Inkoo Kang

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.