Inkoo Kang

Ready Player One has no obligation to be a rigorous intellectual exercise, even if it amounts to a wasted opportunity to explore who else might steer tech, and society, toward greater equity. But it doesn’t have to be so facile, either. Maybe next time the screenwriters shouldn’t set the difficulty mode to “easy.”

Ultimately, the overstuffed, under-dramatized film fails to fully develop the stakes at hand, but it features more thoughtful world-building than most faith-based films, as well as a bracing honesty about the difficulty of reconciling idealistic credos with a harsh and unforgiving world.

An obligatory setup for a sequel slows down the final moments, but until then, Tomb Raider feels like a perfectly paced trio of espresso shots, with a shot of adrenaline to the heart as a chaser.

If you don’t mind your movies nasty, brutish, and slight, you couldn’t ask for a more delectable chocolate-covered razor blade.

Writer-director Hirayanagi runs into a few minor pacing miscalculations, but Oh Lucy!, based on her 2014 short of the same name, is a tense, observant, and heartfelt accomplishment.

The film is just plain bad, with an amateur cast (led by Taylor James), cut-rate special effects, who-cares storylines, and confusing details shoehorned in from the Bible.

Part incomplete rom com, part squishy lampoon, La Boda de Valentina ultimately falls short in both modes, but accomplishes just enough to warrant a RSVP.

The Chris Hemsworth vehicle is is often hammy, but also wryly funny, breath-stoppingly tense, and uncommonly intelligent. Its January dump is a disservice to a promising debut feature.

Proud Mary did not screen for critics, nor should it have. It’s a copy of a copy of a mediocre original, with the drab aesthetics of a TV movie and the emotional hollowness of an infomercial.

Grahame’s contributions to cinema are more than worthy of a reevaluation. Her complications, too, deserve more than this tepid, uncurious portrait.

It’s too bad that Chastain’s heady, exquisitely subtle performance is dragged down by the laughably vehement male characters that seek to speak for her. You can’t keep a good woman down. But you can constantly talk over her, I guess.

It’s a totally serviceable, if disappointingly uncinematic, film about a singular celebrity.

The Square lands its bullseyes, over and over, with a faultless precision that grows duller with each strike.

With its observational dispassion, My Friend Dahmer doesn’t quite help us understand why Jeff is so into killing, and it’s pretty much useless when it comes to clarifying how he justifies committing such atrocities to himself.

Professor Marston and the Wonder Women celebrates the bravery and creativity of Diana Prince’s mastermind and his muses, but with a tepidness toward the complications of their lives. The result is a gauzy, sexy ode to unconventionality that feels distinctly and disappointingly conventional.

The film is meant to be a negotiation of what that long-ago relationship was, and it is that. But considered in our reality of pervasive sexual iniquity, Una also feels, whatever its creators’ intentions, an awful lot like a litany of self-serving excuses for pedophilic behavior, which may or may not be sincere.

Borrowing a few biographical details from Stanton’s life, the virtually plotless drama exudes admiration for its nonagenarian muse, but it’s built so sparely that it doesn’t have much to offer anyone who doesn’t already share its reverence for the “Paris, Texas” actor.

There’s enough good-naturedness and cultural specificity here, alongside a slight deviation from the usual immigrant narratives, to render it a dollop of sweetness and novelty that goes down easy.

Handsome and moving if a bit cautious, “Battle” is full of smart complexities and sensational acting, and it deserves to be considered a serious awards contender.

Even when Ford strongly foreshadows future revelations, Strong Island holds narrative jolts, many fueled by shocks of betrayal. In losing William, the family also lost their faith in their country, their community, and in themselves.

Director Gurinder Chadha (“It’s a Wonderful Afterlife,” “Bend It Like Beckham”) attempts to explore the cataclysmic human costs of the Partition without humanizing any of the Indian characters. And so we’re offered, on the 70th anniversary of the Partition (give or take a couple of weeks), another film about how brown suffering makes nice white people sad.

The new horror-thriller is cheesy, asinine, convoluted and ludicrous. On the plus side, if your eyeballs need a vigorous workout, this will have them rolling nonstop.

Chon’s dense, ambitious, and observant film is full of impressive craft and insight.

Pilgrimage travels quite far on the momentum provided by a series of reveals. Each shifts the film’s stakes significantly enough that we look forward to the next divulgence as much as the succeeding battle scene. It ultimately stumbles when it reaches for depth, arriving at a hollow conclusion that mistakes cynicism for profundity.

A minimalist film like Columbus depends almost entirely on the shading of the characters and the depths of the performances. By that metric, it’s a too-delicate creature, tickling and piquing instead of fully thrusting us into the realm of feelings.

A day can be mind-numbingly dull or fate-alteringly momentous. Person to Person expresses this duh statement with scarcely more wisdom, nuance, or emotional pull.

The death scenes range from goofy and completely preventable to modestly suspenseful.

Director Laura Gabbert pairs her wide-ranging, blithely fawning approach to Gold with a vision of Los Angeles as blinkered as it is tempting.

Unlike the first half, which felt like a fresh look at Biblical events from an unfamiliar POV, the latter section simply recreates the end of the Gospel of Matthew with little of the urgency or humanity that fueled it before.

The Jesse Owens to cheer on here is, sure, the fastest man in the world, but also the canny would-be celebrity who knew exactly how to bet on himself in a world that had little use for his dignity and intellect. If that’s not an inspirational story, I don’t know what is.

Despite arriving a decade too late, there’s a version of the small-town coming-out comedy 4th Man Out...that could feel relevant. But first-time director Andrew Nackman’s emotionally shallow, vaguely misogynistic take isn’t it.

Nearly free of gore, the film taps into the deep and always welcome vein of the opulently bizarre things that rich, emotionally stunted people get into when they’ve got too much money. Stacey Menear’s script is careful and clever about revealing what Brahms really is, for he’s certainly got a mind and will of his own.

If nothing else, Dirty Grandpa is consistent: it maintains a tone of aggressive charmlessness from start to finish.

The Masked Saint didn’t screen for critics, but it’s no worse than any other faith-based film, which as a canon tends to sacrifice story for the sermon. A movie that can finally combine the two — now that’d be a miracle worth beholding.

In terms of anything that has to do with characterization, Chuck Hogan‘s script is punishingly rote. But as bombastic, shoot-‘em-up spectacle, 13 Hours is a visceral, well-paced and often beautiful action-thriller.

American exceptionalism certainly deserves to be deconstructed, but that can most assuredly be accomplished with a lot more nuance than it is here. As an exercise in liberal self-flagellation, hey, whatever floats your boat. But as a political call-to-arms, I believe in America: We can do better.

It’s that devotion to truth that makes Son of Saul such a difficult watch — and also one of year’s most important masterpieces.

Failing almost entirely at amusement, “The Road Chip” may be most useful as a lesson for children to be more discerning about their movie choices.

Fassbender manages to find the psychological throughline that makes Macbeth’s increasing mental deterioration — a development that can feel overly formalistic, not to mention moralistic — wholly convincing.

It’s as punishingly dull as Sunday-school homework — and just as unnecessary.

#Horror” is fueled by the despairing fear and misanthropy you can only get from reading needlessly malicious Internet comments. But it’s also made with verve, style, and sparing gore by writer-director (and fashion designer) Tara Subkoff.

First-time helmer Peter Sohn and screenwriter Meg LeFauve (“Inside Out”) have created a fantastic and frequently exhilarating feature that showcases Pixar’s greatest strengths: technical brilliance, emotional texture, crossover appeal, and an impish sense of humor that takes the utmost advantage of the animated form.

The film’s compassion for everyday Americans...along with its energetic determination to entertain, enlighten, and infuriate make it a laudable surprise.

Timely but dreary and dramatically inept.

Love feels deeply, but not complexly. Both Murphy and Noé’s sustained sex scenes understand want and need, but there’s little to invest in emotionally.

"Art Addict” may be encyclopedic, but it’s all-too-rarely insightful.

Unflinching yet unburdened, Miss You Already is like the best kind of hug: warm, reassuring, cathartic, and a fleeting but vital reminder that there’s at least as much good in the world as there is bad.

Silicon Valley is built on various inequalities, and, frustratingly, CodeGirl isn’t interested enough in delving into those issues — or the girls determined to overcome them.

The women’s movements are routinely and depressingly ignored by the movies. But Suffragette isn’t just a dutiful corrective, a lid to cover up a gap, but a necessarily distressing exploration of how much a political vanguard will push and endure to set things right — and how fiercely and eagerly a society that’s resistant to change will punish them for it.

The Last Witch Hunter aims for pulpy, comic-book fun, but it’s never as fleet, funny, or detailed as it needs to be. And if you’re looking for something above middling in terms of plot, characters, world-building, even action sequences, you’ll need to seek it elsewhere.

Larson excels at determined despair, simultaneously evincing vulnerability and fearlessness. It’s an exciting, tour-de-force performance by an actress who announces herself as one of the best of her generation. If only the film around her were as bold.

This uneven but funny and engrossing drama is less about Victoria than about time itself: how it slows down in the bleary middle of the night, how it speeds up relationships between strangers when no one else is around, how capacious it is in containing the most unexpected of swerves and stumbles.

Goofily self-aware and wholesomely boisterous, it’s a children’s picture whose sense of spooky fun readily diverts from its quibble-worthy messaging.

Grace and poise are certainly embedded in Yousafzai’s DNA, but there’s frustratingly little of her vulnerability or interiority in the film.

At best, The Green Inferno is a reliable shock and disgust-delivery system. At worst — and it certainly veers toward the worst — it’s a racially reprehensible work that exploits one of the world’s most powerless peoples. And no number of movie-geek references to “Cannibal Holocaust” is going to change that.

The New Girlfriend is a delicate figurine: too quaint to feel necessary in the current climate of ever-bolder representations of trans lives, and yet rescued from disposability by its delicate beauty.

Anchored by exceptional performances by the main actresses, Breathe is a confrontation with the terrifying volatility of adolescence.

For all its cheap talk about the importance of innovation, Agent 47 just feels like a copy of a copy of a copy.

The film confidently switches gears into a moving character study of how life passes by while you’re busy looking like you don’t care. More interesting than the growing fissures in their friendship are the increasingly ruinous consequences of thoughtlessness as a way of life.

In a movie culture with near-inescapable CGI, old-fashioned animation like Shaun the Sheep is always a treat — and a romp this ambitiously aimless is an all-too-rare marvel.

The news is only important insofar as it helps us understand the world. Best of Enemies, though, is only interested in zooming in to gaze lingeringly at the media’s navel.

Pixels is ultimately a thoroughly numbing experience, not least because all the characters are doomed by a psychological flatness more two-dimensional than any arcade-game screen.

A lovingly crafted B-level melodrama elevated by its remarkable central performance, Lila and Eve feels like Viola Davis’ “Still Alice.”

Phoenix’s transformation from a scotch-soaked pile of tweed into a homicidally self-righteous ubermensch is fun to watch, but Allen too frequently loses sight of the story he’s telling.

The film bustles along through a series of reveals – a storytelling technique that can lose an audience’s sympathy or suspension of disbelief pretty fast, but which works flawlessly here because the filmmakers and the performers know exactly who their characters are and what kind of world they live in.

Amy is both biography and autopsy, an exhaustive chronicle of her rise to the top of the charts and a bare-knuckled indictment of the vulturish men who took advantage of the emotionally vulnerable singer.

None of these plot points are run through with any thoughtfulness or panache. Despite a great, unaffected performance by Wiggins — the only one among the cast — and the primal joy of seeing the dog actors sprinting, leaping and maybe even emoting, the film is sunk because the characters never transcend their seeming origins in a Disney Channel movie project.

Brice’s script boasts a few surprises, but this is essentially a highly competent film about boring people’s boring problems.

Appropriate to its teenage milieu, Alfonso Gomez-Rejon‘s breakthrough film isn’t unlike spending a couple of hours with an exceptionally witty high-schooler: It’s entertaining as hell, but you can’t help rolling your eyes a little at its self-satisfied pseudo-profundities.

Like Wilson’s cornball “California Girls,” Love & Mercy is by no means a complicated portrait, and yet it’s a curiously satisfying one.

The men are slightly forgettable, but the woman is not. Far from the flawless fembot in “Ex Machina,” Vikander’s slight gawkiness is highlighted here, allowing her to look like a real girl, absolutely the right decision by Kent.

Bujalski’s script does boast lots of smart, sad observations about how both money and self-improvement can lead to isolation. But the characters, while far from broad, aren’t very focused, either.

Aloft is simply adrift.

Tomorrowland is a globe-trotting, time-traveling caper whose giddy visual whimsies and exuberant cartoon violence are undermined by a coy mystery that stretches as long as the line for “Space Mountain” on a hot summer day.

Ironically, then, a designer renowned for his brilliantly precise lines and proportions — enough to make a dress out of a Mondrian painting — is paid tribute by a work with disappointingly sloppy structure. Saint Laurent might glitter like the real thing, but a careful look at the construction shows it’s really just a knockoff.

The recent proliferation of gray-haired cinema is a welcome development, but it hasn’t yielded very many notable pictures. “Dreams” doesn’t just buck that trend; it points a new way forward by being frank about living one’s final years and confronting that fact every day.

The joyless and perfunctory Hot Pursuit would be a black mark on anyone’s résumé, but it’s an especially disheartening one for Witherspoon at this point in her career.

Most impressively, the film admits that the line between faith and magical thinking isn’t as solid as most believers would care to admit — and the Church knows it. Unfortunately, these worthwhile ideas are contained in a phony-baloney tale more artificial than a polyester teddy bear stuffed with Splenda and Cheez Whiz — and just as appealing.

War is brutal and senseless and would be laughably absurd if it didn’t cause so much widespread, unnecessary destruction and suffering. Tangerines is a heartfelt reminder of that fact, but not a particularly essential one.

Crowe’s beauty-seeking, but exoticizing camera is slightly outmatched by his performance, which anchors the film with regret tinged with hope. But what continues to haunt after the credits finish rolling are the film’s explorations of the trauma of life after war: The brutally quick political shifts, the lingering shame of committing vicious and dishonorable acts, and the bitter knowledge that there’s no such thing as lasting peace.

The fatal flaw of "John Doe" is its focus on ideas, rather than people.

A chilly, yet engrossing drama, elevated beyond its four-people-locked-in-a-house framework by the eerie beauty of the production design and the thoughtful curiosity of Garland’s screenplay.

Lost River is little more than Detroit-based ruin porn, an aesthetic exploitation of poverty and hardship punctuated by splashes of neon and blood.

The film boasts all the cinematic strengths we’ve come to expect from the animal-focused nonfic label... But director Mark Linfield’s film is also distinguished by its fascinating focus on the rigid but not immutable social hierarchy of the macaque world, as well as a smartly structured story of repression, rebellion, and triumph.

The Sisterhood of Night is too messy to qualify as a great film, especially when it begins introducing, in passing, peripheral characters who survived rape and incest, but it certainly isn’t muddled.

Laxton’s measured pace appropriately parallels the slow stifling that Effie undergoes, but he extends his muted approach too far, depriving the film of the emotional crescendo it badly needs.

The mystery is solidly structured, but the answers it gradually yields are silly at best and lazy and offensive at worst.

Densely packed and gorgeously expressionist, the old-fashioned tragedy is very nearly a satisfying experience despite its various shortcomings.

Ferrell and Hart don’t bring anything that we haven’t seen from them before, but they create a bouncy, playfully defiant rapport. It’s promising enough that you wish they could have made a movie in which they’re just making us laugh, instead of leaving us wondering how every third scene could be made less offensive.

As with so much of Brazilian cinema, the framing of the plot as a social allegory instead of a psychological portrait doesn't yield the most emotionally satisfying experience. But Wolf serves as an important feminist correction -- and a compelling reminder that predators can come from anywhere.

It’s an undeniable triumph of mood — perfect for anyone who wants to practice clenching their fists for nearly 100 straight minutes — as well as an ambitious effort at reinventing horror by eschewing the genre’s common tricks.

Director Lone Scherfig’s stagings of these suspenseful set pieces are masterful, but the rest of the thriller is a fairly predictable manifesto against Britain’s de facto oligarchy.

Grippingly plotted and exquisitely thoughtful, 52 Tuesdays is a poignant reminder that neither confusion nor crisis is doomed to be calamitous.

Hawke is probably too respectful a director and disciple to challenge anything that his subject says, or even query about the vaguest outlines of his personal life.... The title is truth in advertising; “Seymour” really is only an introduction.

Bring a notebook and some tissues — the mission to protect the queen becomes a tangle of shifting alliances between local and British forces that might require visual aids, while the snail-slow realization of gloomy prophecies may well tear you up in boredom.

A rancid comedy fueled by male entitlement and uxoricidal rage.

A timely, thorough and truly inspiring documentary about the financial and marketing imperatives that lead academic institutions to deny their students safety and justice.

Drunktown’s Finest shouldn’t be viewed simply as an anthropological curiosity, though, but as the promising debut of a gifted filmmaker who wants to show the beating and hurting hearts of the people behind the headlines.