Emily Yoshida

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

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.

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.

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

A pro-union, anti-corporate, race-conscious, Silicon Valley side-eyeing tale of one man’s journey through the late-capitalist nightmare of an “alternate present” version of Oakland, Sorry to Bother You’s greatest asset is the strength of its conviction, and how far it’s willing to go to make sure it stays burned in your brain.

There is so much fascinating, underplayed tension running through Burning.... I was a little let down, then, when Burning lost its steam in its second half.

Aquaman’s as formulaic, excessively thrashy, and mommy-obsessed as any other entry in the DCEU, but its visual imagination is genuinely exciting and transportive, and dare I say, fun.

If Wreck-It Ralph was a film about jobs and self-image, the addition of commerce into that equation in its sequel makes everything exponentially more manic and unstable. And after nearly two hours of our eyeballs being flooded with savvy, incessant product placement of eBay, Amazon, Pinterest, and of course the entire Walt Disney Company portfolio, we’re all wrecked.

As the encounters stack up, though, the impact of what Hosoda is starting to do starts to cohere, and it’s pretty effective stuff. The extradimensional travel is an obvious but heart-tuggingly direct way to get at the truth that everyone was a kid once, a fact that is mind-boggling when you’re a kid, and bittersweet when you’re an adult.

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.

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.

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.

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

The film remains too mannered for its own good; it’s unquestionably nice and well-intentioned, but lacking momentum.

Put up side-by-side, the redemption of killers doesn’t feel quite as urgent a narrative as the alliance of idealists, and in its final minutes The Sisters Brothers retreats back from some interesting, adventurous territory to something all too familiar.

Cameron Post is the kind of film that openly courts falling into the cinematic limitations of an “issues film.” Akhavan’s sense of place and ensemble do a lot to counter that, but that specificity ends with the main character.

As an origin story for a young actor’s warped worldview, Honey Boy is compelling.

Rough Night, which is like an episode of Broad City that got a blowout and smoked a pound of primo studio notes, tries to have it both ways. It wants to be a character-based lost-weekend romp, but keeps forcing itself toward increasingly ridiculous and self-consciously naughty set pieces.

Alex Strangelove is a little stylistically unambitious, nor is it terribly compelling as a romance — who Alex ends up with is ultimately beside the point.

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.

In the hands of "Iris" and "Notes on a Scandal" director Richard Eyre, McEwan’s story is stagy and austere, taking place in gleaming flats and spotless courtrooms, like a Nancy Meyers movie with more court wigs. It’s a wan, sapped atmosphere, making the life, faith, and literal blood of a 17-year-old boy all the more stark a line to run through it.

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.

Its lead protagonists and their endless reserve of raw, bittersweet chemistry are Kahiu’s greatest asset.

Just like the families of the victims in the film who feel nauseous at the prospect of making a celebrity out of Breivik and spreading his toxic ideology, I feel a little queasy at the chilling, captivating portrayal of him by Anders Danielsen Lie. I feel uneasy being “captivated” by any of this, period.

Two biographical documentaries in, and it still feels like we’re in need of a Houston film that digs into her music first, and the hows and whys of its enduring power.

Violet wants to sing. Does Violet want to be a pop star? This is posed as the the driving question of the film, but nothing about Fanning’s performance suggests a desire for much of anything.

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.

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