David Edelstein

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.

Until the computer-generated effects bog it down and mess up its rhythms, Captain America: The First Avenger, has a measured, classical pace and a lot of good, old-fashioned craftsmanship.

Only the generic title disappoints. Leo Rockas, who turned Lady Susan’s epistles into an Austen-esque novel, suggests Flirtation and Forbearance or Coquetry and Caution. But by any title this is a treat.

The best way to think of Captain America: Civil War is as a toy box in which the sheer quantity of toys partly makes up for the lack of anything new. But the big takeaway is worrisome. Marvel has created a universe teeming with superheroes who simply don’t have enough to do. They’re all suited up with nowhere to go.

In my frequent role as “laugh accountant” for mainstream comedies, I’d estimate two-thirds of it works, and when it’s good it’s sooooo good — good enough to make you want to see Jordan Peele and Keegan-Michael Key and director Peter Atencio and co-writer Alex Rubens do it again and go farther out.

A thoroughly charming comedy that bobs on a sea of incongruities.

The film is a triumph of technology and safe “family” storytelling. It’s dazzling — almost no one will dislike it.

If you’ve seen Linklater’s other films, you know that time for him isn’t just a factor, it’s a character, a player.

In truth, I’m not sure the movie jells — even the title, from an album by The Smiths, seems oblique. But I loved it anyway.

This is probably Cheadle’s most electrified performance since the one that made him a star, as the incorrigibly homicidal Mouse in "Devil in a Blue Dress."

There’s enough going on to keep you watching — and, as I said, to keep fanboys wowed by the scale of the production and pretension. But most people will leave feeling drained and depressed, wondering how a studio can get away with withholding so much.

Nichols’s mythic aspirations are still a puzzle to me; I’m not sure he has connected all the dots in his psyche yet, or that he fully brings off his finale. But I love watching his movies.

There’s an extended shot in Trey Edward Shults’s remarkable debut feature, Krisha, that’s a showstopper of bad vibes, a psycho-symphony that bumps the film to a different — more ominous — level of reality.

10 Cloverfield Lane does what it needs to do: make you sit and squirm and want very badly to know. It has the appeal of suspense radio plays from the '30s and '40s and even a touch of Orson Welles’s most infamous Mercury Theater broadcast.

Parts of The Brothers Grimsby are very funny.

Creative Control is the most elegant vision imaginable of a world in the process of losing its moorings.

What saves this big-budget cartoon behemoth is its modest, old-fashioned storytelling.

He has told the story of humanity’s fall from grace so many times that you wonder if his wand is starting to sputter.

It’s not so much bad as dismayingly bland. It’s WTF for all the wrong reasons.

Given the movie’s bloody stew of greed and sadism, its unbalanced frames and ear-scraping soundscape, its moral tidiness can bring a smile to your otherwise appalled face.

Lindholm finds a unique balance between social and individual responsibility. There’s plenty of blame to go around.