David Ehrlich

Beneath its overworked plot — and a Julia Roberts performance that toes the line between maternal desperation and movie-screen broadness — this is a tender and knowing story about the salvation that an addict can find within their family, and the toll that addiction can take on it.

Ultimately, Reversing Roe is a productive contribution to its ever-growing genre because it sharply dissects the process by which abortion soured from a private medical issue to a public political one.

At a time when movies are growing more plastic by the day, it’s always a thrill to experience something that’s so attuned to the tactile pleasures of the cinema; to see a movie that you can feel with your fingers even when it bypasses your heart or goes over your head.

High Life is fixated on the hypnotic rhythms of oblivion, and the human desires it brings to the surface.

If Arcand’s worldview hasn’t changed, his angle continues to grow more acute. Where The Decline of the American Empire focused on social ills, and “The Barbarian Invasions” was preoccupied with ideology, The Fall of the American Empire finds the 77-year-old Canadian legend turning his attention to the greatest moral catastrophe of our time: money.

This miserable chimera — skinned with Black’s wicked sense of humor, but too underdeveloped to survive on its wits alone — should never have been let out of the lab, as it poses a serious threat of boring people to death.

The craft on display is often as undeniable as the cast that Mackenzie has assembled to bring it all to life, but “Outlaw King” is a moribund piece of storytelling. It’s too big to be an intimate portrait of a reluctant leader, and not big enough to effectively contextualize that leader’s role in the war he was born to fight.

Cold Skin is Gens’ best film to date, if only just good enough to make you wish that it were much better.

If A Family Tour is sweet and more sedate than the dissident filmmaker’s previous work, it might also be the angriest thing he’s ever made. The coiled fury he displayed in “When Night Falls” (and “Taking Father Home” before that) has metastasized into a paralytic rage; his homeland’s betrayal is no longer just the focus of his life’s work, but also the full extent of his life itself.

A Land Imagined is a film that’s intent on losing its own sense of self, a goal that Yeo fulfills by never allowing it to have one in the first place; he digs a rabbit-hole, and then falls right into it. It’s fascinating to watch Yeo tumble down into the depths, but eventually it starts to feel as though he’ll never hit the bottom.

There’s no denying that the domestic scenes of Free Solo are more powerful because you appreciate the madness of what Honnold is trying to do, and the climbing scenes are more powerful because you appreciate the full extent of what he’s risking to do it.

While Edgerton’s fractured approach has a frustrating way of compartmentalizing his characters into their own subplots, making it hard for the movie to convey the full sweep of its emotional journey, Boy Erased regards everyone with such raw empathy that even its most difficult moments are fraught with the possibility of forgiveness.

In Reitman’s hands — which are confident and clumsy in equal measure — these hefty matters play out as a mordant political comedy that tries to split the difference between “Veep” and “All the President’s Men.” That’s a tough needle to thread, and it doesn’t take long before “The Front Runner” throws in the towel on that idea.

Guadagnino dredges up the dead with such crazed purpose that his magnum opus is able to dance through its rough spots and make good on its foreboding promise.

Non-Fiction isn’t a surrender, nor is it a call to arms. It’s an anxious — but strangely calming! — reminder that change is the only true constant, and that steering the current is a lot easier than fighting it. Nobody does that better than Assayas, even when it looks like he’s not even trying.

The result is a singularly American riff on “The Act of Killing,” a fascinating and dream-like mosaic that’s less driven by residual anger than by cockeyed concern, less interested in exhuming the past than in revealing its value to the present.

It’s both way too much and also somehow not enough, but even the most exhausting stretches of this bloated import blockbuster are fearless enough to make you wish that American films would follow suit.

Faraut is able to conflate the cinema’s quixotic obsession with reality with the athlete’s similarly impossible dream of perfection. In its own playful way, his film celebrates the beautiful folly of both pursuits.

If The Happytime Murders isn’t the worst movie of the summer, I tremble at the thought of whatever’s coming out next week.

Weitz and Orton mean to question the individual’s role in a mass atrocity, but the abstract nature of their ideas never squares with the rigidity of their storytelling. As a result, Operation Finale doesn’t feel ambiguous so much as it feels like it lacks a point of view.

Despite a starring turn from Sam Rockwell (whose character arc boils down to mastering a Cockney accent) and a supporting performance that should help Phoebe Fox convert a small legion of new fans, this Blue Iguana is far less evocative of yesterday’s classics than it is of today’s direct-to-VOD dreck.

Without a bloody foundation of truth to ground their swagger in reality or give it some kind of moral purpose, these two certified alpha males are completely lost; it’s like they were given all the various bits you need to assemble a watchable action movie, but went into production without any idea of how those pieces might fit together.

Anchored by a brilliant Mélanie Thierry, whose stone-eyed lead performance is at the center of almost every frame, Finkiel’s film never betrays the distance that Duras inserted between herself and her own experiences, or that she wrote from the perspective of a vessel as much as she did a subject.

A tasteless and incredibly undercooked serving of the internet’s stalest Creepypasta, Slender Man aspires to be for the YouTube era what “The Ring” was to the last gasps of the VHS generation...there’s one fundamental difference that sets the two movies apart: “The Ring” is good, and Slender Man is terrible.

Entertaining and exasperating in equal measure, it’s a nine-dimensional chess game in which the pawns think they’re working towards a better future, but the powers controlling them are only determined to maintain the status quo.

Even when Christopher Robin stumbles or steers itself into a corner, it never stops trying to understand what people lose when they let go of the things they love. The movie sells itself by keeping one foot on the ground at all times.

However afraid she is to let things get too serious, Miller Rogen is powerless to erase the emotional undertow that carries this story forward. All of the pent-up animosity her movie doesn’t know what to do with becomes its greatest asset.

The meandering and insufferable Death of a Nation is little more than a greatest-hits collection of its creator’s favorite neocon conspiracy theories, which frame the Democratic Party for the fascistic tendencies embodied by Donald Trump.

Age of Rage is much more potent when questioning its own purpose than it is when giving fancy racists yet another platform to espouse their bullshit.

It’s hard to understand how anyone so capable of diagnosing this problem can also believe themselves capable of solving it — so hard, in fact, that the last 20 minutes of Generation Wealth might compel you to reconsider the value of the 80 minutes before them.

The good news is that the fans of Antoine Fuqua’s “The Equalizer” — a bland and pulpy 2014 riff on the ’80s TV series of the same name — are in for more of the same. The bad news is that the rest of us are, too.

He’s only Tom Cruise because nobody else is willing to be — or maybe he’s only Tom Cruise so that nobody else has to be. Either way, Fallout is the film he’s always promised us, and it was totally worth the wait.

The result is a dull and deeply compromised movie that would rather be a mediocre crime saga than a nuanced character study, but can’t quite bring itself to commit to that choice.

There’s no denying the purity of Fleming’s intentions (the movie’s end credits even play over a montage of same-sex parents), but Ideal Home is too cartoonish to meaningfully celebrate the beauty of the families we choose, and too casual to accomplish much else.

Elijah Bynum’s debut embracing every last cliche it can find in a perverse attempt to forge its own identity. It’s a noble effort that comes up empty. Instead of something original, we’re left with a sweaty pastiche that shares its protagonist’s desire to be all things to all people, only to wind up losing any sense of itself along the way.

An electric lead performance and a growing sense of self make it worth your while to see that Izzy gets where she’s going.

From the flat battle sequence that’s shot with all the excitement of folding laundry, to the literal chess match that anchors the underwritten dynamic between Berg and his target, The Catcher Was a Spy shrugs through each bad scene as though it’s biding time for better ones to come.

Alas, all the darkness in the world doesn’t make “Day of Soldado” feel real, and errant mentions of a weak-stomached POTUS violently return us to the atrocities happening beyond the frame.

Uncle Drew is such a well-acted, warm-hearted basketball comedy that you’re liable to forget about its corporate origins.

Quinn has clearly done the work to establish meaningful relationships with many of his subjects, and you can see the pain and concern in their eyes. Still, Eating Animals feels every bit as scattershot as it sounds, the film’s moral argument cornering you from all sides rather than attacking head-on.

It works because the characters keep things anchored to some kind of dramatic reality.

Connolly’s biopic isn’t a hagiography. The problem is that it’s not really anything. This is a strange thing to say about a notorious mob boss who was locked up for murder, but John Gotti deserved better.

Once the menacing and mysterious Screenslaver is introduced, inciting a Spielberg-level monorail chase that reaffirms Bird’s lucid gift for kinetic and character-driven action filmmaking, the movie blasts off and never looks back.

It’s damning, if not quite fatal, that Lee’s version works best when it’s riffing on the standout elements of the source material rather than trying to reinvent them.

A handful of amusing details in desperate need of a purpose, the film spends its first half looking for a compelling reason to exist, and its second half trying to disguise the fact that it can’t find one.

Unwatchable even by the subterranean standards of a direct-to-video Nicolas Cage thriller, director York Shackleton’s 211 is the kind of low-grade schlock that leaves you with a newfound respect for the basic competence that most bad movies bring to the table.

For most of its interminable runtime, Action Point feels like a porno that deliberately ruins the sex scenes in order to stop you from fast-forwarding through the plot.

Silas Howard’s new film is nothing if not well-attuned to the difference between the purity of sharing the right values and the messiness of actually living with them.

Adrift is told with an inimitable sense of place and a rare attention to detail, both of which help to ensure that we never lose sight of the terror at hand. When all else fails, which it sometimes does, Woodley is there to right the ship.

The movie is able to ride a line right through so many of its genre’s worst clichés because it never stops negotiating between fear and desire, risk and reward. It’s an assured directorial debut from “The Mentalist” actor Simon Baker.

Newton’s film knows that people are always going to be letting themselves (and each other) down, no matter how hard they try, and Nicholson’s unforgettable turn makes it impossible for us to forget it.

For a giallo riff so light on gore, Knife + Heart is still a bloody mess.

A master of threading the needle between conflict and contrivance, Kore-eda manages to turn this drama inside out without every betraying its most resonant truth.

Capernaum is a movie that wants its audience to empathize with its protagonist so intensely that you agree he should never have been born. It’s a fascinating (if obviously counterintuitive) approach, but one that’s frustrated by the literalness with which Labaki unpacks it.

A hyper-stylish and unexpectedly sweet rebuke to the idea that screwing people is a good way to get ahead, Gavras’ second feature manages the almost impossible task of mining something nice from the me-first mentality that’s been sweeping across modern Europe.

It’s a shambling, transportive, and semi-tragic story about a fleeting past where anything seemed possible.

Few narrative dramas (if any) have more sensitively explored the nuances of growing up transgender, the bravery required to transition, and the struggle for self-acceptance that can motivate or define that process. Likewise, few narrative dramas (if any) have more palpably distilled the pain of being deadnamed, the humiliation of being reduced to your body, and the cruelty of being misrepresented as something that you’re not.

The debut feature from writer-director Vanessa Filho is a trite story about a walking disaster and the daughter caught her in path, the tedious melodrama only finding a heartbeat when it abandons the lead character and searches for change.

Subtle as a great dane, and less convincing than a show poodle that’s trying to pretend she’s an untamed stray, Dogman is an obvious and strained little movie.

It’s a brave thing, to tell a story by omission, but Pawlikowski almost pulls it off.

Hell, this thing is so mainstream it feels like the start of a franchise. And yet, that mass appeal is a huge part of what makes this funny and righteously furious American film so powerful.

It’s a movie that often feels like a mega-mix of Jia’s greatest hits, but one that rehashes them with precious little of the ineffable grace that make each of them so valuable on their own.

Arctic works because it’s so believable. The movie never cheats or takes shortcuts.

Vaughn Stein’s Terminal takes a mess of dead tropes and Frankensteins them together into an crime saga that’s in desperate need of brains. And a soul. And a story.

Revenge is a bit too thin to sustain its running time (despite its slickness and mesmeric rhythm), but Fargeat’s well-executed finale is worth the wait, particularly for how it cements Lutz as a final girl for the ages. A girl who’s stripped of her humanity, and then finds the strength to return the favor several times over.

The patience and sensitivity with which The Rescue List renders the children themselves is remarkable.

It’s hard not to smile when John Woo is having this much fun, or to care about the future when the old-fashioned has this much style.

Psychokinesis doesn’t leave you with much more than a bittersweet feeling about it all, but it’s an appropriately different takeaway from such a refreshingly different superhero movie.

It’s a pinhole portrait of life on Earth; a non-judgmental story about trying to reconcile meaning with meaningless before the well runs dry and it rains again.

If we ever truly sympathize with Doremus’ nebulous characters, it’s only because they help us appreciate how painful it can be to spend so much time trying to divine meaning from utter emptiness.

Meredith Danluck’s State Like Sleep doesn’t really go anywhere, but it lulls you into enough of a stupor to enjoy the time it takes to get there.

This runaway train of a biopic renders an iconoclast in the most generic of terms, straining Mapplethorpe’s brief life into a series of bullet-points that feed into each other with all the drama of a Wikipedia page, and a fraction of the context.

What Sam Boyd’s tender and winning debut feature lacks in originality and ambition, it makes up for in honesty and charm.

For an homage boasting a far more fatal outlook than Varda’s original, it’s frustrating and kind of perverse that Blue Night should be so gentle.

The film suffers enormously from its slippery grasp of history, all of its narrative thrust slipping through the cracks between fact and fiction.

Thanks to the fleshed out messiness of Dyrholm’s performance, and how eerily the former Eurovision contestant brings Nico back to life whenever she sings, the movie is able to support the sketchiness of its approach.

The exorcism itself is the least entertaining thing about the movie, even though it eats up a sizable and unbroken chunk of the 68-minute running time.

Not exactly the first movie that’s ever dared to suggest that it’s what’s on the inside that counts, I Feel Pretty at least has the decency to be honest about how far that wisdom can take you.

The movie that’s happening in Ejiofor’s eyes is far more wracked and compelling than the one that Marston shows us through his own.

What does Rampage have? No satisfying action beats, no memorable images, and so little to say that it’s virtually impossible to say anything about it in return. It’s not a movie for critics, that much is clear. The problem is that it’s not for anyone else, either.

Based on the experiences of producer Samantha Housman, 6 Balloons is too short and stunted to leave much of an impression, but the film convincingly illustrates one of the core truths about addiction: It doesn’t really give a shit about your agenda. It’s chaos, it cares only about itself, and it feeds on collateral damage.

Foley never wanted to be a star, shining only for itself. He wanted to be a legend, and live forever. Thanks to Ethan Hawke’s slippery, whiskey-soaked biopic of the late musician — and newcomer Benjamin Dickey’s casually spellbinding lead performance — he’s closer than ever to getting his wish.

Marrying the sensitivity of “Spirited Away” to the lushness of “The Legend of Korra” and the narrative coherence of a lucid dream, Big Fish & Begonia is the very rarest of Chinese exports: An animated film that was made for adults.

Reuben Atlas and Sam Pollard’s convincing but unfocused documentary “ACORN and the Firestorm” firmly contextualizes the group’s targeted debasement and eventual downfall as a landmark event of this modern political moment — not the epilogue of the previous era, but rather the prologue of the current one.

A clever but unformed hunk of speculative science-fiction.

It has to be said that “A Light in Darkness” is considerably better than the two movies that preceded it. Mason, in stark contrast to OG franchise director Harold Cronk, actually knows how to frame a shot like he’s ever actually seen a film before. Corbett also lends a real credibility to the scenes between Reverend Dave and his brother.

In its way, this small, handcrafted, and immaculately well-realized feature challenges the limited way that movies tend to depict loss.

This is a movie about where strength comes from, who takes it from us, and how we get it back. It’s familiar territory, but First Match is such a powerful coming-of-age story because Monique makes us feel like she’s the first person to ever set foot there.

Game Over, Man! becomes to “Workaholics” what “Keanu” was to “Key & Peele” — a sporadically funny riff on a formula that worked much better in small doses. You know it’s a Netflix joint, because it almost feels designed to be half-watched in the background; an overly loud piece of muzak.

Art can be affirmation, but affirmation cannot be art.

A generic and diverting sequel that corrects some of the original’s biggest mistakes while also highlighting some of its more eccentric charms, “Uprising” drops us into a world that’s much richer than what the previous film left behind.

Tragic and terrifying in equal measure, Wu’s intimate portrait of China’s live-streaming culture uses one country’s recent past as a dark portal into our collective future, sketching a world in which even the most basic pleasures of human connection can only be experienced vicariously.

It’s a testament to Stone’s sensibilities — and to Barden’s performance — that you want to see these characters stretched out over the course of a 10-episode season, but it’s to the movie’s detriment that they feel so condensed here, various scenes just sloshing into each other without a clear sense of flow.

Touch Me Not points towards all manner of holistic truths, but leaves them all frustratingly out of reach.

A reductive documentary that’s far too focused on the big picture to really unpack the human element.

The more this film begs to be told from the inside out, the more Zandvliet shoots it from the outside in. It’s enough to make you wish he hadn’t shot it at all.

It almost doesn’t matter that the movie is too emotionally prescriptive to have any real power, or too high on imagination to leave any room for wonder; DuVernay evinces such faith in who she is and what she’s doing that “A Wrinkle in Time” remains true to itself even when everything on screen reads false.

Like a time-traveler who sets into motion the same fate they’re trying to undo, Submission is so desperate not to become a cliché that it ultimately wastes a golden opportunity to become something more.

Although he races through the occasional blasts of gritty action, Roth slows things down whenever Paul corners one of the people who killed his wife, the director sinking his teeth into long torture sequences or terse dialogue scenes that are punctuated with shocking flashes of gore.

Did You Wonder Who Fired the Gun? is at its sharpest and most necessary when Wilkerson interrogates his personal connection to the past, extrapolating his reticence to explore his own family’s violent history into a national epidemic of people who are similarly reluctant to do the same.

When all the dust settles, we’re left right where we started, and with nothing to show for it but a fleeting reminder that peace is impossible without negotiation. It’s a lesson that history has failed to teach us, filtered through a movie that doesn’t understand why.

Eschewing poeticism for an empty sense of prefab empathy, Kings is so determined to be hopeful that it forgets to be honest.

It’s beguiling that a film with an almost religious aversion to subtext could be so unsure of its own subject, but Pellington knows from experience that it’s hard to put a finger on impermanence.

The staggeringly well-crafted Isle of Dogs is nothing if not Anderson’s most imaginative film to date.

From the start, Whittington’s script lays everything out so schematically that there’s little reason to keep watching for the story.

Black Panther is different. It’s the first one of these films that flows with a genuine sense of culture and identity, memory and musicality. It’s the first one of these films that doesn’t merely reckon with power and subjugation in the abstract, but also gives those ideas actual weight by grafting them onto specific bodies and confronting the historical ways in which they’ve shaped our universe.

It’s worth remembering that the “Cloverfield” movies were only able to successfully disrupt conventional distribution methods because they’re good. The best thing you can say about this one is that it’s free with your Netflix subscription.

Theron and Davis are dynamite together, the actresses playing off each other like two sides of the same coin.

Maybe this is exactly the biopic that Kenney would want, silly and bittersweet and laced with regret. Unfortunately, the film is just good enough to convince us that he deserved better.

Mary and the Witch’s Flower may not be a great film — it occasionally struggles just to be a good one — but it’s a convincing proof-of-concept, and that might be more important in the long run.

It’s director Wes Ball who emerges as the real hero here, the former visual effects supervisor proving himself to be the rare filmmaker who can force some genuine vigor into one of these banal modern blockbusters.

It’s almost a blessing in disguise that Proud Mary is so light on action, as Henson and Winston generate some real chemistry during the low-key moments they share together, both of them doing a fine job of negotiating between violence and vulnerability.

This may be a forgettable movie about the forgotten man — a blue-collar morality play disguised as a very contrived hostage crisis — but at least it’s shlock with something on its mind.

From the director of “Suicide Squad” and the writer of “Victor Frankenstein” comes a fresh slice of hell that somehow represents new lows for them both — a dull and painfully derivative ordeal that that often feels like it was made just to put those earlier misfires into perspective.

Shamelessly familiar and profoundly alien in equal measure, The Greatest Showman takes a billion of the world’s oldest story beats and refashions their prefab emotions into something that feels like it’s being projected from another planet.

This is a beautiful film, and an ugly one, and the tension between those two sides doesn’t abate until the very last scene.

The mildly amusing Jumanji: Welcome to the Jungle is further proof that even the stalest whiff of brand recognition has become preferable to originality. Only part of the blame for that belongs to the studios, but after cannibalizing themselves for much of the last 20 years, Hollywood has clearly eaten their way down to the crumbs.

A master chef preparing an entire feast inside a pressure cooker, Spielberg shoots The Post like every shot was delivered to the studio on a deadline, and the result is a film that combines the spartan clarity of hard journalism with the raw suspense of an Indiana Jones adventure.

Voyeur is framed as the story of one observer trying to clarify another, but Kane and Koury lose sight of their own film, which is really a story about two men so desperate to hear the sound of their own voices that they deluded themselves into thinking they had something to say. Voyeur falls right into their trap.

Cuba and the Cameraman, while essentially a greatest hits collection for Alpert’s career, never feels recycled. It also never feels Frankensteined together.

So urgent and far-reaching that it never settles into the comforts of a coming-of-age story, The Breadwinner is a small film about the biggest things. It’s engaging from start to finish, but Twomey — to her great credit — prioritizes stoicism over sentimentality.

Structured like a fireworks display, with only a handful of small reprieves throughout, Brimstone & Glory naturally builds to a marvelous grand finale.

Mr. Roosevelt is a sweet and shaggy comedy about someone who needs to renovate their idea of home. It’s a reminder that the 21st century is going to be full of coming-of-age films about 30-year-olds, and it’s compelling evidence that that might be alright.

Wonder is as manipulative as movies get, but that isn’t necessarily a bad thing. Sometimes a story needs to steer you; sometimes a story tells you what to feel, but redeems itself by virtue of the sincerity with which it shows why you should feel that way.

Holiday movies don’t have to be good, they just have to be comfortable, and by that regrettable standard “Daddy’s Home 2” mostly gets the job done.

Bad movies happen to good actors all the time, but Pottersville is something worse — not malevolent so much as utterly mystifying. It’s a movie that’s mere existence is infinitely more amusing than any of its jokes.

Fresh and stale in equal measure, Coco represents the best of what Pixar can be, and the worst of what they’ve become.

A handsomely furnished holiday movie that should have devoted more attention to its many ornaments and less to the tinsel at the top, this Murder on the Orient Express loses steam as soon as it leaves the station.

Clear enough about what happened to be ambiguous about what it means, the film makes only one clean argument: Truth isn’t always stranger than fiction, but it’s often a hell of a lot sadder.

The Light of the Moon is a lucid, clinical, and wholly necessary drama about life after rape, and the while the film is far more watchable than it might sound (thanks in large part to Stephanie Beatriz’s rich and involving lead performance), viewers should know what’s in store for them.

The story ultimately frays apart by tugging at its flimsiest threads, but Onah hits on too many things with too much force for his debut to be dismissed as a result.

A well-intentioned but wearisome jolt of prefab holiday cheer.

All I See Is You continues to be fun and involving even when things get truly ridiculous in the third act and Forster starts relying on the sheer momentum the plot in order to speed over its potholes.

The Divine Order is as milquetoast as these things get, but Volpe’s film finds real value by emphasizing process over politics, by glossing over the eventual vote in favor of knuckling down on how one act of courage can spark a blaze that’s big enough to burn the whole system to the ground.

There’s a raw honesty here that could have benefited from a surer hand, and yet it almost doesn’t matter that Hall lacks the tools to mend the rotted bridges that isolate veterans from their home country, because at least he understands the sheer depth of those gaps, and how desperately our soldiers need us to meet them half way.

Watching Turner learn to accept his weakness is ultimately satisfying, even if this gentle documentary loses a lot of texture with every shuffle.

Geostorm is terrible entertainment, but it’s a remarkably effective window into Donald Trump’s soul.

Madness is difficult to convey on screen, and less is often more. McLean opts for most, sacrificing Radcliffe performance — so alert and responsive that you can feel the life draining out of his body once the Amazon takes hold — at the altar of some empty affectations.

Rather than spend more time with the band, Traavik tries to milk additional drama from North Korea’s diplomatic tensions.

Unfolding like a microbudget cross between “Salò, or the 120 Days of Sodom” and “The Squid and the Whale,” Peter Vack’s impressively disgusting Assholes is the kind of movie that you wish you could unsee, one you have to watch in your peripheral vision because straight-on viewing would be way too nauseating.

The problem with this hokey courtroom drama isn’t that it says the right thing in the wrong way, the problem is that it ultimately doesn’t say anything at all.

The two plot strands are ostensibly linked by an act of indiscriminate violence, but they’re so clumsily threaded together that it just calls attention to the stitch-work.

So deeply rooted in metaphor and allegory that it might as well be called “father!,” Alex and Andrew Smith’s Walking Out is a strong coming-of-age adventure that buries its vaguely biblical underpinnings beneath the heavy snows of a Jack London epic.

If only its irony were the most painful thing about Flatliners, an artless and agonizingly boring remake of a semi-forgotten movie about the dangers of bringing things back from the dead.

It’s fantastically unrealistic stuff from the first minute to the last (and there are far too many minutes between them), but Idris Elba and Kate Winslet generate enough heat to keep the frostbite at bay, and Mandy Walker’s stunning location cinematography ensures that the film looks considerably more authentic than it feels.

Till spins a sloppy but uproariously clever urban fable, one that doesn’t sanctify or belittle the handicapped, but rather shines new light on that invisible population by inviting them to play the most visible of movie archetypes: assassins.

The ending may be strained, but it works its way to just the right sentiment.

We’re left with something handsome but safe, a film that tries to bridge the gap between children’s characters and adult concerns without ever anchoring itself to either side.

Woodshock offers a whole lot to look at, but not all that much to see.

Every bit as irreverent, smart, and ridiculously entertaining as its predecessors, The LEGO Ninjago Movie proves that these films are now on the brink of becoming a viable brand unto themselves; it cements them as the most consistently delightful franchise in the contemporary world of corporate animation. Nothing else comes close.

Here, the Norwegian’s filmmaker’s signature brand of existential dread (always coupled with and complicated by a youthful sense of becoming), is expressed through style more than action. This isn’t a movie where all that much happens, but every decision ripples with darkness.

The subtly profound ways in which this movie distorts the recent past makes it one of the most radically entertaining things its iconoclastic scribe has ever written.

These portraits don't have a hint of didacticism or preachiness, but "Ex Libris" achieves a certain emotional velocity all the same.

It’s a deliciously unsubtle testament to the power of words and their infinite capacity to inspire.

This is a film that admires — even awes at — Billie Jean King, but it doesn’t share her commitment to the game. If anything, it has more in common with Riggs than it should, moving with the sluggishness of a player who underestimates their opponent.

There’s something ineffably beautiful about such a purehearted folly, even if a Herzogian drama about the making of Loving Vincent might have more to offer than the film does itself.

Human Flow is an epic portrait of mass migration that understands how a lack of empathy often stems from a failure of imagination.

Jan Hřebejk’s The Teacher is a sardonic, richly seriocomic morality play that uses a delicate touch to explore why communism never seems to work out in the long run.

A handsome little biopic that’s sopping wet with the same clichés that its whiny hero so adamantly disavows, Mark Gill’s England Is Mine distills the early days of one Steven Patrick Morrissey into an anonymous coming-of-age story that — if not for its keen sense of place — could really be about any mopey white boy whose talents are dulled by torpor.

The only reason to take such a uniquely Japanese story and transplant it to Seattle is to explore how its thorny moral questions might inspire different answers in an American context, so for this retread to all but reduce America to its whiteness indicates an absence of context more than anything else. It’s the most glaring symptom of a film that utterly fails to investigate its premise.

Raw and compelling from its poetic opening shot to its gut-punch finale, Gook doesn’t always find the best way to express itself, but it knows what needs to be said, and it knows that words can lose their meaning in a conversation where so many people are denied their own voice.

The plot ends in a place that feels honest and true, but it gets lost in a kind of narrative no-man’s land on its way there.

A half-assed action-comedy that lacks the courage to commit to its own premise.

A spare and unflinching documentary about the true cost of cheap textiles, Machines doesn’t tell us anything we don’t already know about the inhumane work conditions in countries like India, but it forces us to become palpably familiar with the awful facts of the matter.

Sunao Katabuchi’s In this Corner of the World is scattered and emotionally disjointed from start to finish, but few films have done so much to convey the everyday heroism of getting out of bed in the morning — not just surviving in the shadow of death, but living in it as well.

Even when accounting for its forced and uncertain finale, this is the most poignant and perceptive thing that LaFosse has ever made, and therefore also the most painful.

Song reference or not, the title alone should be a major red flag, but there’s no way to fully prepare yourself for the navel-gazing narcissism to come during the film itself.

The Emoji Movie might have been a boring and brazenly cynical piece of corporate propaganda, but at least it had the courtesy to be offensive. Kidnap, on the other hand, doesn’t have the the courtesy to be much of anything.

It’s the questions that Fenton can’t answer — maybe even the questions he doesn’t mean to ask — that make It’s Not Yet Dark such an illuminating experience.

The most distressing aspect about The Emoji Movie is that a spectacle this self-evidently soulless no longer feels like a new low. It doesn’t even leave a dent.

Escapes prefers to approach its star in a roundabout fashion, immediately launching into one of Fancher’s slippery and rambling monologues about his wandering days as a charmed lothario.

If Logan Lucky begs you not to take it seriously, that doesn’t mean it lacks real soul.

Detroit is extremely powerful when its wandering eye is trained on the moment at hand, when it’s performing a bracingly direct meditation on white violence and black fear. The film only runs into trouble when it clumsily attempts to contextualize the events of its horrific second act.

Few movies have so palpably conveyed the sheer isolation of fear, and the extent to which history is often made by people who are just trying to survive it — few movies have so vividly illustrated that one man can only do as much for his country as a country can do for one of its men.

Blind is bad for many reasons, chief among them how it contributes to the belittling notion that representation doesn’t matter for a demographic that will never be able to see themselves on screen.

The first 25 minutes of this movie should be mounted as an installation at the Louvre and played on an infinite loop. Only then can our planet know peace.

It often feels like Heineman is (understandably) too overwhelmed by the stories he’s capturing to help shape them into something greater than the sum of their parts. But no other film has so convincingly, or so urgently, illustrated the role that media will play in our fight for the future.

“Homecoming” works by allowing itself to become an actual genre film, the first of its ilk to recognize that superhero movies might be more interesting if they were also something else.

Alternately funny, touching, tough and hopeful, In Transit never tells you how to feel, but it sure makes it easy to feel it.

Shot in beautifully textured 16mm and told at an unhurried pace, Person to Person requires some getting used to, but once you settle into its groove the movie becomes much more than the sum of its parts.

As an act of preservation, Frozen Time is a marvel, a miracle, a complete good. As an act of storytelling, it’s still a bit too cold for the nitrate to catch fire.

It’s not that it’s bad, it’s that it never could have been good. It’s an irredeemable disaster from start to finish, an adventure that entertains only via glimpses of the adventure it should have been.

A true story so pure that it almost grants its teller the permission to be sloppy, Gabriela Cowperthwaite’s Megan Leavey is a bit of a mess from the moment it starts, but it’s hard to completely dismiss any movie with a soul this strong, just as it would be hard to dismiss a disobedient puppy so long as its tail keeps wagging.

From a certain perspective, Sami Blood tells a very familiar story, but the hyper-specificity of its telling renders it a wholly new and quietly profound experience.

A documentary as sprawling and brilliant and flawed as the country it traverses, Eugene Jarecki’s The Promised Land is a fascinatingly overstuffed portrait of America in decline.

While all of the people they meet are delightful characters who the film manages to milk for every ounce of their personality, Varda and JR inevitably emerge as the real stars here.

Sorely lacking the energy that made “Mediterranea” such a vital shot in the arm, A Ciambra is a half-step backward for Carpignano, whose clear sense of place is too often hampered by shapeless plot.

Jupiter’s Moon is no simple story of escape, in part because Mundruczó’s script (co-written with Kata Wéber) has no real idea where it’s going.

As slinky as the reflection of a neon sign trailing across the hood of a black sedan, this is a slight movie, shot on a whim just a few months before its world premiere, and it feels cobbled together in its search for some kind of meaning.

A fitfully amusing erotic thriller in which nothing is what it seems, anything could happen, and everything is at least a little ridiculous.

The film is carried along on a powerful undercurrent of regret, and it comes to feel as though Bong-wan is a prisoner in the book-lined office where he ostensibly holds all the power.

Fortunately, the filmmaker’s rare gift for brutal absurdity remains intact, and The Killing of a Sacred Deer only gets funnier as it grows darker.

The Beguiled is a lurid, sweltering, and sensationally fun potboiler that doesn’t find Coppola leaving her comfort zone so much as redecorating it with a fresh layer of soft-core scuzz.

The Meyerowitz Stories (New and Selected) isn’t the wittiest or most exciting movie that Noah Baumbach has ever made, but it might just be the most humane.

This is a soul-stirring and fiercely uncynical film that suggests the entire world is a living museum for the people we’ve lost, and that we should all hope to leave some of ourselves behind in its infinite cabinet of wonders.

Perhaps the most damning thing that can be said about Term Life is that it’s exactly the limp, shapeless, and forgettable kind of thriller you might expect from the director of “Couples Retreat” (Peter Billingsley, a.k.a. Ralphie from “A Christmas Story”).

Part “Game of Thrones,” part “Snatch,” and almost all bad, Guy Ritchie’s King Arthur: Legend of the Sword is one of those generic blockbusters that has nothing to say and no idea how to say it.

A Woman’s Life is a very particular experience, told with consistency and without a whit of compromise. It’s not always exciting, but there’s something tremendously rewarding (and very sad) about the matter-of-factness of it all, the ceaseless indifference of time’s steady forward march.

Last Men in Aleppo is less about finding meaning amidst a massacre than it is about people who are trying to survive without it.

Of all the non-fiction movies that have already been made about the toxic cesspool of the 2016 election, or how Trump emerged from it like a leather-tanned Swamp Thing, Get Me Roger Stone is the one that best articulates how we got here and who’s to blame.

The film is gripping from start to finish, even when so much of its menace rings hollow.

I Am Heath Ledger is far too loving a portrait to be confused for art — don’t expect another “Amy” — but the film’s superficial approach is buoyed by an overwhelming degree of sincerity.

At times, [Deutch's] performance is perhaps even too strong for the film that’s cobbled together around it, as the actress so convincingly indicates at Erica’s vibrant and complex inner life that she embarrasses the script’s feeble attempts to diagnose and solve her character.

Director Michael Winterbottom hasn’t just delivered the funniest movie of the year, but also a comedy that casts its characters in a harsh new light.

The director’s instincts are a bit too broad to sell the full psychic horror of this scenario, and Taylor-Johnson will never be accused of being able to shoulder a movie by himself, but a super coherent sense of space and a vivid feel for the environment help The Wall to remain upright to the end.

Leaning Into the Wind will inspire anyone who sees it to look for the beauty in every gust, to admire how nature constantly rearranges itself, and us along with it. Even at its most self-conflicted, this is a fascinating reminder that some art wasn’t made to be owned.

A mawkish coming-of-age story that marries Sundance vibes with a soft punk spirit, Peter Livolsi’s The House of Tomorrow never manages to flesh out its skeleton of quirks, but its heart is definitely in the right place.

Swicord, perhaps a touch too reverent of Doctorow’s writing, can’t quite solve the limited emotional range of her protagonist.

Shot with the stoic confidence of a capable young director flexing his muscles, Super Dark Times is visceral and gripping throughout, its probing compositions forcing you to peer deeper and deeper into the darkness.

Lynch’s directorial debut is a wisp of a movie, blowing across the screen like a tumbleweed, but it’s also the rare portrait of mortality that’s both fun and full of life.

It’s awful, and yet it’s almost objectively Sandler’s best movie since “Funny People.”

As knowing and perceptive as Howell’s script can be, it fails to galvanize its most sensitive ideas into compelling drama, and Meyer doesn’t recognize where a spark might be necessary.

F8 is the worst of these films since “2 Fast 2 Furious,” and it may be even worse than that. It’s the “Die Another Day” of its franchise — an empty, generic shell of its former self that disrespects its own proud heritage at every turn.

More than just a hypnotically hyper-real distillation of what it means to be young, All These Sleepless Nights is a haunted vision of what it means to have been young.

Rock’s lack of self-importance prevents the doc from fetishizing the past, and Clay — who appears to have met the photographer on the set of a TV on the Radio video — is wise to assume that the world doesn’t need yet another reminder that it used to be full of gods.

The Lost Village may be awful, but it’s not malicious. It doesn’t flaunt its mediocrity or celebrate its ugliness — it isn’t “Sing.”

Salt and Fire is by no means the most willfully obtuse film that Herzog has ever made — it seems as broad as a blockbuster when compared to the likes of “The Wild Blue Yonder” and “Lessons of Darkness” — but it’s the only one of his works in which his curiosity has completely eclipsed his insight.

By trying to provide a little something for everyone, it ultimately offers precious little to anyone.

In its haphazard search for facts, it happens upon a great many truths about how we see each other, and the price we pay for looking too closely.

The director never intrudes on his film, but — even through the melancholic veil that Collin drapes over this ghostly portrait of the past — you can still feel his unbridled sense of discovery as he introduces the man who made this movie possible.

Band Aid is a thin but knowing portrait of how marriages stretch, sag, and pull back together.

At its best, Prevenge feels like a hilarious distillation of every conflicted, politically incorrect thought that many pregnant women are too polite to share in public.

Decency, in its raw, instinctive form, is ultimately what earns The Zookeeper’s Wife a place in the self-conflicted canon of Holocaust cinema.

For all of its surprising relevance, Power Rangers feels hopelessly lost in time. There is an audience for this movie, but this movie has no idea who that audience might be.

Hirokazu Kore-eda may only make good movies, but After the Storm is one of his best.

A pulpy slice of pie from deep in the heart of American nowhere, Evan Katz’s Small Crimes is far too convoluted for such an admittedly modest thriller, but the film ties together in such a perfect bow that it’s tempting to forgive all of the knots it took to get there.

The Most Hated Woman in America makes it abundantly clear that Madalyn Murray O’Hair was a riveting human being whose story is worth telling in our messed up times, but the film never has the slightest idea of what that story might be about.

Considerably less ambitious or provocative than Boyle’s barnstorming first crack at these characters, T2 Trainspotting (can we please just call it “T2″?) is an enjoyable nostalgia trip about the extraordinary headache of trying to go home again.

Creating a lucid sense of reality only so that she can defile it with a wicked pivot towards madness, Asensio’s film creates a vision of immigrant life in America (and its value) that’s all the more urgent for how it uses genre elements to exaggerate the experience.

The film is never funny, and its attempts to wink at the adults in the room are so lame that you wish they’d been left on the cutting room floor, but the deeper the film delves into Tim’s imagination the less imaginative it becomes.

A limp and lifeless historical melodrama that aspires to be the “Pearl Harbor” of the preamble to World War I and still falls well short of that ignoble goal, Joseph Ruben’s The Ottoman Lieutenant tries to snatch a love triangle from out beneath the Armenian Genocide but fails to get any of the angles right.

If, for all of its godawful men, “Brimstone” has a hard time sewing its feminist fervor into anything more than a thin shawl over its bleak spectacle, this disturbingly watchable religious Western makes a solid case that hell is a place on Earth.

By highlighting sweet, indicative, or hilarious moments rather than tracing the teachers’ relationships with any particular students, the film is more attuned to the rhythms of Headfort than it is the people in it.

Specificity is the film’s strong suit, and The Last Laugh is at its best when eschewing its gaggle of celebrity interview subjects in favor of sticking with Firestone as she reckons with their comedy.

It’s always a shame to watch something so jaw-dropping start to feel stale, but Headshot is much easier to enjoy if you think of it as a good excuse for Uwais to stay in shape so that he’s ready for the movie that turns him into a household name.

Blitz manages to land the occasional punchline, but the smattering of decent jokes only call further attention to the film’s complete lack of rhythm.

Russo-Young insists upon Before I Fall maintaining the courage of its convictions, and she gets her way — the movie takes a while to get off the ground, but when it lands, it lands hard.

Never quite sure where to put his cameras, Creevy attempts to compensate by placing them everywhere, and cutting between them as if at random.

This immaculately furnished film sacrifices too much drama in order to expound upon its characters’ ideals, and sacrifices too much exploration of those ideals in order to accommodate for a healthy degree of drama.

Django deserves credit for refusing to fit its subject into the straightjacket of a survival tale, and Ketab’s expressive turn — much of which is captured in close-ups — provides the story with a richness that the writing struggles to achieve on its own.

The director has a novelist’s attention to nuance, and Barrage is at its best during the scenes in which Catherine and Alba are casually trying to redraw their boundaries.

Logan isn’t always a satisfying movie, but there’s a very satisfying answer to those questions waiting for viewers at the end of it. Satisfying not only because Mangold resolves things with some brilliantly expressive imagery, or because he endows this story with a no-shits-left-to-give honesty that defies its origins and justifies its spectacular violence and salty vocabulary, but because it proves how iconic Jackman has made this character over the last 17 years.

Winsome, sweet, and often very funny, The Other Side of Hope is more of the same from Kaurismäki, and thank God for that.

While the storytelling grows frustratingly elliptical, Lelio so desperate to constrain the drama that he resorts to removing helpful pieces of it, the scenes that remain are succinct and evocative.

Verbinski packs so much stuff into his giddy Grand Guignol, and the more he crams in the better it works.

Keep Quiet is far more compelling as a portrait of a man in transition than it is as a man reborn, but Blair and Martin never solve the problem that they only have access to the latter.

More fun than funny, more clever than smart, “LEGO Batman” moves too fast to acclimate audiences to the world it so eagerly dismantles and rebuilds (and too fast to make them want to stay there for a minute longer), but it serves as a frenzied reminder that laughing at the things we love is sometimes the best way to remember why we love them.

The film is undone by the wobbly dynamic between its romantic leads.

Thoroughbred is a dark and pointed piece of work that depends on the delicacy with which someone can thread the needle between Hitchcockian suspense and capitalistic venom, and Finley — adapting his own play to the screen — demonstrates a cinematic authority that eludes many filmmakers who have worked in the medium for decades.

Whereas most docs about “different” people are content to flatter our empathy, Dina aims to deepen it.

What value there is to be found is in its cast. Hoult and Costa are charismatic, committed, and totally capable of making it feel as though their characters really can’t see what’s coming.

Ingrid Goes West is colorful and flippant enough that it can survive a lot of its more senseless developments, but the movie never digs beneath the most obvious layers of its L.A. stereotypes.

Shot with raw specificity and a remarkable sense of place, Dayveon doesn’t cut through its clichés so much as it is reclaims them as the stuff of real life.

While too silly and open hearted to hate, Brigsby Bear begins with a premise that’s weird enough to be good, but settles for a weak trajectory that isn’t good enough to be weird.

Despite the efforts of its cast, Crown Heights is too crammed and hectic to convey the immensity of the systemic evils that run through its ruptured heart.

If Get Out isn’t half as scary as the ideas that inspired it, Jordan Peele’s directorial debut is almost certain to be the boldest — and most important — studio genre release of the year. What it lacks in fear, it nearly makes up for in fearlessness.

Wind River may not blow you away, but this bitter, visceral, and almost parodically intense thriller knows what it takes to survive.

The final beats of Guadagnino’s adaptation galvanize two hours of simmering uncertainty into a gut-wrenchingly wistful portrait of two people trying to find themselves before it’s too late.

Landline is a textured, silly, sweet, and deeply felt comedy that traces the distance between the most satisfied parts of ourselves and the most desperate, between the people we are and the people we think we should be, and it finds that — for better or worse — we’re all stuck somewhere in between.

By turns resoundingly human and regretfully half-baked, the film wears its influences on its sleeve.

The film never loses its strong sense of character, but those characters deserve a bit more love than they’re afforded. Still, Lynskey and Wood see it through.

If Sleepless feels like the microwaved leftovers of a dish that was designed to be swallowed whole, Foxx is the frozen part in the middle, the bite that makes you regret that someone tried to heat this up in the first place.

The scenes where Creech and co are outracing the Terravex death squads are playful and inventive enough to provide a glimpse of what this movie could have been if it weren’t so remarkably bad in most other respects.

For every moment of sick visceral genius (e.g. whenever Hernandez or Evoli are left to their own devices), there’s another of clumsy metaphor (e.g. the limp punchline of the movie’s final minutes).

These are two magnificent women who live in the shadows of their own legacies, surrounded by petrified images of their former selves.

Over time, Gold becomes nothing more than a masterclass in watching a great actor try to build a fortune out of dirt.

Hindsight has revealed the quiet resonance that’s been humming inside this tiny film ever since it first set out to sea.

Like all of Shinkai’s films, the richness of the light coats everything it touches with such an evocative hue of nostalgia that the plot only puts a damper on things (and there’s a lot of plot here).

This morbid film takes body horror to a new level, but leaves its brains behind.

Declaring Assassin’s Creed to be the best video game movie ever made is the kind of backhanded compliment that sounds like hyperbole, but the description fits the bill on both counts. Regardless of what you call this peculiar, arrestingly uninviting nonsense, the fact of the matter is that it’s the only blockbuster of 2016 that left me desperate for a sequel.

Sing is the Platonic ideal of an Illumination movie. It’s a profoundly soulless piece of work that shines a light on the mediocrity they foist upon the children of the world.

Not only is “Rogue One” the rare modern blockbuster that could have afforded to risk something real, it’s the rare modern blockbuster that gave itself a genuine responsibility to do so. And yet, for all of its excitement and occasional splendor, there’s nothing the least bit rebellious about it. It could have been special, instead it’s just… forced.

The hit rate gets better as the film lumbers along and the scenarios grow more extreme, but it takes a certain degree of perseverance to roll with this thing until it pays off.

Slash is much sweeter than it is satisfying, but it smartly observes that the road to adulthood has never been paved, and it makes a convincing enough case that teens shouldn’t be afraid of driving down their detours.

Frank & Lola is scattershot from the start, and never makes a compelling case for why its story is being told.