Dominick Suzanne-Mayer

A simple story told well can still be effective if the emotional resonance underneath it comes through. In Kubo, it absolutely does, thanks to the uniformly excellent voice performances.

The Hollars deals in weighty personal tragedies, and yet neither the treacly, offbeat humor nor the moments of more straightforward pathos tend to work for any real length of time.

For all of the film’s nonstop, aggressive insistence on its subversive qualities, it’s about as radical and unconventional as a teenager buying a Leftover Crack shirt with their mom’s credit card from Amazon.

Hillary’s America is repugnant, and while it exists to get people who stand against it yelled at as much as anything, it’s essential that D’Souza not simply be written off as a hack pandering to a willing and lucrative audience regardless of the moral implications, though he is. D’Souza peddles the kind of “media” that’s become cancerous to the country he unyieldingly purports to worship.

It’s a warmly empathetic documentary, the kind that simply observes instead of attempting to sound one kind of rallying cry or another.

Captain Fantastic loses its intriguing premise in a muddle of ideas about the redemptive power of family and the right of all people to live as they please.

For a film designed to spawn ancilliary products and sequels, Pets is not entirely without its charms

A curiously loud and ugly beast of a sequel.

The film’s belief in and commitment to the simplicity of its premise takes it a lot farther than it might otherwise go.

Raiders!, as a documentary, is much like Zala and Strompolos’ film in that it’s rough around the edges at points, but so utterly sincere that it’s hard to deny after a while.

It’s a classic case of sequel bloat, a film that seems to exist less because of any extended story it wants or needs to tell than because it must repackage something that was once popular.

Last Days in the Desert explores Jesus in his most mortal phase, and McGregor’s exhausted performance is essential to its success.

It’s a feel-good story enlivened by the fact that there’s no overly sentimentalized hokum to be found.

By firmly rooting all of the film’s sprawling drama in a singular conflict, directors Joe and Anthony Russo manage to do what many superhero films have struggled with in recent years: find a truly effective reason to pit superpower against superpower.

It’s a marvel of filmmaking created from nothing (and one of the more meaningful uses of 3D in recent memory as well), and Favreau stages one scenic tableau after the next with uncommon skill.

The Invitation is supremely well-crafted.

There is a tone of anger that sneaks out of the film in even its moments of levity.

It’s a film with no easy answers, and rightly, Hood doesn’t strain to offer them. If the film’s attempts at barbed satire don’t land as well as its graver moments, it’s nevertheless an effective look at the new kind of war.

The Bronze is so satisfied with its own winking crassness that it lets epithets constitute everything it has to say. Between that and the film’s scene-by-scene tonal shifts, what could’ve been an off-kilter curiosity curdles into a dull roar of disappointment.

Creative Control ably captures the entitled narcissism of modern Brooklyn twentysomethings by way of a plausible near-future,

There’s a note of reflexive, self-aware irony to it, but portions of Knight of Cups feels as though they’re indulging in precisely this same kind of early-college navel-gazing.

To have seen a disaster movie before is to have seen The Wave. But if there’s not necessarily anything remarkable or new about the film, Uthaug finds ways to make the familiar immediate, with a fraction of the money usually involved.

There’s a depth to the city that shows how far the form has come in a short time, and Zootopia is better off for it, especially when it still ultimately doesn’t break away from the familiar Disney formula as much as some of the studio’s other recent films have managed.

How To Be Single doesn’t break much at all in the way of new ground, but it’s a decent walk over well-trodden territory.

It’s hard to imagine a movie much more aware of itself both as a movie and as a moment in a cultural progression of similar movies than Deadpool.

While Yoga Hosers continues Smith’s quest to push himself into increasingly strange and uncomfortable directions as a filmmaker, it’s either too derivative or too malformed to work the vast majority of the time.

At points the film simply observes the smaller, more innocuous moments of a coming-of-age story; much of it is framed in intimate medium shots and close-ups, and there’s a distinct kinship between the numerous wayward souls in its world that carries it along.

The Lure somehow manages to seamlessly assemble a film equal parts hilarious, affecting, and grisly while trading and warping aesthetics and tones by the scene.