Inkoo Kang

Lovering keeps In Fear visually absorbing through unsettling close-ups and a well-paced series of scares.

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 parkour is breathtaking and the plot twists are off-the-charts ridiculous.

The French chamber dramedy What's in a Name is frequently delightful, full of ribald humor and compelling, intelligent debate.

There are too few real humans in Life After Beth, resulting in a lack of both brains and heart.

A love letter to that singular intersection of artistic innovation, cultural legacy, community pride, and family-sustaining (or -straining) commerce known as the restaurant.

Its structure is so meager it's downright skeletal.

A masterful blend of black humor and queasy dread.

The apocalypse is no fun for anyone, but the dreariest possible scenario probably entails being stuck in a house without a functioning toilet and with nine of the dullest people left alive.

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

A rancid comedy fueled by male entitlement and uxoricidal rage.

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

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 film offers disappointingly little insight into the music itself.

First-time feature writer Sofia Alvarez’s attempt to shrink Han’s lengthy, largely internal, and culturally specific story into a 97-minute movie is, simply put, a botch job. Stilted and scattered and strangely cold in its cinematography, it’s a handsomely shot whole lotta nothin’.

The script relies too often on Sasha’s bestie or Marcus’ father pushing the destined couple toward each other, but its smaller moments of naturalistic riffing make up for the rigid plotting.

Belle's extraordinary intelligence is most evident in its slow but satisfying disentanglement of the jumble of privileges and disadvantages that the wealthy, aristocratic, and learned — but also female, half-black, and pitifully sheltered — Dido embodies.

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.

And in these troubled, terrifying times, as many of us are stuck at home simultaneously glued to, and existentially exhausted by, the news, Spelling the Dream is the kind of lighthearted but smart escapism you don't have to feel guilty about.

Though visually unimpressive, Myers’ film is surprisingly rich and expansive in its ideas.

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.”

The two stunning set pieces, both involving car chases, are so inspired and teeth-grittingly determined that they make the case for the possibility of individual heroism in a harrowingly venal world.

Al-Mansour is both a natural and highly imperfect pick to adapt Trisha R. Thomas’ novel.

The thing that catastrophically sinks “Him” – or “Her,” if that's the film you see second – is that the two films are enough alike that sitting through the second immediately after the first is a slog.

Elemental isn't essential, but it's a fascinating if limited portrait of the diversity of eco-warriordom today.

Shelton's comedy isn't just smart, but cheerfully wise; not just funny, but cleverly and endlessly so.

The lack of a precipitating factor, the invisible impulses behind addiction, and the episodic nature of recovery don’t exactly lend themselves to a compelling narrative structure.

Especially in a year so devoid of serious female-led dramas, it's invigorating to see a feminist crowd-pleaser with the force of moral righteousness on its side. But Big Eyes is good, not great. What keeps it from excellence is its reluctance to explore the very questions it raises.