A serious case of the cutes...Pellington knows his movie is more or less bad, but Shirley there’s an audience for it.

A meditation about our own ephemerality on this supposedly corporeal plane. In the end, the truly inescapable horrors are, sure, okay, death, but also living with one’s own mind and the uncertainties of human existence.

Sing is pleasant enough...but scrutinize it, and you'll find that it's neither very musically accomplished nor very funny. The tone is bright and colorful but still evinces a kind of joyless duty...

Pound for pound, scene for scene, there’s not a sequence here that the original film doesn’t execute better in the clean lines of hand-drawn animation and the crisp vocals of the original cast.

Its emotional beats strike honest notes, well played by the actors in the clutch moments...Téchiné and Sciamma prove that there is, in truth, beauty, as in youth and mountain greenery, as in nature's need and human nature's desire.

[Sears:] The greatest part of being an actor, I think, is that wonderful thing that happens between two people who are really listening, really responding...

It's really about pissing off those you love to impress those you will never meet.

When it’s cooking, Moana prepares tender, slip-off-the-bone meat on the tried-and-true bones of the Disney formula.

Builds to the fulfillment of the 'MonsterVerse' promise (further teased in a post-credits scene) of monster-on-monster action...It's all very silly...and also a kind of bruising primordial thrill ride.

Implications, about the long odds for romance, the deeper psychology of mating, and the devastating possibility that love isn’t an absolute but a willful, occasionally mutual, delusion.

Filled with extraordinary performances, Moonlight explores the tension between private and public selves for a closeted black individual who feels pressure to conform to traditional but arbitrary standards of masculinity.

Smart enough to make implications but let us draw our own conclusions about what these images, individually and collectively—and the art form to which they belong—mean to their photographer, to us, and to human society.

What's most interesting about Get Out is how it taps into the same idea to fuel both its comedy and horror: the recognition of social truths.

It's easy enough to appreciate The Tree of Wooden Clogs as a painterly near-documentary, shot and edited by a director who got his start in documentary films...or a spacious moral fable about humility and trust in following the righteous path.

A moody and deeply unsettling look at a pair of failed relationships, regrets and recriminations, and measures of emotional violence—oh, shall we call it 'lashing out'?—symbolized in physical violence.

In its broad strokes, Manchester by the Sea doesn’t explore anything new...[but Lonergan] is the master of telling behavior and conversational nuance.

Doctor Strange looks at urban architecture through a twisting digital kaleidoscope, next-stepping from Inception to an M.C. Escher-esque action aesthetic that amounts to three-dimensional chess. 

[Chazelle:] See if you can marry two things that feel like they should not exist in a movie together: the heights of musical spectacle that we're used to from Old Hollywood with a more documentary-informed sense of realism...

There's a resonant motif in Logan that times have changed for the worst, but this dystopian world revives the humanity in these characters, a development that's all for the best.

I'm a science-fiction freak...I dig that sort of stuff.

Like Noah Baumbach and Jake Paltrow's De Palma (also released in 2016), by Sidney Lumet has one undeniable result: it instills a fervent wish to watch the director's entire output from beginning to end...

Distinctive, invigorating creativity at work...far from perfect, but this treat for the eyes with ideas to consider feels like a miracle of a movie by offering so much more than we expect from the jump-scare horror to which we’ve resigned ourselves.

Makes the case for the Wick franchise as a kind of bizarro James Bond...This antihero may not be licensed to kill, but now he lives in a similarly slick universe of action fantasy and exotic settings.

Full to bursting with Easter Eggs for longtime Batman fans...Zany, frantically paced, and busy, busy, busy. For some, that...will be a bit exhausting, especially in brain-fatiguing LEGO-construction-block animation.

Surprise, this is a romantic comedy...this stand-up gives you no reason to sit down.

Expertly balances whimsy, adventure, terrifying perils, music, comedy, and warmth on the way to a reassuring worldview of moral order, of virtue rewarded and the bosom embrace of familial figures.

Cianfrance makes intimate, psychologically penetrating films, with quiet spaces and moments of brutal intensity...As unlikely as the story is, Cianfrance deftly steers the material through elemental themes...

You won't ever find me calling Inferno a good movie, but I won't deny that, in dribs and drabs, it gets closer to the marks of fun and quality than I thought possible from this picturesque but dopey franchise.

In its broader themes of 'selling a story' to investors and the blinding power of money, Gold has little new to offer, but in its particulars...finds deposits rich enough to make the trip worthwhile.

Call it 'Big Mac-beth.'

Slow going...But Silence also represents consummate filmmaking.

Superficially, it resembles exhilarating action films of the past, but the paint-by-numbers approach just doesn't do the trick. With all-around bad acting, hyperactive production, and a script that passes 'camp' and goes right on through to 'bad'...

Hammer[s] home what the news media didn’t much convey in 2010: the human-level horror of being on the rig and the sheer scope of the unnaturalness of the enterprise.

'Terror bad. Boston strong.'

Could hardly be more historically important, culturally significant, or inspirational, and as a PG-rated film, it’s especially valuable as a STEM education boost for young girls. 

Silly and rarely believable in any of its particulars...Andy Daly, though? Really funny.

There’s a simple power to the clean lines of Ness’ story, and it’s greatly amplified by the work of the actors. 

Nothing if not formulaic, but it has its passing charms...Ultimately, the hacky plot (partly credited to Franco’s buddy Jonah Hill) is also too primal not to work...

Despite its style points, fails to resonate on a higher octave than its low hum of dark doings, leaping around, and fisticuffs.

Born on the Fourth of July for millennials...Stone effectively streamlines Snowden’s story for mass consumption, edification, and identification.

An American classic writ large.

The serviceable movie you make about this subject. But it does offer a little bit more, peeking through with an interesting insight every quarter-hour or so.

What begins as an intriguing premise based on high-stakes “what if”s shrinks in imagination as the pair begins to face crises akin to a Star Trek: The Next Generation episode...

Largely lifeless, which is unusual for fantasy material birthed by Roald Dahl or directed by Steven Spielberg, much less a combination of the two.

How did I get to be this person? What's the history of me? And is it the right story?...And I like trying to get people I've known right on screen.

Even adult Star Wars fans with enough of a sense of perspective to laugh at this not-overly-serious non-canonical storyline will have a good time.

The show's second season improves the spinoff (from more famous elder sibling The Walking Dead) in just about every respect...

Chicken Poop for the Soul...

There's room enough for both Pete's Dragons in this big old world.