Andrew Crump

Twomey gives The Breadwinner ballast, binding it to the real-world history that serves as its basis, and elevates it to realms of imagination at the same time. It’s a collision of truth and fantasy.

The film’s cute, zingy, candy-coated tone is seductive enough, and both Hildebrand and Shipp are compelling in their roles. You will, in short, be entertained. But if Tragedy Girls’ subject matter is odious, its tacit, but perhaps accidental, endorsement of the very thing it means to send up is jaw-dropping.

The Square’s contrast between categories of morality is peak Östlund. There’s no clearly defined gauge for goodness or badness here, just a palette of gray ethical relativism to offset the film’s superior construction.

1922 is a ghastly slow burner, not the kind where nothing happens until the last ten minutes, but rather the kind that layers minor incident upon minor incident until they tally up to something major.

Kingsman: The Secret Service may lack the sophistication of its peers, but damned if it doesn’t know how to have a good time.

In Search of Fellini isn’t a sophisticated movie. Instead, it’s a joyful movie, and the lack of refinement, whether embodied by the overuse of Fellini clips or the lack of juicy material for Bello and Rajskub to sink their teeth into, shows without stymying the movie’s intentions as a love note to its namesake.

The Tiger Hunter isn’t exactly the most woke comic effort you’ll see in 2017, but there’s a particular pleasure taken in watching Khan pick apart our beloved national fable through a South Asian lens, even though that lens indulges a traditional and long-expired style of racial profiling.

The Limehouse Golem has costumes, and drama and an abundance of severed appendages, splattered gore and artfully dismembered bodies, and maybe that’s all any horror fan can ask for. Still: There’s nothing wrong with hoping for more.

It’s a calculated and logical film about an altogether illogical subject.

Maybe this isn’t the sophomore picture we’d hoped for, but it’s sharp and insightful regardless.

There isn’t an action movie out there in 2017 that’s quite like it (for better or for worse), no action movie either as crazy or as committed to its craziness.

Maybe if the film gave us the relief of a satisfying ending, the grimness, the ickiness, wouldn’t be so pronounced. But it doesn’t.

It’s an exquisitely challenging production, one that calls for repeat viewings over years, all the better to persuade the film to surrender its meaning.

If the film is tender, it’s merciless at the same time.

It’s an endurance test where viewers pit their tolerance for naked displays of ugly masculinity against Bravo’s assured directorial chops. It’s also the best, or maybe most vital, presentation of whiteness in theaters in 2017, or for that matter the last half decade or so of pop culture.

Ultimately, fans of the previous two films will get all they crave from The Trip to Spain, which feels like something of a rarity in franchising: These movies have yet to fizzle out and lose their appeal or run out of creative space to explore.

The places and things Kogonada includes in his frame are important for drawing us into Columbus’s world, but it’s Richardson who gives that world its shape, supplying her director’s clean, static compositions, captured in long shots, with aching humanity molded by doubt and disappointment.

The result is a sharp, moving dissection of personal identity and self-agency.

The Emoji Movie’s most insidious trait is its surface-level innocuousness.

If nothing else, think of it as a hilariously repugnant curio, the kind of transgressive art you’ll be unable to unpack because you’ll be too busy chugging ginger ale to bother.

Isabelle Huppert walks on screen in Luc Bondy’s False Confessions intent, it seems, on reminding audiences that she can do anything, including turn a modern adaptation of outdated theater tropes into near-vital product.

It’s a rapturous, gorgeous movie about the sad joy of living, the product of a filmmaker who has spent his life wrestling with the human desire to shed banality and elude our mortality, but for all its intellectual ambitions and philosophical gravity, Endless Poetry never reads as stuffy or self-serious.

It’s a really well-made genre movie, the product of a smart, obviously skilled filmmaker with a good sense of economy.

Their Finest is a joy to watch, if not for Scherfig’s direction than for Arterton’s leading performance, a mixture of affronted gumption, feminine stoicism and vulnerability that adds up to towering portraiture.

Tramps is a minor effort loaded with small pleasures, but tallied together, those small pleasures add up to one great movie.

The discussion of what the film isn’t is a discussion worth having, just not at the expense of what the film is: Delicious, sensual, made with sterling craft and an unassumingly sharp edge.

The Book of Henry means well, but it doesn’t do well. It does incoherent pastiche and self-congratulatory pap instead.

Granted, the film might not have turned out much better had Smit stuck with one perspective or the other, but at least it would have had constancy. Instead, it reads strictly as a video game, sans the requisite interactive gratification.