Andrew O'Hehir

Assaf’s pop-culture transcendence was a coming-of-age moment for Palestinians, a sign that they could triumph in the most delicious, delightful and unlikely of contexts, despite a broken society built on institutional hopelessness. Abu-Assad’s films make the same point, in a darker register.

How close did a simple maintenance mishap come to rendering at least one American state uninhabitable and killing an unknown number of people? And what does that tell us about the security and safety of the deadliest weapons ever built in human history? We don’t know the answer to the first question, and the second one raises extremely troubling issues. I don’t want to spoil the gripping and improbable details of Kenner’s film, but how the Damascus accident started is no big secret.

In Order of Disappearance possesses both a striking soulfulness and a sense of beauty. (Much of the credit goes to cinematographer Philip Øgaard, whose images are memorable but never showy.)

I would simultaneously argue that Sheil and Greene go off the rails several times during Kate Plays Christine, most notably in their overly artful and self-conscious attempt to re-enact the shooting but also that they get viewers closer to the real Christine Chubbuck than I would have thought possible.

Not only is War Dogs a surprisingly well-told tale in the classic American rags-to-riches-to-rags mode. It’s also a mordant morality fable with a genuine heart of darkness. (Plus, it has one hell of a soundtrack, matching its moods to an array of classic rock and hip-hop tunes in the Martin Scorsese vein.)

I hated this movie; I wish I could unsee it and will it out of existence. But that’s not the same as thinking it’s worthless or corrupt or entirely inept. It’s more like a massively self-indulgent prank, inflicted on the world by some reasonably intelligent young men, which makes it the most bro-tastic project of all time. Mo’ bro than this, no es posible, amigos.

Decadence is supposed to be fun, surely, or at least more fun than the desperate, sludgy, frantic mess of Suicide Squad.

Feig’s Ghostbusters is a goofy, free-floating romp with an anarchic spirit of its own, a fresh set of scares and laffs and a moderate dose of girl power that is unlikely to seem confrontational to anyone beyond the most confirmed basement-dwelling Gamergate troll.

There’s a terrible wonder in this rare glimpse inside a country that has tried to empty itself of all thought, all commerce and all civil society — of pretty much everything except an especially lame version of hero worship and despotism.

Fontaine and cinematographer Caroline Champetier create many subdued and unexpected moments of simple humanity, or of what a more generous Catholic than the Mother Superior might call grace.

It seems like it’s more about what happens after the tickling stops, which is also when Tickled stops being hilarious.

If you want a movie that eviscerates “The Hunger” and eats its bloody insides while daring you to look away, here it is.

The truly remarkable thing about this modest little movie is the revelation of how much change is possible within a relatively short time.

Forget the inflated Trumpian moral dilemmas of "Superman" and "Captain America." The summer’s most powerful and most disturbing thriller has arrived, in the form of an intensely atmospheric Korean movie called The Wailing.

For deeply steeped Marvel Comics aficionados it will probably be fairly satisfying, and there’s no reason on earth why anyone else should even bother.

Mesmerizing documentary.

To sum it all up, The Nice Guys is basically “Chinatown” remade by Quentin Tarantino and starring foulmouthed, updated versions of Abbott and Costello, as played by two of the most recognizable male stars of our time.

A stodgy, moribund plodder loaded with stock characters that wouldn’t have felt edgy in 1983 and has about the same contemporary urgency as your average late-night rerun of “CSI: NY.”

I personally find the Russo brothers’ lightning-fast action scenes difficult to process — it’s as if cinema editing now exceeds the speed of human brain functions — but they’re undoubtedly exciting and skillfully constructed.

This High-Rise is a scathing, intoxicating visual and auditory experience, the most truthful and most powerful Ballard adaptation we’ve ever seen, or are likely to.

It’s gruesome and funny and dark and incredibly tense.

To give a performance this layered and complex and unstinting while also directing the film around it, which is risky and imaginative and full of life, testifies to impressive powers of concentration.

This movie isn’t nearly as terrible as I was expecting, largely due to Snyder’s OCD-level attention to the visual details. And, yes, due to Wonder Woman (played by Israeli actress Gal Gadot), who brings in a badly needed dose of “Dragon Tattoo”-style female energy.

I suspect this movie will sharply divide Nichols' existing fan base for reasons I can only allude to vaguely in a review; I loved it, or almost all of it, but I can understand the uncertainty.

The conscientious precision and painstaking identification in Eye in the Sky is presented as morally murky; Mirren’s character leans hard on a subordinate to give her an acceptable estimate of collateral damage, so the politicians will say yes. Even so it may be an overly reassuring picture.

There’s a freshness and an unjaded quality to almost every scene that makes you want to keep watching.

Like any truly successful horror film, The Witch operates on various levels at once and is open to interpretation.

It’s no ordinary movie: Rabin, the Last Day is a disorienting mixture of drama, documentary and meticulous re-creation, and very little of it takes place on the last day of Rabin’s life.