New movie reviews: New York listings and showtimes

42: movie review

• Rated as: 4/5
• Critics choice

Jackie Robinson’s story is so blue-sky heroic and transcendent, it becomes hard for any filmmaker to run the bases without falling into emotional goo. (Tellingly, the first attempt, in 1950, starred Robinson himself and still felt like a fantasy.) Writer-director Brian Helgeland has somehow found a

Admission: movie review

• Rated as: 2/5

Tina Fey is done with 30 Rock and her Golden Globes gig (hopefully not for good), yet finding a niche on the big screen might be harder than she realizes—especially if she continues to lunge at awkward dramedies like Baby Mama and this one, another half-success spoiled by tonal uncertainty. Portia

After Earth: movie review

• Rated as: 2/5

How the mighty have fallen. We’re not just speaking of warrior-class father-son team Cypher and Kitai Raige (Will and Jaden Smith), the last survivors of a spaceship crash on a devastated, human-abandoned future Earth. We’re also talking about director M. Night Shyamalan, whose name has been all

Augustine: movie review

• Rated as: 4/5
• Critics choice

Long before it became a favorite pejorative of intolerant husbands, “hysteria” was filling 19th-century French sanatoriums with females suffering from fits, outbursts and other assorted rebellions of the body. One such working-class girl, Augustine (Soko), is interned in a prisonlike hospital due

Before Midnight: movie review

• Rated as: 5/5

There’s a twinge of heartache in seeing our actors age (or, defiantly, not age) onscreen. To watch Jeff Bridges pull out all the crusty stops in 2010’s True Grit is to mourn his golden god in Against All Odds (1984), washed away in the sea surf. Clint Eastwood is an institution to the idea of

Berberian Sound Studio: movie review

• Rated as: 4/5

He knows his room tones from his bumps in the night. But British sound engineer Gilderoy (Toby Jones) seems positively baffled by his new assignment from a shady Italian studio: to oversee the audio for a bloody horror flick set at an all-girls equestrian academy. The producer (Cosimo Fusco) is all

The Bling Ring: movie review

• Rated as: 4/5
• Critics choice

The first thing you notice: These are some really bad burglars. Vaulting over a gated fence in security-cam footage, they’re less stealthy than awkward: a lame assembly of bumblers that even a sleepy dog would notice. They slam into doors with profane grunts. Maybe keep it down a little? Amazingly,

Cleopatra

The queen of Egypt seduces Julius Caesar, but when he is killed, she uses Mark Antony as her new protector.

The Company You Keep: movie review

• Rated as: 3/5

Run, Robert, run: The talented Mr. Redford has made an art form out of going on the lam, whether it’s from frontier superposses (Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid), Southern lawmen (The Chase), corporate overlords (The Electric Horseman) or intelligence-agency spooks (Three Days of the Condor).

Cosmopolis

• Rated as: 4/5

Prophetic though it was, Don DeLillo’s 2003 novel—now a whip-smart film about meltdowns global and personal—gets one thing absolutely wrong. (So does the movie.) Consider some of cinema’s past greedmongers: Michael Douglas’s ravenous Gordon Gekko, his face strained with impure appetites, or