Joshua Rothkopf

By allowing viewers to step into the shoes of a wall-climbing Jackie Chan, a parkour-sprinting Daniel Craig or a bullet-spraying Ahnold, it does something that live action has never attempted before. The carnage flies—it’s possible to miss a lot of it. But if action movies are meant to be stunning, Hardcore Henry can proudly take its place among the giants. Even better, it lets you stand with them.

As scripted by Bryan Sipe, Demolition buries its lead actor under a rubble of clichés.

A hilarious, deeply relaxed comedy about male bonding, Richard Linklater’s baseball-minded latest ranks right up there with his masterpieces.

If there’s any justice, dawning or otherwise, at the multiplex, audiences will reject Zack Snyder’s lumbering, dead-on-arrival superhero mélange, a $250 million tombstone for a genre in dire need of a break.

Midnight Special is a movie worth believing in. It's an alternative to the assembly line that turns hot young directors into purveyors of the latest shade of superhero spandex. Little here feels like science or fiction but sci-fi is exactly what this is, from the heart and out of this world.

Basically, it’s an electrifying three-person play, as the determined Winstead, the complexly furious Goodman and Tony-winner John Gallagher Jr. (playing a lucky neighbor who made his way down) have it out in scenes that impart the nauseating futility of George Romero’s mall-ensconced "Dawn of the Dead."

Robustly entertaining.

Race is the most timid, lackadaisical movie that could have been made out of potentially classic material.

It’s not often that faith-based films, competing in the same marketplace that rewards action, embrace the deeper, more difficult idea of meeting hate with love, but Risen tries. It’s a drama that neither seeks to convert viewers, nor confront true believers with anything uncomfortable—only reaffirm their bedrock convictions, the ones that are worth repeating.

It doesn’t seem new for them, yet as super polished, mannered, slightly surreal comedies go, the movie feels as rare as a unicorn.

A ridiculously infantile film, one that flatters itself by intimating a deeper comment about suppressed masculinity or romantic passivity.

En route to the harshest, most unremittingly bleak film of his career, Solondz unleashes some of his sharpest commentary on human mortality and regret.

Like an updated The Commitments in rouge (liberally applied), Sing Street nails the details.

The story is a little slight compared to the grand romantic ache of Pride and Prejudice, but Beckinsale and Stillman do their inspiration proud: Finally, a Jane Austen movie that's fresh and deliciously rotten at the same time.

If [it] doesn't feel quite as revelatory as Keep the Lights On (2012) or the heartbreaking Love Is Strange (2014), it still impresses you with its quiet, confident maturity.

To say Lonergan has evolved further with his third feature would be an understatement: He toggles between his new plot’s years with the relaxed mastery of Boyhood’s Richard Linklater. Plus, he’s finally got a complex central performance that anchors his ambitions to cinema’s all-time great brooders.

The final word on this incident will require a more thoughtful filmmaker. But hopefully, that artist will possess at least half of Bay’s punishing, peerless craft.

Shoddy and exhausted from the start, this painfully unfunny buddy-cop comedy lands with a plop in the January sewer of failed Hollywood castoffs.

Even as the trio heads into a complicated dance of multiple infidelities, In the Shadow of Women never villainizes any of them.

One of [Moore's] more hopeful and celebratory efforts.

Concussion could have used the political backbone of Smith’s Ali director Michael Mann; instead, it has Peter Landesman, who steers both lead actor and screenplay away from the sharper edges.

It’s as pure an expression of Tarantino’s voice as he’s ever mustered—easy to savor, even if the aftertaste leaves a trace of nasty bitterness.

The rollicking, space-opera spirit of George Lucas’s original trilogy (you can safely forget the second trio of cynical, tricked-up prequels) emanates from every frame of J.J. Abrams' euphoric sequel. It’s also got an infusion of modern-day humor that sometimes steers the movie this close to self-parody—but never sarcastically, nor at the expense of a terrific time.

A thick sheen of luscious lens flares and Terrence Malick–like poetic lulls feel like icing on an undercooked mud pie—Bedford’s script deserves a stronger engagement with its characters’ desperation. Instead they collide in a clichéd ending that feels padded.

When a Hollywood comedy turns the crime of the century into a lark, you know a huge gamble has been chanced and won.

Alfred Hitchcock’s interrogator, the rising French director and critic François Truffaut, brought a fan’s passion and a colleague’s precision to his questions. The result remains a how-to guide for Vertigo, Psycho and a future wave of nail-biters inspired by their observations.

Amy Berg’s deeply sympathetic documentary on Janis Joplin — a singer whose shredded wail tapped reservoirs of pain — gets so much right, it feels like a major act of cultural excavation.

Of Stallone’s surprisingly tender performance — a definitive late-career triumph — enough can’t be said