Chris Nashawaty

The film is maddeningly uneven. Just as it starts to settle into an inspired groove, it uncorks a couple of gags that fall lethally flat, making for half of a great comedy.

Like Eric Bana's menacingly raw breakout in 2000's "Chopper" or Tom Hardy's in 2008's "Bronson," O'Connell bristles with terrifying hair-trigger unpredictability. Watching him, you feel like you're witnessing the arrival of a new movie star.

As in their previous comedies, Pegg and Frost play men who refuse to stop acting like boys. But these pint-swilling Peter Pans also know how to work the heart and the brain for belly laughs.

Scott’s sci-fi adventure is the kind of film you leave the theater itching to tell your friends to see. Like Apollo 13 and Gravity, it turns science and problem solving into an edge-of-your-seat experience.

Few filmmakers can turn a mundane town council meeting about a library bench into a meditation on patriotism and civic responsibility the way Wiseman can. Let’s hope his camera continues to roll for years to come.

It’s smart, relatable, laughter-through-psychic pain entertainment that happens to be elevated by a handful of wonderful performances even if it, at times, feels like a lesser version of "The Royal Tenenbaums."

Although the film does hint at Apfel’s creeping sense of mortality as she donates her clothes for posterity, it never gets deep enough under her skin.

The ending he’s come up with for The Force Awakens feels so perfect it’s hard to imagine it any other way. In an age when we’ve all become binge watchers, we feel as if it’s become our right to immediately roll right into the next episode, the next sequel. And when The Force Awakens ends, it’s bittersweet because you so badly want to head right into the next chapter.

With his crudely drawn stick-figure body and big, round Wiffle-ball head, Cuca is a bundle of jitterbug energy and boundless imagination. Like Riley’s in "Inside Out," his noggin is a wondrous place to spend an hour or two.

Douglas Tirola’s doc about the satirical bible’s rise and fall is fascinating, funny, smart, juvenile, tragic, and likely to offend just about everyone. It’s a must-see for anyone who cares about comedy.

Directed by another great character actor, John Carroll Lynch (Zodiac, American Horror Story), Lucky is an elegiac and ultimately affirming meditation on mortality, regret, and smiling through hardship. You couldn’t ask for a more poignant swan song from a more singular artist.

Out of costume, Spinney is as impossibly sunny as his alter ego (with none of the crankiness of his other incarnation, Oscar the Grouch). At 80, he has no plans to hang up his feathers—welcome news for kids and parents everywhere.

With his Mephisto-phelean swagger and chewy, good ol’ boy drawl, Reynolds is a chest-beating revelation.

If Ingmar Bergman had directed a remake of "All About Eve," it might have looked something like Clouds of Sils Maria. Mysterious and narratively playful, Olivier Assayas’ film features a trio of finely calibrated female performances that examine the psychological toll of being an actress — or working for one.

A so-so meditation on historical amnesia. It’s also so weighted down with mysticism and metaphor it forgets to quicken your pulse or whiten your knuckles.

The film is fizzy, lightweight fun with some real moments of genuine heart.

The Other Side of the Wind (both the movie and the movie-within-a-movie) is a hypnotic, magical mess of a film. It’s a lot of story and not enough of one. Still, there are shots that are so haunting and beautifully composed that you want to get out of your seat and take up residence in them.

Wildlife is confident and patient and mature. It may be a small film, but its power is massive. Especially its very last shot, which is so devastating it has the force of a sucker punch.

A Most Violent Year isn't an explosive film. It builds slowly, simmering toward an inevitable day of reckoning. It's the kind of uncompromising movie we don't see much of anymore. And it makes you nostalgic for a time when the world was worse and the movies were better.

Anyone who loved Gone Girl the book will walk out of Gone Girl the movie with a sick grin on their face. You can stop being nervous.

The best part is getting to hear both men talk about their art in exhaustive, almost fetishistic detail. If you’re a classic movie buff, this is a must-see.

Two of the chapters stand with some of the best work the merry-prankster filmmakers have ever done, while the rest are varying degrees of… fine.

Part of being in a punk band involves having to play some pretty hostile venues. But the one in writer-director Jeremy Saulnier’s new white-knuckle thriller, Green Room, makes the typical mosh-pit dive look like a kindergarten run by nuns.

It's always a thrill to see what an artist as singular as Jarmusch will do next. I just wish that his foray into the world of the undead had a little more to sink its beautiful fangs into.

DuVernay has done a great service with Selma. Not only has she made one of the most powerful films of the year, she's given us a necessary reminder of what King did for this country...and how much is left to be done.

A sequel that easily tops its 2011 predecessor.

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.

It’s as good as screen acting gets.