Amy Nicholson

For the first time, a Marvel movie draws that pencil line from dream to screen. Where the earlier films felt hard and shiny and steel-colored — the look of bashing action figures on a sidewalk — Strange is ink-smudged and obsessive. It's defiantly old-school — not the cozy, apple-scented nostalgia of the first Captain America film, but that cold, back-of-the-library whiff of eraser nubs and mold.

When it was all over, I found myself googling Dante for my own clue as to what I’d just suffered: “He who knows most grieves most for wasted time.”

Park Chan-wook’s The Handmaiden is a jaw-dropping, pulse-quickening mash-up.

Jenkins has made something astonishing: a film with immaculate craft that, at the same time, feels spontaneous, even tentative, as if it could panic that it’s revealed too much and close the curtains.

It’s a hero story for wonks and scientists, people who spend their days surrounded by dry-erase boards inked with numbers and grids and yet go to work in a jumpsuit, their faces smeared with muck.

The film is polite when it should be wicked — it’s melodrama that thinks it’s saving lives, like it drank too much chardonnay and convinced itself that since Gone Girl almost got an Oscar, maybe it can, too. That tonal muck prevents the film from going in any direction.

The direction is so heavy-handed that it feels like Parker is afraid audiences don’t know slavery is wrong. Or maybe that truth is all he’s comfortable using Nat Turner to say.

When no one is making believable choices, who cares who’s human? It’s all just lines of script.

Tom Hanks is so quietly compelling that he gives the film an illusion of depth.

Don’t Breathe is a small delight, like stumbling across a shiny silver dollar.

Phillips has made a copy of a copy, a brotastic toast to capitalism that steals from all the other movies that stole from Scarface and Goodfellas.

Like most coming-of-age flicks, Morris From America tries too hard to make friends. At least its scenes of unearned triumph are balanced by embarrassing bits that hit emotional bullseyes. It’s so likable I wondered if I was a sap for enjoying it, so I watched it again and liked it more.

Fegley’s heartbreaking performance is fused onto a marshmallow. Lowery overcompensates for the darkness in the script by making everything else soft and squishy.

This solid genre pic salutes its touchstones.

Sausage Party is ballsy and dumb and brilliant all in one bite.

Yes, Nine Lives is dumb. Yes, it’s for very young kids. Yes, Lil Bub has a cameo. And yes, I giggled anyway.

Instead of focusing on the squad in the title — the chemistry the audience wants to see — Ayer doubles down on the usual DC tics: dark fights, a humdrum dependence on guns and fists, a cynical everyone-sucks grasp of politics, and sudden rain showers that people ignore. It’s moody and mindless, an angry toddler screaming over his parents’ classic rock mix of The Rolling Stones, The Animals, and a 14-year-old song from Eminem.

I've rarely seen so much effort for so little thrill.

Though Roberts is miscast as a wallflower — seriously, the film expects us to believe a jock in her class would dismiss the mannequin-perfect beauty as “not my type” — Nerve taps into the rush of realizing strangers think you’re cool.

Freed from reality, Lin turns into a kid gifted a box of markers and glitter: Everything is manic and distracting. There’s a cool swoosh where the lens surfs behind the Enterprise as it accelerates through a tube, but mostly the tricks are garish.

It’s all a little slow and stoic and familiar.

Café Society is a light-fingered, backstabbing trifle. Despite the occasional sour zinger, the film is so retro golden that old-timey miners would run the reels through a sieve.

Spielberg can’t fix The BFG’s strange second act.

DeMonaco makes small choices I admire. For once, no woman gets threatened with rape. Instead, ladies seem to be the aggressors, and as we cruise the streets of D.C. we see wives stabbing and incinerating husbands, or dancing around a tree strung with male corpses.

As much as I enjoyed this bizarre, ambitious adventure and its careful popcorn kitsch, Tarzan’s story will always leave our ears ringing with something we hate, whether you choose Burroughs’s white-savior syndrome or Christoph Waltz’s shivery final speech: “The future belongs to me.”

The dialogue is dense and quick and brainy.

Where Dory was saccharine, Pets is anarchic. It’s the difference between Mickey Mouse and Looney Tunes or The Muppets, where crazy creatures take aim at each other with cannons. That sense of play infects the animation, which favors fun over photo-realism.

The big CG sequences are less captivating than simply watching the four ladies kick it with a pizza. Wiig and McCarthy nestle into their comfortable roles as the soft-spoken priss and the bustling madwoman, leaving room for Jones to barge in with her big punch lines. But keep your eyes on the background. That’s where Jones’s Saturday Night Live costar McKinnon lurks, quietly transforming herself into a movie star.