — as the earlier one.

While Romero's past films have for the most part been experiments in horror (or at best, terror), Monkey Shines moves in another direction -- the psychological thriller, with a difference. It's not just "a man and a woman" story; it's a man-woman-monkey triangle, and how the sparks do fly.

A marvelous breakthrough, a film of incantatory intensity and moment by a prodigiously gifted young filmmaker.

Di Girólamo delivers a performance that is, like the combustible fuel inside the tank strapped to her back here and there throughout the film, intense, hot, destructive — and hard to look away from.

That existential paradox — are we all in this thing called life together, or is it every man for himself? — gives the film and its protagonists something meaty to chew on as it, and they, progress. But “The Long Walk” doesn’t dig into it in any deeply satisfying way.

The film looks great on the screen, and Hamer has commissioned a terrific musical score from Kristin Asbjornsen, who has set a few of Bukowski's poems to haunting, jazzy music.

It's tough, astringent, darkly funny and . . . well, it's also generic, untidy, condescending and mild of impact rather than stunning.

Smart, silly, splenetic and a bit smug, it's a movie that might put a viewer's teeth on edge were it not for its winning lead performances.

It's at once too restrained and too perversely funny to have emanated from the play-it-big-but-play-it-safe sensibilities of Hollywood, U.S.A.

The history of filmmakers skewering Hollywood's darker excesses is a long and rich one, from Billy Wilder through Robert Altman. With Tropic Thunder, a rude, crude, over-the-top satire about rude, crude, over-the-top action movies, Ben Stiller makes an ambitious and surprisingly effective bid to join those vaunted ranks.

Is it a great movie? John Malkovich's portrayal of an aging and sexually aggressive professor of poetry is enough to make the film worth anyone's while.

A spirited remake of the French drag farce, has everything in place, from eyeliner to one-liner.

Director Van Sant, who made the lyrical "Mala Noche," "Drugstore Cowboy" and "My Own Private Idaho," returns to his favorite hunting ground -- the subworlds of grimy, poetic lost boys -- and pulls us right in

For more casual consumers of the costumed comic-book superhero’s exploits, mileage may vary. But there’s a whole lot to like here.

Ralph and Vanellope’s growth in the first film was what brought them together. Here, it’s what might force them apart. In Ralph Breaks the Internet, they’re attempting to hold on to one another while also trying to let go, and the film treats that struggle with sensitivity and care (along with some flatulence jokes).

Mozart's Sister feels like a rococo reverie. The film was shot inside Versailles, which borders on the best sensory overload when you factor in the gorgeous classical soundtrack.

Paint-by-numbers feel-gooder, in which Homer and his friends decide to win a national science fair for their little town and, ultimately, for America.

It's the rapport between the two actors, De Niro and Murray, that saves Mad Dog and Glory from being something less than just another buddy movie. Their real-life friendship spills over into this jittery, very funny look at the male bonding experience.

As a simultaneously slick and provocative entertainment, “War Game” is chilling and a tad infuriating, offering a white-knuckle ride — “Civil War” for policy wonks — that may feel a bit too fresh in the memory for viewers who are still traumatized by the real thing.

That's not to say it's great; it's not. Maybe it's not to say it's good, because it's only sort of good. It is to say, however, that it's nifty.

What becomes clear is that Trumbo's humor is only one thing that helped him survive the professional and personal hardships of the blacklist, which drove more than one of his Hollywood friends to kill themselves and took a toll on Trumbo's children.

It's wage earners versus employers, his same old pitch. No curveballs, no spitballs, no surprises.

To watch this movie is to be moved not only by an affecting, warmly spirited yarn, but also by the wisdom that seems to waft to us directly from those snow-capped peaks.

In Mad Max: Beyond Thunderdome, a great deal of engine noise and clanking iron is drowned out by the audience's resounding ho-hum. It's comic books in a Cuisinart, all costumes and cute monikers and no story, a sort of case history of just what's wrong with sequelitis. [10 July 1985]

This is a “just see it” movie, as in: Forget flowery language, redundant synopsis, clever paraphrasing or hyperbolic praise. Just see the dang thing.

For fans of wildlife documentaries, Wildcat is at least as good as, say, a rerun of “Mutual of Omaha’s Wild Kingdom.” (Google it). That is to say: It’s enjoyable while it lasts but fades from the mind soon after, all except for that little piece of a viewer’s heart that holds out hope that little Keanu — and the people who raised him — will one day find the lives they deserve.

Although the movie never quite dispels the sense of being dated (it could have been made anytime in the past 40 years), it's a memorable, often moving timepiece.

One thousand points of light never looked so fetching.

Like summer movies themselves, it’s become so easy to be glib in dismissing Tom Cruise. “Edge of Tomorrow” provides welcome and hugely entertaining evidence that he’s still a star of considerable gifts, and savvy enough not to let them be squandered just yet.

In the movie’s first hour, all the blood is medical. Then the director stages a big shootout, mostly in slo-mo, that’s more clunky than epic. Before that misstep, though, Three is singularly entertaining.

A bummer, but one that manages to stick to its depraved convictions until the strange and bitter end.

For all the story’s cosmic echoes across the ages, the pacing just feels off. Still, the approach is inventive.

Hacksaw Ridge winds up being a rousing piece of entertainment that also happens to be an affecting portrait of spiritual faith and simple human decency.

First-time writer/director Tom Hanks stays about a half-beat ahead of the cliches with rim shots of boyish enthusiasm and deft comedy.

If Pelosi’s preoccupation with extremes gives short shrift to the majority of Americans who don’t see everything through a political lens, her wide range and curiosity provide a portrait that is vivid, textured and deeply disheartening.

Ultimately, Divide and Conquer offers useful lessons — and maybe even a little hope — for people on both sides of the national divide, about just how we came to this terrible, but not irreversible, place.

This is as good a visual treat as you and your kids can expect.

Le Petit Lieutenant shows how good French movies can be when they stay French and don't try to go international.

This is a sequel that wears its well-worn formula, mocking inside jokes and gleeful taste for overkill proudly, flying the high-lowbrow flag for audiences that like their comedy just smart enough to be not-too-dumb.

There’s some fun to be had, as long as your idea of fun includes being grossed out.

Some of director Alan Parker's compositions here are striking, expressionistic shots of dark shapes silhouetted against the blue light streaming through the asylum window. Then again, they're all the same -- after two hours, you're bored by them.

Though marketed as a comedy, this film is too creepy and acerbic to be consistently comic.

But for all the jagged, witty chatter -- and Streep and MacLaine do their tragicomic damnedest with it -- Postcard provides the most rudimentary and jury-rigged of outcomes.

Entertaining and thoughtful documentary.

What lends the movie authenticity is that most of the people in it really are Olympic athletes and record-holders, and they show that they know what they're doing. The second lead, Patrice Donnelly, is a former Olympic hurdler.

The real problem isn’t an overabundance of potential killers. Rather, it’s the fact that the film, from writer-director Aaron Katz (“Land Ho!”), does so little to make you care about the crime, or its victim, that the whole thing feels like an academic exercise.

Crowe has said he envisioned "Singles" as a celluloid album, and like an album, one comes away remembering some parts more fondly than others.

Brad’s Status contains moments of delicate humor.

Cares not a whit for such arbitrary concepts as justice, crime or punishment. It understands the relativism of right and wrong and takes a kind of perverse pleasure in reminding us that there are some things we'll never know.

Whether the entire production comes off as classy or cloying depends entirely on the viewer's mood.

Handsomely shot by cinematographer Jim Denault, the film immerses the audience in Ana's world, its mosaic of colors and sounds and people, to create a vivid cinematic portrait not only of one girl but of an entire community.

Wuornos was unambiguous about one thing: She wanted to die. In the end, that's the only assurance the movie provides. It's an odd kind of closure for her and for us.

The best heist flick since "The Usual Suspects," a perfect 10 of a movie.

A nostalgic paean to China's fading pastoral ways, might easily be taken for an audition tape for Zhang Ziyi.

Like A Quiet Place, Part II is a lean, nearly flab- and gristle-free piece of sci-fi steak.

Insightful and endearing documentary.

Gaga looks like fun, but the soul-revealing “Mr. Gaga” makes clear the sacrifice Naharin’s dedication has exacted from family and dancers alike.

National Anthem is that rarity, a genuinely sensual American movie, and in that sensuality it connects its characters to the transcendence and union promised by Emerson, Whitman, Melville and all the rest of our country’s great literary dreamers.

The Girl With the Dragon Tattoo may want it both ways, getting its tawdry kicks while tsk-tsking those who deliver them in real life, but Mara's bristling, unbridled performance gives the film the ballast it needs to pull off that curious, undeniably engrossing, balancing act.

Skillfully directed by Rod Lurie, this engrossing and deeply wrenching thriller dances the same fine line as most latter-day movies that want to honor service and sacrifice, without lapsing into empty triumphalism. For the most part, The Outpost balances those competing impulses, with a canny combination of unadorned bluntness and technical finesse.

The movie's surface of bright, brittle patter, initially off-putting, comes finally to serve as camouflage for the sinister movement of large and powerful forces.

Desperately Seeking Susan is just a woman's version of The Woman in Red, where Gene Wilder chased Kelly Le Brock because she was great looking and rich and he had the middle-class blues. The only difference is that Wilder felt guilty about it.

The movie's sense of humor is brash and shaggy, and Rita does have a couple of fliply delivered comebacks. But on the whole, there's not enough variety or definition to hold your attention. Too much is all on the same pitch.

The trouble with the film is that this animal love story also saps some of the franchise’s main strength, which has always been the almost pet-like relationship between humans and dragons.

It does honor the book's flavor and spirit with a bright, funny treatment. Voice performers Jim Carrey (as Horton) and Steve Carell (the Mayor) play their roles just right, without making the movie about them.

It’s a more than serviceable pleasure, for fans of Austen’s 19th-century comedy of manners and romantic misunderstanding.

There remains a maddening emptiness where the film's ostensible subject should be.

Think of Collapse as the anti-"2012." Not because this dour doc is any more optimistic about the future than that recent apocalyptic spectacular but because its vision of disaster is delivered not through expensive special effects but by a talking head.

Despite the threatened NC-17 rating, there's nothing remotely sexy about this stone-cold escapade. It only reaffirms the stodgy reputation of the British, who think hot to trot means let's go fox hunting.

It isn't Austen, but it's delicious fun.

A charming and astute first-person documentary.

It's the individual characters, so carefully crafted, who count, as opposed to a tidy conclusion.

This familiar-sounding melodrama works because of the extraordinary performance, in the title role, by Alba August, a young actress whose every emotion is made manifest, like passing clouds or a burst of sunshine, on her uncannily expressive face.

This cinematic Macbeth possesses a terrible beauty, evoking fear, sadness, awe and confusion. Presented with the aesthetic of a dark comic book, it’s also a mournful masterpiece, rendering Shakespeare’s spectacle with all the sorrow and majesty that it deserves.

The catharsis Warrior offers in the end is hard won, and it will take a steely viewer not to find it gratifying, however over-the-top it may be.

The empowerment trajectory of Ms. Purple, whose title may refer both to the color of two dresses worn by its protagonist and to the hue of hard-won bruises she sports by the end of the film, will surprise no one.

The latest film adaptation of Far From the Madding Crowd will delight fans of period dramas. It checks off the required boxes with solid acting, gorgeous cinematography and all the frustrating, glorious emotional restraint that you expect from a romance set in Victorian England.

With warmth, unsparing self-awareness and that ineffable Everyman appeal sometimes called "relatability," Birbiglia proves to be as engaging a presence on the screen as he has been all these years onstage and over the radio waves.

Lacks the edge and depth of a truly inspired work.

As with Wadjda, Mansour gives audiences a candid, often wryly amusing glimpse of life inside the Saudi kingdom, which is so often cloaked in opacity and menace.

In the end the movie goes nowhere a hundred movies haven't already been and tells us nothing we don't already know. It does so with so much violent energy, however, it's like four brutal years at film school crammed into an hour and a half.

Fellowes has brought intelligence and control to the eternally vexing question of whether the right thing is always the good thing.

In elaborating on the original book so boldly, and repopulating it so richly, Jonze has protected Where the Wild Things Are as an inviolable literary work. In preserving its darkest spirit, he's created a potent, fully realized variation on its most highly charged themes.

Ingrid Goes West doesn’t quite go south, but in diving headfirst into the swamp of Internet addiction, its vision gets a little murky.

Despite her biting legal writing, she comes across, on camera, as unfailingly mild-mannered, decorous and polite, especially when the film explores her rather unlikely friendship, based on a shared love of opera, with her late conservative colleague Antonin Scalia.

The movie is more entertaining than it is logical; its narrative leaps are sometimes ahead of our ability to believe them. But as the compellingly enigmatic Pierre, Pinon keeps us rapt.

A gorgeously morbid meditation on the interconnectivity of life.

The movie is powerful, if numbing. What movie about a massacre isn't?

Entrancing, uncommonly compassionate film.

Diabolically amusing without plunging into the Mel Brooks zone, and it's smart without being pedantic. And it's genuinely scary at times.

If Collateral is all formula, it's polished to a fine sheen.

Some viewers may want delicacy in a period film about women navigating a world in which they’ve been pitted against one another. But maybe, Mayfair suggests, we need the blunt reminder: The issues that women were confronting in the Vietnam of the 1800s — a world in which they’re considered property more than people — aren’t all that different from today.

The movie's intense watchability can be traced directly to superb performances by Jennifer Connelly and Ben Kingsley.

A gee-wonderful virtual visit to the arid orb, which uses ingenious technical sleight of hand to -- let's face it -- fake it beautifully.

The power of "Grbavica" is not the arc of its story line, but the fullness of the world Zbanic creates.

A dreadfully earnest but fatally uninspired effort to compress the aftermath of an epic catastrophe, massive nuclear war, into a small-scale family memoir.

The central story itself is not distinctive, and though Lee certainly churns up a lot of dust, he never captures the mythic quality that made Price's original seem so much bigger than its almost generic cast of players.

The Mighty Quinn is a sunny Caribbean caper as giddily seductive as a great big umbrella drink. It's sly, wry and ocean-salty, a detective story with tropical punch.

In Things Change, the gangsters and bodyguards, the lounges and limos don't got, whaddya call, da same allure. You watch the whole thing with a detached amusement, like a goon cooling his heels in the lobby, just waiting for things to change.

Directed by Heather Lenz, the film offers insight and eye candy, despite the fact that it is far more traditional — in style and format — than its subject.

Writing with his old partner Marshall Brickman ("Sleeper," "Annie Hall," "Manhattan"), Allen produces his blithest film ever. It's an amiable caper descended from the "Thin Man" series, with Keaton as a kookier Nora Charles and Allen not as Nick but Asta, their twitchy wire-haired fox terrier.

Despite the violence, the real horror of Don’t Breathe may be the sense of futility that all its characters feel, whether they can see or not.

Here's a science fiction movie where the special effects are in the background. And the effect is, well, rather special.

Swift, stylish, tough-minded and sharp-tongued, this engaging fact-based drama, about a young woman who at one point ran the richest poker game in the world, is worth recommending if only to see its star, Jessica Chastain, at the top of her nerviest, most icily self-controlled game.

The film may employ the well-worn tradition of filtering African stories through the experiences of Europeans, but they use the conceit for some penetrating revelations.

A taut, high-velocity film that departs from the action flick template by having actual ideas.

With its foibles and quirks, it's something like a Sam Shepard play by way of the Black Forest.

An elegy for an aging rock pixie.

Warm, funny, humane and deeply sincere, this ode to Bruce Springsteen, breaking free and belonging isn’t content merely to revel in Springsteen’s greatest hits — although it does, with vibrant, vicarious exhilaration. It delves into the singular power of music, and by extension art itself, to make its audience feel comprehended.

Just when Sydney Pollack's new film about super-architect Frank Gehry, Sketches of Frank Gehry, threatens to get really interesting, Pollack, perhaps unconsciously channeling about 100 years' worth of bad movies about great artists, reverts to fall-back mode.

The first story “Giraffes” tells is one of endangered animals. The second — and equally powerful one — is a narrative of not just one woman’s struggle to be taken seriously, but the struggle of all women to do so.

Unabashedly, un-graphically romantic.

A typical student film with its arty angles, bad lighting and pretentious observations.

The new Dutch film Black Book manages to turn World War II into a large piece of cheese. A lurid, pulpy, slightly perverse potboiler, the movie suffers mainly from its utter lack of seriousness.

Girls Trip accomplishes exactly what it sets out to do: shock and amuse. Along the way, it reminds us how important old friends can be.

Burton has evoked the surface of Ed Wood's life, but in a story about a man who loves angora and frilly panties, he has barely unbuttoned Wood's uniform.

The tale, from Brazilian writer-director Daniel Ribeiro, is told with such tenderness, such intelligence and such aching honesty that it takes on the weight of something far more significant than puppy love. Like its subject, first kisses and best friends, it’s hard to forget.

It's just a simple, actorly drama about big, gaping emotional needs and the consequences a woman can face -- particularly during the 1960s -- for simply owning up to them.

An uneventful actors' exercise better suited to off-off-Broadway theater.

Florence Foster Jenkins brims with love for its characters and forbearance for even their most blinkered self-deception.

Splash betrays a slightly drippy side, but by and large it's a refreshing plunge into unabashed romantic fantasy and not to be missed for the sake of John Candy, who hits the screen like a playful fat diver cannonballing off the high board. [09 Mar 1984, p.D1]

Remote Area Medical is an in­cred­ibly tragic movie. It’s also an important one, reminding viewers that America is more than its coasts and cities. There are corners of the country we all too easily forget.

Despite its missteps, The Farewell Party feels special in the way it covers the Big Stuff — love, death, friendship, family — without losing its playful streak.

The director Alexander Sokurov is a visual virtuoso. So it’s odd, not to mention a bit disappointing, to find that the Russian filmmaker’s latest project, Francofonia, is so talky and, with rare exceptions, visually dull.

It’s an exceptional film, not because of its protagonists’ impressive triumphs, but because it honors their struggle.

The subject is huge and worthy, and the film makes a noble effort to embrace some of its complexity.

Marshall keeps the film lean and focused. He does have a nice taste for horror imagery.

Clara Khoury delivers a performance that is luminous, fierce and intensely focused as the title character of Rana's Wedding.

For those who enjoy the shift-in-your-seat kick of seeing emperors caught with their knickers down, however, the squirm factor achieved by the Yes Men out-Borats Sacha Baron Cohen at his most confrontational.

A Perfect World is one of the Academy Award-winning actor-director's most unexpected, most satisfying films. This isn't the first time that Eastwood has turned the tables on our expectations, but he's never been this bold in the past, or this sure of himself.

As impressive as Dogman often is — not only with Fonte’s Chaplin-esque lead performance, a bleakly evocative setting and moments of winsome humor but with a standout canine ensemble — it never quite delivers on its initial promise.

Witty as they sometimes are, Romero's ironies aren't subtle or devastating enough to justify lengthy comtemplation. "Dawn" seems like a good 80-minute horror premise stretched out at least half an hour too long. Moreover, the excess running time appears to be filled by repeated shootings, clubbings, stabbings and munchings, always vividly depicted, rather than further character exploration or mordant strokes of humor.

It's a brilliant, profound movie, but it's almost no fun at all.

All about undertones, obliqueness and expectancy, about the scent, if you will, of something no one can stop

Much of it plays like an unintentional mash-up of the numerous wrong-side-of-the-law sagas that preceded it.

One could describe Boseman’s performance in Get on Up as electrifying, and that would not be wrong. But it’s more accurate to say that watching Boseman transform into James Brown, who died in 2006 at 73, is like watching a dude invent electricity while the idea for electricity is still occurring to him.

Steve McQueen’s “Blitz” is a triumph of production design; unfortunately, what it triumphs over is story.

It provides a sturdy, often exhilarating bridge between the present and a past that not only isn’t distant, but isn’t even really past.

Appealingly, the movie has a certain lightness -- like the aforementioned butterfly -- which makes its foreboding qualities surprisingly user-friendly.

There are some inspiring people in the film, and one wishes it had been edited to focus more on their stories. In the end, Tomorrow is less a movie than a long public service announcement.

Thank goodness, then, for The Brink, which is just the kind of lucid, observant, chillingly contradictory portrait Bannon deserves.

Rich, sweet, densely layered and deeply satisfying. A film that might have been a dry exercise in earnest nonfiction filmmaking becomes a soaring, artistically complex testament to survival, character and hope.

Shazam! operates as a thrilling fantasy and a comedy about the learning curve of growing up. It’s also a stirring tale of the heroic potential that lies inside each of us, if only we’re put to the test.

Political junkies will love this movie.

Humor and warmth abound in Mrs. Henderson Presents.

Though long on ambiance and short on story, it may appeal to the spiritually inclined -- and to oater lovers.

In any event, from whatever impulse, [Almodóvar] has given us a movie that is both an uneasy tribute to exiting with grace and a rationale for sticking around for one more movie, one more meal — one more day with the door open.

Little in this movie makes real sense; and characters (particularly Dafoe and Delany) seem to bump regularly into each other. But there's something transcendentally appealing between the lines. This is a film to be savored for its nuances rather than its story.

Perhaps the most pleasing aspect of the film is its fluid, unhurried pace. Rich and his team aren't interested in roller-coaster effects or sledgehammer manipulations. They have a lush, original sense of color, even a flair for the poetic. The score -- by lyricist David Zippel and composer Lex de Azevedo -- isn't terribly distinctive (it's probably the movie's weakest link), but there is a merciful absence of the hard sell in that area as well.

L’immensità lives up to its title: It’s a small but all-encompassing portrait of how life feels in a certain time and place — when the broken pieces of one’s true self are invisibly coming together, even when getting them to fit feels too overwhelming to contemplate.

“Strangers” offers an inspiring look at creative people from very different walks of life who nonetheless communicate beautifully with one another. They don’t need to speak a common language: Their dazzling music says it all.

Short but powerful drama.