Bilge Ebiri

It’s both thin and overstuffed, filled with intricate, at times dazzling set-pieces peopled by characters we don’t care about, and an irreverent sense of fun that nevertheless leaves us cold. It tries so hard… and ultimately achieves so little.

Still, for a film that could have easily become bogged down in Sunday School reverence, or culture-war opportunism, Risen presents an intriguing, oblique approach to a Bible movie.

As Jesse Owens, [James] mixes confidence, bewilderment, and subdued rage into a powerful whole. It’s not a big, show-offy performance. Quite the contrary: He’s surprisingly quiet, watchful. Everything seems to be submerged, but still present.

Mermaid is a very, very funny movie, but its caustic swipes at China’s nouveau riche, combined with its despairing look at the devastation of the country’s environment, suggest a filmmaker trying to find ways to reconcile his buoyant sense of fun with deeper, darker themes.

By the time its finale rolls around, The Choice has completely undone its own spell.

Perhaps a story like this needed to be a drama. Or maybe, with its constant, almost comical shifting of blame, a dark satire. Instead, it’s wound up as the worst of all possible alternatives: a disposable genre movie that cannot scare, convince, or enlighten.

It’s occasionally beautiful, but just as often stomach-turning. You watch it at a remove, but still with a dull combination of pity and horror and regret. Maybe that’s the idea. For a brief, agonizing moment, you share the spiritual quicksand with these disgraced men.

Yoga Hosers is the best film Kevin Smith has made in a long time, which admittedly isn’t saying much. But this new cult comedy-thriller may well represent a turning point for the writer-director.

Sing Street is far more boisterous and certainly funnier than Once, but it remains in a minor key; “finding happiness in sadness,” is how one character puts it.

The earnest enthusiasm with which Operation Avalanche begins, and the paranoia and fear toward which it proceeds, chart the course of an entire nation.

It confronts, but it doesn’t exploit. It’s about one of the most horrifying events of recent years, and yet it’s defined by its austerity, its sense of quiet. It is as much about the complex, dull horror of memory as it is about the brute, sharp horror of that day.

This understated, generous film quietly sneaks up on you.

It's a beautiful, reflective film even as it is also a brutal, visceral one.

Monster Hunt is not a movie that aims for narrative dexterity, or subtlety, or grace. It’s a blunt, bloated object, designed to bludgeon us with silly action and broad humor.

Lonergan is the master of taking a scene that starts off as something familiar, then sending it spinning off in another direction, and then pulling back at just the right moment, as the viewer’s imagination hurtles ahead to fill in the gaps.

Like much of Romanian cinema, Aferim!’s narrative and stylistic gambit doesn’t quite click until the final scenes.

For all the goodwill generated by its early scenes, by the time The 5th Wave lumbers to its conclusion, you realize you’re not watching a movie but an act of crisis management.

There’s a lot of good stuff here, but the movie often seems more interested in ennobling rather than dramatizing.

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

Uninterested in competing on the bromance front, or even on the action-thriller front, this new Point Break often plays like an extreme-sports documentary with bits of narrative interstitials to carry us along.

Everything appears to have been thrown together with little attention paid to how it might all work together.

Ride Along 2, which picks up not long after the first film ended, doesn’t mess much with the formula, except that everything feels more frayed and tired this time around.

The concept promises us a melancholy kind of dread, and there are bits and pieces throughout of the movie The Forest could have been. But any compelling sense of unease is ultimately undone as the film gradually settles for tedious schlock.

By the time the film works up to its finale, what secrets it wants to reveal to us have become fairly obvious. But they still carry a dark charge; Diablo’s ultimate grisliness is impressive in its own way. And it might have worked, had the film not asked entirely too much of its young lead.

Drolly funny and rigorously executed, Corneliu Porumboui’s The Treasure offers a fine example of the conceptual boldness that characterizes much of New Wave Romanian cinema.

Ferrell and Wahlberg previously paired up in "The Other Guys", one of the great comedies of the millennium, but put aside any expectation that their latest collaboration might even come close to that sublime masterpiece.

In the Heart of the Sea isn’t a bad film, necessarily. It has some genuinely effective passages in its first half, and Howard is nothing if not a dutiful, check-the-boxes kind of director. But a story like this – one of horror and madness, which helped give birth to an ornate masterpiece of obsession – needs to go a little crazy. And this director doesn’t do crazy.

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

The film remains grounded in the elemental, the practical, and the real. That’s not to say it isn't beautiful.

Of Men and War’s compassion is matched only by its relentlessness.

Jessie Nelson’s film sells itself well. There’s care in the details, and the characters often feel like actual people.

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.

It’s a cop movie that’s largely uninterested in cops, crimes, or criminals. And yet, despite all that, the film is at times an effective, evocative mood piece. The funereal pall of sorrow that hangs over everything these characters do has a strange, surprising pull.

A catastrophic miscalculation of a movie, Victor Frankenstein is a perfect example of a Hollywood revision that, in trying to outsmart an original, reveals what worked about said original in the first place.

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.

It truly is a movie about politics, and it’s among the more mesmerizing ones you’ll see — even if you know very little about Zimbabwe itself.

Goodnight Mommy is a very disquieting, very suspenseful film, but proceed with caution.

Mustang breathes new life into the old trope by reconnecting it with the elemental horror that drives it. These aren’t just body snatchers; they take your soul, too.

Hardy, it seems, is an ecosystem of love and hate and betrayal and madness unto himself. The rest of Legend just can’t keep up.

You keep watching not just because she and Brad and the Mediterranean are beautiful, but also because small, surprising details start to take on great importance.

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.

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.

The gags are mostly puerile and uninspired — like the film was dreamed up by a bunch of tired, wired 13-year-olds; it has their insistence but little of their invention.

Far beyond the courage of its convictions, The Armor of Light also has the intelligence and grace to embrace its contradictions. It’s a beautiful, conflicted piece of work.

This is not a rich, novelistic tapestry of humanity; this is a solipsistic world, enclosed on all sides by the director’s ego. But the entrapment is vivid and poignant. Look past all the beautiful people fucking, and you realize that Love is sad in all the right ways.

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.

For all of (T)error’s topicality and its thriller-like qualities, what makes the film is Sutcliffe and Cabral’s compact, complex portrait of Saeed — paranoid, chatty, mired in self-loathing, but also oddly reflective.

The Forbidden Room is often maddening, occasionally beautiful, and ultimately unforgettable.

A misguided attempt to mix together social realism, children’s adventure, and political thriller, Stephen Daldry’s Trash never sits still long enough to be any of those things.

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

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.

Bone Tomahawk is terrifying and strange, to be sure, but it’s the old-fashioned veneer that makes it beautiful.

If only Ghost Dimension spent more time in the ghost dimension and less time in the people dimension, we might have had something.

Watching The Last Witch Hunter is like sitting by while someone else plays a game whose coolness eludes us.

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

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

Careens helplessly between the garish and the generic.

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

Taxi is a strange movie. These are nonprofessional actors, and the film veers between documentary realism and playful staginess.

Perhaps seeking not to sensationalize or to Hollywood-ize a story set in a drab, mundane world, Sollett shoots without any frills. That’s usually a good thing, but here it helps to suck the life out of the material — in part because Nyswaner’s screenplay seems to have settled for the most direct, speechifying way of dramatizing the issues at hand.

Hotel Transylvania 2 is minor, to be sure, but given the comedian’s recent work, it still counts as a pleasant surprise.

It’s a tale of class privilege gone wrong, the relentless hunger for fame, stoic mourning and submerged family neuroses, and the crazy contortions caused by money and ownership. In 82 svelte minutes, Finders Keepers encapsulates something ineffable about the modern American experience.

A film that turns on this kind of ambiguity would ordinarily be cold, grim, paranoid. But Boden and Fleck give this world texture and warmth; their widescreen interiors glow, and it’s hard not to be lulled into them by the siren song of conversation and clinking drinks and possibility.

The Intern degenerates into a series of monologues about ambition and relationships and having it all. As the speeches pile up, our goodwill dissipates, and so does the film’s magic.

Unfortunately, Roland Emmerich is a terrible filmmaker, and his efforts to make his protagonist "relatable" backfire spectacularly.

At times, I found myself wishing Berg focused more on Brower and Krakauer’s investigations and given the film a more present-tense narrative. This is a fascinating movie, but there’s a lot to cover here, and one can occasionally feel lost amid all the strands.

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

You’re left with no real catharsis — religious or emotional. And without that, Captive winds up building to a big nothing.

The Scorch Trials isn’t a particularly good movie, but it’s just fast and nutty enough to keep you entertained.

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.

Welcome to Leith is a sober, terrifying look at the very real monsters roaming the quiet countryside.

Coming Home works best on a more lived-in, emotional level. It presents a trajectory not uncommon in Zhang's films: a journey from howling passion to somber, almost tragic acceptance.

The kind of movie you keep wishing would just cut loose and go off the deep end. Nobody goes to these "Fatal Attraction" retreads anymore for serious drama. But this one is a movie torn — too grim and self-important to go truly nuts, but too silly and slipshod to work on a more somber level.

James White looks like a simple film on its surface.... But despite the vérité-influenced stylization, writer-director Mond (whose own struggle with loss likely inspired some of this story) doesn’t seem too interested in realism or grit.

Sinister 2 is far from perfect, but it has a nobility that’s rare in much modern horror cinema.

Hitman: Agent 47, much like its anonymous title, is a film pretending to be an action movie instead of the real thing. It might as well be a commercial. Or, hell, a video game.

One of the very best American independent films you’ll see this year, John Magary’s The Mend, takes what could have easily been a mundane tale of brotherly dysfunction and turns it into something abstract and electrifying.

Queen of Earth is a psychodrama shot like a horror movie — "Persona" meets "The Shining." Right down to the haunting, minimalist score (by Keegan DeWitt) that’s perched dangerously, wonderfully between spooky and lyrical.

It’s a drama, and it smartly uses its little moments of humiliation to open our eyes to a world of delicate, but deep, injustice.

The lax, lame A Walk in the Woods is a road movie without a road, a journey of self-discovery without discovery, and a tale of friendship without any chemistry.

Don’t expect incendiary topicality from The Golden Dream; this is more poetry than politics.

No doubt, Black Panthers won’t be for everybody. Despite Nelson’s efforts at balance, this is a largely admiring portrait, and there will be those who wish the film focused more on the Panthers’ less savory actions and cases. But the film is also refreshingly clearheaded about the limits of idealism and provocative action.

Stupid, stupid, stupid — and it certainly knows it. You might even chuckle contentedly at its knowing silliness — that’s sort of what this low-rent franchise is here for — but you’ll also miss Jason Statham, whose deadpan self-awareness somehow legitimized the ridiculousness of the previous films.

It’s just plain offensive — and not all that well made, either. No Escape takes the casual xenophobia of something like Taken, crossbreeds it with something altogether more noxious, then asks us to kick back and enjoy the ride. We don’t. We can’t. And the ride isn’t that great to begin with.

It’s all big, dumb, broad strokes, with plot points visible from miles away. But it works where it matters: The music is fantastic, and the film invests you in its central relationship.

She’s Funny That Way often displays an old-school generosity and polish, and at least one breakout performance — but just as often, its moments of inspiration are tempered by miscasting and shrill attempts at humor.

Look past its colorful, smooth surfaces and something corrosive emerges. And it’s not like the film isn’t aware of this. But it doesn’t really know what to do with it.

“He’s probably the only man in history who has become famous for trying to kill himself,” says Johnny Carson as he introduces Knievel in a clip from The Tonight Show. As the film makes clear, Evel often bore out that tension in his acts, and it slowly, subtly ate away at him.

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.

We know these characters are going through a lot, even if we don’t always see it. And so, this short, ramshackle, shrinking movie manages to stick with you.

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.

As a result, the mystery itself eventually becomes tiresome and shrug-worthy, even as the film breathlessly racks up the revelations. In the end, this twisty thriller just winds up twisting in the wind.

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

The first thing to know about The Diary of a Teenage Girl is that young British actress Powley is staggeringly good in it.

Shaun the Sheep might look like an exciting, no-nonsense tale for little kids — and it totally is, on one level — but beneath its pitch-perfect simplicity lies great wisdom and beauty.

Given the level of talent involved both in front of and behind the camera, nobody should feel much joy — no anti-tentpole schadenfreude or blockbuster-busting righteousness — to discover that the latest Fantastic Four film is a catastrophe

Lapid’s thrilling use of the camera, the way his unbalanced frame and his imaginative staging work with the precision of his story, results in something new and genuinely unnerving.

Robert Gordon and Morgan Neville’s masterful Best of Enemies leaves you with an overwhelming sense of despair. It’s not just a great documentary, it’s a vital one.

Vacation is lazy, idiotic, and gross — and I laughed my ass off at it.

Smulders’s performance makes Unexpected more than worthwhile.

A tired, unscary, incoherent mess.

The result isn’t an all-the-feels, drown-us-in-tears kind of experience, but something rooted in wisdom and clarity. It’s the rare movie that can sacrifice the clean lines of fantasy and melodrama for the messiness of ordinary life — that neither burnishes nor condemns the up-down turmoil of the teenage soul, but rather lets it be.

A movie like Pixels should be stupid and energetic, not stupid and lifeless.

This small, grim documentary about Indonesia is actually a bigger and grimmer movie about all of us — our capacity for both breathtaking evil and, occasionally, profound bravery.

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.

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

Lila & Eve is an awkward movie, though sometimes by design.

Boulevard is a sad, hesitant little movie about a sad, hesitant little man. That may be a far cry from the Robin Williams roles we knew and loved, but it’s not a bad one on which to go out.

Eventually, you start to wonder if the movie forgot to take its own pills: What starts out as an interesting exploration of identity soon gives way to the uninspired, generic action flick we had feared it always was.

Somehow, gradually, this intimate documentary portrait of one very unique person starts to take on the qualities of a national epic. Through the eyes of this man, we start to see our own country in a different light.

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.

This underdeveloped romance seems to be lacking an act, or two, or maybe even three. But it’s filled with such great music that the emotions are there regardless. Not unlike "Once," the movie itself feels like an excuse for the music. And as with "Once," that’s not always a bad thing.

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.

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.

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 trouble is, lazy, opportunistic writing can be distracting in its own way, and there’s way too much of it in Ted 2 to fully ignore.

The film does occasionally show a pulse when it tries to reimagine the life of the victim — it turns the tables on the mystery and tries to become a film about love and life instead of doom and death. But it’s too little, too late, and too lame.

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.

There’s a powerful austerity to Manglehorn the man’s tale that Manglehorn the film itself — well acted and touching though it often is — doesn’t quite match.

The Tribe is a harrowing, corrosive film, but there’s great, urgent beauty in it.

Look closely and you may see that this madame is alive in all sorts of ways. At least for its first half, this is a textured, haunted, remarkably empathetic film.

It’s too cursory, too frivolous to make a case for the show’s importance as an American institution, even though it insists on it.

Based on a novel by Marco Franzoso, Hungry Hearts is a riveting, relentless film. It may also be an infuriating one, and not always in a good way.

This is so often the problem with this genre — scary setups, followed by dopey resolutions — that you sort of want to give the movie a pass. But given its distinguished forebears, Insidious: Chapter 3 doesn’t quite live up to expectations.

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

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.

Lafleur’s film is a quiet trifle that sneaks up on you, like a pleasant dream you might have and then gradually forget. Its very slightness is its greatest weapon.

The film arrives with both too much and too little to say. It comes at us in choppy bursts of brilliance and dopiness. That is at once its great charm and its great curse.

I found myself often enraptured by this sad little story. Its weird narrative of faith healing serves as an intriguing diversion from the real matter at hand — the notion that grace lies in the search for help, rather than the finding of it.

No. Nope. Uh-uh.

When Marnie Was There may start off a bit awkwardly, but it'll have you bathing in your own tears by the time it's over.

If you’re going to remake Poltergeist without the whole TV angle, "Insidious" already kind of did that. To be fair, this new Poltergeist isn’t anything special, either. But it’s not a travesty, and that feels like cause for brief celebration.

A mixture of mild pleasures and deep disappointments.

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

What makes it work is the solemn efficiency of director David Oelhoffen’s storytelling and the quiet intensity of the two leads.

Welcome to Me might as well have been called The Kristen Wiig Show, for better or for worse. It makes a splendid showcase for the brilliant actress’s brand of mousy absurdism, and for her ability to modulate tone. The film dances between hilarity and disquiet, between goofiness and pathos. But I’m not even sure it can be called a movie; it feels like a setup and a character in search of a story.

If only Crowe brought the same subtlety to his direction that he brings to his performance.

The Age of Adaline, for its part, delivers the twists and turns of its fantastical plot with elegance and confidence. Here, the weak romance threatens to bring everything down.

Fun, touching, and expertly assembled.

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.

A story this dense with incident, character, and history needs to breathe a little — think "The Lives of Others," or "Zodiac" — but Child 44 has no rhythm. It’s blunt, rushed, and scattershot. You're exhausted, bored, and confused by it at the same time.

Nobody was expecting much from Paul Blart: Mall Cop 2, but did it have to be this unimaginative and lifeless?

It may not quite have the explosive charm of some of the classics, but Black Souls is an elegant, unsettling addition to the gangster-movie canon. Get on its unique wavelength, and you may find it transfixing.

The Longest Ride is actually one of the more competent Sparks films in some years — a far cry from the creaky noir of "Safe Haven," the awkwardly backloaded melodrama of "The Best of Me," or the phony brooding of "The Lucky One." It goes down smoothly, if blandly, like an air-flavored milkshake.

This twisty-turny film seems too enamored of its twisty-turniness to give us characters we can latch onto.

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.

Fanning’s controlled presence is ideal for a tale of Victorian repression. But as the film becomes one of quiet liberation, it needs more than her cool reserve. It needs passion — even if it’s of the slow-boiling kind — and I’m not sure that’s there.

It’s great not just because we’re eavesdropping on two rock survivors, but also because we’re seeing, in these living legends, the handiwork of the two unsung men to whom this film pays tribute.

It’s a fascinating meeting of three minds, and perspectives. Chief among them is Salgado himself.

This is not the kind of material for a stately biopic or a political drama. This is nasty, strange business — perfect for Ferrara, whose work often hovers between art and exploitation, between angst and sleaze.

The real problem is that Get Hard’s very idea of edge is itself pretty stale. It feels like a bunch of off-color jokes the filmmakers have been trying to tell for years, and they’ve crammed them all into one film — with tiresome results.

A surprisingly moving tale of friendship and family, dressed up as an adorably frivolous sci-fi comedy.

If Slow West never quite settles on a tone to call its own, it does still offer many pleasures. Fassbender and Smit-McPhee are excellent — the boy's outward bewilderment and unpreparedness play off well against the cowboy’s ragged, stone-faced charisma.

Jauja is a rapturously bizarre movie that resists knowledge. That’s its secret, intoxicating power; the less you understand, the more mesmerized you are.

It’s something of a catastrophe.

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.

The Gunman passes the time, but it never quite reconciles its conflicted nature. It’s not smart enough to be a paranoid thriller, nor fun enough to be a blood-soaked action flick.

Throughout The Cobbler, Sandler himself seems more invested than he’s been for a long time. But the rest of this ghastly movie lets him down.

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.

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.

Sort of a Flatliners for the sensitive indie-actor set, The Lazarus Effect is a grimy, dopey, confused thriller that wastes a very likable cast.

Whenever the film focuses on Gary, it’s O’Connell’s show. And the actor’s ability to quietly express a whole range of emotions with his body language and his eyes, is staggering — especially since, for much of the film, he’s limping and covered in blood.

With this cast, and such a vivid sense of play, Results manages, in its own subtle, unassuming way, to reinvent the rom-com. It’s enchanting.

It tries to repeat everything the original did, and winds up leaving you stone-faced and depressed. I think there were more laughs in Schindler’s List.

It comes by its emotions honestly and wins you over.

Wit and charm matter, and The DUFF has a good deal of both. The cast will be stars, the gags will be immortal, and you’ll still be watching this movie years from now.

It’s a genre-bending mash-up, a non-vampire vampire movie about class, race, love, and cruelty. It consciously seeks to marry its diverse influences in an attempt to present something between schlock and art house, between passionate gore and urbane chill. It contains multitudes, and not always all that well.

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.

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.

Seventh Son not only offers no new spin on its bland, by-the-numbers story, it also fails to deliver any generic pleasures; I’m not sure this movie could even keep a young child engaged.

Gibney’s a bit like a kid in an exposé-candy store here, and you can sense him trying to cram as much as he can into the film. Good for him: Going Clear is jaw-dropping. You wouldn’t really want it any other way.

[A] haunting, beautiful movie.

The descent into a tepid thriller of sexual jealousy slowly negates the abstract, almost metaphorical quality of this film — and it ultimately undoes the spell cast by that mesmerizing first half.

Dope isn’t perfect — it’s got a couple too many endings, and it loses the romantic subplot for a distressingly long time. But it moves with amazing energy, the dialogue and soundtrack and imagery a constant stream of pop-culture references, in-jokes, and digressions.

The problem with Strange Magic isn’t so much its derivative story as it is the odd, half-complete way it unfolds. You can sense the weird mixture of tones, influences, ideas — as if the whole thing were still in its planning stages.

Paddington is decidedly, proudly unhip. It’s a lovely, endearing chocolate-box of a movie.

A mostly disposable, occasionally quite funny bromance distinguished at times by its earnestness.

Taken 3 is bad enough that it may just end it.

As Li’l Quinquin seesaws between the horrific and the ridiculous, between the playful and profound, between control and chaos, we may find ourselves both frustrated and riveted. Something tells me Bruno Dumont wouldn’t want it any other way.

It’s a dour, drab, dark movie, enlivened by some moderately effective chills in the first half but ultimately undone by its downbeat aimlessness.

Wahlberg grows into the part. He may not be right as a precocious, self-loathing intellectual, but he's very much at home playing a dickhead who's gotten in too deep. And as The Gambler becomes less about its protagonist’s dashed intellectualism and more about the gathering danger of his predicament, the film gains power.

As the spiritual subtext took over, I couldn’t help but feel that something essential had been lost. The state overwhelms the individual; so, too, by the end, does this beautiful, strange movie.

Playing Teddy Roosevelt in these films was nowhere near a highpoint for Williams, but it did speak to his fondness for these CGI-infused kids’ spectacles. His final farewell here is gentle, reflectively and almost unbearably moving. It lends the the film a retroactive grace.

It may not always succeed, but the lovely, perplexing Winter Sleep is a very personal film from one of the world’s foremost filmmakers. It’s well worth your time.

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.

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

As uneven as Ridley Scott’s career; at times, it seems to be a journey through the director’s greatest strengths and weaknesses. The good news is that his strengths eventually win out; the bad news is all the awkward storytelling and botched character interactions we have to wade through to get to the good stuff. Once we do, though, Exodus is a hoot.

All Penguins of Madagascar wants to do is make you laugh at its silliness. It succeeds.

It puts the same characters into a vaguely familiar situation, with diminishing, tepid returns. They should have just called it 2.

A truly strange, wondrous beast. It has the playful humor and charm of a children’s movie, but its design is dark and unsettling.

It’s wonderfully inventive filmmaking: Amirpour’s striking compositions borrow from the iconography of both the Western and the horror film — wide, evocative vistas are intercut with dark, tense city streets where shadowy figures follow one another.

For much of its running time, The Homesman doesn’t quite seem to know where it’s going. But once it actually gets there, it attains a hardscrabble nobility.

Gabe Polsky's ingenious, touching documentary Red Army looks at the other side of this myth, the seemingly faceless, allegedly robotic players who made up the Soviet team. There, Polsky finds a story even more epic and powerful than the Miracle on Ice.

Beyond the Lights is a deft, gorgeous movie. For all its honesty, it’s never slow, and for all its criticism of the music industry, it’s never finger-wagging.

One of the greatest documentaries I’ve ever seen.

It’s a strange spectacle: a horror film that spends as much time dismantling suspense as it does building it.

Therein lies part of the dissonance with this often-wonderful, deceptively strange movie. You could get emotional whiplash watching it.

I’ve now seen Jean-Luc Godard’s latest film twice, and I think I might be one more viewing away from finally being able to say what the hell it’s about. That sounds like a condemnation, but a film you need to see again should be a film you want to see again, and the oblique beauty of Goodbye to Language, shot in 3-D, has a tractor-beam-like pull.

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.

There aren’t too many ingenious new concepts in today’s horror and fantasy films, but I’ll be damned if Horns doesn’t come close, at least at first.

Evocative, gorgeous, occasionally maddening film.

Ouija is confident, meat-and-potatoes horror, and that’s a lot harder to pull off than it sounds.

John Wick is a violent, violent, violent film, but its artful splatter is miles away from the brutality of "Taken" or the gleeful gore of "The Equalizer." It’s a beautiful coffee-table action movie.

The film is called Dear White People, but it might as well be called Dear Everybody. It’s hilarious, and just about everyone will wince with recognition at some point in the film.

Watching Ali and Cole (and, of course, Stewart and Maadi), we find ourselves wishing that they would genuinely get the chance to better understand each other. Do they, by the end? We’re not sure. On that score, Camp X-Ray remains admirably open-ended.

In The Best of Me, the melodrama feels so hurried and half-baked that the end result isn’t just disappointing. It’s borderline infuriating.

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

Magical and melancholy, The Tale of Princess Kaguya comes from the other mad genius of Studio Ghibli, Isao Takahata, who co-founded the beloved Japanese animation company alongside the great Hayao Miyazaki back in 1985.

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’s funny, fast, and charming.

Dracula Untold is a dumb, lowest-common-denominator kind of movie, but it’s a surprisingly entertaining one. It’s brisk, which counts for a lot in this overbaked genre. The action is directed with verve and imagination — and it’s all gorgeously bleak, with black clouds of bats whipping around remote, craggy castles beneath portentous Carpathian skies.

The real problem is that the film doesn't know what to do with its depiction of life in the interconnected age. It’s a nothing movie.

Familiarity is not always a bad thing, though. "The Conjuring" breathed new life into old clichés; it showed that those creaking doors and possessed closets and white-robed figures still had the power to scare us. But that was a movie made with sensitivity and purpose. The blunt, lifeless Annabelle, on the other hand, sucks that life right back out.

Left Behind is biblical in its silliness.

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

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.

It starts off as a mess, yes, but eventually finds itself in a very poignant place. Even a lesser Terry Gilliam film is usually more engaging and invigorating than most of the other movies out there.

Certainly for any fan of Cave’s, 20,000 Days on Earth makes for a creative, enthralling journey through the man’s world.

Tusk is not a particularly good movie, but the vivid anxiety dream at its heart makes it one of the most personal films this writer-director has ever made.

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.

Wingard is also clearly enamored of the synthesized soundtracks of Giallo and John Carpenter films, and here, he turns that into a whole thing, too: A mix Anna makes for David becomes a plot point, giving the director an excuse to practically drench his scenes in dreamy electronica.

This amazing, maddening film presents a series of extended, mostly static, terrifying tableaux of despair, poverty, and decay.

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

It’s certainly not good. But it’s not entirely dire.

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.

It's stocked with clichés, but they're arranged in such weird ways that the end result is both predictable and certifiable. If only any of it actually went somewhere.

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.

There are moments of welcome tension amid the inchoate lunacy, but these in turn merely highlight why the rest of the film doesn’t work.

Appropriately pulpy — fuss-free and fast.

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.

The real-life story behind When the Game Stands Tall sounds amazing. But for all its exciting sports scenes, the movie version falls flat as drama.

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.

As playful as it is, Lenny Abrahamson’s film is mostly a surprisingly earnest story about the compromises and conflicts of art, stardom, and mental illness.

A sad, bad, parade of uninspired cameos and listless violence.

You wind up with a movie that plays like a low-rent "Logan’s Run" crossed with a UNICEF commercial.

Let’s Be Cops has its moments, but it in no way distinguishes itself.

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

The fifth entry in the popular dance-off franchise is, like the others, a fantasia that upends the usual rules of filmmaking. Here, the more threadbare the scenario, and the more unmotivated an action, the better. Character and story just get in the way of all the awesome dancing.

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

Into the Storm is at once one of the dumbest films you'll see this year and one of the scariest.

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.

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.

Ultimately, what comes through most forcefully in The Hundred-Foot Journey is the longing of the immigrant, the overwhelming push-pull between the need to belong and the need to assert one’s own identity.

Tate Taylor’s film cares less about narrative clarity and more about portraying a life lived between the extremes of sin and grace, between the abject and the sublime. It’s lively, stylized, and genuinely surprising.

The film seems content to be the class clown of the Marvel Universe, which is all well and good. But like most class clowns, sometimes you wish it would apply itself — because it seems capable of being so much more.

The film never quite reconciles the banality of this love triangle with its far more interesting depiction of the rest of these characters’ lives.

Hercules has no right to be as entertaining as it is.

Clean, pleasant, and thoroughly unremarkable. It passes the time, but with that cast and that director, it should have been so much more.

It has an energy all its own, and Gondry’s voice is always welcome, and essential. Mood Indigo is somehow both unmissable and whisper-thin.

The sequel, Planes: Fire and Rescue, is still a DisneyToon production, but it does aim higher, with a visual zip that was lacking from the first. It is, in almost all respects, a better movie. It’s still not particularly good, though.

It's also breathtaking to watch a throwaway studio sequel break its corporate chains before your very eyes and become something thrilling and dangerous and alive.

Wish I Was Here, not unlike its predecessor "Garden State," captures a certain generational drift. It just doesn’t know what to do with it. So it beats the damned thing into the ground until it’s dead.

The movie is imprisoned by its Cage’s stiffness. All he gives us is strained, robotic seriousness. I’m not sure he even gives us any rage.

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

Earth to Echo resonates, despite itself.

Bana is a likable actor, but he doesn’t bring any vulnerability or transparency to the part; it’s hard to tell what he’s thinking, if he’s thinking anything at all. And so, we move from one bleak, bludgeoning setpiece to another. But with each loud noise, the film loses us more and more.

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.