Steven Boone

I didn’t laugh once, but there were several lines that, in context, got a wide fool-grin out of me.

It's fortunate that, like "The Social Network," Dear White People is so charismatic in form and style that we easily forgive its surfeit of priviliged narcissists.

It's Glass who gives Visitors something like a structure, alternating between long, contemplative stretches and moments of ecstatic grandeur, like the crowd of sports fans who erupt in (extreme slow-motion) joy at some victory.

Lone Survivor burns with the fever of a passion project. Writer-director Peter Berg's gratitude to United States servicemen for all their sacrifice comes through viscerally, from first frame to last.

When Melanie falls under the spell of a silver-haired pedophile as tall and trim as a Marine (Joseph Lorenz), the film gets set on its rocky path to a conclusion that fulfills the film's title and rounds out the "Paradise" series quite beautifully — if you're not afraid to look.

The New Rijksmuseum is a four hour procession of minute details, an exhaustive catalogue of art world diplomacy and process, but what sticks is the way Hoigendijk weaves all the strands together, crosscutting here, overlapping there.

Sylvester Stallone can write entertaining formula action scripts like a demon, but he often hands them over to hack directors who don't know how to extract the pulp and the juice from them. On that score, Homefront is better than average.

Just over the Mexico/U.S. border from Juarez is El Paso, Texas, ranked the safest large city in America three years in a row now. The question that that fact begs is in part why this film is a quietly subversive masterpiece.

The trouble here is a lack of texture and urgency.

The Newell Great Expectations is just a good-looking Classics Illustrated rundown, something to help high schoolers labor through a Dickens English assignment a little faster.

Molina's story is worth telling. I suspect that, in this form, it will reach some of the at-risk youth who are clearly his target audience. But for myself and most folks expecting a movie, it is too transparent an infomercial for the church to move the mountain.

Yeah, it's a mishmash of good, strange ideas and generic nonsense, barely held together by Sly and Arnie.

This one is especially obsessed with grisly details that contribute nothing to our fear or excitement.

The Grandmaster is a drunken love letter to experience, which helps us survive, and wisdom, which helps us face aging, loss and, ultimately, the abyss. Wong, who was called the coolest director in the world when he was much younger, is now 57. This film is about a man like him, who has proven himself in the world and enters mid-life exuding a new, sage kind of cool.

Daniels delights in his actors, all of whom accept the challenge of bringing something true and vibrant to their various sketchily written characters with the enthusiasm of celebrity competition-show contestants.

This film is told in sympathy with the Linda Lovelace who reclaimed her real name, Linda Boreman, and became a feminist anti-porn activist years after her sole porn credit. Unfortunately, despite its passion and purpose, it's executed with so many wrong, false, stale and routine creative decisions that it runs aground by the time Muppet Babies Hef saunters in.

The Artist and the Model is a simple, straightforward film about the wonder and awe that the natural world inspires in us.

The half-ingenious, half-ludicrous third act makes observations about class and legacy worth thinking about. It calls to mind Jeff Nichols's "Shotgun Stories."

Mostly loud and graceless, despite some arresting hyperbolic visuals that deserve an action film of actual soul and purpose. It's simply too generic at heart to justify director Schwentke's delirious, sidewinding, arcing, snap-zooming and whip-panning anti-gravity camerawork.