Emily Yoshida

In telling the story of a disappearing slice of America, Zhao has created a portrait of resilience, and the bonds that last even after the rodeo’s over.

The script is frantically trying to build a whole world when a modest house would do.

Cinematically, it’s undeniably gripping, a tightly wound contraption of nervous energy, grief, and gore. But it’s in service of a story that’s been told countless times before, and it’s not clear where Ramsay’s usually singular point of view is in play.

Haneke’s integration of the ways we communicate and conduct our lives via phone and laptop feels uniquely effective.

Loveless gives us a multicourse meal of social ills, too dispersed to feel like a thesis, yet too chilly to feel like a raw, unbridled tantrum.

Östlund’s eye for the subtleties of human behavior, especially public behavior, never fails.

For all its throttling thrills, Good Time is a film about a destructive love — and loving someone despite not having the right kind of love to give them. Ignore the deceptively convivial title: This is the kind of thrill that sticks.

This is a near-perfect film, and a heightening in every way of everything that was great about Baker’s last movie.

To see an unfettered nightmare like this from such an idiosyncratic director feels like a cruel treat, and a welcome stylistic stretch.

It’s incredible what a difference 12 years makes: Baumbach is an altogether more generous and insightful filmmaker here than he was the last time he told this story.

Wonderstruck gestures at a lot, especially between the two narratives, which Haynes flips between with such rapidity that the film isn’t able to find a tonal groove until well past its halfway point.

The film is packed with so many strange gems of moments, and while a few feel like Bong losing the plot (specifically any time Okja decides to loosen her bowels) it always snaps back together.

King Arthur is guilty of many blockbuster sins critics have taken it upon themselves to call out over the last decade. And yet, seeing a version of them this derivative and dumb, with neither CGI grandeur nor a sense of fun on its side, is like a splash of cold water in the face, a reminder of how bad things can be when nobody cares.

While 3 Generations certainly has some worthy explorations, it’s too vain not to sugarcoat itself, visually or otherwise.

The film lives and dies by Latimore’s performance, which is quiet and ever-shifting.

The action has become incoherent, largely past the point of enjoyability.

Graduation, like Mungiu’s lauded "4 Months, 3 Weeks and 2 Days," layers misfortunes and mistakes on top of one another in a way that feels both oppressive and true.

Outside of its open and shameless heartstring tugging, Gifted at least sets up a compelling, multisided moral dilemma.

Perhaps a less uplifting ending may have seemed more honest. But Shinkai’s a romantic at heart, and it’s infectious. By the end, you just want these two crazy kids to get together, no matter whose bodies they’re in.

All other films hoping to become the official cinematic standard-bearer of #TheResistance, take a seat. This is the most damning political narrative of 2017.

This is peak TV in a feature-film package, a faux-deep, workmanlike script splashed with some strikingly moody sci-fi imagery tailor-made for a YouTube trailer. It aspires to eerie and constantly ends up at belabored and literal.

The filmmakers think little of the emotional and intellectual connection fans already have with this property, and have put all their chips on the aesthetic. It’s exhausting to watch them curate what parts of the story’s Japanese origin are worth keeping and which can be discarded.

As a final-girl structured horror film, it has plenty of imaginative moments.

It’s bright and fun and doesn’t look like any climactic fight of a superhero movie in recent memory.

Lowe, who was actually pregnant during production, also wrote the movie’s script, whose rough edges and gaps are filled in by her strong sense of tone and instinctual truth as a director.

The fundamental ironic juxtaposition — ultraviolence meets corporate banality — is a bludgeon that never feels fresh no matter how many times it’s driven into our aching skulls.

Raw is certainly nasty, but its gore is strategic and sparse. It is, however, a very stressful film to watch from beginning to end, even before the real feasting gets underway.

After a couple musical numbers, it occurs to you that the film you’re watching is every bit as animated as the original, but it’s somehow turned out less lifelike, despite its considerable technological advantage.

The film mostly retains its humanity, largely thanks to Deutch’s performance and Russo-Young’s insistence on keeping her at the forefront of almost every shot.

By replacing the class system of Victorian England with the dynamic of the occupier and occupied, Park has tapped into something uniquely complex about a chapter of history that is rarely explored. There is a deep, festering malady at the heart of The Handmaiden, exacerbated by idle fantasy, cultural projection and denial.

While Green Room shares an aesthetic sensibility with his last film (he shot and directed all his features), Saulnier is up to something very different this time around — something simpler, perhaps, but more immediately satisfying.

What Herce and his crew have accomplished is an invaluable feat of cinematic empathy and vision.

With jump scares and cornball demon faces lurking around every corner, the more ambient (and important) existential despair of Aokigahara is lost.

Eighth Grade is cognizant of all the new scary realities of growing up with an internet-connected camera on your person at all times, but it also finds hope in it, as, if nothing else, a tool for self-discovery.

It’s not that Blindspotting doesn’t have important points to make about how individuals live in a collective history of racialized violence. It’s that it has a hard time making those points feel organic to the story and style, whether it’s going for realism or over-the-top musical-theater territory.

Lisa’s drive is more than biological; it’s intellectual and emotional, and that’s what keeps what often risks becoming camp madness in an identifiably human place — almost all the way to the end.

Politeness may be the film’s weakest point, whether with its characters or bedroom scenes. But it’s hardly something to complain about, especially when the company is this lively.