Quick! Name the movie where Bill Murray plays a proudly shabby dude who acts like a prick for an hour and then, for reasons of narrative convention rather than character-based truth, shambles toward either heroism or some vague be-nicer enlightenment. Maybe a tougher challenge would be to name the Bill…

Here’s a hair-raising assignment: Imagine you’re tasked with capturing the social and psychological complexities of a nation’s crackup within the framework of popular moviemaking. What if Gone With the Wind tried, in its swooning romance, to explicate Scarlett O’Hara’s slow-to-dawn realization of the hopeless immorality of the world she has…

Here’s a scary story for you. Somewhere in Hollywood, a cabal of producers are forever zombie-ing up the corpses of long-dead licensed properties, ever hopeful that you will continue to throw your money at familiar trademarked characters even as they eat your brains. Sometimes, when a silver moon shines just…

There’s much to sadly shake your head at in Pan, a sort of Peter Pan Begins that manages the unlikely feat of making battles between flying pirate ships a crushing bore. Most miserably, there’s the great heap of action set pieces that are easier to wait out than to track…

You’d have to be a monster not to be sniffling by the end of Peter Sollett’s Freeheld, a weepy/rousing retelling of real-life gay-rights triumph that serves as a helpful reminder that the dark ages were just, like, 10 years ago. It’s love that lights up that darkness, of course, and…

The minds of math and science geniuses have long fascinated the makers of crowd-pleasing narrative features, which is curious, as the complexities that fascinate those minds are antithetical to the feelings-first bounce of popular filmmaking. The movies, having settled into candied naturalism, already struggle to suggest interiority, even of characters…

There’s a knot of tough, tender, persuasive scenes near the end of Isabel Coixet’s life-advice drama Learning to Drive. These are muscular enough that, had they come earlier, they might have powered the movie — the filmmakers’ hearts might be in the right place, but the film’s doesn’t kick in…

There’s steady, scary thrill in the final third of Meru, the latest attempt to conquer the climb-and-tweak-the-nose-of-God mountaineering documentary, a genre that has yet to reach its apex. The terrible beauty of the Shark’s Fin point of northern India’s Mount Meru is enough to make this worth seeking out on…

This mean and vigorous men’s adventure pulp throwback has everything going against it. It’s a late-August release whose leads, Owen Wilson and Lake Bell, tend to be the best things in movies you otherwise regret seeing. The trailers, teasing the story of a toothsome American family hunted by peasant-rebels in…

Is it in honor of its subject that the high-flying doc Being Evel indulges so often in hilarious overstatement? “He opened the door and invited people to buy a ticket to watch truth,” one talking head insists, somehow keeping his face straight. Another speaks of how in the early 1970s…

1. Really, it’s all in one line of dialogue. Late in Josh Trank’s Fantastic Four, that ever-lovin’ man-mountain Benjamin J. Grimm sets himself at last to the good work of bad-guy punching. As he rushes off to pound Doctor Doom, he mutters, “This is what I do.” He’s resigned to…

“This conversation is the best one I ever had,” David Lipsky (Jesse Eisenberg) tells us as The End of the Tour wraps up, and the movie, a pleasantly talky chamber piece, gives us welcome bursts of it. That long chat, with a David Foster Wallace (Jason Segel) abashed by the…

We may not need another hero, but true believers don’t need to shrink-ray their expectations. Ant-Man is the first Marvel film — and the first of this summer’s pixels-go-kablooey time-wasters — to get better as it goes. The filmmakers save their biggest, wiggiest ideas for the climaxes, where they wittily…

Above all else, a movie built around a star promises presence, and in Bill Condon’s Mr. Holmes that promise is dual: Here’s 100 or so minutes with the great Ian McKellen, for once not casting spells, controlling magnetism or classing up script pages of expositional gobbledygook. It’s not his job,…

A romance about wanting to see a romance, a comic tragedy about an onlooker willing something tragic, Anne Fontaine’s Flaubert-inspired meta-pleasure Gemma Bovery takes as its subject the act of watching the lives around us — and of wishing those lives were literature. Or films: Here’s a French film thick…

Part of what makes writer-director Rick Famuyiwa’s Dope so fresh and joyous is that in many key ways it’s not new at all. Here’s a dramatic teen comedy, flavor-crystaled with sex and drugs and innocent raunch, about good friends who get caught up in bad business on their way to…

“This is the oldest skull I have,” the Swiss artist H.R. Giger says, showing off this prized possession the breezy way you might a set of Fiestaware. He lifts the skull and regards it. But then his speech is breathy and halting, tender with age, as he elaborates: His father…

Poltergeist 2015 is to Poltergeist ’82 what today’s shipped-frozen-to-the-store Pizza Hut dough is to the kneaded-on-site pies the chain’s stoned cooks tossed in the Reagan era. It’s the same kind of thing, with the same shape and some shared ingredients, but the texture’s gone limp, and there’s no sense of…

This doesn’t feel like a film that exists. How is George Miller’s bonkers, exhausting, no-future smash-’em-up Mad Max: Fury Road not one of those almost-was boondoggles mourned and dreamed of by fans, a revered director’s impossible vision that, thanks to the un-stout hearts of studio bean-counters, never actually vaulted from…

Is it possible to be accidentally definitive? James D. Cooper’s thorough and revealing doc Lambert & Stamp is billed as the story of the managers who whipped the Who into being the Who. But once it’s sketched out the characters and ambitions of Chris Stamp and Kit Lambert, putative New…

One of the most inspired ideas in late-middle Woody Allen pictures comes in Deconstructing Harry, a movie about how Allen loves Bergman, hates Philip Roth and isn’t quite clear on what “deconstruction” means. Allen stages passages from fiction written by the protagonist, a novelist named Harry; one features Robin Williams…