Christopher Gray

Land of Mine's fitful jolts of suspense can't compensate for the story's wholly familiar trajectory.

Fifty Shades Darker takes the Dark Knight approach to franchise maintenance, taking pains to assure you that its protagonists are serious about their passions.

Throughout, writer-directors Lisa Robinson and Annie J. Howell's film buckles under the weight of its symbolism.

Every element of La La Land is bound up in a referentiality that largely precludes the outpourings of emotion we come to musicals for.

As long as Patriots Day is concerned with recreating the sense of ambient chaos among sparring investigators and an anxious community, it’s immersive and thrilling.

Pablo Larraín's film bluntly hammers home the notion that history is framed by perception rather than reality.

This is a work of defiantly simplistic, classically structured Hollywood storytelling, and Mel Gibson takes to its hokey plot points with some gusto.

The smartest thing about Kelly Fremon Craig's teen dramedy is its measured take on its protagonist's theatrics.

It does astounding work animating the mind of its young soldier, but it runs into technical difficulties whenever it tries to grasp the bigger picture.

Broadly, filmmaker Keith Maitland's treatment of the UT Tower shooting is both taut and humane.

It forgoes its promise of twisty adult thrills in favor of a grimly deadpan lecture about messy truths and false perceptions.

By its end, Maren Ade's Toni Erdmann is a work of laser-guided social critique and a comedy.

Kenneth Lonergan's film gradually comes to its sense of exquisitely calibrated, hardened intimacy.

The film captures our world as systematic yet miraculous, evolving toward more elaborate and resilient forms.

A dour and withholding character study, Michel Franco's film invites more questions than it’s willing to answer.

Peter and the Farm is a warts-and-all portrait that asserts its subject's sense of purpose even as it seems to slip out of his grasp.

It's less notable for its originality than for how dynamically it blends a few styles that ultimately prove incompatible.

Alice Winocour's film begins as a vivid portrait of a man warily eyeing the tumult of his homecoming.

Maris Curran never reconciles the film's impulse to interiority with its weakness for hothouse melodrama.

By merely transposing its generic high school clique drama onto an augmented reality platform, Nerve sacrifices most of its novelty, but the filmmakers demonstrate a marginal interest in how this mediated environment warps the perspectives of its characters.

Few horror films are as insistent about the trauma mental illness inflicts on families as Lights Out, and still fewer are so insensitive about it.

The Nanfu Wang film's noble aims are mirrored in its more frustrating and conventional qualities.

The film's reserve softens some of its more piquant observations about tradition and mortality.

The film, full of such quietly inventive visual magic, is perfectly content to simply revel in the stuff dreams are made of.

Even as it invites snarky ridicule, the film dares you to buy into its singular earnestness.

Finding Dory follows its predecessor in being broadly concerned with comforting notions of home and family.

The Conjuring 2 is a model of heightened tension and uneasy release, but the tropes propelling these night terrors grow stale pretty quickly.

The film's expected rehash of recent pop-culture totems is accompanied by a novel attention to millennial-centric debates about entitlement and identity politics.