Chris Nashawaty

Eli Roth’s Death Wish isn’t a bad movie as far as super-violent exploitation flicks go. But it is a deeply problematic one. And that problem boils down to this: It’s the absolute wrong movie at the absolute wrong time.

The one thing Mute has going for it is Jones’ vividly imaginative sense of world-building. Like Ridley Scott with "Blade Runner," he fills every corner of the screen with something cool to look at.

Like some nefarious KGB amnesia serum, Red Sparrow mostly evaporates from your memory five minutes after you walk out of the theater.

What comedy there is comes from Tom Hiddleston’s Lord Nooth — a miser with a head like a soft-boiled egg. But the laughs are mild at best. At least there’s director Nick Park’s playful Silly Putty visual imagination to take your mind off just how thin the story is.

It’s basically a Murderer’s Row of indie pros who play off one another like they’ve been performing this particular toxic soiree on a West End stage for years.

The kind of deliriously trashy psychosexual thriller that only the French seem to be able to pull off with a straight face. It’s like "Dead Ringers" meets "Body Double" with a kinky, winking full-frontal Gallic twist.

Strip the pleasure away from a guilty pleasure and what are you left with exactly? Fifty Shades Freed, the third and final cinematic installment in E.L. James’ trashy S&M trilogy, answers that question with every ludicrous plot twist, stilted line delivery, and too-laughable-to-be-hot sex scene.

For a movie produced by red-meat action maestro Jerry Bruckheimer and starring Thor himself as the face of camo-clad vengeance, 12 Strong somewhat surprisingly manages to fall (just barely) on the nuanced side of the scale. Even if you can feel the film’s director, Nicolai Fuglsig, battling with himself to get it there.

Peppered with implausibilities and foul-smelling red herrings, The Commuter downshifts from a solid cat-and-mouse joyride to a ridiculous howler, insulting its audience’s patience and intelligence at every turn.

An ethically thorny morality play that thoughtfully transcends borders, cultures, and religious beliefs.

Aside from one gag in particular, the scares lack any real mechanical knack. The one thing the otherwise forgettable film has going for it is Shaye, who over the course of the Insidious quadrilogy has miraculously created a real flesh-and-blood character with Elise.

Molly’s Game is a cool, crackling, confident film that appeals to your intelligence instead of insulting it. At the movies, it may be the closest we’ll get to a Christmas miracle.

Westerns can be a tough nut to crack, but Hostiles may be the finest example of the genre since "Unforgiven."

The film simply drags too much in the middle. Somewhere in the film’s 152-minute running time is an amazing 90-minute movie.

Welcome to the Jungle isn’t a bad movie. It’s a diverting, mildly amusing, competent bit of big-budget studio product. And maybe those are the stakes we’re now playing for these days.

Like all of Anderson’s films (the best of which remain Boogie Nights and Magnolia), Phantom Thread is meticulously crafted, visually sumptuous, impeccably acted, and very, very directorly. But until the final act, this straight-jacketed character study is also pretty tame stuff — emotionally remote, a bit too studied, and far easier to admire than surrender to and swoon over.

If you look at The Post next to something like All the President’s Men, you see the difference between having a story passively explained to you and actively helping to untangle it. That’s a small quibble with an urgent and impeccably acted film. But it’s also the difference between a very good movie and a great one.

It's both weird and wonderful.

It’s undercooked even by the filmmaker’s own late-career standards. Yes, Coney Island has never looked more gorgeously golden-hued (thanks to cinematographer Vittorio Storaro), but Allen has seldom been less sharp.

I don’t think we’ll ever see anyone else do Churchill this well again unless the man himself comes back from the dead.

Roman J. Israel, Esq. doesn’t quite have the same frayed-wire electricity as "Nightcrawler," but what it does have on its side is Denzel Washington.

I’m not quite sure how Rees (2011’s Pariah) has done it, exactly, but the depth of heartbreak and humanity in this — just her second feature film — is remarkable.

First, the good news. Justice League is better than its joylessly somber dress rehearsal, Batman v Superman: Dawn of Justice. Now the “but”…you knew there was a “but” coming, right? But it also marks a pretty steep comedown from the giddy highs of Wonder Woman.

Of course, there’s a sort of comfort in familiarity, especially around the traditions of the holidays. But Daddy’s Home 2 never manages to really catch you off guard and crack you up the way the best comedies should.

Farrell delivers his lines with the same replicant monotone he used in The Lobster. And Kidman, the only cast member who expresses recognizably human emotions, extends her recent hot streak. But even she’s not enough to give this head-scratcher any real life.

Only half of these setups go anywhere very interesting. The rest just feel like button-pushing stunts that, like so much of the merry-prankster conceptual art Christian champions, zero in on your intellect rather than your gut. Or, better yet, your heart

Ragnarok is basically a Joke Delivery System — and on that score, it works. The movie is fun.

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."