Joshua Rothkopf

Is Gemini on the level of classic L.A. films like Heat or The Player? Hardly. But you sink into its mood, and that’s enough.

Alicia Vikander makes for a scrappy, spunky Lara Croft, even if the overall concept remains less a movie and more of an exercise routine.

No Hollywood film can ever solve the central problem of adapting this book, in that it inevitably does too much of the imagining for you. DuVernay makes a big-hearted go of it, even if she seems slightly dazzled by her own magical mystery tour.

Thoroughbreds plunges you into an ice-cold bath of amorality, but debuting writer-director Cory Finley has such a command of details—the perfectly soigné clothes and hairdos, the lavish Connecticut living rooms and attentive gardening staffs—that you’ll laugh your way through the shivers.

Garland’s creeping pace lulls you on an almost molecular level; he’s made something akin to an end-of-the-world film, but one in which the changes afoot might not be wholly bad, title be damned.

Pfeiffer is nothing short of heartbreaking in a part that requires her to be completely unvarnished.

Handsomely mounted by Creed director Ryan Coogler and starring an enviable slate of black actors that makes cameoing comics godhead Stan Lee almost seem lost, the film is provocative and satisfying in ways that are long overdue, like its ornate, culturally dense production design and the deeper subtexts of honor, compassion and destiny.

There’s pleasure to be had in seeing Brooklyn’s Carroll Gardens expertly used as a backdrop for bougie romantic frustrations. If you miss the JakeWalk, here’s your opportunity to see the bar revived as the perfect place for neurotic conversations; if you ever ambled down Smith Street in your own mess of emotions, you may be feeling this one.

Dramatically inert and flatter than a buzz cut, the movie ends up diminishing their moment of heroism by turning it into a defiantly amateurish piece of junior-high-grade theatrics.

If you want to feel good about a war with no end, this one’s for you.

They get at the essence of Vertigo, haunting us via ghostly transmissions.

Hard-core fans get the loud noises they came for, but true fear vaporizes.

Ex-Glee geeks and those who sing in the shower: Your passable time-waster has arrived.

Deceptively hidden under layers of gorgeous surfaces, Paul Thomas Anderson’s borderline-sick romance waltzes toward a riveting tale of obsession.

Undeniably, The Post feels timely, but there’s a counter-argument to be made that, in our current era of “fake news” and easily swayed public opinion, it’s actually a dinosaur of a film—and not Jurassic Park. Thank God for the owners, it ultimately says, who sometimes do the right thing. That’s a perfectly fine idea, but our times could use something sharper.

David Scarpa’s nail-biter of a screenplay—based on John Pearson’s 1995 account Painfully Rich, adapted with a free dramatic license—amps up the tension with phoned-in demands and impulsive raids by knuckleheaded local police, yet it never loses the bitter, fascinating taste of imperious wealth.

A triumph of comic irreverence and dramatic purpose, Episode VIII dazzles like the sci-fi saga hasn't in decades.

Destroyed yet defiant, Robbie walks the emotional tightrope of the most fabulously, tragically American film of the year.

Dan Stevens turns in a vibrant comic performance as Charles Dickens in this drama about writerly inspiration that plays like a smarter Shakespeare in Love.

Like that giant metaphorical carousel looming over them, it’s a movie that’s spinning its wheels.

The world's worst film gets an affectionate making-of dramatization that's half as weird as the real thing.

The year’s most shocking transformation arrives in the form of Gary Oldman’s Winston Churchill, a creation for the ages.

A committed Denzel Washington is wasted in a legal drama that never gets around to making closing arguments.

Although the film takes place in a fantasy version of brownstone Brooklyn, it’s more cutting than the book, especially for the way it shuns the concept of a star vehicle and sharpens the material into a forum for several moments of guilt.

Justice League gets the band together but remembers to bring the banter along with the boom.

It’s anchored by a dangerously glum performance by 21-year-old Ross Lynch, who becomes more interesting the more you watch him.

Thank You for Your Service is as necessary as top-flight journalism.

It plays like one of Linklater’s most intimate gifts, an adult rumination on the tricky subject of patriotism.