David Edelstein

My Cousin Rachel is a fascinating hybrid. It uses clunky devices out of a 19th-century melodrama, but its subject is modern: mistakes of perception and of metaphor. It’s about the myopia of the male gaze.

The Mummy is not your usual lousy movie. It has been made with skill and hits its marks. But those marks are so low and so brazenly mercenary that it doesn’t feel like much of an achievement. It’s not involving.

The superb English stage director David Leveaux keeps the pacing taut while creating space for his actors to work their magic.

The only grace note in the generally clunky Wonder Woman is its star, the five-foot-ten-inch Israeli actress and model Gal Gadot, who is somehow the perfect blend of superbabe-in-the-woods innocence and mouthiness.

It’s the smart-ass nerd’s Baywatch. The movie is okay, though, if you don’t mind manic pacing and icky dick jokes.

It’s stuffed to the gills with effects executed by the highest-paid artists and technicians in the business. But it’s still a sorry spectacle.

Coppola’s The Beguiled doesn’t have the southern-gothic kick of its predecessor. It’s not a horror movie. Its power is in its undercurrents, in the sense that what we’re seeing isn’t inevitable but a sort of worst-case scenario of genders in opposition. No one is wholly good or bad. Both sides are beguiled.

The dialogue of Alien: Covenant is often clunky and its plot repetitious. (As usual these days, there are too many climaxes.) But it’s scary and splatterful, which is all it really needs to be. It holds you.

It’s a closed, depressing vision, elevated by compassion and superbly evocative filmmaking.

I’m not sure about Hawn. A youthful twitterer, she has developed an expressively croaky voice, but nothing about her reads “nervous, agoraphobic cat lady.” She’s no longer a jumpy clown — she doesn’t need the humiliation.

You should — you must — see Last Men in Aleppo to witness an ongoing tragedy. But you should also see it to learn humility. We — meaning Americans — ain’t seen nothin’. Yet.

Writer-director Azazel Jacobs has made a very smart movie about a very dumb idea.

The Circle is a tonal mess: part satire, part moralistic melodrama. Some of it is broadly acted, some of it subtle, much of it overheated. It has great moments, though.

The comedy in One Week and a Day comes from confusion, ineptitude, and alienation. It comes from people’s defenses being way, way down. It doesn’t cheapen the tragedy. It grounds it, sometimes in the mud.

It’s not the weighty emotions that drag Vol. 2 down. It’s the plot that chases its own tail and the cluttered visual palette.

The film is no masterpiece — again, George can’t illuminate why a million people were murdered by their own countrymen. But as we focus on Rusesabagina’s almost farcically desperate attempts to forestall tragedy, we have a vision of genocide as a virus with its own terrible momentum.

The result is reasonably entertaining and totally disposable. Which it shouldn’t be, given that its focus is on guns and the way that they facilitate mayhem. Gory farce can be bracing. It’s the glibness that’s unconscionable.

The final scenes are potent enough to save the movie.

The Lost City of Z(ed) isn’t as expansive as you might initially wish but still pulls you in and along.

Vigalondo demonstrates that even the dumbest genres can be used to profound ends — not cheapening serious things but kicking them to the next metaphoric level. A woman finding her inner strength is inspiring. But a woman finding her inner giant monster who kicks butt — that’s just so cool.

I wish the movie had more of a tragic undercurrent — the tone is wobbly.

It doesn’t have the youthful kick of its predecessor, but given the pervasiveness of addiction and suicidal ideation and despair it’s amazingly buoyant.

It’s mesmerizing, too vivid to be evanescent, too precious to hold.

If you have a penchant for mood pieces that flirt with genre but are too pretentious to deliver the full climactic payload, Personal Shopper is for you. I loved nearly all of it, disposed to forgive Assayas his arty withholding for the pleasure of watching Stewart through his eyes.

It’s world away from the mystery and irrevocable tragedy that Barnes evokes in his slim novel. The climactic revelation is very sad, but it doesn’t wound you.

Its combination of lavishness and lack of imagination is the only thing memorable about it.

Tukel takes a big risk in Catfight: using farcical means to weave together personal and political tragedies, so that each dimension feeds the other. The rough edges and occasional clunks are a small price to pay.

The film is stunningly bleak and staggeringly violent. Major characters go down in showers of blood and gore. I’ve seen worse and so, probably, have you, but never from such an essentially wholesome corporate enterprise with a target audience so young and hopeful.

Get Out is a ludicrous paranoid fantasy, but that doesn’t mean it’s not alive in the unconscious. Having it out there in so delightful a form helps us laugh at it together — and maybe later, when we’ve thought it over, shudder.

The absurdity is what makes it such a hoot-and-a-half.

For a movie so visual (how many shades of blue can you count?), John Wick: Chapter 2 has quite a clever script. Derek Kolstad anchors that abstract action with good, spiky passages of dialogue.

People are calling Fifty Shades Darker the worst movie ever made, but it’s really not that terrible. It does, however, misrepresent itself, which is true of most mainstream American films about sex. The movie’s real subject is wealth.

The last hour is like a night at the comedy club after the headliners have left and the room has the smell of stale beer and flop sweat.

All I can is that I didn’t draw too many breaths during the last half hour.

Raoul Peck’s driving, free-form documentary I Am Not Your Negro is not a direct response to Donald Trump’s delighted recognition of the lone nonwhite face he saw at one of his rallies: “Look at my African-American over here!” But the movie feels, if anything, even timelier, which is to say, timeless.

My loathing of Split goes beyond its derivative ideas and second-hand parts.

Once Affleck’s Joe gets to Florida, Live by Night loses its pulse and you’re left with a lot of pale characters, secondhand plotting, and maybe second thoughts about the daffy idea of a liberal-humanist gang boss.

Michael Keaton is sensational as Kroc.

I’ve never seen a film that captures the inner world of an artist with such delicacy.

It’s not cinematic enough to make you forget you’re watching something conceived for another, more spatially constricted medium, but it’s too cinematic to capture the intensity, the concentration, of a great theatrical event.

20th Century Women is irreducible, too, although certain adjectives and adverbs do leap to mind: generous, reflective, absolutely delightful.

The German comedy Toni Erdmann makes the best case imaginable for the importance of tone.

The movie is impressive.

Only a corporate entity could deliver an ending like this one. But only humans could devise and enact the often delightful scenario that precedes it.

The movie didn’t rekindle the thrill of seeing, say, The Empire Strikes Back, but Rogue One will loom pretty large in the Star Wars galaxy — if only because there’s so little competition.

The actors carry the music in their gait, their gestures, the rhythms of their speech, so that their singing and dancing is a small but exquisite step up from the way that they normally talk and walk. To rhapsodize about La La Land is to complete the experience. You want to sing its praises, literally.

Jackie is a hard movie to love, but its brittleness might be its most admirable quality.

Beatty is trying to elevate the material while at the same time draining it of energy. The movie is so misbegotten that it’s almost poignant. But I hope Beatty has a few more left in him.

With Allied, Robert Zemeckis has fashioned a good old-fashioned World War II romantic espionage movie, but that wouldn’t matter a damn if the leads weren’t beautiful and didn’t look great in period clothes. They are and they do.

The movie might pass muster for kids weaned on the Harry Potter films — I shudder to think of the movies that pleased me when I was 7 or 8 — and uncritical critics. But you’d have to be desperate for another Potter fix to think this is magical entertainment. It’s thoroughly No-Maj.

The main problem with Lee’s Billy Lynn’s Long Halftime Walk is superficial, literally. Lee has opted for the rare 120-frames-per-second format, allegedly because he thought it would deepen our connection to the characters. He thought wrong.

It’s the damnedest thing how the longueurs of Loving have such a cumulative power. I was still crying as the credits ended.

Why did Villeneuve and the screenwriter, Eric Heisserer, let the grade-B military melodrama run away with the story?

This is a rare case in which Marvel has freed a director’s imagination instead of straitjacketing it.

Say what you will about Mad Mel Gibson, he’s a driven, febrile artist, and there isn’t a second in his war film Hacksaw Ridge — not even the ones that should register as clichés — that doesn’t burn with his peculiar intensity.

I still don’t know how a gore-meister like Park Chan-wook could have made the year’s most irresistible romance. Maybe it’s that he hates oppression — chauvinist, colonialist, Sadean — so deeply that in hoisting his old boys on their own petards, he has discovered the wellsprings of love.

Tom Hanks takes his art down a peg with another paycheck performance as the dramatic cipher Robert Langdon in Inferno, Ron Howard’s mostly lame adaptation of Dan Brown’s wholly lame novel.

The movie is lighter, more fun, and ultimately more satisfying than its weighty predecessor.

Hype would bruise Barry Jenkins’s Moonlight, which is so delicate in its touch that the usual superlatives sound unusually shrill. It’s the gentlest, most suggestive of great films.

I love when non-fiction filmmakers stretch the form and attempt, with as much honesty as they can muster, to put us in the middle of the events they describe. They give us stunning hybrids like "Waltz With Bashir," "Persepolis," and, now, Tower.

Certain Women turns out to be a study in women’s uncertainties, in the experience of pain that leads not to action but acceptance. It’s a slow go — but you get there.

The action-thriller The Accountant is laughable, but when you’re not laughing at it, you’re laughing with it. It’s enjoyable enough.

A filmmaker has a feel for this kind of storytelling or doesn’t, and the people behind The Girl on the Train don’t.

In the main 13th makes connections that haven’t been made in a mainstream documentary before.

My only serious complaint about Deepwater Horizon is that it’s not quite the muckraker I’d hoped for.

If you think LaBeouf is a joke, you need to see him here. There’s wildness there, but acting centers him. He’s magnetizing.

The Magnificent Seven has the trappings of a classic Western and it hits its marks. All of Fuqua’s movies hit their marks — even sadistic formula junk like "The Equalizer." But there’s no grandeur in its images or generosity in its soul. I don’t think Fuqua ever loved Westerns. And by the time this movie ended, I’d forgotten why I do.

Although it’s patchy and gives off an air of trying too hard, the movie is surprisingly funny.

Stone is so intent on making Snowden an icon that he scrubs him of his nuances, his individuality.

Hanks and those scenes in the cockpit make the movie worth seeing, in spite of the dumb melodramatics. But only just.

Here, the material is already melodramatic — the characters are at the mercy of seismic forces — and Cianfrance’s direction comes off as wildly overwrought.

The movie is charming even when it’s stilted, and it’s often stilted.

There isn’t a single false scare. There isn’t, come to think of it, a scare that doesn’t set up another scare.

It’s a wobbly, uneven, ultimately wonderful film — its unevenness befitting its title character, who we come to love despite her loopy lack of awareness of her own deficiencies.

After half an hour or so of ... stutter steps, Pete's Dragon starts working on you, much like those gold standards of the boy-and-his-otherworldly-friend genre, "E.T." and "The Iron Giant."

This is the kind of Western in which we know there will be blood but pray there won’t be, because the violence is bound to be gratuitous, absurd, with a needless finality. Hell or High Water is a rare humanist Western: Finality is the true villain.

The visuals in the final battle have some charm: They reminded me of early Tsui Hark Hong Kong extravaganzas like Zu: Warriors of the Magic Mountain and A Chinese Ghost Story (which he produced). But there was passion in those HK pictures, along with acrobatic wire-work. Promiscuous CGI makes even the miraculous seem ho-hum.

As an actor, Matt Damon has too much integrity to pretend he can multitask to that advanced degree and still be, you know, a fun person. So he turns his face into a mask of stoicism and gives the dullest performance of his career.

Schamus is the former head of Focus Features, and seeing how he directs (this is his debut, though he has been Ang Lee’s collaborator for decades), I suspect he chose the company’s name. His vision is 20/20 plus.

Bello is an excellent actress and makes Sophie’s anguish credible, although she can’t rise above the material.

It’s better to have a well-made, unapologetic action-adventure like this one than a creepy stab at replication.

It’s funny and inspiring and harsh and depressing. It’s steeped in existential dread. I don’t know how Birbiglia pulled it off, but he gets the minutiae of an improv-comedy show thrillingly right while using the form to build a kind of allegory of the corrosive effects of capitalism.

As the father-in-law, Langella has one of those thankless antagonist roles — the rigid, killjoy patriarch — that older actors take for the paycheck and almost never pull off. As usual these days, he’s remarkable.

It’s an unusually warm world, full of helpful wealthy people and friendly faces. That’s the conundrum. It’s too shallow to nourish the spirit of a man like Bobby. But it’s too rich to leave.

The new Ghostbusters isn’t a horror, exactly. It’s just misbegotten. It never lives.

Owen is a hugely engaging screen presence.

The new Tarzan film, The Legend of Tarzan, plays as if a dog ate part of the script.

A labor of love that sometimes wears its love too laboriously, but a surfeit of rapture isn’t the worst thing in a movie.

This hodgepodge has been thrown together in so slovenly a way that it’s no surprise the studio didn’t show it to the press.

I loved it, but you might not. Despite its often prostrating bleakness and an ending likely to inspire howls of outrage (Solondz’s world is not kind to children or pets), it might be the closest he’ll ever come to making an inspirational work.

In the end, is Finding Dory better than Finding Nemo? It’s funnier and more intricate, but the tears it jerks have been jerked before. It’s not as original, not as deep.

Genius does a pretty good job of capturing the peculiar drama of the relationship between editors and writers, in this case some of the most revered in American letters.

I’d see a whole film about the adventures of Hader’s desperate-for-transcendence roadie. Unlike Popstar, it might actually go somewhere.

Clarke is so insistent on becoming the new adorkable life force that she’s excruciating to watch. The movie makes you admire all the more her restrained power in Game of Thrones, in which her eyebrows are largely stationary.

Watching Apocalypse, you don’t feel as if every character is being set up for his or her own spinoff. They complement one another. They need one another. The overflowing ensemble nature of the enterprise is the whole point.

Maggie’s Plan doesn’t quite gel, but it’s very enjoyable, and it has a solid emotional core.

The Nice Guys has a nice feel: just slick enough to keep from falling apart, just brutal enough to keep from seeming inconsequential.

Weiner is a tabula rasa documentary — one of the most provocative of its kind I’ve seen.