Alonso Duralde

While Hacksaw Ridge is undeniably made with great care and skill, for all of its good intentions it can never refute that famous Truffaut observation that making an anti-war film is essentially impossible, since to portray something is to ennoble it. In celebrating this legendary pacifist, Gibson and company ennoble the hell out of violence.

Nocturnal Animals packs a real punch and confirms that “A Single Man” was no fluke.

It’s not impossible to give audiences both a puzzle-box narrative and an exploration of life choices and what it means to be human, but the balance just doesn’t play here.

The musical is as malleable and eclectic a genre as any other, and Chazelle reminds us how effectively it can be applied to intimate moments as well as huge ones.

It’s a grand, old-school saga full of sacrifice and betrayal and loss, and just when the audience is gearing up for a powerfully tragic resolution of the kind that Thomas Hardy might have written, the movie veers off into Nicholas Sparks territory instead.

Whatever its flaws, this is a rare genre movie that allows two women — both Mara and Taylor-Joy are coolly riveting, particularly when they’re playing off each other — to take center stage in both the drama and the action, both of which get pretty intense.