Drew McWeeny

The movie is as good a Blair Witch film as anyone could have faithfully delivered.

Snowden has a secret weapon, and it’s one that I wasn’t expecting: a fully-engaged and on-his-game Oliver Stone.

Southside With You is quietly romantic, but more than that, it burns with a deep sense of optimism.

Kubo works because it is so direct, so honest about the emotional story it’s telling. Knight may have epic ambitions, but he keeps the stakes very personal.

Our best fables and fairy tales are the ones that speak truth, and this version of Pete’s Dragon easily takes its place on any short list of the great films for young audiences as a result.

By making this look like the sort of film that studios think of when they think of animation, but subverting the very nature of those movies, Sausage Party is more than funny. It’s downright revolutionary.

The Mind's Eye is straight-up sincere, earnestly played and honestly intentioned. This is exploitation fare without any wink attached. These guys aren't trying to elevate the genre… they just want to make a psychic wars horror film and blow up some heads.

Suicide Squad is not the darkest mainstream superhero comic book movie ever made, nor is it even the darkest live-action film featuring Batman ever made. However, it is gleefully nihilistic, and it takes a different approach to what has become a fairly familiar story form at this point, right at the moment when it feels like superhero movies either have to evolve or die.

There’s a brisk sense of invention to the film, and it feels like it is breathlessly told, something that is due in large part to Justin Lin, who has been developing a very particular approach to blockbuster filmmaking. Yes, he’s fine with the big action mayhem that is par for the course with these films, but he understands that the thing that makes any of it interesting is making sure the audience really enjoys spending time with these characters.

The original Ghostbusters will always be a classic that means something special to me. The good news is, there’s a whole new generation that’s about to feel that way about this one. And more power to them.

Like any comedy that throws 1000 jokes at you, some land and some don’t, but it’s the confident, cheerful energy of the humor that carries the day.

While Hunt For The Wilderpeople is very funny, what makes it stick is the way Waititi allows the relationship between Hec and Ricky to develop slowly, and how nimbly he sets the emotional stakes for both of the characters.

The Neon Demon’s going to frustrate anyone who goes in looking for a conventional film or a thriller that has any interest in actually scaring you. This is a ride, a carefully crafted experience, and it is precisely because it is so immersive and controlled that I would recommend it.

Central Intelligence manages to be a far more coherent comedy than I would have expected, and it’s a worthy representation of the genre.

Say what you will, but Pixar understands innately that making their audience feel something deeply is the greatest magic trick in movies, and all of their work as technicians and artists are always focused on making that happen. Finding Dory may be familiar magic, but there’s magic in it all the same.

If you’re in the mood to laugh until various parts of you hurt for a multitude of reasons, then I have a feeling Popstar: Never Stop Never Stopping will accomplish the goal. And then some.

With a rich supporting cast, a smart script, and an ensemble that is put through their paces in some intense physical scenes, The Conjuring 2 is that rare horror sequel that stands toe to toe with the original, possibly even improving on it.

DePalma emerges as a charming storyteller, funny and slightly wicked, and he offers up some terrific anecdotes about his casts, his process, and his choices over the years.

The movie suffers from being the same shape as so many modern blockbusters, and the plot in the second half of the film is basically another riff on the “reach the glowing doodad on a roof to prevent the end of the world” structure. But the focus on the Turtles and the film’s overall amiable sense of goofball humor carries the day.

It is an easy sit, a big fat slice of smart entertainment. Constantly funny, startlingly violent, and oddly heartfelt, The Nice Guys is a grown-up delight, a perfect antidote to the nonstop barrage of effects spectacle that normally marks the summer movie season.

Jodie Foster deserves credit for orchestrating things with a nimble wit and a relentless energy.

I enjoyed the energy of the film, and the cast is pretty solid throughout, but there’s a big problem that is inherent to the idea that we have to make these films bigger and bigger to outdo things that have come before.

Captain America: The First Avenger is one of the finest movies yet from Marvel Studios, and a big departure in tone and storytelling from most of the films they've made so far. It is a strong indicator that the more willing the studio is to experiment, the more exciting the payoffs can be.

What makes Captain America: Civil War such a terrific accomplishment is the way it takes what could have been the most crass and overcrowded story to adapt as a film and instead transforms it into an examination of just who these heroes are and what impact they’ve had on the world around them, and vice versa.

If you enjoy thrillers, Flanagan expertly turns the screws here, and Kate Siegel makes a very appealing and capable hero.

It’s mind-boggling that this entire thing was shot on soundstages using greenscreens. Favreau’s jungle feels like a real place, but it’s heightened and stylized and it feels like a perfect fit for the talking animals who make up the majority of the cast.

Everybody Wants Some!! offers a mature and crystal-clear voice, a filmmaker of enormous muscle who makes it all look ridiculously easy.

Whiskey Tango Foxtrot is a film of modest pleasures, but what I liked about it, I liked a lot. I hope more filmmakers figure out how to write to Fey's strengths, because she's really engaging here.

While it’s doubtful any film could match the weird giddy energy that made Pee-Wee’s Big Adventure a classic, this movie honors and expands his legacy, and should prove to be a pleasure for anyone who has ever loved this character.

This is a very raw, sad, and beautiful film about faith and fatherhood, and it feels just as grounded and big-hearted as the other films Nichals has made.

Economically told from the start, the film moves beautifully.

As crazy as the design of the world is, Zootopia ends up feeling like a genuine place. There's a vibrancy to it that runs through everything from the pace of the storytelling to the background details of the world in which the story takes place.

It is almost preposterous how little "plot" there is in the film...What it has in spades is attitude, and right up until the moment the film began, I was afraid It was going to be so juvenile and filthy that I would end up annoyed by it. Instead, from the very beginning of the opening credits, it is clear that director Tim Miller and screenwriters Rhett Reese and Paul Wernick have crafted something deeply silly that isn't remotely interested in playing by the conventional rules of what we've come to think of as "the superhero genre."

Even when they're silly, Joel and Ethan Coen are as smart as any filmmakers working, and Hail, Caesar! is a clever cartoon filter through which they examine some very sincere spiritual ideas.

What is most impressive about the final film, adapted for the screen and directed by Burr Steers, is that it gets the Pride and Prejudice side of things right, and that's what matters most.

The Dirties feels authentic all the way through, and it carries a bitter punch. It is a slight movie in terms of actual events that happen, but it grapples with some giant ideas and emotions in a very effective way.

It's impressive to see how Johnson manages tone in the film, as things go from sort of giddy and fun at the start to increasingly paranoid and then eventually taking a turn into a sort of brutal sadness.

Kenneth Lonergan's Manchester By The Sea is an extraordinarily wise and well-observed film about what can happen to someone when life gives them more than they can handle, and Casey Affleck's lead performance is, simply put, the model of what great film acting should look like.

This film puts Nat Turner and his moral journey dead center, and it asks you to take an unflinching look at how an inhuman system broke the human beings trapped in it.

While there is an untruth at the heart of the film, it's in service of illuminating any number of smaller truths, and I find that approach fascinating.

Beautifully photographed to take full advantage of the corners of a 2:76:1 aspect ratio, often hiding key character details in the background of shots in a way that demands a second viewing, this is a gorgeous piece of filmcraft all the way around.

It must have seemed like a nearly-impossible task when JJ Abrams and his collaborators set out to bring "Star Wars" back to life, but they've more than done it. They've made something honest and beautiful and, above all, fun, and I find myself energized by the movie and by the promise it represents.

It is as impressive as any movie released this year, but the storytelling falters in some fundamental ways that keep me from completely adoring it. Innaritu dreams big, and he has the muscle to back it up. The Revenant may not be his best film yet, but it's hard to imagine many filmmakers who are working at a higher level than he is these days.

The Good Dinosaur is fine. I found myself moved by it on a very direct level. Technically speaking, it's a gorgeous film in many ways, but I'm still not a fan of the super-cartoony style of the characters over the photo-realistic world, which is genuinely jaw-dropping.

This may be one of the most subversive blockbusters I can name, and I respect just how raw Francis Lawrence and his team play things. Even the "action" in the film is grim and painful and rarely thrilling.

The Hunger Games: Catching Fire more than makes the case for this as a franchise that's going to get better as it goes, and I am genuinely excited to see how they wrap it up.

It is a thrilling, intelligent, deeply-felt movie that does not play by the typical rules of franchise building in modern Hollywood.

By the time Coogler wraps things up, his film manages the difficult trick of looking back with earned nostalgia and standing alone as a genuinely strong dramatic piece.

It may be overstuffed the point of bursting, but there's much to like here.

It sounds far sexier, just based on the synopsis, than it actually plays, though, so hopefully people aren't sold the wrong movie. For those in the mood for a throwback to the doomed romanticism of mid'60s art films, this feels like about as sincere an homage as anyone could produce.

Despite the very real threat and the personal stakes and the grim weight given to things, director Sam Mendes manages to pay sophisticated, sincere homage to the conventions that define the Bond series while remembering that one of the things that makes the series such an enduring presence is fun.

Frequently very funny, undeniably aimed at younger audiences, and true to the source material, The Peanuts Movie is too mild-mannered to win over brand new audiences, but it's going to please people who were already fond of the underlying property, and it should be a big nostalgia-driven hit for the studio.

I was pleased to see that "Spies" is not a thriller so much as an ode to both American diplomacy and the tradition of moral movie fathers along the lines of Atticus Finch.

This is a film of tactile decadence, such a rich sensory experience that it's almost suffocating.

There's not an ounce of fat on the film. It feels like it moves forward in every single scene, and while it's a little mechanical about how it follows three-act structure, it's almost charmingly old-fashioned about it.

When you're watching something Zemeckis made, anything can happen, and reality is up for grabs. In this case, he's used his powers for good, and the end result is stirring and spectacular at times, with a devastating, if subtle, final line of dialogue.

It's a very direct film, a lovely portrait of family and strength and just how far one voice can carry.

Wheatley is all about control of tone and how he's using this big obvious metaphor. His film is alive with human behavior, heightened at times and stylized as hell, but alive and identifiable and crackling with a wicked energy.

Meyers wants this to be all sort of amiable and charming and a big warm bath of a film, and it is.

Anomalisa is an extraordinarily wise film about the reasons we turn to other people and the enormous difficulty of doing so.

If you can get past the witlessness of the world itself, there is some very good work in Equals, and fans of the cast will be no doubt pleased with the connection they have in some of the movie's best moments.

It takes a genuine master craftsman to take something as complex and difficult as this and make it look easy, but it also takes an artist with a great ear to take something as dense with exposition as this is and make it practically sing.

Just on a technical level, the film represents such a big jump forward for Saulnier that you should expect the studios to immediately start arguing over which giant soulless franchise should occupy his time in the near-future.

If you have a fondness for the genre and a particular love of '60s pop, The Man From UNCLE is the summer's big fizzy drink, all bubbles, and while it may be gone the moment you walk out of the theater, the smile it puts on your face will likely linger.

I think Mission: Impossible - Ghost Protocol is the most consistently entertaining, most laser-focused entry in the series so far, and while I would argue that it is very much a sequel to the third film and not just a disconnected piece of a flexible franchise, it is also a great rollicking self-contained spy movie adventure on a grand scale, and it's preposterous fun.

Both of its time and of the moment, Straight Outta Compton is potent and largely successful, and makes a hell of a case for why this was a story worth telling.

I would argue that this may be the funniest of the films overall, and with Robert Elswit shooting it, it's absolutely gorgeous, with crisp, clean action choreography that you can actually see.

Ant-Man has its own voice, no doubt thanks to all of the talent involved, and it stands as a surprisingly sturdy success for the studio, a delightfully weird little movie that has no business working this well.

It is rowdy at heart, but smart about it, and it is one more reminder that Channing Tatum is really not like anyone else working in movies right now. It is also celebratory in the way that the first film was sad, concerned more with self-acceptance than running from something.

Trevorrow seems to be genuinely enjoying what he's doing, and it's that sense of someone having fun behind the camera that ultimately won me over.

The way an Entourage story works is that they establish what it is that Vinnie and his friends want, they challenge them a little bit, and then they get what they want. And while that's something I find unsatisfying, it is the exact reason that fans watch the show and it's why they'll watch the film.

The reason you go see San Andreas is to see what the state of the art looks like when you destroy an entire state, set piece after set piece, and Brad Peyton delivers on that.

Co-directors Pete Docter and Ronnie Del Carmen have told a very, very small-scale story when you look at what happens in the actual physical world. But in doing so, they've done something very powerful, because they have paid full respect to just how turbulent and important the inner life of a child can be.

There is nothing easy or predictable about what George Miller delivers with Mad Max: Fury Road, a stone-cold action master class, beautiful and brainy and startling in the ways it throws off the current definition of the blockbuster.

This is a movie that is almost exhaustingly large-scale, and Ultron's ultimate plan involves a crazy visual idea that Whedon makes sort of beautiful and eerie. It's got so much action that I'm going to bet some audiences go numb after a while. But in scene after scene, there are beats and stunts and poses that suggest that an army of comic book fanatics worked on this movie.

I'm giving this an "A" letter grade because I find it utterly absorbing, start to finish. I don't know if I think it's a good film, but it is a powerfully compelling film. Perhaps my favorite kind of strange or insane film is the personal passion project, and "Roar" is one of the most remarkable examples of this.

It's obvious that they're aiming for something more fun than genuinely haunting, and it helps that there is a good deal of humor used to punctuate the horror. It doesn't all land, but there's a fair amount of wit in something as simple as watching what someone types, deletes, then retypes.

Tim Johnson gets the character stuff right, and the animators do an amazing amount of subtextual work with color and with texture ripples on the various Boov characters.. It's lovely work overall, and it might be the most cheerfully benign conquering force we've ever faced on film.

There is a giddy sense of glee that runs through most of this movie, making it feel like Feig can barely contain himself with all of the things he wants to do and show you in the movie.

This is a film that suggests that Morehead and Benson have something important to share with their work.

Trainwreck is more than funny. It's also wise, and that hard-won wisdom makes this a can't-miss for anyone who feels bruised by love, but never beaten.

Plot is unimportant. Family is everything, and Furious 7 is a blast.

Ficarra and Requa are good at creating a sense of momentum in their films that carries you along from scene to scene, and a film like this depends largely on chemistry. Smith and Robbie have bundles of it, so there is an easy pleasure to watching them circle each other.

Shira Piven, working from a script by Elliot Laurence, has directed a beautiful, sad, sweet and funny movie that deals honestly with mental illness while also earning big laughs and offering up some hard truths. And it helps that Kristen Wiig gives the best sustained performance of her entire career in the lead.

This is a case of all the elements lining up and pushing a potentially good film into the great category because of just how well executed it is.

Knock Knock has something genuine to say, and it uses some really dark dramatic beats to get there.

The film is frantic from start to finish, and I suspect it will wear some people down completely. I thought there was a point where it stopped being funny and started being exhausting, but my kids went positively ballistic for it.

Fast, frequently teetering on the cusp of the ridiculous, and eye-poppingly pretty, Jupiter Ascending is a wicked slice of entertainment, and a heck of an antidote to the typical February box-office blahs.

Using real transcripts, and with the involvement of Dr. Philip Zimbardo, who was the psychologist who designed the project in the first place, Talbott and director Kyle Patrick Alvarez have opted to aim for something authentic and honest.

There is real wisdom and honesty in every moment of the film, and that's refreshing in a genre that is built largely on fantasy every bit as disconnected from our reality as any superhero film.

Z For Zachariah may not be a faithful adaptation of a well-liked book, but as a film, it is a lovely, powerful piece of work.

One thing Mississippi Grind has in spades is soul, and that's a better bet than narrative mechanics any day.

Eggers manages to create a sense of mood and dread that is so suffocating at times that it feels like we're watching something genuinely transgressive, something we should not be seeing.

In the broad strokes, I think The Bronze is okay. I laughed at some things, I sat stone-faced during some things that don't work, and at the end, I could tell what I was supposed to feel, but it was more like I'm being ordered to feel this way instead of the film actually earning it.

It's an excellent showcase for Paul King, for the tremendous character animation by Framestore, and for Ben Whishaw's delicate, inquisitive work as the title character, and it is one of those rare family films that actually seems to think of children as smart and full of empathy.

It is apparent that Ramaa Mosley has a voice, and that The Brass Teapot is a focused, controlled piece of storytelling that displays real control.

Kill Me Three Times is a confident smaller film, and if you enjoy this sort of chess game with bullets, you'll probably get a kick out of it, and for Pegg fans, it's pretty much continuous pleasure throughout.

By far, the best part of the film is the last twenty minutes or so, and it's so good that it almost makes up for some of the missteps along the way.