This true story of a fraudster's been fictionalized into a victim-turned-avenger feminist triumph. It works due to the anti-chemistry of its two leads.

Three young women navigate sex, romance, and the fear of commitment, rejection and failure in this well-acted Sundance Film Festival prize winner about the tumultuous emotional impulses of young adulthood.

A successful nail biter and arm rest gripper. Good at building tension, built for maximum suspense, and it's very well filmed and composited.

A Stand By Me for girls, a kid detective story, a low key hang out movie spotlighting female friendship, and a slight but sweet requiem for childhood.

Painfully unfunny and devoid of insight, the magical realism is rushed and sloppy, and the emotional logic never coheres.

An animated action comedy with postmodern gags and which trusts the ability of kids to keep up with more winding plots and sophisticated jokes.

Lots of punniness in this scattershot and ambitious horror film, which depicts the horrors of gay conversion therapy as scarier and more horrific than the story's slasher elements.

Director Ron Howard and screenwriter William Nicholson do an excellent, bang-up job of adapting this complex story in to a feature film.

There's a glib amorality about this action farce but Pitt is funny as a philosophical self-help-reading dude-bro assassin.

An odd duck of a movie with an upbeat energy about it, and an ultra-campy nostalgia-delivery device cobbled together purportedly by 17 screenwriters.

If Alien was a slasher movie on a spaceship, this is a haunted house movie on a spaceship. Much more likely to please gorehounds than science-fiction fans.

Cinematic dessert for kids.

While retaining requisite elements of blockbuster action cinema...decidedly shifts the focus to pulp fiction...The Batman feels more like a Batman story than a Batman movie, and that's an achievement in itself.

Addictive...traces that fine line between having hustle and being a hustler, a line we watch Holmes cross after being fed the exceptional stories of Silicon Valley disruptor culture.

I wanted with Joachim to have quirks and certain characteristics that I know from friends and people I've worked with...I love him being over the top and flamboyant, but still grounded, 'cause we all have a friend like that.

What sets Operation Varsity Blues apart are its reenactments of wiretapped conversations. Using the wiretaps as scripts, actors like Modine...play out scenes that feel lifted, in their content and their staccato rhythms, right out of David Mamet.

[Grazer:] I feel like Fionn, not only on set but just in life, showed me the ropes as like a brother would do.

[SPOILER-FREE:] Laugh-out-loud funny...transcends offensiveness by holding a mirror up to the very worst of human impulses, making us laugh at crimes against humanity not because the satirists don't care but precisely because they do.

A very sweet, very entertaining blend of whimsy and peril.

Has the benefit of relevance to the current news cycle, but it’s about something much larger even than the famous convicted felon who threw his weight around Hollywood.

I feel like most of the discussion about the character on this one was about hair. (Laughs.) Hair and facial hair....And they told me to take a look at Chris de Burgh videos.

As long as Faxon and Rash...stay in this pitch-black pocket of uncomfortable truth-telling, Downhill retains its power. But since this is an American comedy...

Practically dares its audience to make the mistake of taking it seriously, and yet it’s a bizarrely uplifting story of credibly tough women...survivors all, supporting each other to vanquish a sneering, preening abuser whose time’s up.

Contemplating any of this action-comedy camp in real-world terms...would be a maddening mistake. Accept Lowrey’s assessment that 'Violence is what we do,' or pick another movie.

Attempts to thread the needle of a moving anti-war film in that narrow space between...[war as] thrill ride and the filmic wizardry that, when examined too closely, rings as hollow as a war machine rapped with a wrench.

Aside from Gerwig's own comic and dramatic sensibilities (which never intrude on Alcott) and a stellar cast, her Little Women adopts a bold narrative approach to retelling Alcott’s two-volume story.

[SPOILER-FREE REVIEW:] If Abrams has topped himself, it's by making a Star Wars film that's even more of a multiplex-filling Hollywood widget than his first.

If The Next Level plays fast and loose, it also makes an effort to prompt viewers to reflect not only on the freedom of fantasy, but on the fraught but essential relationship of mind and body.

If the film’s psychology and dialogue remain frustratingly basic...the viscerally effective audio-visual approach amplif[ies] the story’s emotional intimacy in ways the situations and mostly platitudinous dialogue sometimes fail to do.

I don't want to be on my own island...I'm here to collaborate, not to just be the Grand Poobah of costume design.

Knives Out cannot help but be fanciful fun, particularly for murder-mystery fans...Johnson adds ballast to what would otherwise be a lightweight tale by suggesting sociopolitical allegory.

Pointedly setting up its own Turkey Day-teasing Truth & Reconciliation Commission about a proud nation’s not-so-proud past...Frozen II arrives just in time for Thanksgiving as an entertainment parents and kids can be thankful for.

The Nicholas Searle novel Hatcher adapts features a shopworn story with easily anticipated plot twists, resulting in a soggy and largely pointless exercise that gets by on its consummate cast and some witty dialogue.

[Burns:] 'The only thing more powerful than telling someone a story they don't know is telling someone a story that they thought they knew'...Whenever I could I used the language and the facts that are in the report to tell the story of the program.

I'm interested in a democratic narrative...Anyone who is on the screen is interesting. Right? Everyone has their own story.

In some ways, Doctor Sleep has to feel like a pop cultural footnote, but that's not fair to what's a ripping yarn in its own right. 

Wild-ride entertainment that’s by turns funny, squirmy, horrifying, and poignant, all in service of a zeitgeist-y story of working-class frustration...boiling over in ways the blithely wealthy can no longer ignore.

Audiences can’t be blamed for turning off their brains and focusing on the aesthetic trappings...in this film featuring a flying protagonist, nothing really lands.

The filmmaker contemplating his own creation as a man and an artist...plays as a poetic remembrance of things past, a reconciliation of self, powerfully capturing the emotional essence of keenly formative experiences and deep loves.

Joker isn’t the film to seriously tackle the issue[s]--it's more concerned with flair than genuine inquiry--but Phoenix’s pained, raw-nerve performance is one for the ages.

A primer...proves most valuable by gathering a number of Miles’ friends, lovers, musical collaborators, admirers, and musicologists...to share their recollections and perspectives on Davis, his musicality, and his personality.

Forgive me for suggesting that Conservative peer Fellowes—or, as he’s sometimes known, Julian Alexander Kitchener-Fellowes, Baron Fellowes of West Stafford DL—might consider Downton the cake he’s letting us eat.

A deeply moving story of a remarkable woman, its only real fault an arguable virtue: adhering to the old showbiz adage of leaving the audience wanting more.

It’s a story worth shining a light on, Gun a hero deserving of a movie-star moment. And yet this docudrama struggles to give feature-length narrative shape to the story in a way that brings it to vibrant dramatic life. 

Thin characters...thinner satire...maybe best to think of Ready or Not not as trolling us but as gifting us a mosh pit for primal-scream therapy.

The film’s darkest-before-the-dawn middle passage honors the complexity of mental-health struggles for the sufferer and those who, unsure at every step, try to steer their troubled loved one down a path to healing.