Chris Nashawaty

This couldn’t be further from the corsets and curtsies of your typical Hollywood prestige period piece. It’s more like "All About Eve" directed by a Satyricon-era Fellini all hopped up with enough sex, deviance, hypocrisy, decadence, and spicy profanity to make your average Masterpiece Theatre patron reach into their PBS tote bag for some smelling salts.

It’s very much its own thing – part harrowing and exhilarating space epic on a grand canvas and part intimate character study in miniature. And while both of those elements are stunning, especially when you consider just how early Chazelle is in his career as a director, the character sections are slightly less successful.

Kin is a movie about a child with an all-powerful firearm that makes him feel important and special and powerful. On a one-to-ten scale of moral fecklessness, this ranks about a thousand.

There are a few spiky moments of sick, WTF fun (a bout of rough sex that ends with a Silly String climax; the first time a puppet drops an F-bomb), but mostly it feels like a promising idea poorly executed.

It’s the psychological duel between the terrific Isaac and Kingsley as captor and prisoner that delivers the film’s most charged jolts of electricity.

As for the new Papillon, it wisely doubles down on high adventure, but it’s still as lifeless as its predecessor. Just in different ways.

It’s heartbreaking, raw, and true. But it never veers into exploitation or becomes oppressively maudlin.

Blaze isn’t a flashy movie, which seems about right since Hawke’s closest mentors and collaborators (Richard Linklater, for example) aren’t known for their look-at-me personalities. Like the real-life Foley, they’re storytellers and yarn spinners first and foremost, fame and fortune be damned.

A lightweight teen rom-com that isn’t likely to clear up anyone’s grasp of what the studio stands for, but it is breezy and charming enough to merit a watch contingent on reasonable expectations.

It’s both a bit confusing and a bit confused. Fortunately, it’s also loaded with some of the crunchiest action scenes since the John Wick movies thanks to Indonesian martial-arts maestro Iko Uwais.

It’s easily the director’s best movie since 2002’s "25th Hour."

It is ridiculous, cheesy popcorn fun. And Statham, God bless him, knows exactly what kind of guilty pleasure he’s signed on for — Sharknado with a bigger budget and a much bigger monster.

The two leads have chemistry and a rebellious sort of charisma. Too bad they’re given such wheezy clichés to work with.

He’s not just a name-dropper, but a master storyteller. Whether you believe every spicy morsel that drops from his lips is entirely up to you.

The new comedy, The Spy Who Dumped Me, is a mirthless, dead-on-arrival dud.

All of the families in Far From the Tree are compelling — their trials unimaginable and their spirits indomitable.

Over 95 minutes, Blindspotting builds tension like a simmering cauldron on the verge of boiling over. Its themes of racial prejudice, class conflict, friendship and loyalty find a voice that’s both disarmingly funny and heartbreakingly tragic.

Apart from the film’s occasional spasms of rousing, lightning-choreographed ultraviolence (a confrontation with an apartment full of date-raping finance bros is particularly great), the film is too enamored with its own morose righteousness to be very engaging.

It’s the kind of pure, straight-no-chaser pop fun that not only keeps taking your breath away over and over again, it restores your occasionally shaky faith in summer blockbusters.

Eighth Grade is an absolute delight that stings with truth. It’s heartbreaking, heartwarming, and a total charmer.

The harmless high jinks all go down easily enough without being particularly memorable or pushing the art form past the expected.

No one churns out big-budget action mediocrity these days as regularly as Dwayne Johnson. So now, just three months after his giant gorilla-a-go-go Rampage, we have Skyscraper — a film that suggests what would happen if you took The Towering Inferno and Die Hard and stripped them of the qualities that made both work.

After about 10 minutes, The Legacy of a Whitetail Deer Hunter feels borderline promising. After 80, it feels like a blown opportunity.

Exploding with infectious originality, Boots Riley’s Sorry to Bother You may be the most wonderfully bizarre film of 2018.

The best documentaries reveal the ways in which truth can be stranger (and wilder and weirder) than fiction. And director Tim Wardle’s stunning and tragic Sundance sensation, Three Identical Strangers, is stranger (and wilder and weirder) than most.

You more or less know what this soft-drink-sponsored movie is going to be as soon as the lights start to dim. What makes it worth recommending is that it ends up being just slightly more than that by the time the lights come back on.

It’s a slower (at times probably too slow) and more contemplative movie than its predecessor, but it’s no less haunting, thanks to unshakable performances from Ben Foster and Thomasin McKenzie.

Sadly, it isn’t a great movie. It’s a disappointingly mild period thriller that’s light on thrills. Even Paul Rudd, one of the most likable actors in Hollywood, can’t rescue it.