Bilge Ebiri

The Way of Water makes clear that Cameron no longer needs to leave the confines of this (virtual) extrasolar moon in the Alpha Centauri system to create something closer to the heart. He can bend Pandora to his will, and now he’s bent it to make what might be his most earnest film to date.

It’s not original, but it is enlivened by some artful touches and two excellent performances.

It’s an interesting idea, and the deep pall of suspicion that hangs over some of Ned Rifle is occasionally compelling. But the movie doesn’t exactly go anywhere.

Ford has given us a surprisingly candid peek into the creative process, into the strange little hurts — perceived or real, toxic or justified — that make up the soul of an artist. No, we may not like what we find in there. But I’m not sure he does, either.

Cuties is not a blunt screed or a finger-wagging cautionary tale in either direction — which is one reason why anyone watching the film looking for clear messages about right and wrong is bound to be disappointed, maybe even outraged.

It is remarkable, however, that The Stanford Prison Experiment works as well as it does, and for as long as it does. Crudup and the young cast (particularly Angarano) deserve much of the credit.

Like many gothic tales, The Little Stranger hangs tantalizingly between genres: It has elements of haunted house thriller, of doomed romance, of psychological thriller, of historical allegory.

Clark likes to linger on close-ups of intertwined naked bodies, and he seems to admire these characters’ freedom. But ultimately, it all feels whisper thin: The film, already quite short, doesn’t offer enough about any of these people for us to care genuinely about what happens to them.

The Last Duel is full of incident and historical detail, and its universe is a complicated one — but it seems the script, by its very nature, has ingeniously done all the necessary underlining for us. Even as it pretends to add complexity and context, it simplifies and focuses.

The movie has absorbed its actor’s vibe. It looks great, and it ambles along pleasantly, rarely veering too far into the dramatic or the emotional; moments of tension or insight are often defused with a laugh or some other odd narrative distraction. But by the end, it gets you anyway.

Zi is fascinating, at times even rapturous.

I suspect that, if nothing else, this astoundingly beautiful picture will stand the test of time.

It’s that rarest of psychological thrillers: one that actually lives up to the words “psychological thriller.”

Ant-Man and the Wasp: Quantumania is an atrocious movie, but it’s atrocious in a way that Marvel movies rarely are.

Kitano has conjured a universe of such incredible and casual nastiness that we yearn for some nobility and loyalty, or even some modicum of decency.

Bizarre, bewitching film.

Tom at the Farm, adapted by Dolan and Michel Marc Bouchard from Bouchard’s own play, has the outward trappings of a genre piece. And as such, it’s fairly suspenseful. But at heart, it’s still very much an Xavier Dolan film – ragged, explosive, and often moving.

For all the visual vividness, we have very little actual sense of this land, or the people who live there. Yes, The Legend of Ochi looks amazingly, impressively real, but it’s populated by non-characters pursuing a nothing story.

The film’s driving ideas, which transform over the course of the picture, are replete with ironic potential, but Flanagan ably navigates the tonal minefield, never presenting the whole thing as a wink-wink joke on his characters. They feel real, both in their conception and in how they deviate from our preconceptions, which is quite an accomplishment given that most of them aren’t even onscreen for that long within the movie’s frescolike structure.

The good news is that Final Reckoning does eventually recover from the calamity of its first hour to give us an entertaining, if still messy, Mission: Impossible movie.

Somehow, this Peanuts feels familiar, even cozy. I can’t make any great claims for it, but it feels like the return of an old friend.

Clapin has made a film that leaves us puzzled but also curious. Where he stumbles is in evoking the emotional charge he’s clearly aiming for. Meanwhile on Earth is beautiful, but alienating.

I’d urge any viewer to look closely at the lead actress. The emotional journey of the story— and it’s a fairly dramatic one — comes alive and gathers force through her expressions. She is the movie.

As Skye becomes increasingly unable to tell what’s actually happening and what’s a waking nightmare, we should feel more for her, and we should feel more with her. Instead, we lose interest, as the whole thing becomes pointless and even a little cynical and cruel. The movie ultimately scuttles its own ambitions.

It’s a potentially grisly setup, but the actual movie makes death look downright fun.

Save Yourselves! is a small movie about small people doing small things in the face of a (mostly unseen) big event. If it plays things a little too safe at times, that’s probably because it has to. And besides, it’s charming enough that you may not notice, or care.

Sobel lets these conflicting feelings hang in the air, offering no pat conclusions, or convenient corporate bogeymen. By refusing to resolve or reconcile these contradictions, he ensures that we’ll keep thinking about them.

Sherlock Holmes is totally cool again, which warms my dorky heart.

Palestine 36 offers an interesting and valuable perspective on a relatively unknown period in history, though I wish it wasn’t so thinly spread out. Jacir wants to show a cross section of people’s responses to these events, but the result often feels like scattershot scenes from a longer miniseries, flitting from one character to another with little narrative thrust or cohesion.

It tempers its fairly blunt narrative approach by constantly shifting its perspective. It starts off as the portrait of a troubled child, but expands to become a film about community.

With Jimi: All Is By My Side, writer-director John Ridley tries to do for the rock biopic what Jimi Hendrix did for rock 'n' roll itself in the 1960s — explode it, redefine it, and help it find its best self.

The kind of documentary that’s smart enough to step back and let its charming subject take over. It won’t break new ground, but it’s not lazy or generic.

Van Warmerdam has a way with images that are both playful and horrific, and you may find yourself chuckling at Borgman as much as you recoil at it. It’s destined for cult status.

Cop Car does enough things so well for so long that to quibble with its finale feels churlish. This is a film very much worth seeing.

Our New President merely scratches the surface, and in its own weird way, comes to embody the plague of shallow spectacle it purports to fight against.

Alan Partridge awkwardly tries to wed the episodic spirit of the character with the feature-length demands of a theatrical experience. The result is a mess, but it’s got some choice bits. Even if you forget the film itself, you might find yourself quoting parts of it for years.

One of the strangest films I’ve seen this year, Clara’s Ghost is a twisted, slippery little whisper of a thing that refuses to let itself be easily defined.

While it’s broadly predictable in all the usual ways, Creed II admirably toys with our emotional allegiances just enough that we’re not always sure of how we feel about where it’s all headed.

The Transformers franchise has made bloated, histrionic pandemonium such a thing that the modest Bumblebee, for all its derivativeness, feels like a breath of fresh air.

The most interesting part of Elstree 1976 comes when these actors express ambivalence about their odd celebrity.

For all its stridency, Dinosaur 13 isn’t looking to mobilize us or get us to think hard about these issues. It just wants to tell its wild, one-of-a-kind tale in the most engaging way possible, and it does that exceptionally well.

I walked away from After Love feeling like I knew precious little about these characters. Lafosse gets so many critical things right about this decaying relationship that, at first, I did not wonder too much about the lack of specificity or detail about them as people. But later, it gnawed at me.

Ten years later, Idiocracy’s real achievement isn’t how much of it has come true, but how much it continues to disturb.

It doesn’t always seem to know what it wants to be. But it’s still full of marvels.

Cyrano is a delicate dream of a movie, the kind of film that feels like you might have merely imagined it — light on the surface but long on subconscious impact.

It’s a case of diminishing returns: gorgeous, occasionally evocative, but, in the end, mostly dull.

The film suffers from the one thing that Spielberg films almost never suffer from — stasis. He’s made, essentially, a "hangout" movie, one in which we’re supposed to luxuriate among the characters, but Spielberg isn’t a director who thrives in that kind of environment.

The action is creatively staged, without ever getting too intense or scary for young viewers. And the script balances humor, pathos and wish fulfillment as it portrays Alex’s rise from mopey dreamer to confident warrior, without overdoing the mythic portent.

Del Toro’s comes into a marketplace more open to gothic delirium, and he’s such an expert craftsman that the film is a momentous technical achievement. But it’s more than that. Whatever its flaws, the director has filled Frankenstein with seemingly everything he loves, and it reflects his obsessions. It feels like the work of a true madman, and that’s really the only way anyone should make a movie of Frankenstein.

Reeves loves these dead-end apocalyptic environments, and delights in tales that toy with the moral calculus of typical hero narratives. He has given us a Batman that he himself can believe in, not to mention a Batman that feels right for our times.

The easygoing tone of The Gospel of Eureka — sometimes contemplative, sometimes cheerful — distinguishes it from many other documentaries about timely social issues.

White Noise is certainly uneven — wildly so, probably by design — but it’s also never boring, always eager to throw something new at the viewer, and it’s eager to entertain. I never imagined I’d laugh so hard while watching a movie adaptation of Don DeLillo’s White Noise.

The resulting film is amiable, pretty, and charming in all the right ways — even if it ultimately settles for a fairly typical tale of a late bloomer finding his way.

Much of the bloat is still there, but The Desolation of Smaug, the second film in the Hobbit trilogy, is a real improvement – filled with inventive action set pieces and dramatic face-offs that we (finally, at long last, hallelujah!) care about.

The not-so-good news is that Mid90s never quite manages to make an impact, in part because it gives us so little to hang onto with the characters onscreen.

In its blunt, inelegant, but surprisingly gripping way, Catfight is the (im)perfect movie for our rotten times.

The Return works neither as a CliffsNotes version of The Odyssey nor as its own stand-alone tale. But it does remind us that Ralph Fiennes is an immortal.

The Planet of the Apes movies were built on rage and shame about the world as it exists. And whatever its many flaws, Kingdom of the Planet of the Apes gets that largely right.

Fantastic Beasts is often lovely to look at, at times even stirring, but there's very little to hold on to, story- or character-wise.

The movie is less about making a grand social statement and more about conveying the ground-level desolation of this world. Riccobono films it all with intelligence, sensitivity, and a feel for offhand poetry; his camera captures moments of intimacy and tension without ever quite intruding.

It should be wilder, funnier, nuttier.

What Now? Remind Me is all over the place, but it never feels messy or lax.

Unfortunately, as Mohammed approaches his goal, Abu-Assad goes all in on archival footage.... That backfires.

Rogue One's creators clearly want to move us deeply — several major plot developments should pack an overwhelming emotional wallop — but they haven’t given this talented cast enough to work with. It’s fast, loud, even lovely — and not terribly engaging.

Whatever its occasional stumbles, Last Night in Soho is a mostly intoxicating affair.

There is little doubt throughout that it’s a work of artistry, grace, and, yes, outrage.

As the grown-up Kya, Edgar-Jones is perhaps best at conveying this young woman’s wounded inner life; that speaks to the actress’s talents. However, she never really feels like someone who emerged from this world, but rather one who was dropped into it; that speaks to the clunky filmmaking.

Like a child unwittingly navigating a jungle full of booby traps and deadly creatures, the film walks a treacherously fine line without ever seeming to break a sweat.

American Made is his first effort in a long while that feels like an honest-to-god Tom Cruise movie; suddenly, his smile means something again. But there’s one huge, beautiful catch: Doug Liman’s electric film is clear-eyed about the cynicism and corruption beneath its hero’s anxious grin. It voraciously breaks down both the star and the country he has symbolized for so much of his career.

It’s somber and respectful, and even has a couple of genuinely powerful moments, but none of that’s enough to transcend its oppressive dreariness.

Wan is coming off the world-conquering success of his wildly entertaining automotive action sequel Furious Seven, and he sometimes seems to be trying to bring the splashy cacophony of that movie into a world that thrives on sparseness and focus. It doesn’t work.

It makes for an intriguing combination of tones and rhythms — urgency running up against paralysis — that speaks to the twisted dynamism of our political process, then and now.

The colorful, almost exuberant surfaces of Violet Du Feng’s The Dating Game mask a grim, dystopian reality.

Smulders’s performance makes Unexpected more than worthwhile.

Kill Your Darlings wants to be a young man’s movie, but it’s all “cinema du papa,” as the French New Wave used to call it. The philosophical disconnect is downright cosmic.

If in the end it doesn’t quite work — if its many fascinating pieces and ideas and odds and ends don’t ever cohere into a whole — lament not what might have been. Instead, be grateful that Ridley Scott has lost none of his ability to provoke, captivate and infuriate.

Utterly demented and magnificent.

The Courier is a serviceable espionage drama and history lesson, but whenever these two actors are onscreen together, it approaches the sublime.

It’s a perfect role for Bardem, who has always exuded a kind of natural authority and calm. Every line reading is measured without feeling rehearsed. (He’s a great performer, but that wonderfully solid, anvil-shaped profile of his helps, too. Plus, he gets to indulge his fondness for ridiculous wigs again.)

Oh, Canada might be a movie that was conceived in the long dark night of the soul, but it moves towards brightness and possibility.

Akin holds nothing back, and Kruger, starring in a German film for the first time in her career, brings the grief and anger and pain to life — never overdoing any of it, yet refusing to submerge it.

It’s awkward and weird, and yet all that awkwardness and weirdness give it personality and charm and a freewheeling, nonsensical quality that feels refreshing.

The End is a bold swing, and I’m glad it exists. But for all the stuff it throws at us, the film is frustratingly, wearingly one-note.

Byrkit’s film is very much its own thing. It’s an urbane dinner-party movie that turns into something magnificent, terrible, and strange – and yet it never quite stops being an urbane dinner-party movie, never lets up its tone of ironic refinement. Coherence is a gentle film, but you walk away from it with your brain on fire.

Like the best studio horror directors, Stevenson understands that we’re not here for logic. The First Omen is soaked in style and mood with images that are both textured and shocking and that tap into tantalizingly visceral fears.

Sports biopics are so common that one couldn’t blame Safdie for trying to avoid conventionality, but sometimes the conventions are there for a good reason. In the end, though, he understands that his greatest weapon here is his star. A weapon, and a gift: It’s nice to have the Rock acting again.

There’s something truly electric about the pure, visual storytelling of Monster Hunter.

First Steps certainly has a few potentially provocative ideas rattling around in its tulip-chair-and-tiki-bar brain, but it’s too afraid to explore them in any depth.

It feels like a great throwback thriller, one of those movies viewers will still be discovering years from now. Try to see it on a big screen while you can.

[A] truly monumental work of art ... The footage has been edited with fluidity and grace.

Suffragette is slick and efficient, but also diffuse and formless; it’ll pass the time but it fails to engage.

The patient storytelling and the elegant and colorful hand-drawn animation combine to give the film a pleasing, picture-book-like quality that should appeal to kids; there’s something very old-school about the film’s aesthetic. But in some senses, it also feels like a blast of fresh air, not the least because of where, and on whom, it chooses to place its focus.

Alien: Romulus is diverting enough, but it’s also instantly forgettable — something I don’t think I’ve ever said about any other Alien film, good or bad.

One might say that this new film attempts to be something closer to a standard-issue mystery, with its ornate story line, ambitious action scenes, and historically resonant milieu. But in the end, it still thrives or dies on its teenage star’s charm. It mostly thrives, even if the luster is a bit off this time around.

Rental Family might be a modestly likable, often uneven movie about a fictional American actor in Japan, but it’s also a thoroughly fascinating movie about a very real actor in the midst of one of the strangest careers I’ve witnessed.

Preminger, an old noir hand, perhaps understood something fundamental about Sagan’s story: It is not one well served by subtlety or realism. Chew-Bose’s effort is nevertheless a noble one. She wants to make this world immersive, convincing, and compelling. She’s good enough to get part of the way there, but I don’t know if the destination was ever in sight.

The picture thus combines the excitement of an old-school disaster spectacle with a fly-on-the-wall portrait of institutions struggling to function in the face of a calamity. The effect is singular: We enjoy the thrill ride immensely, but it’s the realism that sticks with us. Movies end, but the fires are here to stay.

Belle does have a clear moral compass, but it refuses easy answers and withholds easy judgments. As such, it feels profoundly human.

Though often beautiful, this is an emotionally paralyzed film about emotionally paralyzed people.

It’s hard to untangle the film’s many bizarre indulgences, which at times seem intended to titillate as much as disturb, and yet somehow do neither. It’s all a bit too ludicrous to be sensuous or unsettling, or ultimately all that insightful.

Chinese Puzzle isn’t much of a story, but in leaning into and embracing its complications Klapisch is able to isolate little instances — exchanges, glances, fragments from which he can mine profundity. That may feel like a cheat, but it isn’t, because this is a world where the moment conquers all.

So it's a good thing the film has that cast, and Stoll in particular. He’s the main reason to watch Glass Chin. And not coincidentally, he’s often quiet.

The comedy doesn’t build so much as it drones on, understated in form but preposterous in content. It wins us over not so much through belly laughs but by making us feel like we’re privy to a wonderfully bizarre in-joke.

The fact that The Lost King never quite reconciles this tension between striving for noble recognition and the fallacy of divine majesty feels like an implicit damnation of both.

Infinitely Polar Bear is a good example of how a film that looks on paper like a mess of indie clichés can be redeemed by fantastic performances … even if, ultimately, it remains a mess of indie clichés.

Ortiz’s film does have its charms.

It’ll probably drive some people crazy, but I enjoyed the hell out of it.

Where to Invade Next shows Moore at his cheapest, while also affording glimpses of the filmmaker he once was.

Because Rocket is not just an object, and because the film’s flashback structure invests the quest with emotional power, the plot of Guardians 3 never feels like paint-by-numbers gamification; it feels like something we might actually want to care about.

Their story seems genuine, but the filmmaking can make it all feel premeditated, in part because directors Jeff Zimbalist and Maria Bukhonina are determined to hit every plot turn at the most obvious points.

As Colin, Stanfield is exceptional, his visage a mixture of bewilderment, humiliation, and simmering rage. His performance grounds the film, and keeps it going through its less confident patches.

For most of its running time — thanks to director Young’s visual rigor and the excellent performances of its leads — Bwoy keeps us in this cinematic fugue state, where reality only peeks through in brief flashes.

The destination is often familiar and not always particularly interesting, but the ride itself isn’t always so bad, especially when you’ve got Bill Murray along for company.

It tackles the refugee crisis, capitalism, political repression, and First World hypocrisy within the context of an art-world satire. It’s sometimes confused in conception, but never confusing. It’s a wild, modern-day fable that is lively and thought-provoking … so long as you don’t actually think too hard about it.

The Villainess is entertaining enough, but it’s hard to shake the feeling that we should be caring more for this character as the film goes on, not less.

Everest may disappoint those looking for a more awe-inspiring film with big vistas and jaw-dropping stunts and acts of surreal heroism. Unlike many mountain-disaster stories, this is the kind that makes you never want to look at a mountain again.

It’s just escapist enough to fill our disaster-flick needs, but don’t be surprised if Ric Roman Waugh’s film sometimes feels like too much, especially in the middle of an ongoing real-life calamity. To put it a simpler way: Greenland is not just effective; sometimes it’s too effective.

Lanthimos’s unwavering, matter-of-fact style embodies the unquestioning nature of his characters. And while the internal logic of his controlled worlds feels ironclad, it never really is. The filmmaker’s precision is a ruse, a magic trick designed to make us think one thing while quietly building a case for its opposite: the reality that none of this makes any sense.

Dreamin’ Wild, as I’ve noted, has its issues: There are lines of dialogue so blunt that I actually found myself bursting out laughing during some pretty serious scenes. But great performances don’t happen in a vacuum, and credit should go to Pohlad for knowing exactly what to do with Goggins.

Ready Player One is entertaining enough, and it’s certainly well-made, but what truly stands out is the filmmaker’s prevailing-present sense of bemused disgust at the way his offspring are spending their time. He can’t go home again, and he knows it.

Lovely visuals, terrific performances, renewed ambition: There's enough good in Café Society to make it worth your while — and also to make you wish it were better.

Despite the rough edges, you feel you’re in the hands of someone who enjoys telling a story, and knows how to do it — even when the story’s a disposable one such as this.

The Apprentice is a hodgepodge of scenes from the life of Trump and Cohn with little emotional fluidity.

It’s a sweet, swift 91 minutes long, and only about 80 if you skip the credits — but it’s a surprisingly immersive affair, and the authenticity writer-star Hanks and director Aaron Schneider bring to it is a huge part of its appeal.

The film never stops loving these characters. Mantzoukas brilliantly juggles all the different forces of Richard’s personality so that we never quite know what to make of this guy, which in turn means that we never quite know what will happen next with him and Nat.

The Salvation is visually beautiful, morally down and dirty, and simplistic. But it’s marked by two haunted, quiet performances from stars Mads Mikkelsen and Eva Green, who make this otherwise predictable slog worthwhile.

Ultimately, this is Sanders’s show. His performance breathes new life into one of American literature’s most heartbreaking and controversial characters.

Chicken Run: Dawn of the Nugget is baggier than the original, not as funny, and it drags in parts and is on the whole less memorable. But dammit, it’s still fun, and that’s ultimately what matters.

If Cheap Thrills ultimately does carry us along, it’s due largely to Healy’s performance and presence. He’s a figure halfway between schlemiel and criminal, and the film effectively works that full range.

For much of its running time, director Ritchie’s war movie manages to be topical, suspenseful, and moving. But partly because the story is fiction, Ritchie takes a few genre liberties that threaten to undermine the sincerity of his tale.

Piercing is an unnerving mix of loveliness and lunacy.

This could all easily get tiresome quite quickly, but the director has a light touch thanks to his poppy, direct style — colorful close-ups, broad line deliveries, simple cuts.

While it was often all over the place, it worked, because directors Phil Lord and Chris Miller ladled out the chaos with such charm.

Your Monster has some chucklesome moments, none of it enough to paper over the film’s many contrivances. And some late-breaking gruesome bits can’t retroactively redeem the lazy writing. But the movie does have Barrera, and maybe that’s enough.

The result is the most exhilarating and wounding film M. Night Shyamalan has made in many, many years.

The film collapses, because it doesn’t convince us on a basic level: The characters are driven by convenience, not behavior, and their actions seem like they’ve been manhandled into place to make the plot work.

This Kiss of the Spider Woman might be wildly uneven, but it’s hard not to be moved by the sight of a great new talent emerging into the world.

For all their fuck-ups, we never question why these two characters are still together. In these actors’ hands, ably guided by a director who deserves to be better known, this minor little crime caper becomes a very human romantic drama.

Don’t let the politics scare you off, though, for Jimmy’s Hall is a joyous movie. I wasn’t being glib with that earlier mention of "Footloose": Loach’s film isn’t technically a musical, but it has that same spirit, that same let’s-put-on-a-show vitality.

The film’s central tension, between hand-wavingly vague science and the contagious immediacy of the characters’ emotions, becomes most pronounced during the final act, which is somehow both impressively suspenseful and frustratingly confusing. Still, Stowaway is never boring, even as it leaves you with a million unanswered space questions.

The patient, somber direction gives the characters — and the actors playing them — room to breathe. It lets them do the things they’re best at: Costner gets to be the sad dad. Diane Lane gets to be passionate. And Lesley Manville gets to eat up the screen. For all its surface simplicity, Let Him Go is a surprising emotional roller coaster, and it stays with you.

I was never bored by Normal, but I’d also be lying if I said I was ever excited by it. Maybe it’ll help you forget your troubles for an hour or two, but there’s also a good chance you’ll forget the movie itself in even less time.

We basically know where Laggies is headed; the film is a soft, straight, easy pitch down the middle, story-wise. And it’s a light movie: You won’t get a particularly profound look at adults who act like kids from it.

Maybe this frivolous little movie reflects our own world back to us in more ways than we might wish to admit.

This is an eerily silent work, full of long pauses and distant, baffling sounds; even the score seems to be mixed low, as if it were drifting through a window, a dark memory. Branagh also plays with the rhythm, using pace and composition to set us ill at ease. Vast stretches of darkness in the frame are cut through with shocks of color.

Largely indistinguishable from any number of bloated superhero spectacles that have already graced our screens. Your kids may not mind it, but it’s more insistent than it is fun.

An old-fashioned piece of shameless hokum, Sia’s Music might be hilarious if it weren’t so offensive.

Roth has a talent for anticipation, but not really for suspense. We don’t watch Thanksgiving wondering what’s going to happen next to these people. We watch because we know what’s going to happen next to these people.

While there is some gore late in the film, what makes Backcountry special is the care and patience it invests in its characters and the quiet, haunting tension of its story line.

Aware of the raw, incendiary power of her subject matter, Ben Hania doesn’t sensationalize this story, keeping the action fixed entirely in the call center itself, with actors portraying the dispatchers on the line.

Somehow there’s nothing cynical about it. Beetlejuice Beetlejuice is, instead, a return to form that finds Burton and much of the previous cast getting weird, gross, and, yes, goth in both an idyllic New England town and a gleefully bureaucratic afterlife.

In the struggle between sober subtext and monster-movie goofiness, the goofiness mostly wins out.

I found parts of The Sacrament more effective than anything else he’s done to date, as it’s probably the least genre of his movies. But don’t tell West that; I’m pretty sure he still thinks he’s made a horror flick.

That the actors are so good, and the imagery absorbing, also helps paper over some of the film’s weaker elements. Even as we dig into these men’s pasts, Dunham wants to maintain the slightly unreal, allegorical quality of his story.

The film plays out mostly like an occasionally above-average episode of the show.

All joking aside, this is a director who is incapable of creating something that’s not beautiful. He can, however, on occasion indulge in a little too much cliché.

It’s not hard to enjoy Dumbo. Like the circus owners and carnival crackpots who try to exploit the flying elephant for all he’s worth, Tim Burton still knows how to give us what we want. He may think of himself as the tormented freak on display, but he’s also clearly the all-powerful showman, ready to exploit our sense of wonder.

This could have easily become a torrid, tear-jerking melodrama, but Hansen-Løve’s matter-of-fact approach to performance and incident allow the emotions to emerge organically from the unfussy drama onscreen.

Romantic comedies involving people moving on after divorce are a dime a dozen, but rarely are they as generous, sharply observed, and humane as Angus MacLachlan’s Goodbye to All That.

Like its star, Ryan Reynolds — and maybe thanks to its star, Ryan Reynolds — the picture occasionally seems aware of its limitations. At its best, it turns its cynicism into an asset.

As an honest look into relationships, it's a bust. As a straight-up comedy, though, it’s hilarious.

As a movie, Sly is something of a mess. But as a portrait of a messy man, it can be quite moving.

There’s nothing wrong with stylization and opening things up (usually, these are good things), and Andrews has impressive command of his frame. But here, the extra-cinematic adornments seem somewhat unnecessary, as Una’s chief power lies in its two striking lead performances.

Jonathan is good enough for us to want it to be better.

The violence is visceral and presented with just enough authenticity to make you quiver. The context, however, is unreal enough that you don’t have to think too hard about it. You weren’t supposed to be thinking anyway.

Here’s a movie about the efforts to bring the soldiers stationed at Auschwitz to justice, and it’s strangely light on its feet.

Daddio is a classic two-hander, focusing entirely on the seesawing power dynamic between two very different individuals. As such, it’s at times theatrical and precious, a bit too on the nose with its metaphors and symbols and running themes. But boy, can it be fun to watch these two go at it.

It’s a cheap-thrill movie, and on that score it mostly delivers.

Kidman’s performance as this broken, obsessed woman is powerful. Breathless, rasping through her teeth, she conveys both vulnerability and intractability. She seems like she could drop dead at any second, and yet, we also sense that we’re watching someone who has already had to endure the worst life has to give her.

A movie can and should stand on its own, of course, but it still needs to find a way to give weight and scope to this intimate miniature. And while Dominic Cooke’s film succeeds at much of what it attempts, I can’t shake the feeling that there’s a dimension missing.

In Bloom feels, more than anything else, like a war movie.

Everything dissipates in such a spectacularly unsatisfying fashion that you might wonder if you dreamed the whole thing.

Apostle is ultimately an absorbing, horrifying movie that’s maybe not as smart as it wants to be. But it is a lot stranger, and more disturbing, than you might expect.

All in all, this live-action adaptation works remarkably well — a rare feat.

At times the film seems to struggle to find the right aperture: It hints at elements I wanted to know more about, and occasionally goes into avenues that seem to distract from Pauline’s compelling storyline.

It’s clever but not cute, savage but not depressing, and cartoonish but not asinine.

If we judge these films primarily by the creativity and elaborate absurdity of their death scenes, this latest entry ably expands the palette without messing with the formula.

Fire and Ash is in some ways the messiest of the three Avatar movies, but it’s also the richest, the one in which we most lose ourselves, the one that makes us wonder about these characters and constantly peer into those rapturous backgrounds, trying to see forever.

The Secret Life of Pets is an ADD-addled mess of a movie — and that, amazingly, is its charm.

The new Russian horror film Sputnik whipsaws between suggested horror and schlock so furiously that it turns inconsistency into a virtue. It’s a creepy chamber drama that morphs regularly into an effects-laden ick-fest. But transformation is in the film’s DNA.

The problem with Peter Pan & Wendy is all too often one of subtraction, not reinvention. You can almost read the tsk-tsking studio notes as you watch the movie.

You might go nuts trying to figure out exactly how anything works in this movie. But in the right hands, this can be a strength too. It certainly enhances the overall sense of dread, since we’re now in a world whose rules haven’t been clearly defined.

It is an uncompromising work that will make many viewers frustrated and even furious. I adored pretty much every single glorious, gorgeous goddamn minute of it.

Novelist-turned-director Leigh's dryly efficient style is perched between the matter-of-fact and the impossibly arty.

The picture’s surface austerity and simplicity have a crystallizing effect, drawing our attention to the coldhearted, transactional nature of this world.

Mohan seduces us with form while the central performance engages us on a more elemental level.

It's not bad, exactly; the songs are catchy, the cameos are okay, and some of the jokes work fine. Set your expectations super-low, and you'll probably be fine.

This film feels like a pile of prefab story ideas occasionally enlivened by brief flashes of earnestness and invention.

Karia’s film is uneven, but, as with its aforementioned staging of “To be or not to be,” it tosses enough new ideas around to keep us watching.

In the details, Blue Beetle comes alive — in the warmth with which the Reyes family is depicted, for example, or in Jaime’s utter cluelessness as he tries to control his newfound powers. Maridueña conveys the overwhelmed young hero’s anxiety with real charisma; the more helpless he is, the more we like him.

The way the narrative starts and stops and doubles back mirrors the characters’ own confusion. We try to make sense of the story along with them — who did what, said what, when, and what did it really mean.

Scream 6 does distinguish itself in the horror set pieces. Directors Matt Bettinelli-Olpin and Tyler Gillett (who also made the previous entry) clearly grasp that these movies are, at their best, mean.

There is absolutely nothing original in Scary Stories to Tell in the Dark, which just goes to show that you don’t need originality to be effective.

Bad Trip might be a dumb, gross candid-camera comedy, but don’t be surprised if it makes you feel a little better about your world.

Kingsman is full of elaborately orchestrated violence and acrobatic stunt work, shot in fast, sinewy, CGI-enhanced long takes that push and pull our perspective this way and that. It’s all very silly and not really meant to be taken seriously, but as the story gets more and more brutal, something strange happens: We start to care for these cartoonish characters and this absurd scenario.

It skips the florid romanticism, the thick atmosphere, the grand mythmaking, opting instead for a breezy, silly modesty. It’s fun, ridiculous, and deliriously violent in its own right.

Saturday Night might not be factually accurate, but it feels spiritually true.

The glue that should turn these individual moments into something resembling a unified cinematic experience just isn’t there. The Commune feels like fragments of a far more interesting film, haphazardly stitched together.

For all its charm, Anora is a movie in which just about everybody’s fighting for survival, and they only ever manage to succeed when they start working together.

For all its airy lightness and apparent simplicity, it’s hard not to watch Claire’s Camera and sense beneath its placid surfaces the fretful voice of a filmmaker who longs to return to the elements of his art.

The hoops our heroes jump through become increasingly surreal and hilarious.

Trumbo is a film that at times can’t seem to decide what it wants to be. At its worst, it’s musty and awkward; at its best, it’s irreverent and funny. Unfortunately, it settles for the former more than the latter.

Allied doesn’t deliver any particularly shocking twists or turns; the real surprise here is how much a well-told, well-acted tale can still resonate.

This new Scream is so determined to be a Scream movie that it forgets the primary, unstated rule established by the original Scream: You can sell anything to us, so long as you make it scary.

As seen in the film’s terrifying opening and its gruesome climax, Avery deftly orchestrates some grisly, intense set pieces. He delivers on the thrills, even if the story leaves something to be desired.

Some might want to leave the theater and file a lawsuit. I stayed and laughed. It’s funny because it’s abominable.

Once everything finally collides in The Whale, something shattering and beautiful and honest emerges.

For all of R’s allegedly humorous observations about the wasteland of the undead through which he walks, they feel tacked on — like somebody decided to turn this thing into a comedy at the last second.

I walked away from this picture both moved and confused. Because it’s got Colin Firth and Rachel Weisz in top form, The Mercy nails the emotion, but comes up somewhat short as a narrative.

It comes by its emotions honestly and wins you over.

Christopher Robin preaches a return to childhood exuberance and frivolity, but its quiet, focused restraint often feels like it’s coming from a very different impulse — an old-world professionalism and humility. It’s a grown-up sensibility applied to a child’s tale, which makes for an occasionally endearing mixture. In today’s world, I’ll take it.

The American Meme can be fun, even informative, but there’s a bigger story here, and Marcus mostly fails to tell it.

Three Thousand Years of Longing is indeed a cautionary tale, but it’s a complex, beautiful one, suggesting that love, longing, and loss are all parts of a vast, wondrous life.

The cluttered story and the shifts in form might lose you from time to time, but the film conjures some genuinely powerful emotions.

Sea Fever teases out elemental anxieties that have been given fresh life by unfortunate reality, but the movie is worth seeing because, when all’s said and done, it gives us characters and circumstances we can care about.

The movie version of Goosebumps replicates that balancing act. It’s a cheerful, nasty delight.

Watching Big Nick get a little lost in a boozy dream of abandon, an ocean away from his troubles, we understand him better than we understand most of today’s movie heroes.

Taking pretty much every rom-com trope and distilling it into highly concentrated ridiculousness, Wain’s film is both a takedown and a tribute: As with his summer-camp-movie spoof "Wet Hot American Summer," you walk away with a renewed love for the genre.

Isn’t It Romantic has plenty of fun toying with various familiar elements and sensibilities, but its deconstructions also feel like resurrections.

Mitchell has interesting ideas, and his actors seem to be having fun, but that’s not enough when the film itself lacks atmosphere, or tension, or emotional engagement.

At its best, Hobbs & Shaw offers a refreshing antidote to the bloat. I’d rather watch another one of these than sit through one more Vin Diesel speech about family.

If Life of Crime transcends its lightheartedness to actually make us care for what happens to its characters, it doesn’t quite transcend its own haphazard, impoverished story.

Hateship Loveship is in no way a comedy, but Wiig's enormous presence threatens to make it so. She can't disappear into the void, so the drama onscreen becomes hard to take seriously.

I never really bought the onscreen relationship in We Live in Time, in part because I could constantly feel the movie trying too hard. The love story is syrupy, and the tragedy even more syrupy.

The Best Man Holiday is an inelegant movie, but its cast is so damn likable that we’re still willing to follow them — even when they’re not going anywhere.

Rarely have I seen a horror-comedy as joyless as Little Monsters. Which feels like a weird (and sad) thing to say, because rarely have I seen a horror-comedy that is also so insistent in its humor, so determined to try and entertain me, as Little Monsters. It’s fast, loud, and impossibly shrill — except when it quiets down, which is when it briefly, belatedly comes to life.

The Hobbit: The Battle of the Five Armies feels thoroughly inconsequential — a bloated, portentous mess that, in a just world, should not exist.

It’s a half-assed premise, given a half-assed treatment that makes Wayne’s World look like The Treasure of the Sierra Madre. The performances are loose and self-aware, the filmmaking strictly at the level of sketch comedy, the jokes amiably predictable, and the story a mess.

The problem with Godzilla vs. Kong is that the filmmakers seem to think they’re delivering characters and human drama when all they’re doing is irritating the shit out of us.

For all its breeziness, No Hard Feelings stays with you because its central dynamic feels so surprisingly honest.

Mr. Peabody & Sherman is slight, but it’s exceedingly charming, making good use of a talented voice cast.

At its best, the film gives us a sincere look at the creative process and reveals it to be a sad, scary, at times uncontrollable and destructive thing. Just for that alone, it’s worth seeing.

Structurally, there’s little that’s new in Suntan. The tale of a middle-aged man delusionally pursuing youth and beauty reaches back to Thomas Mann and beyond. But Papadimitropoulos has a feel for the physicality of this world, for contrasting postures and gestures.

Most of The Dead Lands, in fact, adheres to a fairly simple action film template. But the dynamic between the characters works because Fraser keeps it tough.

Every decade or so, Godard’s film is revered all over again for everything it got right about the future. But for all its influence, Alphaville still looks and feels like no other movie. More than a prophecy, it is poetry.

The main danger with these types of movies is that all the fighting and shooting and snapping and stabbing and exploding will feel predictable or anonymous in a universe where action movies have become mere background noise. Tjahjanto infuses just enough creativity in his set pieces to keep us watching.

This is, indeed, a somewhat kinder, gentler Bad Boys: less proudly offensive, less extravagant, but still basically the same collection of stylish clichés made palatable by a duo of likable stars with good chemistry.

For all the limitations of its setting and palette, this is a gorgeous, visually exciting movie.

Jodorowsky’s fondness for the surreal and grotesque is in full evidence here. What makes his films so captivating, however, isn’t their strangeness, but their refusal to divide the world into good and bad, even when it’s easy to do so.

In the end, What If belongs to Zoe Kazan. And both she and it are wonderful.

What Primate lacks in terms of narrative complication, it makes up for with cinematic smarts, as director Roberts ably uses form to build suspense, conveying plot points via images instead of dialogue and refreshingly avoiding the usual jump-scare clichés.

Perhaps the film’s most telling part comes during the deep dives themselves. When Cameron finds himself alone in his submersible, crammed into a little turret from which he can watch and film the world around him, the bravado fades away, and he becomes a little kid again.

Cinematically speaking, this is all low-hanging fruit. Maybe such unimaginative choices wouldn’t stand out so much if Huppert were herself not such an inventive and riveting performer. She is, and Mama Weed doesn’t really deserve her.

Directors Dan Berk and Robert Olsen take this dumb-clever, fake-movie-science idea and run with it as hard and as fast as they can in one straight direction, using Nate’s condition as an excuse for pure, unchecked mayhem.

This film really doesn’t know what to do with itself, except to show us the difference between Jerry’s happy world and his dark world as if it’s some kind of revelation; it’s the one move the film has, and it does it over and over again.

It’s an inviting, approachable world that Murdoch creates for us — still a total fantasy, of course, but one with a veneer of plausibility. Get on its wavelength, and you’ll be utterly charmed. Don’t, and you’ll run screaming from the theater.

On the evidence of the first half of Baskin alone, Evrenol seems to be a filmmaker who understands character, tension, and terror. Now all he needs is some follow-through.

A well-crafted family flick that gets the job done, then gets out of the way.

Beneath the goofy plot, the tacky fashions, the fronting rappers, and the exploding bodies, there’s an undeniable earnestness to Tokyo Tribe. It’s the craziest film you’ll see this year, but it’s also — dear God, am I really saying this? — one of the sweetest.

Even when it comes to life, Jason Bourne offers very little that could stand on its own; its best scenes remind you of even better ones in the earlier films. There's a greatest-hits quality to the movie, only the band is tired and its heart isn't in it.

One of the pleasures of afterlife movies is the leaps taken visually, but Eternity looks hopelessly mundane. Still, the actors are game, and that’s half the battle.

The Highwaymen never quite manages to conjure a changing world, and as a result its more interesting ideas are left blowing in the wind. But as an excuse to spend some time with Kevin Costner and Woody Harrelson doing what Kevin Costner and Woody Harrelson do, it’ll do just fine.

The House of Tomorrow sticks to a time-tested coming-of-age template that’s as common in the indie world as the superhero origin story is in the studio world. But there’s good news, too: When it’s not busy hitting the usual notes, Peter Livolsi’s film, which is based on a novel by Peter Bognanni, manages to be a touching exploration of what “tomorrow” actually means.

As much as its premise may sound like the start of a bad joke, Peter Ramsey's movie preserves just enough genuine childhood wonder in its whooshing, high-tech theatrics to make it a delight.

As a director, he’s always been more about conjuring a mood than telling a story, about immersion rather than suspense. Filled with large, empty rooms, great blank stretches of barren landscape, and forlorn glimpses of the lonely vastness of space, The Midnight Sky is a movie you’re supposed to lose yourself in, at least a little bit. And on a small screen — even on a really big small screen — that’s practically impossible.

Days of Grace is strong, brutal, despairing stuff. It’s also somewhat anticlimactic, by design.

Now, approaching twilight, Eastwood has stripped everything down to its essentials. The picture doesn’t always work, but it works when it has to. It’s a fragile enterprise — lovely to bask in, but liable to fall apart if you stare too hard.

Stone seems genuinely interested in the slow and steady process by which Edward Snowden came to distrust the government that he worked for, and the director has made a slow and steady movie to go with it.

The Antenna works first and foremost as a thriller that delivers its share of unsettling, upsetting images and scenarios — even if it doesn’t always seem to make a whole lot of sense or follow a clear narrative trajectory.

Tykwer sublimates what Eggers made explicit: the joblessness, the debt, the isolation. He knows the power of an image, a gesture, a brief exchange, so he captures those social themes in flashes, which ironically gives them new power.

The pressures of the untamed setting, combined with the inability of these characters to ever trust each other, results in an over-the-top melodrama that gets loopier as it goes on. But it pulls us along, too.

Jumanji: The Next Level, represents the version we might have dreaded, the tired and only modestly funny one that just coasts on its proved, no-longer-novel premise.

While The Cat Rescuers movingly portrays the unique individuals committed to helping these cats, it doesn’t quite tackle the full complexity of this subject. Still, no animal lover should be surprised to find themselves holding back tears while watching this documentary.

It’s a pageant, as they say — a bunch of cameos and funny situations all sort of held together with a bare bones plot and some nods to the Christmas spirit.

After a while, the film feels more like a cute conceit that hasn’t really been developed further. It’s intriguing, and very well-acted, but empty.

If Monday succeeds as a compelling drama — and, for all the clichés of its story, it does mostly succeed — it’s because Papadimitropoulos and his actors capture the intoxication of new love, as well as the slow-burn agony of the psychological combat that often ensues, with all the small skirmishes and victories and defeats that slowly pick away at a relationship.

The damn thing is fun. Mangold may not have the young Spielberg’s musical flair for extravagant action choreography (who does?), but he is a tougher, leaner director, using a tighter frame and keeping his camera close.

Wicked: For Good is shorter than the first film and, while it might be a step back in terms of spectacle, it’s a leap forward in (go ahead, laugh) subtlety and emotion. My audience was audibly sobbing by the end.

Director Chaney clearly has a lot of skill and talent. But for all of Rabbit Trap’s technical accomplishments, it’s very hard to be frightened or moved by something that never stops feeling like an exercise in style.

It’s all quite gorgeous, and surprisingly moving. The Wedding Guest shows just how much you can do with a wisp of a story and a whole lot of cinematic vision.

It starts off great. But then it goes on. And on. And on. And takes itself ever more seriously at each turn. By the end, any buoyancy has disappeared into a familiar wasteland piled high with corpses and exploding heads.

The film itself is uneven, but it’s kind of awesome seeing Bateman act so vile.

Instant Family is a surprisingly foul-mouthed, filled-to-bursting roller coaster of a comedy-melodrama that tosses you in eight different directions before leaving you a teary, conflicted mess. And when it works, it’s genuinely funny and moving. But when it doesn’t, hoo boy, it’s atrocious.

The Maze Runner only answers some of the questions it so marvelously sets up. And while I probably now know too much about the story for it to work a similar magic next time, I find myself genuinely anticipating the next one.

There are many elements that make The Fall Guy enormous fun, but what makes it genuinely artful is the way that Leitch and his team (including writer Drew Pearce and stunt coordinator Chris O’Hara) have conceived the film’s stunts as extensions of the characters.

Cold Pursuit ultimately winds up being about how unsatisfying films like Cold Pursuit can be.

Despite the ticking clock of Finch’s rapidly progressing illness, the movie doesn’t build up much urgency or excitement. The script is pretty thin, almost all premise and little incident. But director Miguel Sapochnik has the eye to make this world compellingly hostile and bleak, and that counts for something.

Wrath of Man could have been salvaged had it delivered on some decent action sequences, but once such sequences come, they tend to be either lifeless or unintelligible or both.

You don’t have to believe in divine intervention to be moved by this story.

The pitch-black and paper-thin Galveston not only fails to find a way to reinvent, or at least refresh, that old tired idea, it also piles a few more tired ideas on top of it.

This is a deceptively weird movie. There’s always been an immediacy to Jacquot’s visual style; he likes to follow his characters closely, and he gets performances that are energetic but quiet.

All the technological marvels of the world can’t breathe life into a film that doesn’t know what it wants to be.

For all its efforts at wild humor, The Rise of Gru never quite builds up a comic head of steam. It’s filled with laugh lines, but they feel like placeholders — a lot of middling bits about the time period plus a tired assortment of anachronisms.

Showing the allure and gradual corruption of power through the eyes of a third party — sort of a mixture of "The Great Gatsby" and "Scarface" — is a solid conceit. But Andrea Di Stefano’s underbaked film doesn’t quite know what to do with it.

No matter how much they remind us that this is all based on a true story, at heart Tag is still a dumb, goofy Hollywood comedy with big stars running around making glorious asses of themselves. It’d be a pretty good one, too, were it not so afraid to embrace its essence.

Million Dollar Arm is cute, cloying, simplistic, borderline offensive … and thoroughly effective.

The Sonic movies have built their success on mixing light doses of Gen-X nostalgia with shiny, sparkly, speedy CGI action, and this new entry has that in spades. But for all their swiftness, the fights and chases in these pictures tend to have a predetermined quality; it can sometimes feel like watching someone else play a video game. That’s why giving the characters some shading helps.