Emily Yoshida

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.