A.A. Dowd

There are those who will surely argue that this is not a tonally coherent film. But I was nonetheless rather elated by the way Filho weaves in so many outside touchstones while still maintaining his core interests in social dynamics and anti-capitalist sentiment.

The actors navigate their uncertain motivations with finesse — especially Asano, who captures not just the shell-shocked daze of someone trying to readjust to life on the outside but also a carefully, unnervingly suppressed wellspring of resentment.

That Civil War doesn’t collapse under the weight of its various moving parts, that it manages to be the most serious entry yet in this franchise of franchises without sacrificing much in the way of valuable comic relief, is a testament to the creative mojo of directors Joe and Anthony Russo and screenwriters Christopher Markus and Stephen McFeely.

This is something different: an acknowledgement that, for many young women in Iran, prison may offer an escape from everyday horrors, to say nothing of the paradoxical freedom it affords them.

Dread this thick stays with you, long after the shock of projectile vomit and masturbation by crucifix has worn off.

Saulnier savages the legal loopholes that allow police to exploit their community, all while offering the year’s most breathlessly suspenseful standoffs. It’s what a modern crowd-pleaser should be: smart, gripping, and about something.

Anachronism, as it turns out, is the guiding force of this frequently funny, agreeably bawdy farce, which imagines what a convent of the grubby, violent, disease-infested Middle Ages might look and sound like if it were populated by characters straight out of a modern NBC sitcom.

For all its mode-bending gamesmanship, American Animals is ultimately a fairly straightforward heist movie, albeit a stylish and engaging one.

There’s something a little tidy about the resolution, closing a movie of messy emotional confusion on a note of affirmation and maybe even a kind of surrender. But On The Rocks shines brighter in the context of a career, especially in indirect dialogue with Lost In Translation.

More often that not, however, Captain Phillips is riveting. Though he remains unfortunately convinced that violently shaking his camera is the best way to achieve visual urgency, Greengrass nevertheless excels at pressure-cooker scenarios.

In a sense, what we’re watching is a classic con-artist movie, built around someone who plies his shady trade not for money but esteem—the feeling that he matters, that his name carries weight.

A film about taking chances takes its own big chance, risking ridicule with a third act that’s at once sweet, amusing, lackadaisical, and more than a little preposterous.

Sharp as the dialogue is, it’s hard to imagine any of this working as well without the late, great Gandolfini.

It’s something of a hangout Western, too, and its pleasures mostly come down to the company we get to keep with the characters and the actors easing into their eccentricities.

This handmade approach is a big part of the film’s DIY charm. It’s also a perfect match for the story, which seems to have been pulled, too, from the messy locker of teen-boy imagination.

Life is a B movie on an A budget, an old-fashioned creature feature that delivers its cheap thrills expensively.

At times, we might be watching a deadpan workplace comedy; that it’s possible to laugh at this subject matter at all is a testament to its matter-of-fact presentation and maybe also to the extent that this virus has completely seeped into every corner of life.

True to its name, Monsters University brims with cleverly designed creatures, a student body worthy of the recently deceased Ray Harryhausen. What the movie lacks is its precursor’s human ace-in-the-hole—that pint-sized, inadvertent agent of chaos, Boo.

Quintessentially, and maybe to a fault, this is a Farhadi movie: another of the writer-director’s gripping studies of a family torn asunder by a compounding mess of deception and revelation.

As always, Wiseman’s approach guarantees memorable encounters.

Even coming from a filmmaker who walks a narrative line like a drunk driver tipsily failing to prove his sobriety, this is scattershot stuff—and maybe too much movie for one movie. Yet it’s been made with enough brio and confidence to drag a chaos-tolerant viewer along for the ride. You want to relent to its winding navigation as fully as the director himself has surrendered the wheel to his muse.

I, Tonya may be more of a pop-biographical exercise than a deep interrogation, but there’s a resonance to the synergy between its star and its subject: one famous female artist reclaiming her professional narrative by playing another who never quite could.

This new-new Baumbach isn’t necessarily better than the old-new Baumbach; "Young" felt meatier, with a stronger sense of who its neurotic New Yorkers were. But that film didn’t have Gerwig, bringing warmth, wit, and loopy star power to a character — a human bulldozer of incorrigible extroversion — as fictional as the Big Apple you see only on the big screen.

For as much as Van Groeningen may have pulled from both of his mirrored source materials, for as deep as Chalamet digs into his character’s skirmish with own urges, Beautiful Boy holds us outside of his struggle.

For two hours or so, he becomes a magnetic actor again, the same vibrant presence who wowed audiences with his work in "Leaving Las Vegas" and "Adaptation." He is, in these rare instances, just plain good.

As gross and spooky and, yes, occasionally frightening as these terror tactics get, they never quite cross over into the deep end of truly grownup horror. That’s intentional, and a key to the film’s fun: It gets away with everything it can on a PG-13 leash, smuggling some real scares to the under-18 crowd.

Zemeckis has fashioned an unfashionable throwback, and if Allied doesn’t land the gut-punch it winds up to deliver, there’s nevertheless plenty to admire in a blockbuster craftsman and two beautiful stars paying tribute to the spirit of an older Hollywood.

Speaking of style and confidence, Morris From America constitutes a huge leap forward in both for writer-director Chad Hartigan, whose last feature, "This Is Martin Bonner," was about as minimal as American cinema gets.

For all the minor creepiness Undine pulls from its inspiration (including some striking underwater shots), it also inherits a certain simplicity of plotting and one-note characterization. Yet I still wouldn’t hesitate for a second to recommend the film, because it’s been made with the superb economy of pacing, shot selection, and editing that’s become a Petzold specialty, nay a trademark.

An ambitious, expertly crafted, and admittedly kind of ludicrous horror movie.

Seeing the director’s usual style applied to a whole different culture provides fascination enough. Not surprising, maybe, but welcome.

Pain And Glory has are some beautiful passages ... What’s missing from the movie is any real sense of danger or subversion—qualities that used to basically define this once-radical filmmaker’s work.

Panahi has frequently blurred the line between cinema and reality; here, he builds the search for that line into the work itself, even flirting, playfully, with a self-critique.

High Flying Bird turns out to be a kind of shaggy heist movie, with a grand design (and payout) that’s only fully clear in retrospect.

There are elements of coming-of-age drama, tortured romance, and supernatural horror, though part of the film’s strange power is that it never seems to commit to any of those genres, hovering in some liminal state instead, teasing the audience with the various possibilities of where it might go.

Like too many franchise installments, Catching Fire builds to more of an ellipsis than a period, teasing the next chapter instead of providing closure. But isn’t that true of "The Empire Strikes Back" as well? At least casual fans will only have to wait a year, not three, to see what happens next in this galaxy not so far away.

The Killing Of A Sacred Deer doesn’t have as sharp an allegorical edge as his best work — it’s no Dogtooth in that respect — but it does find the director honing his command of unnerving atmosphere to a razor point, enhanced by a camera that glides menacingly down hospital corridors and gazes from above with the severity of a merciless god.

Closed Circuit may be little more than a high-minded, shrewdly topical gloss on a shopworn genre, but its cynicism is bracing.

No amount of needless chatter can quite dilute the power of The Counselor’s grim endgame, especially given the way its writer and director conspire to keep the threat offscreen, like some terrible, unseen force of nature.

Suffice to say, No Way Home hits its hoot-and-holler beats about as skillfully as Endgame did. There are moments here that will probably inspire comparable choruses of applause; by opening a wormhole into the multiverse of past Spider-Man movies, Marvel and Sony have made something like an all-purpose Spider-Man sequel, shrewdly designed to hit a whole range of nostalgia centers.

Nate Parker’s film on Nat Turner, imperfect though it is, deserves to be seen.

Written by Simon Barrett, another purveyor of micro-budget carnage, You’re Next boasts a sometimes-uneasy blend of comedy and horror.

If Ponsoldt can step beyond the 12 steps, he might make something truly spectacular.

It’s overflowing, like a bright portal into a new reality, with gorgeous details. So what if they don’t quite add up to a deeper whole?

This is no sympathetic drama of absolution, no portrait of forgiveness sought by sinners. Larraín is after something trickier and harder to pin down; he asks us to share real estate with these men, while offering few windows into their heads or hearts, or even a clarification of their crimes.

It’s a gripping portrait of boots-on-the-ground activism, at least so long as it keeps the focus squarely trained on the actual activism.

Deerskin is more of a twisted lark than anything else, but it hits on something meaningful—a first for a director who’s shown almost no prior interest in reality, even within a film called Reality.

It’s a portrait of the comedy tour as odyssey of madness, a plummet into the abyss.

One reason that The Tribe “works” is that it presents a story so simple and familiar, so cliché even, that one doesn’t need to understand what the actors are saying to follow along.

There’s still something exciting about seeing familiar tropes placed in an unfamiliar context — in this case, a nation ravaged by violent conflict and stifled by fundamentalist law.

Yet for all its expensive grandeur, almost too epic even for the vast canvases of IMAX, Pacific Rim is unmistakably a Del Toro creation.

Madeline’s Madeline, the third feature from writer-director Josephine Decker, is a self-devouring thing: a movie about artistic process that doubles as a document of—and even a commentary on—its own artistic process.

The film is as campy and nearly as regressive as the E.L. James adaptations it consistently out-kinks, except that it’s been made with a slumming Hitchcockian verve that enhances, rather than apologizes for, the proud disreputability of the material.

It’s an ode to the way that even impermanent relationships can be profoundly meaningful.

Malick’s tricks may be aging, but every world still looks new through his eyes.

Style doesn’t triumph over substance in The Neon Demon. It devours it.

In a way, this B-movie on an A budget gets closer to the values of George Romero, the godfather of zombie cinema, than Snyder’s actual, hyper-adrenalized remake of Romero’s masterpiece.

Though gently outraged in its portrait of class divisions, Happy As Lazzaro mostly takes its tonal cues from the eponymous character’s comically gentle, trusting nature.

The easy elevator pitch on Swiss Army Man is that it’s "Cast Away" meets "Weekend At Bernie’s." Weird as that movie may sound, it’s not nearly as weird as the one actually cooked up by “Daniels,” a.k.a. Dan Kwan and Daniel Scheinert, the branded directing duo making its feature-length debut.

The Eyes Of My Mother is a grotesque, depraved genre movie with the skin of an art film pulled tightly over its bones. If Ingmar Bergman had helmed "The Texas Chain Saw Massacre," it might look something like this exquisite nightmare.

It’s minor pleasures from a major talent: B-movie fun in the key of Kurosawa.

Much of the film’s infectiously youthful spirit comes courtesy of its star. At 21, Tom Holland is only a hair younger than Toby Maguire was when he first donned the tights.

Custody doesn’t do much more than plunge the audience into this hellish situation, but it shrewdly understands the bad dad’s pathetic pathology, and the film may resonate for anyone who’s grown up under the unhealthy supervision of a mean bastard. Take that as a sobering recommendation.

Intentionally exasperating.

At the very least, its central mystery keeps you guessing, right up until a final turn that’s nearly as clever as it is convoluted.

Perhaps more than ever before, the animators do the heavy lifting: Every detail, from the gentle bob of a beast's breathing to the fluid shifts of Spot's facial expressions, has been lovingly rendered.