Chris Nashawaty

The Rolling Thunder Revue was Dylan’s personal magical mystery tour — and in Scorsese’s hands, there’s no shortage of magic or mystery.

Director Jesse V. Johnson sprinkles in enough cruel twists of fate and melancholy-laced flashbacks to prevent Avengement from becoming just another disposable exercise in action sadism on a budget. The real credit, though, goes to Adkins, who one of these days will hopefully get called up to the Hollywood big leagues and wind up surprising a lot of people — and grin while he’s doing it.

It delivers. The Perfection is a pure hit of twisted, absurd camp catnip.

Even if this handsome film runs a bit snoozy and dull at times, it’s wondefully acted and clearly made with no shortage of compassion and love.

I don’t mean to give the impression that John Wick 3 is anything grander than a gorgeously choreographed, gratuitously violent action movie. But as gorgeously choreographed, gratuitously violent action movies go, it’s high art.

Hoult brings a quiet, romantic intensity to the young Tolkien (pronounced ‘Tolkeen’, who knew?), Lily Collins does a lot with a little as his first love Edith, and the Hobbit horde will gobble up all of the easter-egg references peppered throughout the movie.

In the end, Non-Fiction is a warm, humane story that ends on a hopeful note reminiscent of "Hannah and Her Sisters." Life can be a messy business, but every so often it reveals moments of unexpected joy with perfect clarity.

Not that there’s a ton of competition, but Long Shot may be the most deliriously raunchy comedy with a pivotal semen gag since "There’s Something About Mary."

There’s something about the movie that makes it all feel as though it’s being presented under glass. Nureyev is more of an idea than an actual flesh and blood character. The only time The White Crow truly shoots off sparks is during its dance sequences. For those brief, beautiful moments, you can almost feel what it must have been like to witness a one-of-a-kind artist at the spellbinding height of his powers taking flight. But then the spell is broken, and the crow falls back to earth.

No matter how shaggy and self-indulgent it is, or how anticlimactic its big so-what of an ending ends up being, I was never bored. More than that, I kind of dug its sheer swing-for-the-fences insanity.

Marcello may remain a mystery, but the thing that makes Dogman worth checking out is the actor who portrays him. It’s a performance that never barks too loudly, but leaves you with an unmistakable bite.

The moments that work the best are the ones where Tammi lets the pace and pulse slow down, lets the ominous wind whistle and groan, and it isn’t trying to turn The Wind into Meek’s Cutoff as interpreted by the director of Insidious.

High Life is, at turns, gorgeous, ridiculous, and confounding. Yet, the more you wrestle with it, the more it haunts you. As for Pattinson, who commits as fully as ever, he can rest easy knowing that he’s left his audience another riddle to chew on.

Fortunately, directing duo Kevin Kolsch and Dennis Widmyer get everything absolutely right in their bone-chillingly effective new remake.

As a faithful update of a cherished classic, the new Dumbo will get the job done for restless kids on a rainy Saturday afternoon. Still, we’ve come to expect more magic, more bizarro pixie dust from Burton. Maybe that’s why the second marriage between the director and Disney feels more like an uneasy corporate alliance than a union of artistic passion.

It’s a cliché to say that they don’t make movies like this anymore — nasty, nihilistic, nicotine-stained ‘70s death trips. But thank goodness that Zahler’s doing everything in his power to prove that cliché wrong.

Shazam! is basically two movies in one. One with Levi and his wiseass foster brother (a fresh Jack Dylan Grazer), the other with Strong and all his snarling, computer-generated gobbledygook. And they both have the other in a headlock, wrestling for the soul of the story. I loved one, yawned through the other.

It’s cartoonish, fast-paced, a bit cheesy, and ridiculously dumb fun.

The Highwaymen is a leisurely ride with a pair of actors who know how to do a lot by not doing too much. It won’t reinvent cinema the way that "Bonnie and Clyde" once did. But it’s a ride worth taking nonetheless.

Yardie is a sprawling drug-world saga, but whatever narrative flaws it has are helped out by an infectious selection of dub-heavy reggae tracks and an authentically gritty sense of period and place.

It’s just another three-hankie teen weepie, albeit one with the saving grace of another excellent Haley Lu Richardson performance that gooses the film just past serviceable into the realm of slightly better than average.

The NASA mission at the heart of the must-see documentary Apollo 11 reminds you what it feels to be truly awestruck.

There may be no honor among thieves, but Triple Frontier certainly makes watching them pretty entertaining.

Petzold walks the tricky tightrope of being both timeless and timely, the performances (especially those of Rogowski and Beer) are chillingly good, and the ambiguous final shot is damn near perfect. In Transit, the past is prologue… and it’s devastating.

Thanks to two pitch-perfect performances, Paddleton is bittersweet and poignant beyond words.

It’s a triumph of style over substance. But what style!

If there’s one nit to pick with Everybody Knows, it’s that Farhadi’s films, as excellent as they are, are starting to feel a bit same-y. He’s plying the same family-in-crisis formula he’s worked before. That formula still works like gangbusters, but it’s becoming a formula nonetheless: Happiness and community curdle into paranoia and suspicion.

Clocking in at a lean and very mean 81 minutes, writer-director Nicolas Pesce’s follow-up to his grim 2016 black-and-white arthouse chiller "The Eyes of My Mother" is a sick-joke psychological cat-and-mouse game with just enough twists to keep you on your toes.