Chris Nashawaty

It’s 85 minutes of grim abyss-gazing with no hope of salvation. If Silverman’s going to bare her soul this nakedly, she deserves a better film to do it in.

It’s a shame that, despite some excellent performances, this urgent, well-intentioned film feels so conventional and stolid.

I doubt there’s a huge audience for a movie like Bone Tomahawk, but those who find it may turn it into a new cult classic.

Knock Knock is a pretty flimsy erotic thriller, but thanks to Reeves’ oaken obliviousness it’s also got a few moments of deliciously trashy fun.

Crimson Peak is a cobwebs-and-candelabras chamber piece that’s so preoccupied with being visually stunning it forgets to be scary.

As horror comedies go, this one sadly winds up somewhere between Scary Movie 4 and 5.

For a movie about the importance of objectivity, Truth feels like a biased and sanctimonious op-ed column.

Room is more than the title of one of the year’s most powerful movies — it’s a state of mind that’s unbearably tense and as claustrophobic as a straitjacket

As sharp and slick as Steve Jobs is, it ends up feeling more interested in entertainment than enlightenment.

Bridge of Spies is like Capra with a dash of le Carré.

Davis Guggenheim’s latest documentary is a forceful and exquisitely made piece of advocacy journalism.

A pretty average siege thriller. I’m positive there’s an audience for an Old West tale about fierce, independent women. I’m equally positive it can be done better.

The Green Inferno is less a riff on spaghetti splatter flicks like Cannibal Holocaust than a desperate-to-shock pastiche of guts and gore served with a wink to audiences with strong stomachs. You know who you are.

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.

Rourke, whose face has become an inexpressive waxwork in recent years, doesn’t do much with what’s already a pretty undercooked role.

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.

Neither scary enough to be a horror film nor funny enough to be a comedy.

The achievement of Edward Zwick’s new Fischer biopic, Pawn Sacrifice, is that it does just that. It manages to turn thinking into action.

With a taut and timely screenplay by Taylor Sheridan, Sicario is a brilliant action thriller with the smarts of a message movie.

Cooper, the director of Crazy Heart and the underrated Out of the Furnace, has made a tight and tense gangster film with Black Mass. But it’s a pretty straight-ahead entry in the genre, albeit one peppered with spicy performances.

What the movie actually could’ve used less of is Gibney, whose faux-pensive voice-overs are meant to push the story forward, but more often make your eyeballs roll backward.

When the lights come up, you don’t want to feel like you’ve watched a ­better Cliffhanger. You want to understand the tragedy you’ve just watched. Yes, you want to be entertained, but you also want the icy, whipping wind of reality to sting.

Yimou’s lovely import is the kind of lump-in-your-throat drama they don’t make much anymore, at least in Hollywood. Watching Coming Home you’ll wonder why that is — and who we can write a letter to to fix it.

Even though there’s not a lot to Jim Strouse’s new relationship comedy, it has a real warmth and charm thanks to the undeniable appeal of comedian Jemaine Clement.

What starts off as a promising indie about a couple (Jake Johnson and Rosemarie DeWitt) trying to balance their own needs versus their partner’s quickly goes south in director Joe Swanberg’s latest meditation on aging-hipster malaise.

The early-’60s styles are chic, the Euro locales are swank, and the music cues (including a nod to Ennio Morricone’s Once Upon a Time in the West score) are fantastic. Too bad the plot and the lead performances are so lifeless.

Cop Car feels like a great short stretched into a mediocre feature.

The Runner is a well-meaning character study with an admirably cynical ending, but it’s too cold to ever fully draw you in.