A broad comic tone...The few funny bits and sharp lines amount to fool’s gold scattered around a claim that never satisfactorily pays off.

[Tomlin:] I like to do it all...you want to get as much information, as much input as you can...I like to learn something that I can do in the scene...

I was taught to deeply respect the written word...the role is on the page, the character is in me, and I suppose I bring my intuition and my wisdom and my love of language to that page, and that's how it comes to life.

Does not miss its chance to blow...Every bit a screenwriter’s idea of what it takes to make it...while accidentally cultivating the pervading sense that real DJs would laugh their asses off at this movie and its endless dopey brodowns.

At times pokes fun at the genre's cliché in amusingly productive ways...More often than not, though, this conspiracy isn't the real deal, but rather an elaborate distraction.

[Not] played for cynical misanthropic laughs or as miserable tragedy, but...[in] an honest treatment devoid of the usual rush to judgment.

A week-in, weak-out study in same-y procedural storytelling and mythology stalling that's powered by the usual salacious crime exploitation and the unusual lead performance of James Spader.

Like Brooke, the film flies a strange and arresting course: if not quite a screwball, then certainly a change-up pitch.

A film every single American and, indeed, every world citizen should see and contemplate.

Pure mid-period Allen, a muscle-stretching ensemble comedy with dramatic undertones and playful philosophical musings...Allen's characters ponder the permeable divide between lust and love, and the meanings of sexual intercourse...

Another solid entry in the DCU line, Justice League: Gods and Monsters works best as an entrée into what should be a fascinating and highly entertaining series of its own.

Honors the original characters just fine, but the leads are lukewarm...the [action] mostly unmemorable ...and the split-the-difference jokey-serious tone errs...on the side of fashion-conscious and smug.

Does a lot of its work with its tongue-in-cheek title, a meta commentary on the not-so-broad spectrum of liar, actor, fiction writer, filmmaker and journalist.

That special brand of La Streep mugging—here applied to the character of a hot-mess bar-band deadbeat mom—will wear you into submission until nothing else seems to matter. Except that it should.

Like the debates it concerns, Best of Enemies entertains to a degree, enlightens to another, and asks us to ponder the relative merits of polar political ideologies and two complicated men who very publicly represented them.

[Starzak:] We add the mumbling for comedy or to help a story point, but generally we try to keep it as dialogue-free as possible.

[Bel Powley:] Reading it made me realize how much we don't talk about about teenage female sexuality.

[Segel:] I really did relate to this feeling of extreme caution that, uh, even something I say off-handedly could now be printed out-of-context, anywhere, for the rest of my life.

McQuarrie doesn't make it easy to invest in the characters here, but paradoxically he does know how to make us grip our armrests as they face danger, and thus the mission is accomplished once more.

[Alvarez:] I wanted it to be a collaborative environment. I didn't want to pit the actors against themselves. The characters are pitted against each other. So the actors didn't have to be.

Zimbardo insists he’s 'trying to understand how an institution affects an individual’s behavior.' Alvarez’s own dark study, empowered by potent acting, allows the audience to contemplate the many variations on that psychological dynamic.

I'm a communicator. I reach an audience by whichever means are possible, and my voice is one of them. The other is the ability to clearly enunciate what it is that I want to say...And to treat everything as a story to be told.

When I got to set, [Woody Allen] kind of showed me what the temperature of the movie was. I didn't know if I was in a comedy. I didn't know the tone. I thought a lot about jazz when I was working on this.

'Do what you have to do.'...Netflix's flagship series addresses this dictum to many characters grappling with tough choices, but the core subject of [Season Three]...is the marriage of Frank and Claire Underwood.

With its playful use of scale, Ant-Man drops a dollop of Lewis Carroll whimsy on the usual clashes of good and evil.

Shows little strain in maintaining its cute factor, thanks to the drily winning personalities of the likes of Smith, Dench, Nighy, and the comic ebullience of Patel.

The technical execution is strong...but the invention is weak...simply feels late to the party by spinning off sidekicks...as it trades on '60s style...

Celebrates a city united for fun and goodwill, and the rare, pronounced sense of play and energy adults are capable of rediscovering, as do those who toil excitedly and hopefully to give Miles 'a little bit of his childhood back.'

That it is Hitler doing the exploiting has little relevance to the overriding theme of tragic history humanity remains doomed to repeat: sending naive young men—and, at some times and places, boys—to their ends.

In Criterion's Blu-ray and DVD boxsets titled André Gregory & Wallace Shawn: 3 Films, we can ponder the full cinematic depth (and much of the theatrical depth) of the collaboration between two complementary creative souls.

Any senses of suspenseful stakes or human-scale relationships have turned weightless, leaving us with crashing and bashing, running and gunning, and a whole lot of head-scratching. The experience is utterly numbing...

It's not an easy business...

Links all-American patriotism with military righteousness, religious faith, and socially conservative family values...when Max isn’t leaping around, Max rolls over and plays dead.

I fervently hoped that some particularly annoyed soul would create a 'Slapheads Yell "Chappie"!' supercut...to refine the movie to its purest form of annoyance. As of this writing, internet, you disappoint me.

A disappointing 'film' but, at least for its target audience of white middle-class teens (and probably their parents), a deeply satisfying 'movie.'

[Mann:] It's about the importance of opening up, or letting people in, and making real connections. Even if you're facing rejection, it's ultimately more fulfilling, and you at least can learn something from it...

The script already has such a beautiful rhythm...quite playful and fun...As he starts to come of age, the movie starts to be still and quiet, and so that's the kind of big picture that we set out to design the film together.

The culture has had just enough time to miss this franchise, and director and co-screenwriter Colin Trevorrow...has met the challenges with an appealing self-awareness.

Like Tarantino's films, Wild Tales will rub some the wrong way by taking glee in the violence that comes from our worst selves, but the catharses have a positive social function...there's no doubt Szifron intends cautionary Tales.

Wiig plays her role with total commitment, fearlessness, and lack of vanity...the movie we deserve in the age of social media and cable television, a satiric child of Paddy Chayevsky's Network in its autopsy of "vox populi" viral video...

This latest gentle, sensitive, unhurried tale from Studio Ghibli...excels not only at natural beauty, touched with supernatural flourishes, but also at acute psychological perceptiveness...

Workman has done a service in making a broadly accessible history of Welles that stands a chance of drawing younger generations of film buffs, like moths, to 'the master''s flame.

Succeeds at exploiting a proven disaster-movie formula without troubling itself much with little things like plot, character, and dialogue.

Our American addiction...bloodsucking from humanity in order to maintain the lifestyle to which we are accustomed. By the time Hess wearily muses, "I'm tired of this existence," it's more or less clear he means a spiritually empty capitalist existence...

At times one feels there's an interesting film here struggling to break free (free as a bird!)...but what's made it to screen sends eyes aloft in its symbolism and its character dynamics.

Curiously vacant characters and curiously pulse-less whimsy...lumbers, middlebrow and tiresome, when it should be daytripping the light fantastic...

Zvyagintsev literally and allegorically depicts modern Russia's runaway corruption but also captures universal fears about the shaky ground on which we construct our lives.

It's a prison movie when you think about it....you know, his being watched, infantilized. And yeah we're talking about this specific period of his life and his career where it's a dialectic between work and life, and enjoyment and freedom...

Though the thrill of invention is gone, there's enough comic fertility and accumulated goodwill to sustain Pitch Perfect 2 through to its splashy and socially optimistic finale...

Showrunner Michelle Ashford has played slow and loose with the facts, but in ways that achieve thematic resonance in a speculative, provocative dialogue with history.