Dana Stevens

This new Blade Runner dazzles the audience with plenty of staggering sights but never quite matches the original’s mysterious ability to suggest something even more incredible lying just beyond our ken.

This movie’s strength lies in its gentleness just as its wisdom lies in its willingness to get extravagantly silly. Richard Linklater is one of the best directors going, and Last Flag Flying shows his talents in the full flower of their maturity.

Battle of the Sexes breaks little new ground as either a sports film or a lesbian romance, but it’s lively, funny, and, if you’re unlucky enough to be a feminist in 2017, vicariously wish-fulfilling.

This is the kind of movie that often racks up more than a few walkouts but also makes for passionate postscreening conversations.

Nearly every scene builds to some kind of climactic jump scare.

Though Logan Lucky’s funny and committed cast (also including Dwight Yoakam, an underused Katherine Waterston, and a barely there Hilary Swank) provides a steady supply of good-sized laughs, this film struck me as underachieving on several fronts.

Having already admired Pattinson’s post-vampire work in David Cronenberg’s "Cosmopolis" and elsewhere, I wasn’t surprised to see him kill it in this role as a shambling antihero in the "Dog Day Afternoon" mode. With this movie, both Pattinson and the Safdie brothers have broken new ground in their careers.

The particular kind of “fun” to be found in a slick and shallow spy fantasy like Atomic Blonde feels peculiarly arid in a moment as desperate for substance and meaning as our own.

The swift-moving, pulse-pounding Dunkirk reveals its filmmaker at his most nimble, supple, and simple.

War for the Planet of the Apes is a formidable achievement: not just the rare last chapter in a trilogy that maintains the high quality of the first two, but a visually lush, heart-pounding summer action movie that dares to ask hard questions about the struggle between good and evil—both on the larger social scale and within each individual—and the fate of life on Earth.

In its brief sojourn on the screen, A Ghost Story moves through centuries of geologic time and into the deepest recesses of the human heart.

If you see Okja, and I hope you do, stay for the final credits. It’s not often that a stinger scene pops up at the end of a movie, not to pre-sell the inevitable sequel, but to leave you with something to think, wonder, and worry about.

From an aesthetic and technical perspective, her achievement is laudable, but there’s something underfurnished about this movie, a lack of historical, intellectual, and thematic richness. For all its elaborate design and carefully calibrated mood, it comes down to the tale of a randy fox in an impeccably preserved Greek Revival henhouse.

This movie keeps a lot of balls in the air: generational and cultural conflict, hospital drama, screwball banter — and only rarely lets one drop.

Though its themes are so dark they seem to call for the invention of a new color, It Comes at Night does offer a few glimpses of levity and affection amid the unremitting bleakness.

This is a movie about battling evil that pauses to ask what evil is and whether it’s necessary to understand its nature in order to defeat it.

Baywatch is surprisingly without sexism or condescension: It’s equal-opportunity stupid.

The film’s scruffy, smartass band of brothers, along with Gunn’s light directorial touch, make for an invigorating breather after too many summer weekends of hammer-wielding superheroic solemnity.

Justin Lin, who's now directed three movies in the Fast series, knows how to choreograph and edit an action sequence so that it's more than an onslaught of chopped-up images and grating noise.

The two storylines interweave seamlessly and subtly, the couple's real-life problems not so much repeating as refracting the experiences of their fictional counterparts.

Despite its technical and visual grandeur, there’s a moral simplicity to Silence that can sometimes recall the work of perhaps the other greatest deeply Catholic filmmaker, the French master Robert Bresson.

Fences functions as a faithful—sometimes doggedly faithful—record of a remarkable ensemble performance of one of the great works of American drama. Granted, it’s never exactly a great movie, but given the chance to see actors of this caliber tear into material this rich, you would be foolish to pass up the chance.

For all its borrowing and bricolage, La La Land never feels like a backward-looking or unoriginal work. Even when not every one of its risks pays off the way that first song does, this movie is bold, vital, funny, and alive.

Through two viewings of Jackie, I was never able to pin down whether it was Portman’s performance or Larraín’s way of framing it that left me emotionally shut out.

Each character in this movie — down to the smallest cameo by Lonergan himself — is an individual rather than a type, prone to spontaneous changes of mood and sometimes amusing outbursts of pettiness or ill humor.

For people who enjoy coming out of movies unsettled, a little riled up, bursting with questions, and spoiling for a debate, see Elle.

One thing that Loving gets right in a way that few civil rights dramas do: It insists on racial discrimination as a systemic problem, not merely an interpersonal one.

Moonlight is one of those movies that showers its audience with blessings: raw yet accomplished performances from a uniformly fine cast, casually lyrical camerawork, and a frankly romantic soundtrack that runs the gamut from ’70s Jamaican pop to a Mexican folk song crooned by the Brazilian Caetano Veloso. But the film’s greatest gift may be that flood of cleansing tears—which, by the time this spare but affecting film was over, I was also shedding in copious volume.