Critics review the latest film releases:  “Argylle,” “How to Have Sex,” “Scrambled,” and “Orion and The Dark.”

The latest film releases include Miller's Girl, Tótem, The Breaking Ice, and The Sweet East. Weighing in are Christy Lemire and Alonso Duralde, co-hosts of the YouTube channel Breakfast All Day.

The latest film releases are I.S.S., The End We Start From, The Kitchen, and Founder’s Day. Weighing in are Katie Walsh, film reviewer for the Tribune News Service, the Los Angeles Times, and The Wrap; and William Bibbiani, film critic and co-host of the podcast Canceled Too Soon and The Critically Acclaimed Network.

The latest film releases are Mean Girls, The Beekeeper, The Settlers, and The Book of Clarence. Weighing in are Shawn Edwards, film critic at Fox 4 News and co-founder of the African American Film Critics Association, and Alison Willmore, film critic for New York Magazine and Vulture.

The latest film releases include Night Swim, Occupied City, All of Us Strangers, and Good Grief. Weighing in are Witney Seibold, contributor to SlashFilm and co-host of the podcast Critically Acclaimed, and Amy Nicholson, host of the podcast Unspooled and film reviewer for the New York Times. 

The latest film releases are Aquaman and the Lost Kingdom, The Iron Claw, Ferrari, and The Color Purple. Weighing in are William Bibbiani, film critic and co-host of the Critically Acclaimed Network, and Shawn Edwards, a journalist for FOX 4 News in Kansas City.

The latest film releases are The Zone of Interest, American Fiction, Wonka, and Chicken Run: Dawn of the Nugget. Weighing in are Tim Grierson, senior U.S. critic for Screen International and the author of This Is How You Make a Movie, and Alison Willmore, film critic for NY Magazine and Vulture.

The latest film releases are Poor Things, The Boy and the Heron, Origin, and Waitress. Weighing in are Christy Lemire, film critic for RogerEbert.com and co-host of the YouTube channel “Breakfast All Day,” and Alonso Duralde, co-host of “Breakfast All Day.”

The newest film releases include Godzilla Minus One, Eileen, Silent Night, and Candy Cane Lane. Weighing in are Katie Walsh, film reviewer for the Tribune News Service and the Los Angeles Times, and Witney Seibold, contributor to SlashFilm and co-host of the podcast Critically Acclaimed.

The latest film releases include Napoleon, Wish, Maestro, American Symphony, and Good Burger 2. Weighing in are William Bibbiani, film critic and co-host of the Critically Acclaimed Network, and Shawn Edwards, journalist for FOX 4 News in Kansas City, Missouri.

The latest film releases include The Hunger Games: The Ballad of Songbirds and Snakes, Next Goal Wins, Fallen Leaves, May December, and Saltburn. Weighing in are Tim Grierson, senior U.S. critic for Screen International and the author of This Is How You Make a Movie, and Amy Nicholson, host of the podcast Unspooled and film reviewer for The New York Times. 

Critics review the latest film releases: “The Marvels,” “Dream Scenario,” “It’s a Wonderful Knife,” “A Still Small Voice.”

The latest film releases include Priscilla, The Killer, What Happens Later, and Rustin. Weighing in are Christy Lemire, film critic for RogerEbert.com and co-host of the YouTube channel “Breakfast All Day,” and Alonso Duralde, film critic and co-host of movie podcast Linoleum Knife.

The latest film releases are Five Nights at Freddy's, Pain Hustlers, The Holdovers, and Fingernails. Weighing in are Amy Nicholson, host of the podcast Unspooled and film reviewer for the New York Times, and Shawn Edwards, film critic at Fox 4 News and co-founder of the African American Film Critics Association.

The latest film releases are Killers of the Flower Moon, The Persian Version, More Than Ever, and Divinity. Weighing in are Witney Seibold, contributor to SlashFilm and co-host of the podcast “Critically Acclaimed,” and Carlos Aguilar, film reviewer for the Los Angeles Times and AV Club.

The latest film releases include Anatomy of a Fall, My Love Affair with Marriage, Silver Dollar Road, and The Mission. Weighing in are Katie Walsh, film reviewer for the Tribune News Service and the Los Angeles Times, and Shawn Edwards, film critic for FOX-TV in Kansas City.

The latest film releases include The Exorcist: Believer, Cat Person, The Royal Hotel, and Dicks: The Musical. Weighing in are Tim Grierson, senior U.S. critic for Screen Daily, and Allison Willmore, film critic at New York Magazine and Vulture.

The latest film releases include The Creator, Saw X, Fair Play, and Dumb Money. Weighing in are Christy Lemire, film critic for RogerEbert.com and co-host of the YouTube channel “Breakfast All Day, and Amy Nicholson, host of the podcast Unspooled and film reviewer for The New York Times.

The latest film releases include “Flora and Son,” “Invisible Beauty,” and “The Origin of Evil.” Plus, “Stop Making Sense” is re-released in 4K IMAX. Hear reviews from Alonso Duralde and Dave White, film critics and co-hosts of movie podcast Linoleum Knife.

The latest film releases include “A Haunting In Venice,” “Cassandro,” “Rotting In The Sun,” and “A Million Miles Away.” Hear from  Katie Walsh, film reviewer for the Tribune News Service and the Los Angeles Times; and Witney Seibold, contributor to SlashFilm and co-host of the podcast “Critically Acclaimed.”

The latest film releases are “Scrapper,” “El Conde,” “The Nun II,” and “My Big Fat Greek Wedding 3.” Weighing in are Christy Lemire, film critic for RogerEbert.com and co-host of the YouTube channel “Breakfast All Day,” and William Bibbiani, film critic for the Wrap and co-host of the Critically Acclaimed Network.

The latest film releases include “The Equalizer 3,” “Goldfish,” “The Good Mother,” “Nandor Fodor and the Talking Mongoose.” Weighing in are Katie Walsh, film reviewer for the Tribune News Service, the Los Angeles Times, and The Wrap; and Shawn Edwards, film critic for FOX-TV in Kansas City.

This week’s film releases include “Gran Turismo,” “Retribution,” “Golda,” and “Bottoms.” KCRW gets reviews from Amy Nicholson, host of the podcast Unspooled and film reviewer for The New York Times; and William Bibbiani, film critic for The Wrap and co-host of the Critically Acclaimed Network of podcasts.

The latest film releases include “Blue Beetle” and “Strays.” KCRW gets reviews from Alison Willmore, film critic for New York Magazine and Vulture; and Witney Seibold, contributor to SlashFilm and co-host of the podcast “Critically Acclaimed.”

The latest film releases include “Jules,” “The Last Voyage of the Demeter,” “Medusa Deluxe,” “Men of Deeds,” and “Red, White, & Royal Blue.” KCRW gets reviews from Christy Lemire, film critic for RogerEbert.com and co-host of the YouTube channel “Breakfast All Day;” and Carlos Aguilar, film reviewer for the Los Angeles Times and The A.V. Club.

The first time I did a film commentary for KCRW was so many years ago that listeners must have been listening on crystal sets. That long and wonderful run ends today, but not my connection with this special and essential station. I'd like to think you haven't heard the last of me here.

The hero of Robert Eggers's "The Northman," a Viking warrior in 9th century Iceland, thinks of nothing but avenging the death of his father, whose death may recall the plot of "Hamlet." Rivers of blood are spilled along the way in a dark saga that also casts a light on our time.

The lovers in "Paris 13th District," a romantic comedy by the French director Jacques Audiard, don't necessarily want to live the erratic lives they're living. They'd rather be solidly grounded, with good jobs and a stable network of friends. Or would they?

A new Netflix documentary, "Return To Space," may come on like a promotional piece for SpaceX, and why not? Elon Musk's aerospace venture has achieved remarkable things since it was founded two decades ago. The film is more than that, though. It charts the beginning of a new era in space exploration, and also serves as a testament to the power of failing upward. Way upward.

Watching the Oscarcast in all its astonishing amateurism and then watching "The Contractor" for review is an unwelcome reminder of the state of the movie medium.

Previous years of ratings declines don't bode well for the popularity of this year's Oscars show. Have the Oscars, and the movies, lost their place of preeminence in the entertainment universe?

By now it's no spoiler to say that the teenage heroine of Pixar's "Turning Red" turns into a panda whenever her emotions get out of control. It's a shame most people will see the film only on Disney+, but it's worth seeing anywhere for its buoyant spirit and brilliant animation.

A new Batman movie is upon us, with Robert Pattinson in the title role. "The Batman" isn't one more origin story, and yay for that--here's to storytelling in the present tense--or a conventional action thriller. It's the Dark Knight seized by deeply dark thoughts about what he's doing with his life, and what difference it makes in a world of overwhelming evil.

A new "Cyrano" with Peter Dinklage has much to recommend it, but the film is diminished by a dreary score and banal songs.

"Blacklight," starring Liam Neeson, is competing this week against "Death On the Nile." The latter isn't very good, but it's a professional entertainment. I've chosen to talk about the former because it's barely a movie at all. Rather, it's a rusty recycling bin that threatens, in its modest way, to contribute to the death of the movie medium.

Roland Emmerich's "Moonfall" contends that the moon is hollow, and sends it tumbling from orbit. Is the movie itself hollow or solid? A question for the ages that will nonetheless be answered here.

Two people thrown together by chance in a tiny compartment on a Russian train traveling from Moscow to Murmansk, in the arctic north. That may not sound like a combustible formula for a plot, but "Compartment No. 6," from the Finnish filmmaker Juho Kuosmanen, is greatly rewarding and improbably beautiful.

"Lunana: A Yak In the Classroom" is Bhutan's international-feature entry for the Oscars. It was shot at extremely high altitude with extremely modest resources, yet the result is affecting and thoroughly delightful.

In "Who We Are: A Chronicle of Racism in America," the documentary filmmakers Emily Kunstler and Sarah Kunstler conjure with surprising concepts--including the weight of cotton--to show how and why racism is, in their words, "our shared history."

Almost no one in Asghar Farhadi's "A Hero" can tell the unvarnished truth, a fact that makes the film great fun and a fascinating comment on human nature. 

"Spider-Man: No Way Home" does whatever it pleases in bringing back golden-oldie characters from whatever universes they've been inhabiting. And the film is all over the place in more ways than one. But it really pleases, by bringing up feelings we may not have known we still had.

Steven Spielberg's "West Side Story" starts with three annunciatory notes of the greatest score ever written for a Broadway musical comedy. What follows is partly a rethinking of the basic material, and a redressing of wrongs represented by the casting of previous productions, which was never representative at all. Mostly, though, it's an exultant new version of an American classic. 

Paolo Sorrentino's "The Hand of God" is much less serious than it sounds, though far from frivolous. It's a fond and funny piece of autobiography about his coming of age in 1980s Naples. 

"Cmon C'mon" is all over the place, like the 9-year-old at the center of Mike Mills's unusual road movie, but it's a special pleasure that manages to be simultaneously serious and marvelously funny.

In "Belfast," Kenneth Branagh's semi-autobiographical evocation of his childhood in Northern Ireland, the filmmaker, stage actor and writer is a bright-faced 9-year-old struggling to understand the sectarian violence raging around him and his tight-knit family.

Five years ago the Chilean director Pablo Larraín gave us "Jackie," a fictionalized portrait of Jacqueline Kennedy during and immediately after her husband's assassination. Now he's done a fictionalized--and mostly grim--account of a Christmas weekend the Princess of Wales spent in 1991 at Queen Elizabeth's Sandringham Estate.

Joanna Hogg's semi-autobiographical 2019 feature "The Souvenir" was rightly hailed as something perilously close to a masterpiece. Now she's done a sequel, "The Souvenir: II," which picks up where the first film left off. Sequels are risky, but there was no need to worry about this one.

"The Electrical Life Of Louis Wain" stars Benedict Cumberbatch as the Victorian-era illustrator who celebrated cats and believed he could feel electricity in the space around him. Claire Foy is Emily Richardson, the woman he loves, and the two stars in conjunction are a grand spectacle.

A filmmaking couple in Mia Hansen-Løve's wonderful "Bergman Island" spend a summer residency on the island off the coast of Sweden where Ingmar Bergman lived and made some of his most cherished films.

It's not your ordinary lamb, but then "Lamb" isn't your ordinary Icelandic indie film. It's a debut feature, by Valdimar Jóhannsson, that's extraordinarily well made, seriously strange and stars the superb Noomi Rapace, who was the fierce Goth hacker Lisbeth Salandar in the original Swedish version of "The Girl With the Dragon Tattoo."

It's been 15 years since we first saw him, and were startled by him, as James Bond in "Casino Royale" (which turned out to be one of the best Bonds ever.) Now Daniel Craig is playing Bond for the last time in "No Time To Die," which is very long, very uneven and, from time to time, greatly affecting.

What if the man who says "I'm Your Man" isn't a man? Maria Schrader's German-language sci-fi romance explores the shifting ground between hormones and silicon.

The 48th annual Telluride Film Festival took place actually, rather than virtually, at its accustomed site almost 10,000 feet up in the Colorado Rockies. Last year the festival went dark during the pandemic. This year it was an exuberant reminder, as always, that the movie medium is alive and, against heavy odds, well.

In the movie world the word "sequel" is usually a synonym for letdown. Not so with the new "Candyman," which calls itself a "spiritual sequel" to the 1992 slasher classic. The director, Nia DaCosta, and her colleagues--she wrote the screenplay with Jordan Peele and Win Rosenfeld--have transformed the material by rethinking what it said about race in America in the first place.

"Reminiscence," a futurist debut feature by Lisa Joy, the co-creator of "Westworld," may be best remembered for its stunning images of Miami at a time of catastrophic climate change, when rising sea levels have engulfed much of the city. The immensely complicated plot, on the other hand, is mostly mind-numbing.

Matt Damon is an Oklahoma oil-patch worker who travels to France to help his daughter, imprisoned in Marseille for a murder she claims she didn't commit. The film is a fictional reworking of the case of Amanda Knox, an American woman acquitted in 2015 of the charge of having killed her flatmate. The director and co-writer was Tom McCarthy, who did the investigative procedural "Spotlight."

Vacationers in a tropical resort age mysteriously in "Old," an inexplicably silly horror/slasher/sci-fi feature by M. Night Shyamalan.

"Roadrunner: A Film About Anthony Bourdain" captures the sweep of the chef-turned-TV-celebrity's life in captivating detail. It also struggles with the mystery of why, at what seemed to be the peak of his career, Bourdain committed suicide three years ago in his room in a French hotel.

Value "Black Widow," the latest addition to the Marvel Cinematic Universe, for what it is (a surprisingly intimate portrait of two sisters and their strange family, plus several elegant action sequences) rather than discounting it for what it isn't (another of Marvel's adventures in which cosmic forces are at work.)

The action master, who last directed an episode of "Fast and Furious" in 2013, is back with "F9: The Fast Saga," an action spectacular in which cars not only fly--that's so old-school--but go into orbit.

Retired? Not on your life, or hers. This indefatigable entertainment icon has recently finished a role in Steven Spielberg's new screen version of "West Side Story" (she won an Oscar for her work in the 1961 version.) Now she's the subject of a new documentary in which she looks back on her life, and forward to whatever the next gig may be.

Before Lin-Manuel Miranda brought his astonishing "Hamilton" to Broadway he created "In the Heights," a Broadway musical set in a Latino, mostly Dominican neighborhood of Washington Heights, in Upper Manhattan near the George Washington Bridge. Thirteen years after its opening, the show has finally made it to the screen in a production that's just what is needed to bring movie audiences back into the fold.

"The Conjuring" films have conjured billions of box-office dollars since the first one in 2013. But now, with the latest installment called "The Devil Made Me Do It," there's a sense of paranormal events winding down, which is a very normal fate for a blockbuster franchise.

"A Quiet Place II" picks up where the original--the very original original--left off. The post-apocalyptic world is still beset by blind monsters who listen for the tiniest sound, then turn the hapless human who made it into lunch.

You could say "The Dry," a fine Australian thriller, is partly about global warming. It's been almost a year without rain when Aaron Falk, a federal cop played by Eric Bana, drives northwest from Melbourne through parched lands to a funeral in the small town he left 20 years ago. The drought has changed everyone's life, Aaron's best friend seems to have killed his wife and son before taking his own life and Aaron himself remains under suspicion in the town for his girlfriend's death all those many years ago.

Usually the simplest part of reviewing a movie is designating its genre. The most straightforward description of “Riders of Justice,” in Danish with English subtitles, is a drama with intense action elements and darkly comic overtones. But a more accurate description is that it’s a deliciously absurdist, fundamentally serious, even philosophical enterprise that uses a superheated revenge plot to address our common need for making sense out of life.

Billy Crystal plays a comedy writer with dementia in "Here Today," and Tiffany Haddish is a singer and street performer who becomes his guardian angel, but the mirth is forced and the energy false.

The hero of "Moffie" is a closeted gay conscript in the South Africa of 1981. In addition to the killing arts, he and his fellow draftees are trained in racism and homophobia.

Versus films are a genre unto themselves. Now we have "Godzilla vs. Kong," an addition to the genre that isn't proud so much as inevitable. Or unavoidable.

In "Nobody," the star of "Better Call Saul" plays a placid suburbanite who discovers the pleasures of revenge.

"The Courier," a Cold War spy thriller starring Benedict Cumberbatch, is earnest to a fault. Meaning it's unaccountably dull, even though Cumberbatch gives another of his strong performances, this time in the role of Greville Wynne, a British civilian recruited by MI6 and the CIA to travel to the Soviet Union and make covert contact with a Soviet intelligence officer who wants to help the West avoid a nuclear war.

Working from the Nico Walker novel about the horrors of war and opioid addiction, Anthony Russo and Joe Russo have made a screen version that elevates, for better or the gritty source material into the epic journey of a troubled soul.

In "The Truffle Hunters," a new documentary by Michael Dweck and Gregory Kershaw, Italian men in their 60s, 70s and 80s do as they've done for decades--search the forests of the Alba region for precious white truffles. Their lives are happy and their health is fine, but their work is increasingly endangered.

"The United States vs. Billie Holiday" chronicles the U.S. government's war on Billie Holiday in the late 1940s, when the Bureau of Narcotics saw in the peerless, heroin-addicted singer a chance to racialize its so-called war on drugs. 

In Chloé Zhao's gorgeous "Nomadland," a woman in her 60s, played with gusto and intimations of grief by Frances McDormand, joins a transient population of older and just plain old Americans driving their vans and RV's around the American West in search of companionship, and gig work where they can find it. 

In Shaka King's remarkable "Judas and the Black Messiah," Fred Hampton and the Chicago Black Panthers struggle against racism in the late 1960's, unaware that the FBI has planted an informant in their midst.

"Little Fish" finished shooting many months before Covid-19 hit, but it gets some things right and other things very right, even though the virus in the movie attacks your memory instead of taking your life.

Sutton Hoo, in the English countryside in Suffolk, was the site of one of the most spectacular archaeological finds of the 20th century. Now that discovery has been dramatized--affectingly, and quite accurately--in a Netflix film called "The Dig."

Flawlessly acted by Dakota Johnson, Casey Affleck and Jason Segel, and beautifully directed by Gabriela Cowperthwaite, this movie about friendship and cancer--in that order--is funny and affecting in equal measure.

That's how the hero of "The White Tiger" views his native India. The way you'll view the film is with rapt attention and great delight. It's really terrific.

A documentary called "The Reason I Jump" is a stirring new addition to the movie genre--best exemplified by "The Miracle Worker"--about disabled people who can't express what they're thinking or feeling.

"Ma Rainey's Black Bottom" stars Viola Davis as the great blues singer of the title and Chadwick Boseman, brilliant in his final performance as the cornetist in a quartet that accompanies her. "White folk don't understand the blues," Ma says at one point. Their understanding will be enhanced by this powerful, ultimately shattering film version of the 1982 August Wilson play.

Are you willing to watch 130 minutes of unfounded self-delight for four minutes of terrific song and dance? Then "The Prom" is the film for you. The cast includes Meryl Streep, James Corden and Nicole Kidman, but there's little they can do to save this Netflix music from its own excesses.

The subject is love--between Eva Green's astronaut mother and her 7-year-old daughter, played affectingly by Zélie Boulant--and extremely well-founded separation anxiety, since Mom is soon to blast off for a one-year tour aboard the International Space Station.

Frederick Wiseman's documentary feature, "City Hall," is the latest in a remarkable string of 43 films about cultural and political institutions. It's more than four hours long, but fascinating at almost every point along the way, a testament to the ideal of civic governance and the complex pleasures of city life. 

"The Witches," Robert Zemeckis's remake of the 1990 version of the dark Roald Dahl novel, transfers the action from Norway and the United Kingdom to Alabama in the late 1960s. That's a good idea with one substantial reservation. Remaking a cult classic turns out to be a digital-effects extravaganza and too much of a good thing.

In striking ways Aaron Sorkin's "The Trial of the Chicago 7 " is a docudrama for our time. It's about the riots that surrounded the 1968 Democratic convention, which took place during the Vietnam war, and the 1969 trial of anti war demonstrators charged with inciting violence in the streets around the convention. But docudramas have their own way of mixing truth with invention, and this one is no exception.

Garrett Bradley's "Time," a gorgeous documentary that skips back and forth over the course of two decades, is a Black filmmaker's lyrical tribute to a Black family trying to hold itself together while it's beset by barely imaginable pressures.

Bill Murray and Rashida Jones star in Sofia Coppola's "On the Rocks," a film about her marriage and their relationship, both of which are fraught and funny.

Millie Bobby Brown was only 12 when she first played Eleven, the mysterious girl with psychokinetic powers, on the TV series "Stranger Things." Now she's all of 16 and starring as Sherlock Holmes's kid sister in "Enola Holmes." The mystery this time is how she carries the whole movie with nary a false note.

After cancelling this year's Telluride Film Festival because of the pandemic, the festival set up shop for one night at a pop-up drive-in next to the Rose Bowl. Only one film was shown, but it was special, and beautiful--Chloé Zhao's "Nomadland."

A Netflix documentary, "The Social Dilemma," examines the myriad ways social media platforms hold our attention while they mine our minds for data and pollute them with news that ranges from trivial through questionable to flat-out counterfeit.

Charlie Kaufman's "I'm Thinking of Ending It All" defies description but doesn't defeat it. The Netflix film starts with two people in a car on a road trip, then goes off on a trip of its own to explore matters of identity, relationships, projection (not the multiplex kind) and nothing less than the nature of reality. It can be exasperating, but also beautiful, a work of emotional impressionism with moments of rueful grace and startling images that evoke yearning.

A new documentary, "Robin's Wish," deals with the disease that took his life, but also celebrates his life, and his courage as his inner self came undone.

"Desert One," a superb documentary by Barbara Kopple, examines the 1980 special forces mission launched secretly by President Jimmy Carter in an attempt to end the Iran hostage crisis.

In "Boys State," a documentary streaming on Apple TV+, 1,000 or so high school juniors come together in Texas for a week-long program in which they build their own state government and run for governor in mock elections. How they go about it inevitably reflects the state of participatory politics in supposedly adult America. It is not a pretty picture.

Ron Howard's "Rebuilding Paradise," a fine National Geographic documentary, reconstructs the 2018 wildfire that destroyed the town of Paradise in the foothills of Northern California. The film also has something to say, however indirectly, about our own rebuilding effort, once the pandemic is behind us, and about even greater challenges to come.

"Radioactive," a biopic that starts to be about Marie Curie, can't resist a cause-and-effect survey of radiation that extends as far afield as  Hiroshima, the Nevada Proving Ground and Chernobyl. But Rosamund Pike's vivid performance as the peerless scientist and two-time Nobel Prize winner comes close to redeeming the whole production.

A Netflix documentary, "Father Soldier Son," spans almost a decade as it tracks a former platoon sergeant, gravely wounded in Afghanistan, and the two young sons who adore him.

"Greyhound," with Tom Hanks as a destroyer captain during the Battle of the Atlantic in World War II, brings an action adventure to home screens. But it also reminds us how much we've lost with the closing of theaters and their huge screens.

"The Audition" stars the great German actress Nina Hoss as a violin teacher determined to turn a tender young student into a virtuoso.  

"Babyteeth" is a debut feature from Australia, and what a debut: Shannon Murphy, who's never done a full-length film before, directed from a screenplay by Rita Kalnejais. The genre is familiar, a lovely young girl with a disease that may kill her, but that's where the familiarity ends and a wonderfully unpredictable tragicomedy begins. The girl, Milla, is played by Eliza Scanlen, who was so radiant as Beth in Greta Gerwig's "Little Women." Toby Wallace is remarkable as Moses, the whacked-out love of Milla's life. 

Spike Lee's "Da 5 Bloods," streaming on Netflix, is sprawling, enthralling and essential viewing. It comes on as an action adventure--a group of black Vietnam vets go back to Vietnam to find the remains of their squad leader and the gold bullion he helped them bury. But it's really about black lives--how much they matter, what blacks have endured in America's past and where they belong in its turbulent present.

"Shirley," a free-form fictional biopic about the writer Shirley Jackson, has two main settings: Bennington, Vermont, where, in the 1960s, her husband teaches English at Bennington College, and the turbulent landscape of Shirley's inner life, where she struggles with the same demons that populate her stories and books.

Can the theatrical experience survive? Movie theaters will reopen sometime soon, though not all of them, but the streaming revolution was changing viewing habits long before the pandemic, and has only gained force, and converts, since the coronavirus struck. Balancing the gains and losses is hard for a child of the movie palaces.

Every few years since they joined forces to do "The Trip" in 2010, the English funnymen Steve Coogan and Rob Brydon have done another installment--"The Trip To Italy" followed by "The Trip To Spain." The latest and final one, "The Trip To Greece," follows their formula of visiting photogenic spots, eating fancy meals and talking funny talk that includes spot-on celebrity impressions. After this there'll be no one to do Michael Caine except Michael Caine. 

In less than four minutes, on Super 8 film, Spike Lee has captured the pain and surreal stillness of New York's pandemic moment.

"Saint Frances" is a feature debut for its director, Alex Thompson, and its writer, Kelly O'Sullivan, who also co-stars with a remarkable child actor named Ramona Edith Williams. They play, respectively, Bridget, a nanny, and Frances, the kid who changes the nanny's life. "Mary Poppins" it is not.

"Deerskin" is a tale of murderous obsession and a deerskin jacket, though not in that order. The star is Jean Dujardin, who won an Oscar in 2012 for his buoyantly funny portrayal of George Valentin, a silent-film actor on the way down. Once again he's playing a Georges, with an 's' but without the buoyancy.

"Circus of Books," a new Netflix documentary, centers on an old West Hollywood landmark, the porn shop on the corner of La Jolla and Santa Monica Boulevard. But the center of the center is about prejudice, and how it can arise in the unlikeliest places.

In "Selah and the Spades," Tayarisha Poe's impressive debut feature, a tyrannical teen rules the prep-school roost.

At a time when the luckier among us are having food, booze and even weed delivered to their doorsteps, movies about delivery services may be a fitting accompaniment. ("Deliverance" isn't one of them.) 

Look outside your window these days and what you see is a sci-movie with silent streets devoid of life. Here are a few movies that have turned empty cities into art. 

"Crip Camp: A Disability Revolution," evokes the history of a camp for disabled kids that flourished in the Catskills in the 1960s and 1970s. More than a camp, though, it was a seedbed for radical political action. The film streams on Netflix.

What's a movie lover to do? No new openings because theaters are shutting down for the duration. But new releases are coming. It will just take a week or so before they find their way to video on demand. Meanwhile, a few ideas for streaming in the madness of our moment.

Eliza Hittman's "Never Rarely Sometimes Always" is provocative--some might consider it explosive, since it follows a pregnant 17-year-old from rural Pennsylvania to New York City in search of a safe abortion she can't get at home. But it's also one of the most beautiful films I've seen in a long time, the odyssey of a lost child in poorly charted territory.

Kelly Reichardt has endeared herself to fans of independent film with a string of heartfelt features shot on a modest scale. None of them has been as endearing, or as funny and wise, as her new one, "First Cow"

Almost 90 years ago "The Invisible Man" thrilled audiences with special effects they'd never seen. In the latest version of the story, the focus is on a visible and all-too-vulnerable woman who's either being chased by a vengeful ex she can't see or is suffering from florid delusions.

A new screen version of "The Call of the Wild" is calling to us; it's the Jack London story of a California dog named buck who goes native in the Yukon of the Gold Rush days. This time the dog is digital, which lends the film at least one distinction.

"Beanpole" is a new Russian drama directed by the prodigiously gifted Kantemir Balogov. The setting is Leningrad during the first autumn after World War II, and it's a profound--and profoundly beautiful--tale of two women who've been traumatized by the war.

The Harley Quinn of "Suicide Squad" is back in "Birds of Prey," though with a difference, even though she's still played, with skill and zest, by Margot Robbie. In the earlier film, a torture chamber for actors and audiences alike, Harley was a flamboyantly brutal criminal, rather than an entertaining one. She's flamboyant in "Birds of Prey," but joyously so.

Kitty Green's "The Assistant" is audacious in a deadpan way, a #MeToo drama that comes on like an HR video illustrating the responsibilities of an entry-level job. The heroine, Jane (Julia Garner), is a junior assistant to the chairman of the company. His name is not Harvey Weinstein. In fact he's never named, or seen. This is a story of sexual abuse in which the predatory behavior, like the abuser, remains behind closed doors, but increasingly obvious to the decreasingly innocent assistant.

Guy Ritchie is back, mostly for the better, in crime-caper mode with "The Gentlemen," a tale of criminal toughs and toffs in London trying to take down Matthew McConaughey's Mickey Pearson, an ex-pat American who's made a king's ransom growing marijuana in subterranean, tech-intensive farms under some of England's statelier homes.

“Dolittle” is the latest in a long, undistinguished line of movies about the veterinarian who can talk to animals. It doesn’t speak well for the film that one of its only affecting moments involves a stick insect that doesn't seem to listen and has nothing to say.

Log line. The Star Wars party is over, or at least a significant part of it. Forty-two years after George Lucas put the saga in motion, the Skywalker trilogy has come to an end with "The Rise of Skywalker." 

Energy flows from anxiety in "Uncut Gems." You may be exhausted but you'll never be bored by Adam Sandler's astonishing performance.

"The Aeronauts" is in the Jules Verne vein of "Around the World In 80 Days," but on a slightly more modest scale. It's around and above London during a few hours with an intrepid pilot played by Felicity Jones and her scientist companion, who's played by Eddie Redmayne. Without giving away too much, I can tell you that the higher they go the colder they get.

It's tempting to say that "Knives Out" is the sort of movie they don't make any more, but they didn't make all that many way back when, because it's really hard to pull off a production of such startling quality. If there's a false note in it I must have been laughing or gasping when it sounded.

Tom Hanks is Fred Rogers, the children's TV host in "A Beautiful Day in the Neighborhood." The movie was made for grownups, of course, so sticky sweetness threatens at every turn. But the movie bets on goodness, and wins.

Movies about car racing sound like operas scored entirely for bassos. "Ford v Ferrari" fills that bill, but it also has significant things to say on a variety of worthy subjects. It's a great spectacle with a resonant soul to go with its smarts.

Every divorce story is a marriage story, but every movie about divorce is not on the level of Noah Baumbach's "Marriage Story." Marvelous performances, steel-trap writing that also manages to be heartfelt--it's a deeply affecting classic.

Here's an all-points bulletin about Martin Scorsese's "The Irishman." It's a huge movie, made to be seen on big screens, but it's a Netflix production that will be playing in theaters, and not all that many of them, only for three weeks. See it if you can before this genuine epic shrinks down to the size of a streaming attraction.

Words, words, words. "Synonyms," an Israeli film set in Paris, is all about them. For once, though, wordiness in a movie is a good thing, even a delightful thing.

Three years ago Robert Eggers made his dark mark with a remarkable debut feature called "The Witch." Now he's back with "The Lighthouse," a horror fantasy in a dramatic and aesthetic class by itself.

Think about "Parasite" as a home-invasion story unlike any other. This funny, smart and genuinely profound social satire from Korea was directed by Bong Joon Ho, and it's one of the most original films in memory.

If you’re feeling insufficiently anxious in your life, “Joker” could be just the ticket. If not, look elsewhere to be entertained.

Renée Zellwegger plays Judy Garland with heart-stopping brilliance in "Judy." It's a performance that no one could have predicted, not even on the basis of her bedazzling portrayal of Roxie Hart in "Chicago."  She sets the film on fire every time she sings a Garland classic in her own voice.

In the past few years there's been a very real invasion from Mexico--by remarkably gifted filmmakers. Now a woman named Issa López joins their ranks with an interesting horror film called "Tigers Are Not Afraid."

A remarkable documentary called "Aquarela" is about water--really and truly about water and its effect on the planet. The film makes the stuff almost palpable, as no motion picture I've ever seen before.

The Peanut Butter Falcon is a certified feelgood film that has no use for naked tenderness, disability sentimentality or full-frontal sweetness. Go in expecting the best and you'll come out smiling.

An interesting independent film called "Luce" is framed as a psychological mystery. It labors under more layers of significance than it can handle without falling into contrivance. Yet the dramatic core is strong: an exceptional young man—played by an exceptional actor named Kelvin Harrison Jr.--struggling to become whoever he really is.

Quentin Tarantino's "Once Upon a Time...in Hollywood" seduces you, in the spirit of its once-upon-a-time title. Come along, it seems to say, you may have guessed where we're going but we'll have fun and some surprises along the way.

Disney's remake of "The Lion King" looks like the real thing--animation that simulates real life in astonishing detail. Whether we want animation to simulate real life is another question, but it's the crucial one.

The lovely paradox of Lulu Wang’s “The Farewell,” in subtitled Mandarin and English, is that everyone in it tries to hide their feelings as long as they can, yet their story goes straight to your heart.

A fourth "Toy Story," coming nine years after the trilogy ended, is automatically big news. But is it good news? The answer is four times yes, with only minor qualifications.

"Men in Black: International" is an industrial product salvaged from the remnants of an exhausted franchise and aimed at a young audience that may not know or care what a joy the original was.

“The Last Black Man in San Francisco” is about the stories we need to tell ourselves. What the hero of this piercingly beautiful debut film longs for most strongly is a place he can call home.

"The Fall Of the American Empire" is a French-Canadian crime caper about money--not just the small fortune involved in a heist, but the larger fortunes that sustain the world of business and finance.

“Booksmart” is a high-school comedy with a graduate degree.

It is, every bit of it, the cat’s meow.

I’m Joe Morgenstern. I’ll be back on KCRW next week with more reviews.

Audiences may well be looking for an even higher level of outlandishness than the TV news channels and talk shows offer, and “Long Shot” provides it.

Good news for humanity, and for the significant fraction of it that’s been following the exploits of the Avengers and their allies in twenty-one Marvel movies over the course of the past 11 years.

The title is “Hail Satan?”—but with a question mark at the end and it may look like a mockumentary, but it’s not.

Brain- numbing and head-splitting (literally the latter, since the cleaving of skulls is a recurrent motif).

It’s terrific fun, and none of the things that were threatening to turn DC Entertainment into the cinematic equivalent of a black hole.

Disney’s new “Dumbo” is one ponderous pachyderm.

Jordan Peele’s “Us” is a polytonal slasher saga with more undertones, overtones, intricate themes, elusive mysteries and scary images than anyone could absorb in a single viewing.

“The Mustang” starts with a good idea and makes it better—an incorrigible prison inmate learns to tame his own wild rages by taming, and training, a wild mustang.

It takes a long time for “Captain Marvel” to focus its force fields. And for Brie Larson’s fearless pilot, Carol Danvers, to find her true identity, her authentic superpowers and a reason for us to want to watch her.

Your own pulse will pound often and hard during Todd Douglas Miller’s film, which opens this week exclusively in IMAX.

This time it really is about the films themselves.

The film was directed by Robert Rodriguez, who did “From Dusk Till Dawn" and "Sin City," and it comes by its visual elegance honestly, since the technology derives from James Cameron's "Avatar." Cameron produced this one, and the digital wizardry, as in "Avatar;" came out of the Weta Digital facility in New Zealand.

"Cold Pursuit” finds Liam Neeson once again in avenger mode—it’s a given that he’s recapitulating the spirit of “Taken.”

Brrr.

There’s a lot to enjoy about the film, starting with the title’s sly reference to Rudyard Kipling’s “The Man Who Would Be King” and John Huston’s classic screen adaptation.

It’s a sort of a climax to a kind of a trilogy that began at the turn of the century with “Unbreakable” and includes “Split,” which was released in 2016.

“On the Basis of Sex” is a fictionalized account of Ruth Bader Ginsburg’s formative years as a lawyer and law professor. The film is informative, in a dutiful way, but it’s a skin-deep celebration of someone who’s never settled for superficiality in her life’s work. Hints of her future self appear, but only in flashes. Mostly the production takes its cues not from real life but from film clichés. The fateful flaw isn’t hard to locate. It’s the script, which was written by Daniel Stiepleman. For one thing Stiepleman has no experience writing feature films; for another he’s Justice Gisnburg’s nephew. That constitutes double jeopardy for filmgoers who may wonder why the production is so predictable, in spite of the best efforts of Felicity Jones as Ruth and Armie Hammer as Martin Ginsburg, her loving, charming and endlessly supportive husband. Apparently Marty Ginsburg was all of those things and more, a reputation that’s burnished by “RBG,” the fascinating documentary released earlier this year. Still, Hammer’s portrayal of the fictionalized Marty is monotone, or rather tri-tone; this guy is loving, charming, and supportive at every moment. The only glimpses of the young Ruth Bader in the documentary came from still photos, and from home movies shot during her undergraduate days at Cornell—a strikingly beautiful young woman asserting her intelligence and sense of purpose in a man’s world, and, in the 1950s, aspiring to a place of prominence in a man’s profession. That’s when “On the Basis of Sex” picks up the fictionalized Ruth—a Cornell grad about to enter Harvard Law School in 1956. We’re moved by the hope and resolve that radiate from Ruth’s face, and so what if Felicity Jones doesn’t quite nail her subject’s baroque New York accent. The question of accents raises the larger question of why the role of a quintessentially American heroine was given to an English actress. But casting isn’t what vitiates the story’s power. Neither is accuracy. The film reminds us of the lowly status of women as recently as 1972, when Ruth, in conjunction with Marty, argues an ostensible tax case that becomes an early success in her almost half-century-long legal battle for gender equality. The trouble with “On the Basis of Sex” is that it fails to make the case for its subject’s exceptionalism. We’re certainly told how determined she is, how devoted and intelligent, and you can find those qualities in Felicity Jones’s performance. What’s missing, though, because the writing and direction don’t dare to dramatize it, is the steely fury that must have been burning in Ruth’s soul all along. There’s no way to imagine this young woman growing into the flesh-and-blood thinker and fearless fighter who commands our attention, with renewed urgency, from the intersection of law, politics and mortality. I’m Joe Morgenstern. I’ll be back on KCRW next week with more reviews.

At the beginning of “Mary Poppins Returns” we’re told that the story takes place, quote, “in the days of the great Slump.” Meaning the Depression, of course, except that the elation merchants at Disney avoided the word out of concern that it might be depressing. Rather than run the same risk, I’ll simply note that I found this sequel deeply slumping. The misuse of talent is what slumped me the most.

Within the first 30 seconds you know you’re watching something new. A sensational title sequence threatens to be the design equivalent of flash bang grenades, yet the art isn’t assaultive, only inventive, with colors that stretch the spectrum as far as the eye can see.

It’s a bizarre treat to watch Portman singing—very well—and strutting her stuff in a black sequined gown like a cross between Madonna and a Roomba Robot vacuum gone rogue.

A zombie musical with a high-school setting.

There’s no other way to say it than to say it: “Roma” is one of the best movies I’ve ever seen, and one of the most moving.

One of the many things you may learn from “Widows” is that cemeteries don’t have gravediggers anymore; backhoes do the job.

“The Girl In the Spider’s Web: A New Dragon Tattoo Story” is a reference to the terrific series that started years ago with “The Girl With the Dragon Tattoo.” The central character in the new installment has the same name, but she’s changed and a lot around her has changed, none of it for the better.

Be forewarned that Disney’s latest holiday offering has reprocessed nothing but bits, pieces, slivers and chunks of Nutcrackery into a colorful, sumptuously produced confection with no detectable nutritional value.

A small-scale Swedish feature that sneaks up on you but isn’t scary so much as amusing, then intriguing, then, by degrees, unsettling, troubling, frightening, honest-to-badness horrifying and enthralling.

“Wildlife” is just plain wonderful, and I’ll explain the plain part in a minute. This coming-of-age drama is the directorial debut of the actor Paul Dano; he and Zoe Kazan adapted the screenplay from the novel by Richard Ford. The time is 1960, the place is Montana and the hero, a lonely 14-year-old named Joe Brinson, is trying to understand the ways of the world through his suddenly fractured family.

Here’s the radical notion behind Damien Chazelle’s “First Man”: Tell the story of mankind’s boldest adventure thus far, the Apollo 11 mission that reached the moon nearly a half-century ago, but tell it through a taciturn, emotionally closed-off hero, Neil Armstrong, the first man to walk on the lunar surface.

"A Star Is Born" is thrillingly right in just about every respect. It’s as if no one knew they were shooting a remake. The film feels fresh from thunderous start to exquisite finish.

Feel free to find your own meaning in “Free Solo.” Maybe you’ll see it as a movie about defying death (while courting it), or transcending fear (without banishing it), or solving problems (through excruciating attention to detail), or simply as an expression of the unquenchable human spirit. It’s all of those things and more. 

Spike Lee doesn’t mince words in “BlacKkKlansman.” He ignites them, and illustrates them with inflammatory images. This is a freewheeling account of an African-American cop who infiltrated the Ku Klux Klan in the early 1970s. It’s uneven as narrative drama, but stunning as a furious, in-your-white-face outcry against racial hatred in America’s past and turbulent present, with pointed references to President Trump.

Tom Cruise’s Ethan Hunt is back to saving the world from nuclear devastation—he did it almost seven years ago in “Ghost Protocol,” so you can bet on him succeeding again.

Yes, the glee is industrial-strength, and the ABBA-fueled production numbers are so far over the top that the film is both topless and chaste. Yet there’s a wellspring of genuine feeling in “Mamma Mia! Here We Go Again,” a time-hopping sequel that amounts to an origin story.

Paul Rudd is back, winningly, as Scott Lang/aka the superhero of the title, along with Michael Douglas as the inventor Dr. Hank Pym, and Evangeline Lilly, who’s lovely and strong as Hank’s daughter, Hope van Dyne.

“Leave No Trace” was made by an artist who combines plainspoken poetry with documentary detail. It’s a gorgeous film, a triumph on top of an earlier one and, not incidentally, a small miracle of concision at a time when audiences are more and more interested in stories spun out at great length in episodes and seasons.

An imminent threat of extinction drives the narrative. It’s three years after the previous film, “Jurassic World,” and the collapse of the theme park on Isla Nublar. The dinosaurs have the island to themselves, but a volcanic eruption threatens to wipe them out.

For all its repetitiveness, and frantic silliness, “Tag” ends up being good fun, with an unexpectedly sweet spirit that stays with you.

I’m happy to bring news about “Hereditary,” a sensationally scary debut feature by Ari Aster.

This formidably accomplished debut feature by Michael Pearce takes us down familiar paths into a darkness all its own.

This short, bright comedy with a dark core was directed by Jason Reitman from a superb screenplay by Diablo Cody; they collaborated previously on “Juno” and “Young Adult.” It’s a remarkable film about nothing less than regeneration, the harrowing process of pulling one’s worn, dispirited parts into a vibrant new whole.

Marvel has rounded up a remarkable collection of characters for this picture, starting with Iron Man, Thor, Black Panther, Spider- Man—a new Spider-Man played by Tom Holland—and all the rest.

At first blush “I Feel Pretty” has a promising premise. It’s about a sad duckling who’s far from ugly, just pleasantly plump and plagued by self-doubt. Suddenly, magically, she believes that she’s drop-dead gorgeous, and her delusion releases her joyous, lovable self. At second blush, after seeing the film, it’s a botched premise. At third blush, after thinking about the film, it never had a chance of being much good in the hands of filmmakers whose take on their subject is sitcom-deep. The duckling, Renee Bennett, is played by Amy Schumer. She knows how to sell a comic notion, and she commits to selling this one, come what may. Renee’s only wish is to be beautiful. She works for a global cosmetics company modeled on Revlon or L’Oreal, but she does so from the company’s online office, a squalid warren in a Chinatown basement. (Where her only co-worker, a guy, is a total dimwit, and a slob.) This establishes two things—the heroine’s obsession with physical appearance, and the movie’s devotion to selling plot points, however absurd they may be. And however arbitrary. Renee’s imagined transformation follows her watching TV and happening onto a key scene of “Big”—the one in which the little kid tells a carnival machine, “I wish I were big.” This is a praiseworthy example of truth in borrowing. But it’s also a reminder to be careful what you wish for; some instant transformations have wondrous consequences, while some don’t. This one doesn’t, notwithstanding Amy Schumer’s desperate efforts, and despite our wishing the movie well for its message that beauty comes from within. After the kid in “Big” wakes up the next morning and is big enough to be played by Tom Hanks, our delight extends beyond the physical change to the sweetly naïve 13-year- old point of view that the ostensibly mature hero brings to the adult world around him. When Renee transmogrifies miraculously the day after she sees the scene from “Big,” it’s all in her head, so the rest of the movie depends completely on her behavior, which is comically delusional if you buy it, and scarily demented if you don’t. All the beautiful people in her company buy it, even when Renee talks febrile nonsense about being a supermodel, and no one asks any questions. The men around her buy it. They tell her she’s dazzling and perfect. But the compliments are unearned, because she keeps coming on like a runaway narcissist, the kind of woman any sensible man would flee in a New York nanosecond. Renee eventually reverts to her original self, as in “Big.” She’s duly cured of her paralyzing insecurity, and gets to deliver an earnest exhortation about the need for girls and women alike to believe in themselves. But you can’t believe in “I Feel Pretty.” It’s a put-up job about a self- enchanted Cinderella. I’m Joe Morgenstern. I’ll be back next week with a review of “The Avengers.”

“The Rider” has an unerring feel for its subject, a young cowboy struggling against his fate in the American West. That’s all the more remarkable because this beautiful film was written and directed by Chloé Zhao, a Chinese woman born in Beijing.

“A Quiet Place” is exactly 90 minutes long, or short. It may not make the masterpiece cut, but this little horror thriller is enormously entertaining, because it’s organized around a terrific idea—the necessity of absolute silence.

This new film is impressive, and technically cool, but also emotionally cool. There’s a fundamental mismatch between artist and material.

“Isle of Dogs” is clever, funny, startlingly beautiful, politically acute and surprisingly heartfelt.

All the same, “The Death of Stalin” gets off lots of clever jokes—finding a doctor for the comatose Stalin is hard because all the good ones are in the gulag. And it gets at political and historical truths on its own terms. Power doesn’t have to corrupt, the film suggests; many come to it pre-corrupted, as well as ignorant, fatuous and heedless.

It’s the sort of tossed-off magic that Jennifer Lawrence has worked so often in the past, and that I hope she will work again.

“Annihilation” is new. It wants us to think, and feel, while we’re having fun.

Sebastián Lelio’s “A Fantastic Woman” is Chile’s entry for this year’s foreign-language Oscar.

A story of redemption that will stand the test of time.

When the little guy with the floppy red hat and a fondness for orange marmalade first appeared on the feature screen three years ago this month, he seemed like a gift from the movie gods in a traditionally lean season. Now he and his creators have outdone themselves. One lovely sequence finds Paddington inside the London of an antique pop-up book, but lovely sequences keep popping up with remarkable frequency.

Annette Bening can tell you everything you need to know about her character in a single unfolding scene. It’s always rewarding to see her in action, even though her latest movie, “Film Stars Don’t Die In Liverpool,” doesn’t measure up to her performance.

The most important movie opening this holiday season is The Post.

The Last Jedi starts where The Force Awakens left off. The rebels are in full retreat, and Rey has discovered Luke Skywalker as a monkish hermit on a faraway island of a really faraway planet. The question is what comes next...

Impressive in its own right, the movie I, Tonya is also a cure for all those feel-good films about innately noble athletes who manage to triumph over impossible odds. 

Guillermo del Toro's The Shape of Water is a flow of sumptuous images set to music, a flood tide of feelings with a mythic undertow..

This new film is a crowd-pleaser only if you're part of a comics-obsessed crowd. 

Three Billboards Outside Ebbing, Missouri is darkly comic, blazingly profane, flat-out hilarious and often violent, not to mention flippant, tender, poetic and profound. 

Greta Gerwig is one of the pre-eminent actors of our time, and fine actors often make good directors. And she's no stranger to the art of the screenplay.

Joe's got two movies this week, one good and one really, really bad...

There's never been a film quite like this one.

Marshall is a movie that surprises at every turn.

The big question in Blade Runner 2049 continues to be the one posed by Ridley Scott’s 1982 sci-fi masterpiece. Who is human, made of flesh and blood, and who is a replicant, built in a factory but able to pass for human in most respects? 

Errol Morris's enthralling Wormwood, a six-part, 258-minute miniseries produced by Netflix, debuts in December.

Step is a stirring documentary about a female step-dancing team in an inner-city high school. 

Detroit is Kathryn Bigelow’s incendiary evocation of the riots that convulsed the Motor City 50 years ago this week. 

Christopher Nolan's Dunkirk is an astonishing evocation of a crucial event during the first year of World War II. It’s something new in the annals of war films — an intimate epic.

If you listened to War for the Planet of the Apes with your eyes closed, the music alone would let you know you were in the presence of a grand adventure. 

Spider-Man: Homecoming is delightfully smart, genially aware of itself and terrifically likeable. Only now is this series coming of age. 

Baby Driver is a time-capsule testament to the primacy of music and movement in contemporary life; the beat is both the medium and the message.

Maybe the title of The Big Sick could be improved, but everything else conspires to make this romantic comedy a cockeyed classic. It's hilariously hyperverbal, yet wonderfully heartfelt.

Cars 3 is about Lightning McQueen. This time the hotshot is a faded champion who yearns to win one more race. He's an intriguing hero for young audiences, a living legend and incipient geezer struggling to compete against a new breed of race cars.

"The Mummy" goes beyond defying comprehension. It's truly incomprehensible, and I have some questions about it.

Wonder Woman puts the super back in movie heroism, and the Woman herself, as played by Gal Gadot, is the dazzling embodiment of female empowerment.

The action sequences of Alien: Covenant give satisfaction, and the supersmart, superambitious android element provides ample food for thought and plenty of cause for worry, given what machine-learning already is and soon it soon will be.

A new film called Risk could hardly be more timely. 

Director Lydia Tenaglia traces Jeremiah Tower's progression from Chez Panisse to the 1984 opening of his own restaurant, Stars, the spectacularly successful San Francisco brasserie where he reigned as a new model of celebrity chef until 1999, when the place closed. .

Sense, or logic, is not what turns out vast audiences for The Fate of the Furious. It's the cars, of course...

Joe Morgenstern says Their Finest is one of the smartest, funniest and most surprising movies he's seen in years, proof of the power of two stories artfully told.

Not all wonderful books are meant to be mainstream fiction films.

Taken on its own terms, as a kinetic thriller, Life is lively enough for a while. 

More is less in Disney’s live-action remake of Beauty and the Beast — so much less that this crazily cluttered venture in industrial entertainment betrays the essence of what made the 1991 animated feature a beloved classic. 

In the new action adventure Kong: Skull Island, a bunch of scientists and explorers go looking for the latest incarnation of King Kong.

The slashing starts early in Logan – no surprise, since it's an R-rated action thriller about Wolverine, also known as Logan, the "X-Men" character with the tortured psyche and retractable claws.

There's a terrific horror flick opening this week. Jordan Peele's debut feature scrupulously honors the genre's  conventions. Get Out never strays from the path of entertainment, yet the horrors of racism lurk in every gleefully lurid frame.

There is no lack of spectacular sequences in The Great Wall. It's the most expensive movie ever produced in China, with fancy weaponry that's meant to show how technologically advanced the Inner Kingdom was.

The LEGO Batman Movie targets the familiar universe of superheroes and extravagant villains, with a subplot reminiscent of The Incredibles -- society has come to see Batman and his ilk as vigilantes who need to learn the value of teamwork.

Sometimes movies are just plain bad, but sometimes they're distinctively bad. The Space between Us takes a delicious cake for stupidity – it's a sci-fi romance for young adults.

Arthur Miller would have admired writer-director Asghar Farhadi's drama The Salesman for its intensity and moral depth.

Michael Keaton plays Ray Kroc, the entrepreneur who gave the world McDonald's -- and Keaton does it with panache.

The opening frames of The Crash promise a thriller about cyber warfare...

When a monster shows up at a young boy's bedroom window one night...

Denzel Washington and Viola David recreate their roles in a 2010 Broadway revival of the August Wilson play, and we're the beneficiaries.

WEB BONUS: La La Land is a crowd-pleaser if ever there was one and Joe Morgenstern couldn't be more pleased to be part of the crowd.

In Jackie, Natalie Portman's portrait of Jacqueline Kennedy during and immediately after JFK's assassination rises above impersonation to an eerie kind of incarnation.

Joe Morgenstern says Lion in narrative form is about the randomness of adoption, but in substance it’s about the mystery of identity.

Joe Morgenstern calls Manchester by the Sea is the best movie he's seen so far this year, "a quiet masterpiece that eggs and flows at the rhythm of life."

We yearn to believe what Arrival has to tell us -- that life on earth isn't all there is, that we're connected to the cosmos, that time flows more mysteriously than we can fathom.

Loving, a new movie by Jess Nichols about a landmark civil rights case, is new in style too -- calm, human, deeply moving -- one of the best movies of the year.

Fire at Sea is Gianfranco Rosi's profoundly moving documentary on the migrant tides transforming our wold, and the connections in it are as revelatory as they are mysterious.

Just when you think you know what's going to happen, American Honey serves up one more surprise.

A poor Ugandan girl's chess skills take her around the world.

Hell or High Water is one of the most enjoyable films I've seen in a very long time, following two brothers on a bank-robbing spree in a desolate part of west Texas where the banks themselves are seen as robbers.

It's not exactly breaking news, but Meryl Streep is remarkable, and her latest showcase is Florence Foster Jenkins.

Suicide Squad amounts to an all-out attack on the whole idea of entertainment.

Jason Bourne used to be an amnesiac. Now he remember who he is, but this latest episode of the franchise forgot to make him human.

It looks big, with plenty of cosmic battles, but it feels smallish, a congenial adventure with familiar friends.

Captain Fantastic is a terrifically accomplished and enjoyable film about a singular household.

Spielberg uses digital wizardry to throw spectacular dreams of friendship and adventure on the big screen.

In Hunt for the Wilderpeople, a goofball preacher tells a tiny group of mourners that sometimes in life we may feel "like a sheep trapped in a maze designed by wolves."

Finding Dory can be touching, sweet and tender, but it's preposterously and terrifically funny.

Morgan Neville's documentary is a joyous revelation, a group portrait of superb musicians from all over the world offering music as an emblem of what people can do in these troubled times when they live in concert with one another.

A wonderful little movie, The Fits opens on an 11-year old doing sit-ups -- 25 in all, hands clasped behind her head, radiant face to the camera.

Enormous going on keep going on, and on, in X-Men: Apocalypse. It's a collection of explosions, eruptions and conflagrations that looks like the implosion of a franchise. This is disappointing, but also surprising.

Disgraced New York politician Anthony Weiner has been memorialized in an extraordinary documentary called...yes, Weiner.

In Money Monster, George Clooney plays a TV personality -- a medium-manic version of Jim Cramer, the host of NBC's Mad Money.

Viva is another retelling, though a particularly affecting one, of a classic tale -- the struggle to discover and assert one's authentic identity.

A Hologram for the King was based on the novel by Dave Eggers.

Nine years ago American audiences discovered the Irish film Once, and took it to their hearts. The magic is back in Sing Street, a coming-of-age comedy that's also concerned with making music, and downright lovable in its evocation of young love.

Louder than Bombs is very much a movie about memory. It lives and breathes with a lovely intimacy and density of detail that we associate with fine independent features from Europe.

Richard Linklater calls the semi-autobiographical Everybody Wants Some! a "spiritual sequel" to his 1993 Dazed and Confused.

Batman v Superman is an underdeveloped, overlong and stupendously dispiriting duel of unlikely antagonists.

Midnight Special is a beautifully strange and stirring sci-fi adventure about a boy with special powers.

Like lots of movies these days, Marguerite tells us that "it was inspired by a true story." That usually means the story's truth was buried beneath layers of rubbish. But the key word here is "inspired" -- the film is a wonderfully imaginative work of fiction.

If you're looking for joyous fun, Disney's Zootopia is Yootopia.

The title of Triple 9 comes from a police code, 999, that means an officer is down and urgently in need of help.

The Witch's psychodynamics may be familiar, but Robert Eggers makes them seem newly discovered with the intensity of his writing and direction.  Race is a saga of unquenchable spirit and fast-twitch muscles shot in slow-twitch style.

Zoolander 2 is a dud glitter bomb...

Like the high desert that provides its main setting, Mojave is dry, often windy and full of hot air...

Joe Morgenstern remembers British actor Alan Rickman, who died this week at 69. His voice made him instantly recognizable; his iconic roles and acting prowess made him memorable.

Anomalisa takes its title from combining "anomaly" -- something that deviates from the standard -- and Lisa, the name of the woebegone anti-heroine.

The Star Wars franchise has roared back with full force.

What gives The Big Short its surprising resonance is the breadth of its comic vision, which makes room for collateral tragedy.

The Lady in the Van is wonderfully funny, terribly touching and a vehicle -- with comically dilapidated vehicles -- for the boundless gifts of Maggie Smith.  Like Paolo Sorrentino's previous film, The Great Beauty, Youth is full of Fellini-esque flourishes, plus glib existentialism juxtaposed with synthetic optimism.

In Pixar's newest feature, the Old West is a home where the dinosaurs still roam.

The Hunger Games series has come to a sporadically stirring climax with Mockingjay, Part 2.

WEB EXCLUSIVE: By the Sea takes place sometime during the mid-1970's in a coastal village in the south of France.

Spotlight is the year's best movie so far, and a rarity among all those dramatizations that claim to be based on actual events. Remarkably, the movie and its flawless ensemble cast have captured their subject in all its richness and complexity.

Our Brand Is Crisis is meant to be a fictional version of Rachel Boynton's 2005 documentary of the same name...

Nasty Baby is alive with random energy that sets up a surprise ending without blowing the surprise. Rock the Kasbah is a two-bit Ishtar that might play better on a phone.

Although its derivations are anything but poetic -- notorious cases of real-life imprisonment and abuse, Room is as beautifully wrought as any film that's come our way in a very long while.

Knowing the premise of The Martian won't prepare you for the remarkable variety and complexity of Ridley Scott's sci-fi extravaganza. 

99 Homes is a relatively small, tough-minded drama about pitiless people doing unprincipled things. And it turns out to be one of the most interesting, elegantly crafted and improbably entertaining films to come along in quite a while.

Johnny Depp creates a seethingly evil portrait of James "Whitey" Bulger, one of the pre-eminent -- and pre-eminently violent -- criminals of recent times.

Just back from the Telluride Film Festival, Joe Morgenstern introduces us to a couple of stand-outs.

In Z for Zachariah the post-apocalyptic thriller gets a renovation, if not re-invention -- as a love triangle in a valley that has somehow been spared from whatever it was that brought an end to civilization.

Top Spin starts ultra-slowly, then picks up speed. The subject of this documentary is table tennis  -- or ping pong, for those of us who play it just for fun.

Straight Outta Compton is notable for its omissions as well as its strengths, but that shouldn't be surprising.

One of the many gifts conferred by the new movie The Gift is the pleasure of feeling like putty in the hands of a first-rate storyteller.

Best of Enemies is a must-view film for our media-besotted age, a serious film about a serious failure to communicate ideas.

Southpaw stars Jake Gyllenhaal as a boxer in desperate need of redemption.

American comedy doesn't get much better than Trainwreck at its best. Amy Schumer is a fearless artist without borders.

Minions are mischievous sidekicks who keep getting into trouble of their own making.

Amy Winehouse was unlucky and unwise in life, but her story fell into the right hands after she died.

Seth MacFarlane's raunch-rich comedy is a sequel to his 2012 hit about an amiable guy from Boston and the foul-mouthed womanizer of a teddy bear who's been his best friend since childhood.

Actors use their faces, voices and bodies to convey what their characters are feeling, but the new Pixar film Inside Out takes a more direct approach.

Me and Earl and the Dying Girl is a fresh take on contemporary adolescence as a journey from ironic detachment to open-hearted feeling.

Charm has curdled into smarm in the big-screen version of Entourage.

Can we fix our troubled world, or not?

George Miller, whose Mad Max gave the movie medium a new genre almost four decades ago, is back with Mad Max: Fury Road.

Unfriended is a micro-budget horror film played out entirely one high school girl's laptop.

Alex Garland's Ex Machina is an elegant sci-fi fantasy about artificial intelligence.

Cute dogs doing cute tricks have become stars of the social networks, but White God offers a different take on man's best friend.

Call it bias if you choose, but any Cinderella with Cate Blanchett as the wicked stepmother couldn't be bad.

In its advocacy of skeptical thinking, An Honest Liar dovetails neatly, if accidentally, with Merchants of Doubt.

Queen and Country, the sequel to Hope and Glory that took John Boorman almost three decades to make, is worth the wait.

Marketing campaigns can bring movie goers into theaters to see what the fuss is all about, but they can't generate the excitement of those rare occasions when audiences discover a movie on their own. A charming curiosity from New Zealand. One more riff on mythical bloodsuckers.

Reasonable minds may differ on what the playroom is all about in 50 Shades of Grey.

In a momentous conjunction of events, Jupiter Ascending -- the mega-budget sci-fi extravaganza -- is opening around the nation and the world on the very day that Jupiter, the mega-planet, is at its annual opposition to Earth.

Timbuktu takes a deadly aim at Islamic fundamentalism by playing its own game of deft ridicule.

The opening of Red Army is good news if you're a hockey fan, a history buff or just an admirer of first-rate documentaries.

Paddington is the comic chronicle of a Peruvian bear's adventures in London, and it turns out to be a total charmer...

How did such a turkey ever escape the studio lot?

A pyrotechnic pinwheel of a personal comedy.

Reese Witherspoon is the angry, wounded soul of Wild. She commands the screen throughout her heroine's 1,100-mile journey of self-discovery and self-repair, on foot and mostly alone, from the Mojave desert to northern Oregon along the Pacific Crest Trail.

The Imitation Game, with Benedict Cumberbatch in full cry, summons up a life that changed modern history.

The Hunger Games: Mockingjay, Part 1 is a rare bird in its genre, an action adventure with an interesting mind and a resonant spirit.

Foxcatcher is an enthralling enigma of a movie.

Joe Morgenstern reviews Christopher Nolan's 168-minute odyssey through the space-time continuum...

Dan Gilroy's Nightcrawler is a dark dream of a thriller.

Rather than let nuance intrude, Gone Girl doubles down on perversity, and its stars follow suit.

Two luminaries of Saturday Night Live are reunited in The Skeleton Twins — Kristen Wiig and Bill Hader. It’s hard to say if they give wonderful comic performances with a tragic dimension, or wonderful dramatic performances with a comic dimension.

Joe Morgenstern reviews the new Pixar short Lava, as well as Birdman, Leviathan, and Mr. Turner from the Telluride Film Festival.

Joe Morgenstern reviews the new Chloe Grace Moretz film If I Stay, and the new comedy The Trip to Italy from Steve Coogan and Rob Brydon.

For all of its gastronomic and cultural crosscurrents, The Hundred-Foot Journey boils down to comfort food.

Get On Up is about the transformative power of performance. James Brown was a performer of legendary gifts, immeasurable influence and almost infinitely renewable energy.

Lucy doesn't keep track of its own logic, but it's gleefully bold, often funny, surprisingly concise, and 100% entertaining.

I Origins, the second feature from director Mike Cahill, features intriguing characters, but the script lays out more highways and byways than a single movie could possibly navigate.

On rare occasions a movie seems to channel the flow of real life. Richard Linklater's Boyhood is one of those occasions.

In Clint Eastwood's film version of Jersey Boys, the first signs of trouble come in the opening scene...

How to Train Your Dragon 2 is a movie the world needs. This sequel is gleeful and smart, funny and serious...

What can you say about a movie that brings two beautiful teens together in a cancer support group?

Disney's Maleficent and Seth MacFarlane's A Million Ways to Die in the West are opening this week, but the significant event is a little independent film from Sweden.

A film that's as remarkable for depth of feeling as it is for action....

The best film reviewers in the business give you recommendations on what to see and what to skip each week.

This franchise needs more than a reset. It's ripe for retirement.

What makes the drama "Locke" so powerful is the quality of the writing.

A cautionary fantasy about artificial intelligence...

You don't have to be a fan if Jim Jarmusch's special brand of indie spookiness to enjoy his new film, "Only Lovers Left Alive."

With "Captain America: The Winter Soldier" Marvel has won a rebirth trifecta...

Darren Aronofsky's "Noah" is a daring venture in mainstream entertainment, and it's pretty terrific for the most part.

Knight & Day is a movie of thunderous comings and goings. The pretext for it all is a little battery that the hero has to keep out of the hands of the bad guys. We're told that the battery is "the first perpetual energy source since the sun..." Restrepo is a superb documentary by Tim Hetherington and Sebastian Jugner. It's about American soldiers in one of Afghanistan's most dangerous areas, the Korengal Valley. The action is worlds away from the centers of power where generals and their presidents are currently struggling to set policy...  

"Divergent" features a strong heroine battling for survival in a dystopian future.

"Need for Speed" is nothing if not racy...

Hardly a moment goes by in "The Grand Budapest Hotel" when there isn't something to make us smile...

The suspense thriller "Non-Stop" plays a reliably old-fashioned game of finding the bad guy among 150 passengers and the crew.

Joe Morgenstern warns movie-goers off two films opening this week.

One of my readers at the Wall Street Journal sent me an email: "Joe, Please tell me that "Winter's Tale" is a great movie befitting a wonderful book..."

The documentary "Tim's Vermeer" is a fascinating work about the porous border between technology and art.

Stories about babies switched at birth follow a familiar pattern in the era of DNA, but…

Jack Ryan: Shadow Recruit is loosely based on the Tom Clancy canon...

Spike Jonze offers a vision of our era's evolution in a blissfully inventive fantasy called "Her."

Ho, hum, another holiday season and another great movie from David O. Russell.

"Inside Llewyn Davis" is a wonder evocation of an important period in popular culture.

Disney is at it again with a prince, a princess and a queen in "Frozen."

"The Hunger Games: Catching Fire" is exceptional entertainment, a spectacle with a good mind and a pounding heart.

Nebraska, a classic road movie, is remarkable for its kindness and generosity…

Was iconic cyclist Lance Armstrong nothing more than a compulsive liar?

"Dallas Buyers Club" is a showcase of fine performances, some of them distinguished by their restraint. 

"The Counselor" represents Cormac McCarthy's screenwriting debut...

Movie audiences have never been presented with anything quite like the intertwined beauty and savagery of 12 Years A Slave...

The film is an exciting entertainment that makes us feel good about the outcome, and about the reach of American power, rather than its limits...

In one form or another, motion pictures have been with us since the middle of the 19th century, but there's never been one like "Gravity."

"Enough Said" stakes a claim on our hearts before the first frame lights up the screen... 

It was feast or feast at this year's 40th anniversary Telluride Film Festival, just one terrific movie after another...

"Short Term 12" is a vividly intimate film, written and directed by Destin Cretton...

Zachary Heinzerling's documentary gathers force slowly, but with such wisdom and calm mastery that...

The Spectacular Now is a story of adolescents on the brink of adulthood is refreshingly unlike the overheated features that define the genre. 

Joe considers two very different films this week: "The Conjuring," a saga of demonic possession, and the enthralling documentary, "Blackfish."

Ryan Coogler's "Fruitvale Station" opens with a shaky cell phone video of a now-infamous event, the fatal shooting of Oscar Grant, a black unarmed 22-year-old...

"The Way, Way Back" is a coming-of-age story...bursting with life -- and blissful silliness, along with sweet anguish...

"White House Down" may or may not have certified Channing Tatum as an action hero, but it certainly displays his energy, bemuscled build and easy charm....

Saving the world is a challenge under the best of circumstances. Saving it from zombies is especially demanding...

Two films about the story behind the story. "20 Feet from Stardom," spotlights the singers behind the singers. "Man of Steel" takes itself seriously as an origin story.

Baz Lurhmann's version of The Great Gatsby is a tale told idiotically, full of noise and furor, signifying next to nothing.  

You know the story of the emperor’s new suit…

"Mud," the third feature by Jeff Nichols, is a model of what an independent feature can be, starting with the homely grabber of a title.  

"Oblivion" is the new sci-fi adventure starring Tom Cruise.

A new film from Henry-Alex Rubin, the co-director of the Oscar-nominated documentary, "Murderball."

"Olympus Has Fallen" starts with a bold idea, then throws massive firepower into the execution…

Rather than star-crossed, the lovers in "Upside Down" are planet crossed; they come from adjacent planets with opposite gravities.

With "Oz the Great and Powerful," Disney has produced two spectacles for the price of one...

Heroine India Stoker isn't sweet in this psychological thriller directed by Park Chan-Wook.

A young woman and two men make up the unlikely – and dangerously unstable – triangle of "Like Someone in Love," which turns on mistaken identities.

"No" is an exceptionally smart political drama with a satiric edge about the 1988 referendum that drove the Chilean dictator Augusto Pinochet out of office.

Anarchy defies scrutiny...

First he was the Terminator, then the Governator. Now Arnold Schwarzenegger has cast himself as the Rejuvenator, breathing huffs and puffs of new life into his screen career. Much of "The Last Stand" is a wheezy setup for an enjoyably preposterous showdown in a sleepy Arizona border town called Sommerton Junction.

When the classic Warner Bros. logo comes on the screen at the start of "Gangster Squad," it's in a tint that is somewhere between color and black and white. It holds out a two-fold promise: Los Angeles in 1949 brought back to life in the lavish style that only a Hollywood studio can provide, and a movie from the studio that made many of the greatest gangster films in Hollywood. The first part of the promise pays off.

The safest thing you could say about "Django Unchained" is that it finds Quentin Tarantino hurtling over the top yet again...

"Amour" has won all sorts of prizes all over the world, and no wonder...

Joe Morgenstern spends two hours and 46 minutes in Middle Earth...

Joe Morgenstern reviews Hyde Park on Hudson.

As a gangster thriller, "Killing Then Softly" is long on violence and short on thrills, but it does present a mystery...

The desperate hero in "Life of Pie" says that hunger can change everything you thought you knew about yourself...

Joe Morgenstern on David O. Russell's romantic comedy of prickly passions and rampant dysfunction...

Joe Morgenstern reviews Sam Mendes' latest Bond action thriller and Steven Spielberg's portrayal of our 16th president within the politics of his day.

Six interwoven, interlocking story lines, in six separate time frames...

Polio survivor/director Ben Lewin's film on a man in an iron lung who wants to lose his virginity...

It's often said of incredible but true stories that you can't make such stuff up...

Joe Morgenstern reviews "the iPhone of recent action thrillers."

Is 'The Master' a story about Scientology? Well, sure it is. Still that's a limiting way of looking at this film...

Joe Morgenstern's back, with highlights from the 2012 Telluride Film Festival.

Joe Morgenstern on Len Wiseman’s remake of Paul Verhoeven's sci-fi classic

Joe Morgenstern on the documentary about baseball and the power of money, and the new Swedish thriller by the director of Safe House.

Joe Morgenstern on a 'good and nasty' film, sustained by a 'bouyant spirit, and a 'reboot of a foundering franchise.'

There isn't a trace of calculation in Benh Zeitlin's debut feature, only hopes and artistic ambitions that have come to fruition in the year's finest film so far.

Joe Morgenstern on Pixar's first feature with a female protagonist, a good first and long overdue, but…

Joe Morgenstern reviews Ridley Scott's tale of interstellar search, with its cosmic questions about the meaning of life.

Joe Morgenstern reviews the ambitious production by first-time feature filmmaker Rupert Sanders, "a whiz at visual storytelling."

Joe Morgenstern offers thoughts on three very different new movies being released this Memorial Day weekend.

Joe Morgenstern considers Sacha Baron Cohen’s gleefully scabrous portrait of a fictional North African tyrant, and a board game gone megabudget-ballistic.

The big weekend movie at the multiplexes may be Tim Burton's worn-out "Dark Shadows," but the big movie for Joe Morgenstern is a little Japanese comedy about kids.

What if Marvel gave a party and everybody came? Joe Morgenstern on Joss Whedon’s "fitfully enjoyable convocation of Marvel's comic book superheroes..."

Joe Morgenstern on the "smart, funny, scary, surprising" new Norwegian thriller, and  the "mirthless romcon" from the Judd Apatow laugh factory...

Kevin Macdonald's "Marley" documents the emergence and evolution of the late reggae icon.

You may remember the moment in Titanic when Molly Brown sees the suddenly tuxedoed Jack Dawson and says, "You shine up like a new penny." Well, Titanic in its new 3-D version shines up like gold bullion.

It's a good week for documentaries. "Bully" and "The Island President" are both worth checking out.

Joe Morgenstern reviews "The Hunger Games," a movie about kids being manipulated – literally unto death. It's a film that manipulates it audience as well…

Some movies capture your interest in the first scene. The Kid with a Bike grabs you in the first few seconds and never lets go…

Joe Morgenstern on Jennifer Westfeldt's follow-up to Kissing Jessica Stein and Disney's latest would-be epic...

Joe Morgenstern considers David Wain's comedy of hippie chaos that makes nudity a selling point, and Joshua Marston's film on blood feuds and land disputes in Albania.

Joe Morgenstern reviews Contraband, a breakneck English-language remake of the Icelandic thriller, Reykjavkik-Rotterdam.

Could a mere ten movies represent a whole movie year? Joe Morgenstern gives it a try...

Joe Morgenstern, film critic of the Wall Street Journal, says the American remake of the Swedish-language trilogy has lots to recommend it, yet lacks a vital spark.

Joe Morgenstern on the latest installment of Mission Impossible with its "impossibly magical gadgets and gizmos" and a schizoid attitude toward technology that...

Joe Morgenstern on Young Adult, starring Charlize Theron, the latest from the filmmaker and writer who brought Juno to the screen.

Steve McQueen's Shame is about a man trying to lose himself in soulless sex. The remarkable thing about it is that it keeps us connected to the hero…

Joe Morgenstern on Martin Scorsese’s first 3-D fantasy, Hugo, and the black and white, mostly silent French production, The Artist…

Director Alexander Payne (Sideways) takes on family and family history against the backdrop of our 50th state.

In principle, biography should do what J. Edgar tries to do -- reveal an inner life, whether or not the subject is outwardly appealing...

The music of Paul Simon's Graceland flows through 'Like Crazy' and comments on it. This wise and beautiful little tale is about two lovers falling from a state of grace...

If your spine is given to shivers, watch out for the moment in Margin Call when a young risk analyst spots a piece of data on his computer screen, takes a moment to reflect...

Most of the campaign workers in The Ides of March worry about the polls; it's a political thriller, and polling is what people in contemporary politics do. I worried about...

When the frightened young hero of 50/50 reveals that he’s got a 50/50 chance of surviving his newly diagnosed spinal cancer, his buddy responds with...

The context of Moneyball is runaway commerce. The subtext is statistics… Never, until now, have statistics added up to such electrifying entertainment…

The hero of Drive is known only as The Driver in the stylized, often beautiful and graphically violent action drama… Happy, Happy is Norway's entry in this year's Oscars...

A primate shelter becomes the scene of an epic jailbreak. Swarming chimps turn San Francisco into a surreal circus...

A romantic comedy of intertwined lives, overlapping dialogue and naked contrivances -- more of them than naked bodies, because Crazy, Stupid, Love is really quite innocent..

Mike Cahill's debut feature exerts a gravitational pull out of proportion to its size through powerful performances, a lyrical spirit and a depth of conviction that sweeps…

So many good films come to bad ends, but not the tales of Harry Potter...

This is one of those weeks when going to the movies makes you wonder about the movie industry's future... But let me tell you about Project Nim, an enthralling and appalling documentary that opens next week in LA...

For more than 15 years, Pixar has made great movies in the joyous spirit of Buzz Lightyear's motto: "To infinity and beyond..."

It's worth remembering that the term "feelgood" grew out of the drug culture... But a really good film like Buck does much more than serve as a drug substitute.

As anyone who's seen the Super 8 trailer knows, the teenage auteurs are shooting a night scene alongside a train track when a freight train comes roaring through, derails...

Like all the other X-Men movies before it, X-Men: First Class preaches the gospel of mutant pride. But this movie turns out to b a mutant in its own right -- a zestful and radical departure from the dreary spawn of a sputtering franchise...

Many of the images in The Tree of Life are remarkable for their grandeur... Others for their grandiosity... Some of the most memorable, though, are the most fleeting...

In Midnight in Paris, Woody Allen's beguiling and then bedazzling new comedy, nostalgia isn't at all what it used to be -- it's smarter, sweeter, fizzier and lots funnier...

If Bridesmaids is only a chick flick, then call me a chick...

Fast Five...with bellowing muscle cars, screeching exotics and an armor-plated monster that makes the Hummer look demure.

Let me tell you about the film that should have won the best foreign-language Oscar this year but didn't...

Today, Joe considers the rich 3-D hues of Rio, a business exec struggling to keep her business alive, and the first woman executed by the US government.

The first question to be asked about Cary Fukunaga's new version of Jane Eyre is why we should bother to see it when there are 18 feature film versions of the Charlotte Bronte novel before it, and nine TV versions, some of them rally good...

Rango is an animated tale of a chameleon with an identity crisis, and the big news is it was shot in 2-D. This is a process that lets you watch pictures on a screen without having to wear special glasses...

Of Gods and Men, in French and Arabic, is one of the most beautiful movies I know, even though its subject matter and otherworldly pace set it apart from mainstream entertainment. The story was inspired by real events, eight Christian monks menaced by Islamic terrorists in 1990's Algeria. The narrative takes its rhythm from the brothers' unhurried lives...

The main thing about Cedar Rapids is that it makes you laugh -- often and out loud. At the same time, this tale of a dweeb's belated entry into the real world can make you uneasy, because it keeps wandering from gleeful comedy to glib condescension and then back again... Garden gnomes may not bring Graham Greene instantly to mind, but Greene's distinction between his more serious works and the ones he called "entertainments" may be useful all the same. Gnomeo & Juliet doesn't pretend to any kind of seriousness... This new little animated feature from Disney is just an entertainment, an animated doodad in the grand scheme of things...

The prospects for No Strings Attached seemed pretty grim: a romantic comedy, from a Hollywood studio, with a premise that smacked of Last Tango in Paris -- that's the scandalous classic in which Marlon Brando and Maria Schneider have a sexual liaison with no strings -- or names -- attached. Yet the outcome is pretty delightful...

The Green Hornet may not be the end of movies as we know them, though the people who made this atrocity were certainly in there trying. The question -- which amounts to an industrial mystery -- is trying to do what?

Blue Valentine is the auspicious directorial debut of Derek Cianfrance, and it can be crushing in its portrayal of how two people who truly do love each other come to lacerate and eventually devastate each other. The heartbreaking brilliance of this film lies in its contradictions...

The patch is on the other eye and the boot is on the other foot on the Coen Brothers remake of True Grit. Jeff Bridges is Rooster Cogburn, the role that won John Wayne his only Oscar 40 years ago, and Bridges fills it boozy with panache...

Breathes there is a movie with soul so dead as TRON: Legacy? Well, Speed Racer lumbers to mind...

Fans of boxing movies follow the rankings just as closely as boxing fans do. Whenever a new one comes along, they want to know where it ranks in the pantheon that includes classics like Raging Bull and Rocky. In the case of The Fighter, a terrific movie directed by David O. Russell, I'd suggest a different pantheon, one that's reserved for the sort of families dramatized by Eugene O'Neill...

Fine actors can reveal complex feelings in a flash, and one of those flashes comes early in Black Swan.

The King's Speech is one of the most pleasurable movies to come along in years. The pleasure starts with two magnificent performances: Colin Firth as King George VI, who's afflicted by a terrible stutter, and Geoffrey Rush as an unorthodox Australian speech therapist... Once in a great while a debut feature leaves you blinking in amazement at the bountiful talent. Tiny Furniture did that for me. Lena Dunham, who's now 24 years old, is the writer, director and star of this marvelously strange, semi-autobiographical comedy about 22-year-old Aura, who diagnoses herself to be in a state of post-graduate delirium...

Who knew that Unstoppable would be sensational? Talk about well-kept -- and welcome -- surprises. Tony Scott's latest thriller turns out to be pure cinema in the classic sense of the term. It's a motion picture about motion, an action symphony that gives new meaning to the notion of a one-track mind...

The pleasure principle prevails in 127 Hours, even though Danny Boyle's new film depicts horrific pain. As yo probably know by now, the title refers to the time it took a real-life mountain climber named Aron Ralston to extricate himself from a slot canyon he'd tumbled into during a solitary hike in Utah seven years ago...

Before I went off to see The Girl Who Kicked the Hornet's Nest, I came down with a case of advance nostalgia -- no more Stieg Larsson in my movie going life, at least not in Swedish... In this age of indecent production costs, Monsters is a little horror film you want to root for. Gareth Edwards made it on a frayed shoestring -- maybe for $15,000, maybe for $100,000...

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Only in Hollywood is someone seriously old at 55, but this is the underlying notion of RED, and it works like a well-worm charm... Matt Damon is a spiritualist in spite of himself in Hereafter. He's one of three people in the film who have haunting connections with the afterlife...    

Nowhere Boy is a dramatized account of the young John Lennon -- who would have turned 70 tomorrow. It's a modest film, and an enjoyable one... Disney's Secretariat is a family film about one of the fastest racehorses in history, but it stumbles along beneath the weight of leaden life lessons...

The Social Network is all about Facebook and its founder, Mark Zuckerberg, who's played by Jesse Eisenberg.... It's dazzling as contemporary cultural history, and devastating as biography -- an unfriending of epic proportions...

Michael Douglas' Gordon Gekko leaves prison at the beginning of Oliver Stone's Wall Street: Money Never Sleeps -- he served eight years for crimes committed in the course of the previous film... The real movie news this week is Waiting for Superman. The movie puts five tender young faces on a national scandal that's all too often described with depressing statistics -- the state of public education in the United States...  

Why am I so pleased with the new high school comedy Easy A? Because the movie, in spite of a few flaws, seems to have been made by higher intelligence, and because it catapults Emma Stone into a higher place reserved for American actors who can handle elevated language with casually dazzling aplomb...   Ben Afleck works both sides of the camera in The Town. As the director, he showcases a number of fine performances and illuminates character without losing a beat of the throbbing pace. As the star, he gives on of those fine performances, though it's an artistic toss-up between his intensity and Rebecca Hall's lovely simplicity...

Every year I go to the Telluride Film Festival with the same fervent hope -- to put the summer's junk behind me and recharge my enthusiasm for the fall and winter. This year I got supercharged. It was a wonderful program, with all sorts of treats that will be showing up in the weeks and months to come...

 A new documentary called The Tillman Story is actually three stories in one... Soul Kitchen, made by the German-born Turkish filmmaker Fatih Akin, is a delirious farce, in subtitled German and Greek, that doesn't flag for a single one of its 99 minutes...  

Sometimes the best way to see a movie is knowing nothing about the plot. At other times, a sense of what's to come increases the pleasure of watching the story unfold. Mao's Last Dancer is one of those other times...

For quite a lot of time, the new film Cairo Time seems to be just a pretext for the camera to follow Patricia Clarkson around the Egyptian cpital and its spectacular surroundings... Will Ferrell and Mark Wahlberg are hapless cops and mismatched buddies in The Other Guys, a summer movie that honors summer-movie conventions with a vengence...

The Kids Are All Right is a thrillingly funny and casually profound film that Lisa Cholodenko directed from a script she wrote with Stuart Blumberg. Near the beginning, a teenage brother and sister talk about whether to make a fateful phone call. They're the suburban California children of lesbian mothers, and the brother has decided to seek out the sperm donor who was instrumental in bringing them into the world...

You'd never guess what the best part of the new Twilight saga turns out to be. It isn't blood-sucking monsters doing their thing, though there's some of that to feed the franchise...Never mind that the little kid flapping his arms to whip up the waves looks like a pouty-faced version of Mickey Mouse as the Sorcerer's Apprentice, or that The Last Airbender looks no worse if you take off your 3-D glasses...

While the entertainment conglomerates have been churning out ever cheesier sequels, Pixar has been the Fort Knox of honest feelings, and so it remains. Fifteen years after Toy Story burst upon the scene, Toy Story 3, the third film of the trilogy turns out to be gorgeously joyous and deeply felt…

Instead of belaboring this week's pseudo-spectacular offerings from the studios -- a mediocre remake of The Karate Kid and a benumbing big-screen version of the A Team -- let me tell you about a movie that's really worth watching. It's called Winter's Bone...a classic, and spectacular for its humanity, austere beauty and heart-stopping urgency...

Joe Morgenstern, film critic for the Wall Street Journal, reviews Splice and Ondine.

In previous installments of Sex and the City the ancient mystery of what women want was basically solved -- they want love, sex and designer clothes, not necessarily in that order. Now Sex and the City 2 reveals what Islamic women want...I don't want to tell you too much about Father of My Children, which is playing at the Landmark -- you really should discover this French-language drama for yourself. It isn't saying too much, though, to cal lit beautiful, profound and phenomenally full of life...

At one point in "Shrek Forever After" the hero sees his face on a poster nailed to a tree and says, "Sure is great to be wanted again." Wanted, yes, but needed? Not on the strength of this fourth and presumably last installment. Now it jogs and lurches but mostly meanders though a story that tests the limits of true love (Shrek's, and ours.)

Of all the Robin Hoods that have come and gone, at least one of them wondrously zestful -- that's Errol Flynn's -- and one of them was woefully zonked -- that's Kevin Costner's. Up to now, the only absurd one has been Mel Brooks's send-up, "Robin Hood: Men in Tights." Yet Ridley Scott's new version achieves an absurdity all its own. It's an ersatz epic about men in fights -- grim fights, grinding battles, clanking combats that are repetitive and, in a movie that runs 140 minutes, almost endless. Russell Crowe fights a losing battle against Brian Helgeland's turgid script, and the production's almost total, and truly absurd, absence of fun.

Tony Stark creates a new element in "Iron Man 2," though it's no big deal. Robert Downey Jr.'s zillionaire genius, who was revealed to be Iron Man at the end of the previous film, simply builds himself an in-home particle accelerator, fires it up and then bango, he's got a...new element. This sequel, unfortunately, settles for a new alloy of old elements - less iron, lots more lead and tin.

During the superbly absurd adventures of a suburban couple in Date Night, a pair of thugs contemplates the husband and wife with slow-burning bafflement. One thug says to the other, "These two are not at all what they seem." And that is true...Then there's the case of After Life, a pretty dreadful and particularly squirmful horror flick. Women often wear their hearts on their sleeve, and even hatless men can go hat in hand. But one of the many repellent first in this film is a woman with her heart in her hand, standing in a shower a la Janet Leigh in Psycho...

A few more 3-D spectacles like Clash of the Titans and audiences will be clamoring for 2-D...

The Hubble Space Telescope, one of the crowning glories of our scientific age and it's the subject of the latest IMAX documentary, Hubble 3D. The movie's playing downtown at the California Science Museum. Shortly after the Hubble was launched in 1993 it was diagnosed with, and subsequently cured of, an extremely inconvenient case of astigmatism...Everyone is haunted by something in Conor McPherson's The Eclipse. This leisurely and quite lovely drama honors the conventions of Gothic ghost stories without the slightest stain of self-irony. The time is the present and the setting is a beautiful Irish town with a Gothic cathedral in County Cork...

One of the most touching lines in Noah Baumbach's remarkable new movie Greenberg is an announcement by the wistful young heroine, Florence Marr: "I've gotta stop doing things just because they fell good..."

During the exciting but eventually wayward course of Green Zone, Jason Bourne discovers the truth about weapons of mass destruction, then teaches a sloppy reporter from the Wall Street Journal how to be a good journalist...

The Cheshire Cat brags about his evaporating skills in Tim Burton's 3-D Alice in Wonderland, and the movie has its own way of evaporating before your polarized eyes. Every scene brings something new and remarkable to look at, yet every scene sweeps away specific recollections of the previous one...

Extraordinary Measures requires extraordinary tolerance for bathos, bombast and plain old unpleasantness. It’s a fictionalized – and sadly trivialized – adaptation of a non-fiction book, The Cure, which was written by my Wall Street Journal colleague Geeta Anand... Creation is a fancier botch, blissed out on its own cleverness. Paul Bettany is Charles Darwin, struggling to finish The Origin of the Species while he grieves the loss of his beloved daughter Annie, who died at the age of ten.

The Last Station is Michael Hoffman's evocation of the last years of writer Leo Tolstoy. It's a "seduction that draws us into a vanished world where Count Leo Tolstoy and his wife of 48 years, countess Sofya come to life in a match pair of magnificent performances by Christopher Plummer and Helen Mirren."

Youth in Revolt is an endearing coming-of-age comedy that stars Michael Cera. In one way, only, but in a significant way, Cera reminds me of Billie Holiday, who achieved subtle marvels within a severely limited vocal range... The German filmmaker brothers Michael Spierig and Peter Spierig have come up with a new twist on vampires in an English-language movie called Daybreakers. The year is 2019, and vampires have taken over the world...

James Camerion's Avatar takes place on a planet called Pandora, where American corporations and their military mercenaries have set up bases to mine a surpassingly precious mineral called unobtanium. The vein of awe mined by the movie is nothing short of unbelievium...

Until now, America's curiosity about rugby has been on a par with its knowledge, but this could change with the advent of Invictus... Clint Eastwood's new movie is an inspirational game played by Morgan Freeman as Nelson Mandela, and Matt Damon as the captain of a South African rugby team...Peter Jackson's The Lovely Bones was adapted from Alice Sebold's widely admired novel. The movie, like the book, is party set in an Inbetween that occupies an ethereal space between heaven and earth; it's the vantage point from which the young heroine watches over her family after her death at the hands of a monstrous pervert...

The best of Up in the Air -- meaning most of it -- is right up there with the fresh and sophisticated comedies of Hollywood’s Golden Age…

This year's prize for clumsiest title goes to Bad Lieutenant: Port of Call New Orleans. I wanted to get that out of the way so I could talk about a defining moment in the movie, set in post-Katrina New Orleans -- it's when Nicholas Cage's rogue cop pulls up to a seedy building to make an arrest...Red Cliff, set in China in the twilight of the Han Dynasty, lends new meaning to the notion of Baby on Board when a fearless swordsman plunges into battle with an infant strapped on his back...

2012 is Roland Emmerich's latest assault on planet Earth and its moviegoers, and it isn't the end of the world: it only feels that way...Pirate Radio follows the form -- when it chooses to follow any form -- of a cat-and-mouse game between the British government, circa 1966, and a crew of deejays beaming round-the-clock rock and roll from a decrepit tanker anchored in the North Sea just outside Britain's territorial waters...

To put it bluntly, and Scroogely, Disney's 3-D animated version of A Christmas Carol is a calamity... In a shockingly beautiful new film called Precious, one of the most telling moments comes toward the end, and it's hardly more than a throwaway -- the heroine glances at a mirror and sees herself...

After all the media madness about Michael Jackson over all the years and decades, it comes as bittersweet news that he lives vividly in This Is It... I've checked out two Cirques recently, a movie called Cirque du Freaks and the Cirque du Soleil, which is back in town and playing under a big blue-and-yellow tent next to the Santa Monica Pier...

I've seen the movie Amelia, and I can tell you that Amelia Earhart is still missing...

The movie version of Where the Wild Things Are honors the book in every imaginable way...and in ways no one could have imagined until Spike Jonze and his crew came long...

This week brings a thrilling new film called An Education. It's a tale of an English schoolgirl's hard-won wisdom, and it's thrilling for all sorts of reasons...

Nobody doesn't like Ricky Gervais, and his new comedy soars for a while on the wings of a clever premise: it's set in a world where everyone tells the truth. In the spirit of that world, I cannot tell a lie: The Invention of Lying... Zombieland teems with wild-eyed chewers and spewers. They're only lurid wallpaper, though, in an improbably delicious comedy about a quartet of human survivors crossing an America that's been taken over by ravenous hordes...

Michael Moore starts Capitalism: A Love Story with a sequence of secuirty-camera videos showing holdups in progress, and ends it by showing himself, like some vigilante version of the environmental artist Christo, stringing great lengths of yellow crime-scene tape around banks and brokerage houses in Lower Manhattan... Clothes may make the man, but the woman makes the clothes in Coco before Chanel, Anne Fontaine's smart and sumptuous French-language account of the legendary designer during her early years when she, like her couture, was still ascending from basse to haute...

Bright Star is Jane Campion's dramatization of the love affair between the young Romantic poet John Keats and his younger neighbor, Fanny Brawne. The production is modest in physical scale, mostly reserved in tone and touchingly simple in design (aside from Fanny's dazzling wardrobe, which is justified by her gifts as a seamstress.) But the effect is exhilarating and deeply pleasurable...

Love at first sight can be as dangerous as it is exciting, and the sme goes for love at first screening. I fell hard and heedlessly for a film called An Education, which happened to be the first of 14 films I managed to see in the course of three movie-besotted days at the Telluride Film Festival over Labor Day weekend... (Joe also reviews A Prophet, The Last Station, Bright Star and Bad Lieutenant: Port of Call New Orleans.)

The people in Judd Apatow's Funny People are painfully unfunny, and remarkable off-putting...In Flame & Citron, two melancholy Danes share center stage in the movie, but neither one of them is Hamlet...

In the preface of (500) Days of Summer, a narrator says, "You should know right up front this is not a love story..." I wrote a mixed revue in the Wall Street Journal for the new Harry Potter film, Harry Potter and the Half-Blood Prince...

Well, here's the bad news: Brüno is no Borat. Here's the worse news: Brüno crosses the line, like a besotted sprinter, from hilariously awful to genuinely awful... Period pieces can be marvelous or musty, depending on the period, as well as the piece. Soul Power is marvelous, and no wonder -- among the performers in this concert film are James Brown, B.B> King, Bill Withers, Miriam Makeba and Celia Cruz, all at the peak of their powers...  

Michael Mann's Public Enemies never lacks for interest, or interesting info. Back in the 1930's, for instance, the FBI was simply called the Bureau of Investigation before being formally federalized...

The Hurt Locker starts with a quote from the journalist Chris Hedges -- "War is a drug" – then makes that case with masterful clarity and phenomenal force…In Transformers: Revenge of the Fallen, a National Security Adviser confronts the leader of the Autobots, Optimus Prime – he's a good robot, trying to help us foolish humans defend ourselves against an army of bad Decepticons – and says, angrily, "Who are you to pass judgment on us?"

Boris Yellnikoff is the prolix geezer played by Larry David in Woody Allen's Whatever Works. He was once a world-class physicist teaching string theory at Columbia, but the only string he strums now is misanthropy... At one point in The Proposal Sandra Bullock shakes the handlebars of her runaway bicycle and says frantically, "Why are you not stopping? Stop! Stop!" At more than one point in this wheeze of a romantic comedy I wanted to shake her and say...

Raise those lowered expectations a bit before you see Eddie Murphy in Imagine That... The Taking of Pelham 123 is Tony Scott's fevered remake of the 1974 thriller about a hijacked subway train...

General Motors may be in a class by itself when it comes to bankruptcy, but so is Land of the Lost. This dramatically, thematically and artistically bankrupt fantasy cost something in the neighborhood of $100 million to make and isn't worth the celluloid it's printed on... Studs Terkel, the late chronicler of American workers and their work, would have loved 24 City. I certainly did, and I hadn't expected to be stirred by an account of Chinese workers and their labors over the course of decades in a factory that became their whole world...

The good news -- and there's no bad news -- is that Sam Raimi's horror flick Drag Me to Hell is smart, funny and cringe-worthy for all the right reasons, and up to speed on the mortgage crisis too... Most of the events in Departures flow from a comical misunderstanding. After a Tokyo orchestra is disbanded, a discouraged young cellist, Daigo, looks for a new line or work...

In Terminator Salvation, primal screams come with the bleak territory. Any character of consequence gets to unleash one, and there's plenty to scream about... Night at the Museum: Battle of the Smithsonian is critic-proof; nothing I might say would have the slightest effect on its commercial fate...

Angels and Demons draws a sharp historical distinction between the Illuminati (the bad guys) and the Catholic Church's Preferiti (the good guys), but the movie may leave you feeling like a member of the Stupefiti... Management, a debut feature by Stephen Belber is a sentimental and modestly enjoyable fantasy of mutual need...

Joe Morgenstern, film critic for the Wall Street Journal, reviews Star Trek. He also mentions Qalaxy Quest, which is just being released on DVD.

It's been a while since I've seen anything as unpleasant as X-Men Origins: Wolverine, but one sequence sticks out...Does anyone love to watch Matthew McConnaughey act?... If his self-pleasure seems unearned, it's at least appropriate to the character he plays in Ghosts of Girlfriends Past, a bizarre conflation of chick flick and A Christmas Carol...

The Soloist is actually a duet on the theme of redemption. It's scored for two very different, though equally remarkable actors, and performed with uncanny bravura...

How long has it been since a mo vie left you literally speechless? For me it's been a week. When the lights came up after a screening of Every Little Step, a friend and I turned to each other but we could only gulp and emit small gasps...Sources are as crucial to filmmakers as they are to investigative journalists. In the glossy, ambitious thriller State of Play, Russel Crowe is a powerful presence as Cal McAffrey, a veteran reporter for a newspaper that resembles the Washington Post...

Early in the course of Valentino: The Last Emperor, an interviewer asks the legendary fashion designer whether he ever wanted to be a fireman or a train driver. “No, no,” Valentino says with amusement, he always dreamed about movie stars, the silver screen, “about everything beautiful in the world.…” Greg Mottola (Superbad) is back, as both writer and director, with Adventureland, an ambitious film that sets the goofiness of extended adolescence against the sadness of being adrift in an adult world…

One of the retro monsters in DreamWorks Animation's Monsters vs Aliens is a scientist with the head of a cockroach. He points to another monster, a blobby blue cyclops called B.O.B., and says haughtily, "As you can see, he has no brain..."Shall We Kiss? gives us storytelling as art. Emmanuel Mouret's romantic drama, in French with English subtitles, is expert, intricate, ineffably droll, surprisingly provocative and completely enchanting...

To give Duplicity its due, Tony Gilroy's romantic caper goes against the Hollywood grain by smartening itself up instead of dumbing itself down…By Hollywood standards Sin Nombre is a very small movie, shot in Spanish on a tight budget in Mexico, but it's a very big deal…

At the end of Sunshine Cleaning, a foxy grandpa shrugs off the extravagance of an advertising claim he has made by saying, "It's a business lie. It's no the same as a life lie..."

Watchmen presents two great challenges -- getting your mind around it, and getting your head out from under it. The first comes as no surprise, given the source material... A camera story owner in Everlasting Moments tells a winsome customer, "Not everyone is endowed with the gift of seeing." He's flirting with her, of course...

Crossing Over has its heart in umpteen places and its head stuffed with dramatic claptrap... I'm reviewing An American Affair only because it's opening, and America must be forewarned...

A documentary called Eleven Minutes follows the fashion designer Jay McCarroll as he prepares his first show and pulls it off…Horror and social value contend for equal honors in Must Read after My Death, a frightening – and eerily edifying – documentary that Morgan Dews created from a family trove of photos, Dictaphone letters, audiotapes, voluminous transcripts and home movies…

When people talk about the Bible's twin sin cities, top billing always goes to Sodom. Some balance may be restored, though, by the extraordinary Italian film Gomorrah... Joaquin Phoenix has been saying that he plans to quit acting and devote himself to his music career. Here's hoping for a change of heart. His performance in Two Lovers is inspired work by a superb actor in an elegantly grave romantic drama...

 Well, Inkheart may not be rotten to the core, but it's impossible to overestimate the over-ripeness of its special effects… Let me also mention a couple of important new DVD releases. "Masterpiece" is not a word you want to cheapen by overuse. Still it's the only right word for The Earrings of Madame De… Carol Reed's Our Man in Havana, a droll comedy turned subversive adventure, will be available February 3 for the first time on DVD. The genre it subverts is the international spy thriller…

One way to see Hotel for Dogs is as a cute little family comedy that ups its cuteness quotient by multiplying its canine count…

This is the time of the year when movie critics realize they've become seasonal workers, a lot like fruit-pickers...although real fruit doesn't get picked when the pickers know it's rotten...Bride Wars is nothing if not user-friendly -- whenever something is funny, or meant to be, the soundtrack signals the event with a helpfully puckish passage of plucked strings...

The Wrestler stars Mickey Rourke as a bulked-up ruin named Randy 'The Ram' Robinson. It’s something of a miracle that Randy is still alive after decades of giving and taking terrible punishment…Until today the subject of Seven Pounds has been kept strictly under wraps. A huge marketing push signaled only the imminent arrival of a Will Smith movie starring Will Smith, with Will Smith in the main role. Now we know why…

No one makes movies like Gran Torino any more, and more's the pity. Clint Eastwood is the director, and the star, and the film's concerned with honor and atonement, with rough justice and the family of man... "Everything will be explained," a government goon tells Jennifer Connelly's beautiful exobiologist in The Day the Earth Stood Still. A space ship has just landed, and she's urgently needed to make nice with the occupants...        

Frost/Nixon is a spellbinding film version of Peter Morgan's play, about the 1977 televised confrontation between the English talk-show host, David Frost, and the former president who had resigned in disgrace three years before…

Australian aboriginals believe that everyday reality co-exists with an infinite state of being called "the dream time." Baz Luhrann does his own version of that duality in Australia…Gus Van Sant's Milk stars Sean Penn as Harvey Milk, the late, gay activist and San Francisco Supervisor…

Attention all 13-year old female readers of our newspaper and listeners to this station. Run, do not walk, to the nearest multi-plex playing Twlight. That's the screen version of Stephenie Meyer's best-selling potboiler, about a principal vampire and the girl who loves him... By happy happenstance, a remarkable fine and genuinely frightening movie about a teenage vampire is playing in a dozen or so cities around the country. Let the Right One In, in Swedish with English subtitles, was directed by Tomas Alfredson from John Lindqvist's adaptation of his own novel. This time the roles are reversed...

Slumdog Millionaire is the world's first globalized masterpiece. This fervent romantic fable is set in contemporary Mombai, the former Bombay, but it draws freely and sometimes rapturously from Charles Dickens, Alexander Dumas, Hollywood, Bollywood, the giddiness of Americanized TV, the cross-cultural  craziness of out-sorced call centers and the zoominess of Google Earth…

If Role Models is any barometer, the weekend weather’s going to be hot and humid. This is a quintessential summer comedy dropped into early November…Madagascar: Escape 2 Africa continues the sage of the animals who escaped from the Central Park Zoo and landed in the island nation of Madagascar. This time they try to return to New York aboard a rickety airplane piloted by penguins...

Jor Morgenstern, film critic of the Wall Street Journal, reviews Splinter and Zack and Miri Make a Porno .

Clint Eastwood's Changeling is set in Los Angeles in the late 1920's, but connections are missing or scrambled between the filmmaking and the period, between the co-stars -- Angelina Jolie and John Malkovich, and the characters they play… It's a shock to see Kristin Scott Thomas in the first shot of I've Loved You So Long. She's bleakness personified, and it's not the sort of pretend bleakness that make-up and lighting can bestow on a beautiful face…

W. is Oliver Stone's exuberant account of the life and times of George W. Bush. Stone goes for the juggler vein -- he juggles genial mockery and moist empathy without venturing any judgments on his hero's presidency...

Mike Leigh's Happy-Go-Lucky is a wonderful new movie with an astonishing performance by Sally Hawkins...

Devotees of old movies will detect an echo of the casually sophisticated Thin Man films in the title of Nick and Norah's Infinite Playlist. And this Nick, played by Michael Cera, is the soul of un-sophistication...

If you've watched the trailer for Ghost Town, or simply noticed the movie's clever tag line -- "He sees dead people, and they annoy him" -- you already know too much to be surprised by the premise... Lakeview Terrace is the bottom of the week's barrel...      

Burn after Reading could just as well have been called Forget after Seeing... Towelhead, directed by Alan Ball from his adaptation of the novel by Alicia Erian, is a bleak coming-of-age comedy set in suburban Texas during the first Gulf War.  

Joe Morgenstern, film critic of the Wall Street Journal, has just returned from this year's Telluride Film Festival with reviews of two winners, Slumdog Millionaire and I Loved You So Long...

Joe Morgenstern, Pulitzer Prize-winning film critic of the Wall Street Journal, reviews Frozen River and The Mummy: Tomb of the Dragon Emperor.

Joe Morgenstern, film critic for the Wall Street Journal, reviews The Dark Knight.

Joe Morgenstern, film critic for the Wall Street Journal, reviews Hellboy II: The Golden Army and Meet Dave.

Joe Morgenstern, film critic for the Wall Street Journal, reviews WALL-E.

Joe Morgenstern, film critic for the Wall Street Journal, reviews Kit Kittredge: An American Girl, Get Smart and The Love Guru.

Joe Morgenstern, film critic for the Wall Street Journal, reviews The Incredible Hulk and The Happening.

Joe Morgenstern, film critic for the Wall Street Journal, reviews You Don't Mess with the Zohan, Mongol, and Kung Fu Panda.

Joe Morgenstern, film critic for the Wall Street Journal, reviews Sex and the City.

Joe Morgenstern, film critic for the Wall Street Journal, reviews Indiana Jones and the Kingdom of the Crystal Skull.

Joe Morgenstern, film critic for the Wall Street Journal, reviews Reprise and The Chronicles of Narnia: Prince Caspian.

Joe Morgenstern, film critic for the Wall Street Journal, reviews Iron Man.

Joe Morgenstern, film critic for the Wall Street Journal, reviews Baby Mama and Then She Found Me.

Joe Morgenstern, film critic for the Wall Street Journal, reviews Forgetting Sarah Marshall and The Life Before Her Eyes.

Joe Morgenstern, film critic for the Wall Street Journal, reviews Smart People and The Visitor.

Joe Morgenstern, Pulitzer Prize-winning film critic for the Wall Street Journal, reviews Paranoid Park.

Joe Morgenstern, film critic for the Wall Street Journal, reviews The Bank Job.

Joe Morgenstern, film critic for the Wall Street Journal, reviews The Other Boleyn Girl and Penelope.

Joe Morgenstern, film critic for the Wall Street Journal, reviews Vantage Point and Charlie Bartlett.

Joe Morgenstern, film critic for the Wall Street Journal, reviews Jumper and Definitely, Maybe.

Joe Morgenstern, film critic for the Wall Street Journal, reviews In Bruges and The Bands Visit.

Joe Morgenstern, film critic for the Wall Street Journal, reviews Taxi to the Dark Side and Mad Money.

There Will Be Blood has a wondrously monstrous hero, a turn-of-the-cent oilman named Daniel Plainview. One of the many ways he vents his rage against humanity is by threatening to bury his enemies alive...

Tim Burton's brilliant blood-soaked screen version of Sweeney Todd stars Johnny Depp and Helena Bonham Carter. The movie begins with sticky globules of blood on the wheels and cogs of what can only be [gulp] a meat grinder...  By now we know the nature of the meat and the gist of the ghastly story...

So you're the last human being in New York City--maybe on earth. That's not good since you're a social animal and you can hardly hang out with the hordes of murderous zombies, who emerge from their dark hives every night. On the other hand you've got the city to yourself in the daytime. No gridlock, no pickpockets, no bicycle messengers to dodge. Such is the plight of Will Smith in I Am Legend...

Joe Morgenstern, film critic for the Wall Street Journal, reviews Atonement.

Joe Morgenstern, film critic for the Wall Street Journal, reviews The Diving Bell and the Butterfly.

Before I talk about Beowulf, I have to tell you that I've seen it only in 3D... First, at a screening in digit 3D, the eye-popping version being shown at 740 or more conventional theaters around the country, then at a screening in the eye-popping plus jaw-dropping 3D version that's being shown at one hundred Imax theaters as well...

Lions for Lambs isn't just wooden, but Woodish--it's as if the great issues of our time had been addressed by the hapless filmmaker Ed Wood...  (Joe also reviews No Country for Old Men.)

Denzel Washington plays a 1970's drug lord named Frank Lucas in American Gangster. Lucas takes pride in many things, but most of all in the quality of his merchandise, Southeast Asian heroin as pure, in its fashion, as Ivory soap... (Joe also reviews Bee Movie.)

Joe Morgenstern, film critic for the Wall Street Journal, reviews Dan in Real Life.

Joe Morgenstern, film critic for the Wall Street Journal, reviews Things We Lost in the Fire and Gone Baby Gone.

Joe Morgenstern, film critic for the Wall Street Journal, reviews Lars and the Real Girl.

Joe Morgenstern, film critic for the Wall Street Journal, reviews Lust, Caution and Michael Clayton.

Joe Morgenstern, film critic for the Wall Street Journal, reviews The Kingdom and The Darjeeling Limited.

Joe Morgenstern, film critic for the Wall Street Journal, reviews Into the Wild and The Assassination of Jesse James by the Coward Robert Ford.

Wall Street Journal movie critic Joe Morgenstern reviews Eastern Promises, The Brave One, and Ira and Abby.

Wall Street Journal film critic Joe Morgenstern reviews 3:10 to Yuma and In the Shadow of the Moon.

Joe Morgenstern, film critic for the Wall Street Journal, reviews Deep Water, which depicts the voyage of Donald Crowhurst, one of nine competitors in a disastrous 1969 round-the-world yacht race, and the 30th anniversary DVD of The Flight of the Gossamer Condor.

The French have a word to describe Ratatouille, the tale of a provincial rat named Remy who becomes a great Parisian chef. The word is "génial." Not genial as in cheerful, though Pixar's latest animated feature is certainly that, but génial with an accent, as in brilliant, or inspired...

Of the two powerful presences in A Mighty Heart, only one gets star billing: I'm talking, of course, about Angelina Jolie. She gives a fierce and astute performance as Mariane Pearl, the wife of Daniel Pearl, the Wall Street Journal reporter who was abducted and murdered by al Qaeda operatives in Karachi five years ago. The other presence is the city itself – vast, throbbing with life, teeming with misery and, as depicted here, all but unfathomable to Westerners trying to penetrate its secrets...

Don't expect to see a lot of New Zealand's natural beauties in Eagle vs Shark. This is an endearingly odd romantic comedy – a debut feature by Taika Waititi – and it takes a good while to move outdoors from the fast-food restaurants, video arcades, shopping malls and multiplexes that constitute the unnatural habitat of its preternaturally shy lovers. Still, other beauties emerge, even though one of the lovers suffers from deeper-than-comical alienation and the other from life-threatening naiveté...

In the spirit of Edith Piaf's signature song, no, I regret nothing about La Vie en Rose -- not the narrative confusion, not the sketchy details or the music-video editing. Olivier Dahan's impressionistic biopic gives us a brilliant performance by Marion Cotillard as the passionate, tortured Piaf, and Cotillard gives us something new in this genre -- a sense of what the song does to the singer...

No conclusion has ever been more foregone: Knocked Up is going to be a huge hit. The hero’s a slob, the story is about what the title says it’s about, and the movie goes about telling it in a style that’s sexually explicit, often coarse and occasionally crude. So should the film be seen as just another sign of civilization’s decline? Not for a moment...

Stumbling out of the theater after the new Pirates of the Caribbean had run its semi-coherent course, I thought about the movie it might have been...

It takes all of ten seconds for John Carney’s new movie “Once” to announce itself as something special. A handsome young street  musician in Dublin raises his voice in song, then raises it higher  with heart-stopping fervor. When a mysteriously endearing young woman stops to interrogate him about his music – she turns out to be a musician too -- the movie reveals itself as something magical.

There's no better fun for movie lovers than a small, unheralded film that turns out to be terrific -- unless it's a small, unheralded sequel that beats the original. That's the case with 28 Weeks Later, which comes four years after 28 Days Later, Danny Boyle's brilliant riff on zombie flicks...

I'm going to give fairly short shrift to Spider-Man 3 because it is what it is -- lots of spectacular action and lots of unaccountably flat dramatic interludes. They're all the more unaccountable in a production that, by another accounting, may have cost more than any other in movie history. And the film also suffers from a surfeit of villains. Poor Spidey has to deal with three bad guys -- though one of them swings between nasty and nice -- plus the arch villain of a script that seems to be obsessed with the settling of old accounts, and the recycling of old themes. It's too harsh to say that what was fresh has gone completely stale -- the truth lies in between, as it does with day-old bread...