Emily Yoshida

Like any conspiracy theorist, you sense that landing on an actually airtight unified theory would almost spoil the fun for Mitchell.

The film’s most offensive qualities have nothing to do with its grotesque violence and displays of human mutilation, but its terminal navel-gazing and reductive, borderline harmful ideas about art.

BlacKkKlansman is a nuanced story of race in America, but Lee doesn’t take any chances with vagueness or ellipses, nor should he. As much as BlacKkKlansman plays with the mechanics of blaxploitation fantasy, it doesn’t leave one with any question about what’s real.

By the end, the transformation of China is more compelling than Qiao’s love for Bin, but watching both unfold over time is continually thought-provoking, given the ephemerality of whole cities, much less love affairs.

I was shocked to discover that I was actually … touched. Climax is a small miracle, and if this is Noé going soft (for him, of course), that might actually be a very good thing for the movies.

Pawlikowski understands the mythic, destructive pull such narratives have on us — as audience members and those swept up ourselves.

Lu Over the Wall...is every bit as imaginative as the rest of his body of work, but whereas previous Yuasa works would veer from ominous to outrageous to sweet to explicit to metaphysical, Lu is perfectly happy to stop at sweet. And so am I, quite frankly: Yuasa can be really good at sweet, something that’s often overshadowed by his more mile-a-minute tendencies.

The mystery becomes popcorn-chompingly compelling, each new piece of information adding shading and dimension to the true shape of the family. Nobody is above suspicion or below empathy.

By shifting its perspective and updating its anxieties, Overboard is a decent-to-great model for a rom-com renaissance, the kind of film that sends one out on a high note great enough to blur many of the blemishes that have come before.

Most Likely to Murder, a perfectly fine and forgettable story about a man who still has some growing up to do coming back to his childhood home, is not the worst or the best, merely the latest.

Cream-puff light, but is deceptively rigorous, and about so much more than one woman’s quest to find the One.

A brutal, meandering depiction of a quarter-life crisis, Gillan’s script is staunchly resistant of silver linings or “it gets better” messaging.

Thanks to a beautifully lush, moody score by Michael Nyman and great sound editing, even a fan who has pored over these archives obsessively will see them in a new light. What McQueen reminds those obsessives and laypeople alike is that fashion is an incredibly emotional art form, and McQueen’s work was some of the most moving there was or ever will be.

Duck Butter is a lot — I felt dizzy upon leaving the theater, like I myself had just gone through that same wired 24 hours the protagonists did. For that, I have to give Arteta and Shawkat props — and as the writing debut for the latter, it isn’t shabby at all

This is clearly all fantastic material for a film, but the problems begin with the woeful miscasting of Elle Fanning as the title character, and continue from there.

The plot-engine joke — that Schumer’s character Renee hits her head and wakes up convinced she’s gorgeous — is nothing if not well-intentioned, but veers into cheap and easy enough times to be misinterpreted. When it’s good, though, and when Schumer’s fully locked into her take-no-prisoners charm assault, it’s pretty undeniably delightful stuff.

During the many scenes back home in Jamaica, blessed with the lively Jones clan as subjects, the director doesn’t have any idea what to do with her camera.

I’m not terribly convinced that the overtly campy version of this film would be any better, but I’m very certain that this one is bad.

There’s a lopsided quality to Lean on Pete that will particularly destabilize viewers (like myself) who are unfamiliar with Vlautin’s book. It has three distinct acts, and the last one feels like a very different movie indeed — its turn of events aren’t implausible, it just feels like they keep going well past the logical finish line.

Chappaquiddick is somehow both cynical and deeply inquisitive about the morals of every character involved.

This is an conversation- and character-driven film with an occasional eye for something more ineffable, but Falco and Duplass’s complicated, nakedly searching performances are the main event.

The film’s conclusion leaves a lot to be desired, which is unfortunate given how well it weaves its atmosphere and small ensemble together.

It’s at once familiar and unsettling, with shades of "Pan’s Labyrinth" and "Return to Oz."

As it turns out, the Ferris wheel is the other perfect parallel to Love, Simon, not the most thrilling ride in the park, a little slow, utterly predictable, perhaps even welcoming the label of “boring.” But like the chorus of a latter-day Taylor Swift song, it will lift you up, goddammit, and good luck trying to stop it.

Uprising’s script isn’t great at jokes or nuance or originality, but it’s pretty good at shuttling us from one set piece to the next. And when those set pieces are good — as is the case with an early Jaeger fight in Siberia, or the gee-whiz silliness of the climactic battle in Tokyo — it’s easy enough to overlook.

I’ll give Flower props — in an age when so many teen movies are grasping so desperately for message-y topicality, it does the impossible, and manages to be about nothing at all.

The flatness that is meant to shock early on quickly becomes boring, and the movie never sparks, slogging on in its nearly unbroken monotone all the way to its climactic moment.

Gringo is a slightly above-average crime farce with a way above-average protagonist — both in terms of writing and performance, and especially given the genre. It’s a surprising high point in Oyelowo’s already distinguished career.

It won’t fix the studio comedy, but it’s a welcome, watchable outlier for now.

A culture clash defined by an incredibly strong first-time performance, it’s continually more emotionally surprising than its dry packaging lets on.

To mistake Garland’s succession of haunted-house-like spectacles as Acid: The Place would be missing out on so much emotional work that he’s doing. (Although, the squeamish should be warned those spectacles range from mildly disturbing to gory and disgusting to absolutely terrifying.)

A half-baked tragic love story so desperately engineered to tear-jerk that it ceases to resemble anything human.

It’s so insistent that this isn’t your great-grandmother’s Peter Rabbit — while, again, not straying from the original character design all that much — that it feels like the animators are at war with the writers, and the loudest of the two groups tends to win out at every turn.

Ozon is doing sexual gymnastics all over his uncanny womb-based plot, and somehow it all coheres pretty seamlessly, even at its most ridiculous.

By the end of Freed, Christian and Ana are no longer a rich man and his middle-class girlfriend, but two rich people telling the tale of how and why they got rich to each other. Doesn’t get more deviant than that.

There aren’t a lot of people to necessarily sympathize with here, but the collective swell of a thousand nagging disappointments, both identifiable and not, make Perry’s film strangely haunting despite the bourgeois mundanity of its events.

The film treads familiar territory when it’s trying to carve cinema-worthy myth from its semi-fictitious protagonist’s life, but its more impressionistic, painterly moments are what feel truly fresh.

This is the sort of action film where the bad guys often hold their fire for no discernible reason, and are terrible at dodging things, but if one suspends one’s disbelief long enough, they’re rewarded with a rollicking, highly competent popcorn movie.

What Mary lacks in the resources to visually gobsmack, it partially makes up for with its unstoppable titular ginger, whose empathy, depressive streak, and enviably fierce eyebrows place her shoulder to shoulder with any Ghibli heroine.

This isn’t to say that the humans in The Commuter act anything like real people; the train is the most realistic performer here, but you could do a lot worse.

The film gets progressively funnier and more delightful as it goes on; King layers plenty of good-natured comedy on top of each daring escape and chase scene, stretching probability and sometimes patience near the end, but each new hitch and escape feels like an act of invention.

There is a real chance that one might be too busy trying to piece it all together to notice the jump scares, the film’s prime mode of horror-stirring.

Bright turns out to be more interested in its mythrilpunk world-building than any kind of social commentary, which is a good thing, because while it is so-so at the former (the plot holes in this thing), it is clearly out of its depth with the latter.

Musicals are inherently fake — they can be ecstatically, transcendentally fake — but this is a whole other level of disingenuousness.

I appreciate that Payne is more interested in blowing out a middle-class American perspective, and its perpetual victimhood narrative. But Damon is completely forgettable here — I suspect that’s by design, but nothing about him commands you watch him the way you watch Chau or Waltz.

Ends with a sentimentality I didn’t buy — the Bellas don’t seem to particularly care about each other outside of a competitive setting, so why should we?

It has its creaky corners, but there are enough twists and shocks to keep it engaging throughout.

Hostiles is a brutal if well-intentioned film that doesn’t help its cause with its lack of development of its Native characters.

Everyone seems to be a walking embodiment of an essence, not cartoons exactly, but something more totemic. If all this makes Darkest Hour propaganda, then the shoe may fit, though it’s hard to find fault with its protagonist’s aims, at least in this small of a scope.

It’s a gorgeous-looking, sensitively edited film to be sure, but never finds a dramatic foothold, no matter how many manic arguments and drug overdoses it throws our way.

By its close, Voyeur spouts some lines about how we all like to watch, and we are left with three documents of the Voyeur’s Motel and no closer to knowing why we should care.

An altogether warm, sharp, and unobjectionable family holiday film.

Brimstone & Glory, in a lean 67 minutes of cinematic poetry, bears that love out in dizzying extremes.

One of the films best visual treats are its alebrijes, the colorful fantastical creatures from Mexican folk art, rendered here as electrically colored lizards and gryphons that seem to pop off the screen even without the aid of 3-D.

Mudbound could have easily turned out as a kind of dusty, respectable period drama that looks important while advancing nothing, but it exceeds expectations with every new layer.

I just wish Vega and Lelio let us in a little more to see her as an individual, aside from the hostility she encounters.

This is a toxic, not at all benign film.

It’s intermittently successful, but even in its more meandering moments it is a gripping, almost unbearably dark watch.

A Bad Moms Christmas is a film about women trapped in a bleakly infantilizing suburban hellscape with horrible lighting, whose only idea about how to subvert their situation is to scream and push people and hit each other in the crotch.

Watching Jigsaw go about his torture business is about as interesting as watching a child burn ants — a dumb and ugly waste of energy, resources and time.

Only the Brave feels like a film that would have made sense coming from Peter Berg or Michael Bay, but Kosinski mostly pulls back on the macho cheerleading to find something more objective, and ultimately, deeply emotional.

Thank You for Your Service is a more critical film than most in this milieu, and it’s refreshingly honest about mental-health issues.

As a psychological not-quite thriller, it’s consistently entertaining; as a visual exercise, it’s more adventurous than most would be.

Her ability to take in the chaos and darkness of the ’70s and find some kind of acceptance through her writing is what makes her as relevant as ever.

It’s a plenty good story to tell, but even by the time the respirator takes its last gasp, I was ultimately unmoved.

Ai clearly wants to take a macro view of an impossible problem, to find some clarity in abstraction. But whenever he just talks to the refugees face to face, we learn more than any drone shot could tell us.

What Professor Marston and the Wonder Women does, with a wink but refreshingly few snickers, is color in the life-giving fantasy that fueled the creation of the perennially embattled American icon.

As a woman with a seemingly boundless amount of love to share, she gives voice to an urge that most other romantic comedies take for granted.

Phillips kind of stumbles when he tries for a pat wrap-up of a still-horrific problem. But when he digs into the muck of the rot at the heart of it, he comes up with some unforgettable moments.

If you’re the type of viewer who thought "Wolf of Wall Street’s" failing was that it looked too cool, American Made is for you. It’s the grubbiest, greasiest vision of bad boys gettin’ away with it in recent memory.

Though Gyllenhaal is making the clearest bid for the big awards performance and deserves any accolades it brings him, Maslany’s performance was the one that floored me.

There’s no there there, and the film never seems to know what it’s playing with besides the idea of movies in general.

Five Foot Two distinguishes itself from similar projects from Justin Bieber and Katy Perry by not trying to be a 101 class in the subject and her personal history, but when it hits similar beats — heartbreak, the physical demands of performing, tearful scenes with family — anyone who doesn’t have a Little Monster’s encyclopedic knowledge might feel a little emotionally lost.

There are a lot of half-complete ideas among the sisters’ jumble of imagery, but trying to tie them together is a fitfully enjoyable, if ultimately fruitless experience.

It gallops along quickly enough to keep us entertained, but not so quickly that we can’t see the seams of its creaky American Hero setup.

Amid all the important facts, I longed for something unnecessary from the filmmaker, some expressive flourish whose sole purpose isn’t just to convey information. Again I find myself typing the words, “It’s an unquestionably worthy story, I just wish it was told with more inventiveness.”

This new It has more on its mind, and gives more body and voice to King’s ideas of childhood anxieties and the corrosive power of fear.

The film is at its best when it lets Dickinson’s deceptively blank face and Hélène Louvart’s lyrically natural cinematography tell the story, which is far more informed by mood than events.

The whole film feels slightly grubby and low-res, like it’s been languishing in private mode on the filmmakers’ pre-HD YouTube page since 2008.

The images of polo-shirt wearing Asian men with rifles lining the rooftops of Koreatown is one of the more troubling images from April 1992. Gook purposefully chooses not to tell a story of that scale, but I did wish it could have found more moral complexity in the corner of the city it chose to depict.

We’re left floored by the facts of Colin Warner’s case; the film itself falls away.

It’s the work of a filmmaker who has been honing her own jarring, idiosyncratic sense of rhythm and character for years. As a debut feature, it feels auspicious; as a snapshot of a masculine emergency, it feels timeless.

There’s nothing cheap about the rest of Annabelle: Creation, so this scattered finale felt like a letdown.

Even those of us willing to accept that there are many different shades at work here will likely feel the foundation of the film fall out from under us by its conclusion.

Director Matt Spicer’s Sundance breakout is a friend-crush tale as old as time, modeled almost to a T on "The Talented Mr. Ripley" (without the murder). As such, your mileage will vary depending on whether or not you’ve ever been to Café Gratitude and how much of a tolerance you have for Aubrey Plaza.

As a character study, it’s highly successful, but given the context it will be watched in — albeit not quite as oxygen-deprived and manic as Sundance — it feels a little too pat.

There are many films that attempt to illuminate the world through pain, but Step is most instructive in its moments of joy.

This is a low-stakes, no-frills, point-A-to-point-B crime thriller, taking inspiration from every parent’s worst nightmare, and pretty much nothing else.

The Incredible Jessica James is a little odd duck of a film, an old-fashioned romantic comedy that’s decidedly modern in its frame of reference, a character-driven piece that never lets us too deep into its protagonist, a movie as pleasant as it is fleeting.

It is one of the darkest, most dismaying films I have ever seen, much less one ostensibly made for children.

It elicits more than a few excruciating laugh-out-loud moments, but it’s also tragic and vulnerable — not to mention frequently unpleasant.

It’s a light musing on adulthood and monogamy and sisterhood, washed in Pavlovian period nostalgia. The revelations are gentle, but worthwhile.

Like "Bridesmaids," it makes no more promises than an actual night out: These people will be there, and the goal is to have a good time. And while it may not quite have the undergirding pathos of the former, Girls Trip is a very good time.

A deeply silly midsummer lark that makes up for the fact that it’s about nothing by being incredibly entertaining.

All these performers are given decent setups, but the script loses interest in anything that starts to look like a comedic through line.

The Transformers movies are a favorite object of critical scorn, and narratively, The Last Knight remains barely coherent. But it’s more fun than "Age of Extinction," though both movies are so drunk on money and effects they accidentally go weird.

All Eyez on Me is rarely more than a faithful adaptation of the rapper’s Wikipedia entry, so fixated on name-checking every footnote of Shakur’s public life that there is no space to explore the experience of the man himself.

It does not suffice to call The Book of Henry bad; it’s nonfunctional, so poorly conceived from the ground up as to slip out of the grasp of the usual standards one applies to narrative film. It might be admirable if it wasn’t such torture to watch.