Christopher Orr

With The Big Short, McKay threaded a needle by managing to be jokey while still serious, and angry while still entertaining. With Vice, he fails in both directions.

Hathaway delivers a sharp, witty dissection of female celebrity, at once impenetrably vain and entitled, yet also riven with self-doubt. It is both the most pointed and most amusing way in which the movie toys with gender expectations.

Victoria & Abdul is worth seeing for Dench’s magisterial performance and for Frears’s light but sure directorial touch. Just don’t mistake it for actual history.

This peculiar but delightful hybrid just may be the best animated offering of the year.

It’s refreshing to see a kids’ movie that’s content to remain just that, and doesn’t feel a need to douse itself in pop references or inside jokes. Find the right frequency, and you just might enjoy yourself.

Branagh’s retelling of the classic Agatha Christie tale is visually sumptuous yet otherwise inert, a series of what are essentially cameos by performers far too gifted to waste their time like this.

A punk-rock-meets-aliens story of young romance, it finds itself uncomfortably on the spectrum somewhere between Earth Girls Are Easy and Liquid Sky: neither good enough to be a conventional success nor weird enough to be a cult hit.

While McCarthy does what she can with the material provided her, it’s not nearly enough to save the movie. As a result, Life of the Party doesn’t live up to either of the nouns in its title.

The movie is too long, too violent, too silly—too everything. Yet for those who enjoyed the original Kingsman, it is a more than adequate second act. To put it another way: first time satire, second time farce.

It all culminates, of course, in a cacophonous and interminable final battle involving far too many participants to possibly keep straight.