A fitfully crackerjack picture with astonishing mise-en-scène...some memorable set pieces to take advantage of same, and flashes of Hitchockian wit...

Though the film, by necessity, expands Dahl's original story and fuses it to the sensibility of Anderson, author and auteur share a common tone of twisted twee...

Nervy and unnerving...arguably the purest expression of Allen's cinematic vision.

Runs on Judeo-Christian good-versus-evil mythology and the firm belief that love conquers all, especially if you have a magic flying horse. I know that sounds pretty awesome, but...

[Has] a soupçon of military-industrial complexity...Judged on its own merits, this RoboCop pump-fakes in some interesting directions without getting to fully explore any of them.

It all feels a bit like an overearnest deleted subplot from someone else's war epic, rather than a confident Clooney picture.

Zany episodes...provide a clothesline on which to hang social satire and an overriding message that an individual's imagination can trump social and cultural oppression. Throw out the instructions, and make what you want of the world. Plus butt jokes.

The wild pulp adventure that prefigured Raimi's eventual direction of the Spider-Man franchise...If you've a taste for Hollywood-funded outré, Darkman is one of those rare films that fits the bill.

A laughably precise, even parodic, archetype of a fantasy male...[and an] offensive stereotype of a female basket case who, more than anything, needs a strong man, preferably a bad-boy hunk with an easy touch for her and a slow hand for a Swiffer.

Cumberbatch gives a commanding performance, but corrective rewrites to the worrying early drafts of the script obviously were too little, too late to do justice to the nuanced complexities of [Assange] and his revolution.

Crucially, we stay at the side of the conflicted Nelly, and Jones proves as powerful in nuanced moments of quiet emotional availability as in Nelly's few, stirring allowances to speak truth to male privilege...

Like many rodents, the plot runs in circles, covering over and over again the same ground...[Plus,] Psy, who parties like it's 2012.

A culminative reflection on the reboot's characterization of the Doctor, a respectful hat tip to the decades that preceded the show's return to the airwaves in 2005, and a jumping-off point for...the next fifty years of Who.

Neville does a good job of highlighting songs that are especially characterized by backup singers, like Lou Reed's 'Walk on the Wild Side,' and introducing us to some of the 'unsung' talent that made those hits possible.

Clearly, Archer is coming for you. Phrasing. Boom!

The unwillingness to 'engage' in larger questions disconcertingly reduces a real-life tragedy to an action movie.

Achieves some romantic uplift when Mitty dreams of Cheryl and literally takes flight, but most of the time, the picture strains to make any kind of sense, much less entertain.

Rests comfortably alongside Scorsese's masterpieces Goodfellas and Casino, but carries a sting that even they don't by examining the most acceptable, yet most rapacious, of criminal swindles.

With patient sensitivity, Farhadi expertly elicits sympathy, followed by empathy, for each character, almost in turns, to resist misguiding the audience to easy answers.

Captures the zeitgeist of a tech-centric world that may be too 'smart' for its own good...It's about the life of the mind and emotional dysfunction as much as it is a quirky romance, and every scene opens up new questions.

It’s very funny when you tell...the studio...'We have a second movie.' They can’t comprehend it...they were like, 'Ha ha! Must feel like that, right?'...'No, we literally have a second movie. We've cut it, if you want to watch it.'

Prompts 'The Cosplay Kid' of the Comic-Con era of cinema to swallow the sins of our forefathers and the ones we countenance today.

There's a self-aware feel to the period pageantry, the alternatingly seductive and kinetic cinematography, and the actor's showcase this ramshackle contraption has been held together with spit and bailing wire to be.

By neatly assembling an uplifting weepie out of a few choice lies, it’s almost as pleasant a fantasy as Mary Poppins itself.

Had me at 'Ride Like the Wind.' But by 'Shilo,' I was not so sure.

[Walt Disney] pulled the car off to the side, and stopped the car, and he says, 'You're not going to give your royalties on this song away! It's going to put your kids through college!'

One of the great movie musicals and of that rare breed of deathless family entertainment that's guaranteed to transfix children, well beyond this, its fiftieth anniversary.

This material...isn't deceptively simple: it's just simple.

If you can grin and bear [certain] eye-rolling situations...there's found poetry in Nebraska's slow builds of respect and its deeply understated emotional climax: a father and son crossing past each other as they switch places.

[Rush:] Hans has a kind of natural emotional intelligence for he senses a spark of life and isn’t going to engage in therapy like 'Are you feeling grief?'. He’d rather play the accordion and say 'I understand something about you.'

This craven refusal to risk offense demonstrates the length to which the film is willing to go for truth: not very far at all.

Benefits from the estimable comic instincts of Vince Vaughn. It's just too bad that the movie around him is squishy.

A competent sequel...The Hunger Games could be fairly accused of being what it satirizes, but it's not without a thought in its deadly little head.

Brims with funny ideas both verbal and visual that are finely tuned by Baumbach and his cast, and sharply edited...

Makes an epic impact, fully exploiting cinema to chase the intensity of a live musical while also allowing time for intimate expression of character.

Gibney frames his film as being somewhat catch as catch can, and it is...educates about the details of doping, the 'moral relativism' so pervasive in the age of juiced athletics, and the willful ignorance that attends it.

Classic 'Oscar bait,' and falls into some of the common traps of exploiting a true story. But it's also lively, funny, and scary...

Say what you will about stop-motion sketch-comedy show Robot Chicken, but there's nothing else like it on television.

[Dern:] A couple years ago, I got tired of performing. And I just wanted to be human beings in movies from now on. I want to be real people. I don’t want to perform. I want...an hour and forty-five minutes of moment-to-moment behavior.

Staying in character—it was just an obvious thing. For me, there were so many physical attributes. So many emotional things to keep track of. I couldn’t imagine, like, letting go of all that.

It's Christmas morning for Whovians with the release of the entire rebooted Doctor Who series in 1080p high-definition on Blu-ray.

[A] family-friendly science-fiction series redefined for the new millenium by an especially grand, generous spirit to its storytelling.

The Doctor dead? Not on your life.

In the penultimate batch of episodes before Doctor Who's jubilee year, executive producer Steven Moffat continues to marvel with his ability to keep the time-and-space-travelling Doctor in ever-so-complicated trouble.

Thundered back onto the BBC in a manner that honored the series' canon while also injecting new energy and reestablishing a show previously aimed primarily at children as one sophisticated enough that adult geeks could love it unabashedly.

Davies, and especially Tennant, made Doctor Who more catchy than campy...

The good-natured show...has a winningly inclusive spirit, a fantastical appeal, and a Vaudevillian comic showmanship that evoke The Wizard of Oz (surely a conscious inspiration).

A lurid yet fascinating look into Allen Ginsberg's formative influences...fearlessly explores dark places and the compulsion to exorcise the shadows and remake the world through art.

The film succeeds by simply, plainly placing audiences in the emotional crucible of pre-abolition America and firing their imaginations.