Justin Chang

Evan Jackson Leong’s film makes the most of its superior access and exciting basketball footage, overcoming repetitive stretches by sheer dint of a tremendous underdog story.

Stick with Song to Song, and Malick’s elusiveness becomes surprisingly direct. Long, tense conversations are reduced to a few piercing exchanges. Difficult questions and answers are distilled to their philosophical essence. People clash, break apart, fall down, get back up and slowly, tentatively reunite.

The story is rescued from its somewhat formulaic groove by the vividness of its milieu and the vitality of the performances.

Is there a point to all these cheeky meta-shenanigans? Not really. Yet it’s hard not to share Morelli’s delight in the possibilities of an impossible story structure, and if the final work feels inevitably uneven, that’s less a flaw than a feature — a testament to the visual and tonal distinctiveness of the movie’s individual parts.

The movie’s achievement is to remind us that milestones are invariably the result of hard, often thankless work, preceded by conflict and marked by compromise.

Pitch-perfect performances by Shirley MacLaine and an unusually restrained Jack Black hold together this offbeat true-crime saga, but Linklater's keen eye for human eccentricity flowers most memorably on the periphery.

Hayakawa keeps her story at an intimate and, for the most part, effective human scale. Baisho’s beautifully calibrated performance holds us close, turning Michi’s every step — a brief stint as a traffic guard, a trip to a cafe she once frequented with her husband — into a quiet act of resistance against her perceived uselessness.

Hua Tien-hau’s sentimental, conventionally inspiring film offers good-natured insights on the importance — and the difficulty — of living life to the fullest at any age.

The Photograph is a movie of seductive, slow-savored pleasures.

A dishy and engrossing peek inside the fashion world’s corridors of power -- every bit as slickly packaged as the publication it seeks to uncover.

An absorbing legal thriller that can't help but taste like exquisitely reheated leftovers.

Title refers not only to its heroine's physical gyrations but also her moral maneuverings as she strives to break out of her lower-class surroundings in this moody, intelligent take on conventional material.

Director David Yates spins the series' most expansive, structurally free-form chapter yet -- lumbering and gripping by turns, and suffused with a profound sense of solitude and loss.

Searching is nothing if not ambitious, and its rapidly accelerating second half is jammed with bold twists, red herrings and breathless confrontations. It’s also here that the movie begins to slacken its grip — partly because some of the twists beggar belief, and partly because they strain the limits of the online-all-the-time interface.

Like the first film, Frozen II is less a triumph of storytelling than of packaging. It bundles together a bunch of familiar, likable characters and a fresh list of bright, catchy songs, expertly written (by the returning duo of Kristen Anderson-Lopez and Robert Lopez) with an ear toward the Broadway showtunes they will one day inevitably become.

Filmmaker Daniel Karslake lobs a grenade into the culture wars with his heartfelt, provocative and unabashedly polemical For the Bible Tells Me So.

The family that slays together pays together in Killer Joe, a nasty little Texas noir that transfers Tracy Letts' 1993 play from page to screen with generally gripping results before devolving into an over-the-top splatterfest.

This robust, impersonal visual-effects showpiece proves buoyant and unpretentious enough to offset its stew of otherwise derivative fantasy/action elements.

In the end, The Mule is essentially a straightforward, somewhat overextended crime story enlivened by its uniquely grotesque circumstances (based on a true story, as noted at the beginning), and directed by Mahony in a lean, no-frills style that’s entirely convincing where it counts.

At times the experience of watching Election Year is a bit like scanning a few years’ worth of alarming headlines while someone sets off firecrackers under your desk. Black Lives Matter, drone warfare, local protests, home-grown militias, predatory capitalism, the Florida electorate, pop pop, bang bang.

Tangled is snappily paced and easy enough to get wrapped up in, propelled by a set of jaunty, serviceable songs from venerable composer Alan Menken and lyricist Glenn Slater.

Even when Allied loses its footing, there is something unmistakably touching about Zemeckis’ commitment to evoking a world so quietly, heroically out of step with the times.

On its own unpretentious, unapologetically pleasure-seeking terms, “The Shallows” has enough to recommend it — not least the fact that you could watch it twice in roughly the same amount of time it would take to watch “The Revenant,” and with little appreciable loss in adrenaline or poetry.

Writer-director Lucy Mulloy’s sexy, pulsing debut feature has an undercurrent of ribald comedy that doesn’t entirely prepare the viewer for the harrowing turn it eventually takes, but it nonetheless amounts to a bracing snapshot of desperate youths putting their immigrant dreams into action.

A sweetly amusing ode to the underdog sports movies that proliferated during that widely derided decade.

Birds of Prey, directed by Cathy Yan from a screenplay by Christina Hodson, is an impudent blast of comic energy. Light on psychology and devoid of prestige, it’s a slab of R-rated hard candy that refuses to take anything, least of all itself, too seriously.

Your head might not be spinning as you exit the theater, but your senses will be deeply and thoroughly ravished.

Over the course of a generous 137-minute running time, Mackenzie evinces a patience in his own storytelling that only occasionally tests yours. There are excesses and longueurs, to be sure, but crucially, the tone of the piece never feels monotonous.

Whether or not it triggers a craze for divinely inspired detective stories, Risen makes a decent case for itself as the “Columbo” of the genre: It’s amiable, creaky and not remotely predicated on the element of surprise.

Though its forays into the subconscious may strike more adventurous cinematic palettes as precious and unimaginative, few will be able to resist Martin Freeman's appealing lead turn or the wry Brit wit that gives this fanciful confection a robust comic core.

It’s pleasurable enough to see Skarsgård and especially Peña, so often cast as a genial second banana, taking pride of place in their own vehicle, even if this one fails to make the most of their considerable chemistry.

Teen Titans Go! To the Movies is loud, cheery and fairly relentless in its assault on your rib cage. The pleasingly rudimentary visual design, all bright colors and madly expressive eyebrows, is no more and no less than what the material requires.

While its succession of emotionally loaded moments never crystallize into a vivid whole, the strong performances and highly effective use of music should put audiences in a forgiving mood.

Temperance of a different sort, a willful abstention from trippy stylistic excess, is what makes this 1960-set Caribbean picaresque easily the most lucid screen adaptation of Hunter S. Thompson's work, even if it's still several drafts shy of a fully developed yarn.

While Fukunaga creates Agu’s world with an extraordinary attentiveness to detail, he hasn’t quite found a way to approximate the novel’s radically childlike perspective, or to bridge the gap between this child soldier’s psyche and our own.

Its unwieldy title notwithstanding, Zathura: A Space Adventure is arguably the best adaptation of a Chris Van Allsburg book to date.

Enough Said may be her cleanest, most polished and broadly funny effort to date; its emotional generosity is undeniable, but so is its tendency to smooth over some of the hard, brittle edges that have been the more interesting hallmarks of Holofcener’s work.

Like any pleasant surprise, this funny, frenetic, cheerfully nonsensical movie makes its own rules and gives you a few things that you weren’t, well, expecting.

If the outcome of the film feels at once daring and more than a little preposterous, Davis just about pulls it off, largely by treating the emotional fallout in completely rational, even realistic fashion.

The lingering lesson of Soul, a lovely, imperfect movie about life’s lovely imperfections, is that every moment is worth living to the fullest, this one very much included.

Even when he’s dealing with this boilerplate material, Collet-Serra brings an understated intensity and a subtle emotional pull to every scene, aided immeasurably by actors who invest their roles, big and small, with just the right degree of conviction.

The candlelight flickers exquisitely even as the passions are slow to ignite in this spare, shrewdly acted but not especially vital retelling of Jane Eyre.

Mescal’s good-humored watchfulness and contemplative calm make the character a companionable presence, even as the filmmaking ultimately succumbs to inertia and the great, defining passion of Lionel’s life recedes into the mists of memory.

Impressively made and serious-minded to a fault, this physically imposing picture brings abundant political-historical dimensions to its epic canvas, yet often seems devoted to stifling whatever pleasure audiences may have derived from the popular legend.

There’s something fitting, even respectful, about the sheer number of movie stars that have been pressed into service here. Throwing subtlety to the wind with wild gesticulations and exaggerated Italian accents, they may flirt with and sometimes tumble headlong into stereotype, but they do so with a verve and commitment that, for the better part of 2½ hours, disarms judgment and suspends disbelief.

Deeply intriguing but almost too-faithful adaptation of Philip K. Dick's nightmarish 1977 novel.

Structurally, the film is somewhat rambling and unfocused even within its tight 40-minute running time, cutting away periodically to address the ways in which overfishing and rising water levels have severely impacted the reef and its ability to support plant and animal life. The lessons are valuable and necessary, but they’re not particularly well integrated.

It’s the rare superhero movie in 2020 that can leave you wanting to see more, closing-credits kicker and all.

That the film still works as well as it does is due to not only its polished craftsmanship and disarming comedy-of-manners approach, but also its fascinating insights into the conflicted mindset of British society

“Sky Ladder” may not fully penetrate the mystery of Cai’s artistic identity, but it ends with the poignant suggestion that the most significant accomplishments often stem from the simplest, most personal impulse.

As funny and ferocious as much of Zola is, it’s let down by an increasingly haphazard script that doesn’t know how to either sustain its humor or negotiate its turn into darker territory — and so, disappointingly, it waffles.

But gripping as the film often is, its unrelenting doom and gloom offers fewer lasting rewards.

A lavishly overstuffed gift basket of a movie.

There is something about the calculation of Blindspotting, a movie all too aware of its own impressive ambition, that somehow resists the poetic abandon, the electrifying spontaneity that Estrada and his collaborators are trying to pull off.

Working with cinematographers Ehab Assal and Peter Flinckenberg, Abu-Assad continually boxes his female leads into tight corners, visually and dramatically. Nearly every scene takes the form of a single unbroken shot, a technique that sometimes pulls you in and sometimes merely calls attention to its own virtuosity.

The rare Hollywood remake that, by daring to reinterpret its source material within a fresh political context, actually has a reason to exist.

The ending packs a lovely surprise, not because you don’t see it coming, but because for once you’re not simply grateful that it’s arrived.

This sophomore directing effort for Ross Katz (“Taking Chance”) resolves itself a bit too tidily in the final stretch, but sustains affection most of the way with its well-observed moments and gently offbeat comic rhythms.

It’s hard to shake a nagging feeling of more is less; with its convoluted plot mechanics clearly cribbed from past thriller templates, the film never quite generates or sustains its predecessor’s pure sense of menace.

It’s a lot of fun — and often quite funny — while it lasts, though I could have used less gunplay and more whistling, an element that, more than anything else here, speaks to Porumboiu’s gift for deadpan absurdity.

Respect is fine, fitfully rousing, even respectable. And sometimes, it’s something more.

Miller, like most directors, isn’t remotely in Cameron’s league as a maestro of action technique. But he gives the visual-effects-encrusted combat scenes a nicely visceral intensity, with just the right ratio of spatial coherence to logistical chaos.

The juxtaposition of formal beauty and surpassing human ugliness is hardly the least of “Wiener-Dog’s” numerous internal contradictions, some of which are more resolvable than others.

You leave Ad Astra feeling dazzled and befuddled, moved and frustrated, and perhaps wishing that its maker had cast his own preoccupations aside and taken a deeper, headier plunge into the void.

Predestination succeeds in teasing the brain and touching the heart even when its twists and turns keep multiplying well past the point of narrative sustainability.

This efficiently assembled primer hardly counts as a revelatory dispatch from the old-vs.-new-media frontlines, but its ideas will engross anyone for whom the viability of traditional newsgathering remains a matter of pressing significance.

Marked by an affecting and understated performance from newcomer Ashley Shelton, this lovely drama tends toward the over-emphatic at times, but overall demonstrates a warm, subtle intelligence in the way it captures a person’s growing sense of dislocation from the traditional pressures of marriage, family and career.

Dragged Across Concrete has been made with enough skill and moody, meticulous craftsmanship — another Zahler signature — to earn its own measure of tolerance, or at least some closer scrutiny.

Shang-Chi and the Legend of the Ten Rings is most enjoyable when it shakes off the tedious franchise imperatives and forges its own path.

A powerful, necessary contribution to a chilling body of reportage that, one senses by film's end, has just begun to take stock of the human costs of a monstrous conspiracy.

It marks an unstable new mode for Zhao, a weave of subdued pastoral realism and forceful, sometimes pushy emotionalism. The movie whispers poetic sublimities in your ear one minute and tosses its prestige ambitions in your face the next.

Fort Bliss is a flawed little gem of a movie, but Monaghan’s flawless performance is its own quiet call to arms.

This is a comedy whose laughs seem to arise as much from the silly, sun-drenched atmosphere as from individual gags, and whose pleasures can feel as sweet and impermanent as marijuana smoke.

Keener, so deliciously nasty in Holofcener's "Lovely and Amazing," is no less engaging here in what is, surprisingly, the film's least bitchy role.

Roger Ross Williams’ forceful polemic succeeds to a startling degree, rightly decrying the use of the gospel to incite homophobia, and allowing the most fervent interviewees to damn themselves with their own proselytizing words.

It’s a compelling thesis, though predicated less on supporting arguments than on dramatic feints and hallucinations, on scenes that either evaporate like smoke or strand the viewer in a thick cloud of metaphor. Sunset is maddening and mesmerizing.

Before it bogs down in one too many moments of cathartic reckoning, The Vicious Kind is an unpredictable, off-kilter and scabrously funny piece of work.

To say it’s all over the place, a frenzied collection of hits and misses, is to both capture its shortcomings and deliver a fairly cogent plot summary. But as directed by Susanna Fogel (“Life Partners”) from a script she wrote with David Iserson, the movie also has a playfully vicious screwball energy that consistently locates the violence in every joke, the humor in every kill.

As spirited and irresistible as the college a cappella craze it celebrates, Pitch Perfect is a cheeky delight.

For the most part, nothing about Claire in Motion seems overly calculated. It knows precisely where it’s going, but it’s also wise enough to leave that destination open-ended.

This muscle-bound meathead extravaganza is a sometimes blissfully cretinous endeavor, delivering the maximum firepower and zero brainpower its target audience expects.

Cross-species bonding may have its limits, but it’s hard not to find beauty in a boy-meets-beast saga that, by the end, has made it hard to tell which is which.

If there is a reason to cherish this often captivating, sometimes irritating, unavoidably perplexing movie, it's that its mere existence seems to defy rational explanation. It is by turns savage and soulful, mangy and refined, possessed of an unmistakable pedigree and yet boldly resistant to categorization. It's a shaggy Frankenmutt of a movie, dressed in artisanal fur and infested by bespoke fleas.

The emotion and the horror might have taken still deeper root if the world of the movie felt less hectic and more coherently realized, if the supernatural touches and occasional jump scares welled up organically from within rather than feeling smeared on with a digital trowel.

Meticulously crafted by Ecuadorian helmer Sebastian Cordero and his team, this futuristic tale of astronauts searching for signs of life near Jupiter was ostensibly shot using cameras positioned aboard their spacecraft; their video diaries have been cannily reassembled into something coherent and genuinely compelling on their own low-key terms, if a touch over-earnest at times.

The grimly multitasking finale of Promising Young Woman feels both audacious and uncertain of itself, as Fennell tries to meld a cackle of delight and a blast of fury, with a lingering residue of anguish. It doesn’t all come together, though there’s an undeniable thrill in seeing it come apart.

This ambitious think-piece ultimately smothers its good intentions in didactic revelations, earnest pleading and incessant violin music. Engrossing nonetheless, the story of a high schooler troubled by his parents' legacy reps one of the Canadian writer-director's most accessible efforts.

Bello gives a tremulous wacko-mom performance from which she has eliminated every whisper of camp. She’s both sympathetic and infuriating, and her scenes with her daughter hint at a more painful, complicated emotional history than the movie has time to explore, though it’s nice that it bothers to explore it at all.

For all “No Way Home’s” vertiginous heights and precipitous drops, few things here shake you more fully than the anguished closeups of Holland, in which Peter’s genetically modified strength — and his all-too-human vulnerability — are on tear-soaked, grime-smudged display.

By narrowing its range of voices to Christian leaders, thinkers and writers, Kevin Miller's sober, stimulating documentary on the hot topic of eternal damnation necessarily limits its audience, but achieves a level of rhetorical eloquence that would theoretically appeal to open-minded viewers of any religious stripe.

For all its obvious smarts and mildly provocative ideas, Mockingjay doesn’t seem to trust its audience quite as much as it clearly trusts its heroine.

If the narrative progression feels too tidy and circumscribed, Shelton’s talent for bringing out the best in her actors remains satisfyingly intact.

Zhang’s own authorial touch is unmistakable in the mazelike palace intrigues, the phalanxes of armed soldiers and the ferocious bursts of action, plus the climactic nationalist overtones of a story that pits the will of several individuals against the fate of an empire.

The Little Things has a couple of hair-raising scenes and a few nifty, low-key twists in store, though little about the overall experience of watching it can really be called surprising. I don’t mean that as a knock. The pleasures and comforts of crime fiction, even with the built-in expectations of suspense and revelation, are not always dependent on novelty.

All you need is love -- for the Beatles, for psychedelic visuals, for ideas about being young in the ‘60s -- to fully enjoy Across the Universe.

In the bruising melodrama Pieces of a Woman, Vanessa Kirby does something remarkable and rare — or at least, she makes it seem rare. She brings sharp emotional definition to a character who, in the throes of a devastating loss, refuses to make her feelings easily readable, or consolable, for those around her.

A slender, morally simplified fable that makes up for its tonal and narrative imprecisions with considerable visual energy, musical pizzazz, and a panoply of colorful characters.

The emotional momentum...is carried along easily by Mozhdah, making a remarkable screen debut: In an instant, she can melt from trembling vulnerability to hair-pulling defiance, and in nearly every scene, we see her not just emoting but also thinking, continually renegotiating her position in a world that perceives her as tainted goods.

Only a curmudgeon could entirely resist the laid-back charms of Red, an amusing, light-footed caper about a team of aging CIA veterans rudely forced out of retirement.

Where its predecessor kept a foot planted in reality, “Beetlejuice Beetlejuice” barrels through the underworld with an ever-looser, crazier Looney Tunes energy.

Truths this scalding and plain-spoken need no such embellishment to be heard.

A witty, warmly crafted chestnut.

What gives the story its moment-to-moment buoyancy is the pleasure of watching two actors working brilliantly in tandem.

An unexpected treat. Bright and perky, cheeky but never mean-spirited.

Whether it is the movies that have shaped our dreams or our dreams that have shaped the movies, it’s safe to assume that The Nightmare will find its place in that eternally recurring cycle.

Septuagenarian director Robert Benton brings his characteristically fine touch with actors and appreciation for the female form to this tastefully erotic ensembler, but compassion finally outstrips insight in a drama as soft-headed as it is soft-hearted.

It's an absorbing, vividly inhabited tale nonetheless, never exploiting its horrors but rather treating them as tough local realities.

It was shrewd of the screenwriters, Murilo Hauser and Heitor Lorega, to stick so closely to Eunice’s perspective, trusting the audience to identify with her uncertainty, her vulnerability, and her instinctive urge to protect her children. But I’m Still Here has its own share of tactical evasions, and its dramatic caginess winds up blunting its own emotional force.

Delicately tracing the troubled nine-year bond between two men living in New York, Ira Sachs mines his own memories to sensitive, melancholy if somewhat muted effect in Keep the Lights On.

The film would nonetheless benefit from occasional tightening, its digressions and longueurs occasionally moving beyond the lyrical and into the belabored. Nevertheless, as a vision of the past, “Embrace of the Serpent” offers a stately, striking panorama and an entirely persuasive one.

Searing portrait of an out-of-control youth who winds up in a decidedly shady rehab center has more than its share of teen-angst cliches but still makes a surprisingly trenchant tearjerker, thanks to strong acting from all quarters and an especially blistering perf from Lapica.

At 81 minutes, Code Black feels like a brisk, vital report from the frontlines of emergency medicine, forged and rooted in the most intense sort of personal and professional experience.

This madcap romp runs out of steam well before the finish, but its combo of sweetness and high spirits -- not unlike the chemical composition of the dope-infused brownies that serve as a key plot device -- proves sufficiently ingratiating to satisfy viewers.

The result, though it delivers only in fits and starts, is still sharper and more inventive than most comicbook-adapted fare, and eventually gets the job done as far as action buffs are concerned.

For all the actors’ commitment and ferocity, the experience they offer feels less like a confrontation with the anxieties of modern life than a plush, moody escape.

An agreeably meandering exercise that brings some clever French New Wave fillips and structural repetitions to Hong's characteristically boozy party. Rougher but more approachable than his previous "Oki's Movie."

Perhaps the highs feel so stirring, in part, because they are surrounded by so much conventional din and clatter.

The Inventor becomes less an exposé of white-collar crime than a study in the power of self-delusion and corporate megalomania. Gibney’s methods are simple but often brutally effective.

A story of love and subterfuge in 1980 East Germany that never quite accelerates into an outright thriller, Barbara reps another assured collaboration between director Christian Petzold and his main muse, actress Nina Hoss.

Writer-director Anthony Lucero’s delectable debut feature has its share of on-the-nose writing and Cinderella-story contrivances, but for the most part folds its cross-cultural insights into a pleasing underdog narrative as deftly as its heroine presses together rice and nori.

Volorzhbit has a gift for building tension through narrative restraint and mordant humor; she also has a keen sense of misdirection.

Behind-the-curtains comedy reps an amusing showcase for John Malkovich's diva-like theatrics in the title role.

Well suited to Hillcoat’s gifts for low-boil suspense and brutal eruptions of violence in close, male-dominated quarters, the film has grit and atmosphere to burn but also a certain narrative sketchiness, as though unable to reconcile its sharp sociological portraiture with the pleasures of a more robustly plotted crime yarn.

Central Intelligence is dumb in all the right ways, and also a bit smarter than you might expect.

Measured and absorbing rather than deeply compelling or vital, this latest adaptation of a rarely well-filmed novel makes a strong effort to capture the stiflingly provincial world that Flaubert was able to describe in such precise, painstaking detail on the page.

A bold, often clumsy, but always intriguing piece of work.

As his camera prowls the rugged terrain in precisely choreographed movements, director Baltasar Kormákur (working with cinematographer Philippe Rousselot) achieves a physical groundedness that makes even a digitally engineered predator seem palpably real.

The Report parcels out its intel efficiently enough, though it creaks a bit more than it crackles.

Scene by scene, The Flowers of War is an erratic and ungainly piece of storytelling, full of melodramatic twists and grotesque visual excesses (a bullet pierces first a stained-glass window and then a girl's neck), which are nonetheless delivered with startling conviction.

At times it might remind you of a slightly edgier version of the genteel White House romances that flourished in the mid-’90s, like Dave and The American President. Long Shot may nod overtly to a world under threat by terrorism, corruption and climate change, but it also yearns for a gentler, less polarized moment in our political discourse.

Paddington in Peru belongs to Olivia Colman, who, as the Reverend Mother at Aunt Lucy’s retirement home, delivers a performance so rich in winking mischief, and so blissfully untethered to the mechanics of the plot, that she should be billed in the credits as Irreverent Mother.

[Rankin’s] film, at its best when it expresses a sincere belief in the possibilities of human connection, can feel trapped in the margins of its conceit, short-circuited by movie love.

This earnest weepie plays like "The Karate Kid" with a pro-literacy agenda, pushing all the right emotional buttons yet hitting quite a few wrong ones in the process.

If our understanding of the losses these characters have suffered feels incomplete, it’s hard to come away entirely unaffected as these men and women look back at their young adulthood and the whirlwind of historical change against which it played out.

Pulse-pounding third act expertly pushes the audience’s buttons, to excruciatingly ironic and ultimately devastating effect. Pic does turn overwrought in the final stretch and would have been wise to end on an earlier note, though action fans won’t mind.

This beautifully designed canine-resurrection saga feels, somewhat fittingly, stitched together from stray narrative parts, but nonetheless evinces a level of discipline and artistic coherence missing from the director's recent live-action efforts.

To properly appreciate Must Love Dogs, one must first love John Cusack. Thesp's maverick turn steals the show in this otherwise middling romantic comedy, which retools standard meet-cute elements for the Web generation in pleasant but uninspired fashion.

An enjoyably eccentric, insouciantly funny and often beautiful-looking jumble of an entertainment that plays — at least when it isn’t let down by a wobbly seriocomic tone and some excessive narrative multitasking — like a sincerely moving farewell to some of the more likable rogues and motley misfits in the Marvel cosmos.

Chang Can Dunk gets that the pursuit of fun, seemingly frivolous goals can be meaningful in itself, especially when undertaken with the loving encouragement of friends and family.

A glum but tenderly observed micro-portrait of a woman struggling to re-enter society after being released from prison.

Whatever else it may be — a wrecked, towering monument to its own incompletion, a howl of rage at the industry that Welles helped build and forever define — The Other Side of the Wind increasingly comes to resemble a shattered cinematic hall of mirrors.

Boy Erased is a sobering, justly infuriating movie, but its own convenient elisions keep catharsis at bay.

Directed with an assured sense of style that pushes against the narrow confines of its admittedly fascinating story, John Krokidas’ first feature feels adventurous yet somewhat hemmed-in.

Roberts brings an acrid sense of bitterness and sorrow to this exceedingly sharp-witted sleuth, registering the cruel passage of time and the toll of unspeakable tragedy in every careworn feature and vocal quaver.... it’s a skillful and humane turn from an actress whose darkly penetrating gaze comes closest to fulfilling the mystery of the title.

This family-friendly outing captures the story's human snowball effect with a measure of sly, satirical wit, if also an excess of boilerplate subplots and jokey '80s details.

Even by series standards, it’s an astonishingly staged and sustained panorama of violence, much of it mediated (and attenuated) by the usual inventive weaponry and bulletproof menswear, and meted out by international action stars including Donnie Yen and Hiroyuki Sanada.

The result may not be much more than an exercise in craft, a skillful demonstration of all the games you can play with long takes, moving cameras, blurred focus and cavernous pools of darkness. But craft is hard to overrate these days, and Sandberg’s technique, far from feeling assaultive or bludgeoning, has the effect of heightening your concentration.

Anchored by a terrific performance from Nick Nolte as a grizzled umpire who gets an unexpected second chance at fatherhood, this easygoing comedy-drama plays out slowly but assuredly, infusing a conventional story about a blossoming relationship with welcome reserves of honesty and humor.

While it never tops the explosive hilarity of its first 20 minutes, The Invention of Lying is a smartly written, nicely layered comedy that, like last year's underappreciated "Ghost Town," casts Ricky Gervais as a mild-mannered schlub who manages, in spite of himself, to make the world a better place.

This unusually voluble comedy is as eloquent about love, self-realization and adolescent angst as its protagonist is endearingly tongue-tied.

Vincenzo Natali's outlandish sci-fier sustains a grotesque and funny fascination throughout its slightly protracted runtime.

While the characters’ background details (including their occupations) are kept to a minimum, the emotions the story touches are vivid and accessible.

Wisely sticks to its protagonist’s p.o.v. while avoiding a longer view of the calamitous events around her, making up in emotional immediacy what it lacks in broad dramatic sweep.

While its surface pleasures are dazzling — if a bit protracted, at well north of two hours — it finally suggests that memorable screen villainy and complex inner humanity may be forced into a kind of stalemate, at least when there’s a corporate-branded intellectual property involved.

Presents the viewer with reams of depressing data, loads of hand-wringing about the woeful state of humanity and, finally, some altogether fascinating ideas about how to go about solving the climate crisis.

Pixar wizard Brad Bird's live-action debut serves up sights and setpieces of often jaw-dropping ingenuity and visual flair, but it's a movie of dazzling individual parts that don't come together to fully satisfying effect in the final stretch.

One of the achievements of Buirski’s absorbing documentary is that it allows Lumet to remind us, in his own voice, of the passion in his ostensible dispassion — the way he deftly subsumed self-expression within the brisk rhythms of his material and the superb performances of his actors.

The poster made it look kind of fun, and lo and behold, it is. It helps that the pairing of Bullock and Tatum — now that sounds like a law firm I’d hire, or at least a hoity-toity restaurant I’d eat at — is as delightful as you’d expect from two actors of such goofy charm and combustible energy.

Punsters, linguists and crossword puzzle fanatics everywhere couldn't ask for a more bracing tribute than helmer Patrick Creadon's buoyant and exhilaratingly brainy documentary Wordplay.

It's hardly the first or last time Hollywood has plundered one of its own long-dormant properties, but it's also a reminder that not every resurrection has to feel like a desecration.

Contrived excess is rarely as entertaining as it is in the ironically titled Just Another Love Story, a furiously overheated romantic thriller from Danish writer-helmer Ole Bornedal.

Although stronger on breadth than focus, it’s an appropriately stimulating take on a far-from-sustainable system.

If Before We Vanish isn't nearly as focused or accomplished as Kurosawa's horror masterpiece "Cure" (2001), or as shattering as his magnum opus "Tokyo Sonata" (2008), it's nonetheless a reminder that he has few equals when it comes to spinning even the flimsiest B-movie template into a cinema of ideas.

Morley sustains a vibe of low-key Lynchian weirdness throughout, enough to keep your mind from wandering even as the investigation meanders this way and that.

A softer, flabbier and considerably higher-budgeted follow-up to Kevin Smith's 1994 indie sensation that nevertheless packs enough riotous exchanges and pungent sexual obscenities to make its 97 minutes pass by with ease.

To call this movie assertive would be an understatement; to describe it as small would be a lie. At nearly two-and-a-half hours and with a terrific ensemble of actors singing, rapping, dancing and practically bursting out of the frame, In the Heights is a brash and invigorating entertainment, a movie of tender, delicate moments that nonetheless revels unabashedly in its own size and scale.

This tale of a still-grieving widow (Bening) hypnotized by a dead ringer for her late husband verges on ludicrous, but ultimately succeeds at conveying one person’s complicated yet emotionally rational response to a highly irrational situation.

This well-acted, smoothly crafted drama tells a story of cross-generational bonding in the face of historical oppression, in touching if unsurprising fashion.

Planes: Fire & Rescue is a slight but improbably successful example of a movie that, despite its profusion of chrome and steel, somehow succeeds in touching something human.

The reassuring familiarity of Abrams’ approach has its limitations: Marvelous as it is to catch up with Han Solo, Leia and the rest of the gang, fan service takes priority here over a somewhat thin, derivative story that, despite the presence of two appealing new stars, doesn’t exactly fire the imagination anew.

Within the confines of this cross-cultural shaggy-dog tale, Hirayanagi locates both a sharp vein of absurdist comedy and a bitter, melancholy undertow. She also has a deft enough touch to make one mode almost indistinguishable from the other.

Kormakur doesn’t make the mistake of exalting his subjects as extraordinary individuals, or suggesting that they were obeying some sort of noble higher calling. Everest is blunt, businesslike and — as it begins its long march through the death zone — something of an achievement.

As it marches its characters ever so slowly toward a suitably despairing climax, the movie feels increasingly like a self-satisfied but unsustained provocation, a rich display of craft in service of secondhand shocks and ideas.

What might have seemed pro forma on paper...overcomes its occasionally studied stylistic tics to become a troubled, anguished love story that neither exaggerates nor soft-pedals the demons on display.

It suggests not just a subversion but a putrefaction of the Ruddy-comedy genre—a portrait of male loneliness so totalizing, and so scarily close to the bone, that laughs and screams all but bleed together.

A disturbing but nonjudgmental study of online addiction and the lure of manufactured identities.

Among the movie’s more disquieting pleasures is the sight of this peerless actor — known for her ability to project an air of casual, chilly mastery over any situation — wilting under the mockery of her character’s unruly students, who treat her with only slightly more contempt than her colleagues do.

Christopher Robin finds ways to distinguish itself within its generic confines.

It’s the sort of verbally dexterous farce you’d have to be a total Crabapple Annie not to enjoy.

A villain will rise, as he must, and the inevitability of that spectacle is the source of this movie’s undeniable power as well as its real limitations.

May not make a lick of sense, but it does make for fairly irresistible nonsense.

High-Rise is a stubborn, incoherent wreck of a movie, and I mean that as fairly high praise. You won’t follow everything that happens, but you may feel weirdly at home.

As with its beloved subject and his enormous catalog of multiplatinum earworms, the movie’s familiarity turns out to be crucial to its charm.

Following the exhaustive efforts of photographer-scientist James Balog to capture irrefutable evidence of the world's glaciers in retreat, first-time helmer Jeff Orlowski's documentary supplies a heroic human-interest angle on global warming that's ultimately less remarkable than the grandeur of its arctic imagery.

A crafty feature debut for the English writer-director Remi Weekes, His House is one of those return-of-the-repressed freakouts in which suspense and social conscience effectively breathe as one. That’s the idea, anyway.

For a catalog of aggressively stupid, socially deviant male behavior, Rick Alverson's cheekily titled The Comedy is not without a certain subversive intelligence.

Whatever else it may be — a culmination, an obligation, a staggering feat of crowd control, a truly epic tease — Avengers: Infinity War is a brisk, propulsive, occasionally rousing and borderline-gutsy continuation of a saga that finally and sensibly seems to be drawing to a close.

The occasional creakiness of the narrative machinery is largely dispelled by Cornish’s flair for brisk, energetic action and his ability to keep the journey flowing from one mini-adventure to the next.

Its interest in the injustices and compromises of the sports world run secondary, in the end, to its greater priority, which is to find a place for a star in a game he loves. I’m talking, of course, about Sandler, whose hustle is all the more persuasive here for its low-key restraint. He’s seldom worked harder, or more winningly, for an audience’s pleasure.

After the Hunt will be derided as little more than an intellectual parlor trick, a flimsy house of cards. I wouldn’t disagree, but few directors build more luxurious houses than Guadagnino does, whatever the materials.

This directing debut for co-writers Rogen and Evan Goldberg offsets its slightly smug premise with a clever sense of self-parody and near-cataclysmic levels of vulgarity.

The Drop is at once upfront and highly effective in its manipulations, tugging at our heartstrings even as it flicks away at our nerves.

The pleasure of Popstar: Never Stop Never Stopping derives not from the sting or accuracy of its satire (though Will Arnett does a pretty killer Harvey Levin), but from the precision of its timing and the singular comic energy it derives from the talents on display.

Ben-Ari seems just as invested, if not more so, in the social and psychological obstacles that can make breastfeeding problematic, and she explores them with impressive rigor, sensitivity and a refreshing lack of judgment, listening intently while prescribing little.

The puns and one-liners are jauntily amusing, the gags clever and well-timed. The tone is a familiar, infectious blend of sincerity and snark — or, if you will, earnestness and cynicism, which might as well be Emmet’s and Wyldstyle’s respective nicknames.

Warm, spirited and occasionally slathered in goo, Birth Story is a celebratory tribute to the endangered art of midwifery and its most influential practitioner, Ina May Gaskin.

You might wish that the ending, and the story overall, had packed a bit more dramatic oomph, but Miller’s decision to keep the emphasis entirely on character and theme shows impressive confidence. He gives the movie all the juice it needs.

It's one of the more viscerally accurate portraits of parenthood, and specifically motherhood, that the movies have recently given us.

The film’s truest and most meaningful chemistry is generated by Ellie and Charlie, two individuals who are so fun to hang out with that they justify even the film’s flimsiest narrative setups.

A routine, even mundane crime story relayed in tones of world-weary fatigue, Killing Them Softly deglams the mob movie to coolly distinctive if rarely pulse-quickening effect.

Those who have had their fill of the director’s impressionistic musings will find his seventh feature as empty as the lifestyle it puts on display; for the rest of us, there’s no denying this star-studded, never-a-dull-moment cinematic oddity represents another flawed but fascinating reframing of man’s place in the modern world.

This clever, involving spy drama builds to a terrific level of intrigue before losing some steam in its second half.

It’s a muddled, tortured miasma of a movie and also, inevitably, a fascinating one.

In the end M.A.S.H. succeeds, in spite of its glaring faults, because Gould, Sutherland, Skerritt, Jo Ann Pflug as the delicious Lt. Dish, and Roger Bowen, as the goof-off commanding officer who is bright enough to recognize his junior officers' medical competence and stay out of their way, are all believable and bitingly funny in their casual disdain for the Army.

For all Winocour’s obvious skill behind the camera, too much of “Disorder” bogs down in ill-defined motivations and credulity-straining plot turns.

[A] dense, disturbing and palpably angry new documentary.

Superfly may be suffused with political fury, but it is also unapologetically awash in cheap, disreputable B-movie thrills.

The movie is a canny mixture of flash and grit, an unabashedly contrived Cinderella story in Dirty Jersey drag. And in Macdonald’s winning performance, it gets the hoop-earringed, heavy-set, frizzy-blond princess-to-be it deserves.

Giddily recycling everything from “2001: A Space Odyssey” and “The Matrix” to yakuza actioners and National Geographic documentaries, it’s a garish, trippy, wildly uneven and finally quite disarming piece of work, graced by a moment-to-moment unpredictability.

Absent the ability to really get the audience’s heads in the game, the film succeeds better at presenting chess as a subtle metaphor for the psychological warfare being waged behind the scenes.

A beguiling blend of the audacious and the familiar; it dances right on the edge of the ridiculous and at times even crosses over, but is armored against risibility by its deep pockets of emotion, sly humor and matter-of-fact approach to the fantastical.

There is no triumph or easy uplift here, only an urgent emphasis on Christ’s message of sacrificial love and a principled rebuke to anyone who would cheapen the gospel with politics — a conclusion that has lost none of its sting or relevance 2,000 years later.

A swiftly paced, rough-and-ready entertainment that, in anticipating the canonical events of “A New Hope,” manages the tricky feat of seeming at once casually diverting and hugely consequential.

Roughly three parts charming to one part cloying, The F Word attempts and largely succeeds at pulling off a smart, self-aware riff on romantic-comedy conventions while maintaining a core of earnest feeling.

The beats of this story are easy enough to recognize, which is not to say that they’re formulaic. Sanders’ quietly mesmerizing performance refuses to let anyone cast Jahkor as either victim or villain, instead locating a tricky middle ground.

Try as you might to lose yourself in Coco, or pause to ponder its metaphysics, too often you find yourself hindered by the movie's breathless velocity.

By turns gorgeous, propulsive and feverishly overwrought, A Wrinkle in Time is an otherworldly glitter explosion of a movie, the kind of picture that wears its heart on its tie-dyed sleeve.

Even in a film that makes no bones about presenting its subject in a flattering, softening light, this 89-year-old stage and screen legend has refreshingly few qualms about saying exactly what she thinks.

The result is a movie that feels both truthful and evasive, deeply moving and a little perplexing.

It’s the warmth of Gladstone’s presence that leaves a lasting impression and endows this remake—with all its reshufflings, inspired or strained—with a whisper of something authentically new.

Good-humored and endearing, full of energy and color (sometimes neon) if not quite Pixar-level invention.

Gallic helmer Eric Valette (“State Affairs”) invests this giddily implausible crime yarn with a propulsive sense of energy.

The complications are ludicrous, but the movie navigates them with cheek and verve, and the jokes land with surprising consistency.

Under Johnson’s patient, observant direction, a relationship that might sound ridiculous on paper lives and breathes with surprising tenderness and plausibility onscreen.

A coolly absorbing, deeply unflattering portrait of the late Silicon Valley entrepreneur that expands, not altogether convincingly, into a meditation on our collective over-reliance on our favorite handheld gadgets.

In Avatar: The Way of Water, the director James Cameron pulls you down so deep, and sets you so gently adrift, that at times you don’t feel like you’re watching a movie so much as floating in one.

There are times when the nonstop visual momentum lends 1917 the feel of a virtual-reality installation, and others when the simulation of raw immediacy slips to reveal the calculated construct underneath.

The movie’s strongest asset is Keough, an actress who can seize and hold the screen with electrifying force (check out her terrific turns in “American Honey” and the forthcoming “Zola”), but who is no less powerful in her quieter, more recessive moments.

Mendelsohn and Davis, among the finest Australian actors working today, are both awfully good at villainy, which is why their characters’ emotional restraint and fundamental decency here feels refreshing as well as true.

For a film that is very much about the need to continually question our heroes and hold them to a higher standard, Happy Valley offers an unapologetic tribute to one man’s painful honesty and a tacit rebuke to those who couldn’t muster anywhere near the same courage.

By the end you may feel moderately relieved and more than a little creeped out, but you may also wish that this undeniably compelling documentary had done more than lightly brush the surface.

Luce has a lot on its mind, and its desire to provoke and disturb is far from unwelcome. But in attempting to think outside the box, the movie may unwittingly trap itself inside one, too.

A fiendishly inventive thriller built around an audacious if unsustainable gimmick, Open Windows elevates Hitchcockian suspense to jittery new levels of mayhem and paranoia.

If Upgrade ultimately plays like a genre exercise, it’s certainly a taut, engrossing one.

The Polka King doesn't have the dazzling ambition or energy of a great grifter classic. Instead she seems intent on nailing the details, on realizing Jan's milieu in all its tacky splendor, and trusting that our attention will follow. As in "Infinitely Polar Bear," Forbes has a gift for letting her production design tell the story.

The Devil Wears Prada 2 is selling a truckload of preposterous goods, but it sells them awfully well, with unfeigned assurance, conviction, and the appropriate ratio of cynicism to hope.

97-year-old Detroit fixture Grace Lee Boggs doesn’t just explode the docile-Asian-female stereotypes Lee set out to question with her earlier pic; she makes an inspiring case for self-determination and intellectual fortitude regardless of background.

That rare ensemble piece in which all four principals are not only compellingly drawn but handled with an astute sense of dramatic balance.

It isn’t one of her better movies, but like even her lesser achievements, it warrants more than easy dismissals. It’s a fascinating confluence of talent and tedium; it’s also a story in which tedium — the day-after-day frustration of a stalled, thwarted existence — may well be the point.

Ultimately a sweet, simple ode to the virtues of honesty and commitment in a relationship, Arlo & Julie may be a trifle at day’s end, but it’s a deft and pleasurable one — steeped in affection for its characters, not too in love with its own quirkiness, and marked by a nice retro flavor apparent in the jazz records Arlo and Julie play (which make up most of the score) and the playful iris shots used as scene transitions throughout.

This enchantingly strange movie couldn’t possibly be called naturalistic, but at times, it feels somewhat disappointingly normalized.

Swift, no-nonsense and pummelingly intense, this is the big-budget Hollywood disaster flick on a CrossFit regimen and a Paleo diet — a hellish cataclysm that never risks overstaying its welcome.

Charming if not especially kid-friendly toon.

A twisty, thorny new documentary that grips, jolts and exasperates in roughly equal measure.

Danner makes an elegant, warmly sympathetic heroine in this sometimes broadly played but always tender and appealing effort.

Crisp, efficient and appreciably modest in scale...this conspicuous attempt to breathe new life into a long-dormant action franchise gets at least a few things right, chiefly the shrewd casting of Chris Pine.

Squirmingly fun suspenser that brings Alfred Hitchcock's "Rear Window" into the era of vidcams and cell phones, serving up hearty, youth-skewing portions of PG-13 violence and bikini-bait along the way.

It’s without a shred of guilt that I say there is honest pleasure to be found in Before I Fall, which takes an unapologetically silly conceit and wrings from it a surprisingly nimble and affecting survey of contemporary teenage attitudes and anxieties.

Within the context of a sport that thrives on artifice, writer-director Stephen Merchant spins a story whose emotions feel entirely genuine.

As a fierce superspy and mistress of many disguises, Jolie represents the one indisputably kickass element in this brisk, professionally assembled but finally shrug-inducing thriller.

Neither Hathaway nor the script makes any overt bids for the audience’s sympathy in Colossal, which may explain why they earn it so handily.

Truth be told, I don’t much mind the version of Bad Times at the El Royale we have before us. Even if, with its multi-chapter narrative and time-skipping plotlines, its mix of verbal longwindedness and abrupt violence, the movie initially seems to warn of a terminal case of Tarantino-itis: an El Royale with cheese.

Centered around four outstanding performances, Yaron Zilberman's fiction-feature debut feels like the work of a filmmaker who knows and appreciates the art form under scrutiny, laying a credible foundation for a story that lays bare the often melodramatic passions of the artistic soul.

You could read Thelma as a saga of Sapphic liberation, a fiery critique of religious patriarchy or perhaps yet another superhero’s traumatic origin story; it’s graceful and ambiguous enough to support each of these readings. But the more possibilities the movie seems to entertain, the more its cumulative power seems to dissipate.

Picture's comic smarts and affecting daddy-daughter drama provide a sturdy platform for its heartfelt advocacy of informed voting and responsible citizenship.

With considerable grace and beguiling modesty, the movie frames its subject as one of Christ’s most discerning followers and a crucial witness to his ministry, death and resurrection.

Forcing their usual ethical query into the structure of a whodunit, the Dardennes have emerged with a narrative that, as compelling as it is, can also feel prosaic and even a bit predictable, especially in the overly aggressive melodrama of the closing scenes.

In 82 minutes, Murray wrangles enough data to make his point that biology can't keep up with sophisticated fishing technologies and worldwide demand; attacks high-end restaurants such as Nobu for putting endangered species on the menu; praises Alaska as a paragon of responsible fishing.

Johnson doesn’t get to pledge his love for unicorns and Molly Ringwald in this relatively straight-faced outing, but his versatility is more than intact: He’s a human wrecking ball, a human bridge and a human teddy bear rolled into one. He’s a towering Dwayneferno.

An inventive marriage of ancient China and Agatha Christie, Detective Dee and the Mystery of Phantom Flame is a lavishly overwrought historical whodunit.

If the choreography behind these intricate set-pieces is dauntingly complex, the satisfactions they produce could hardly be simpler.

Will Reiser's semiautobiographical script initially prescribes too artificial a story treatment for its characters but is rescued by a genial, low-key vibe that builds in sensitivity and emotion up through the final reels.

As a stripped-down, minutely detailed portrait of the daily grind as back-breaking Sisyphean ordeal, “Sorry We Missed You” is engrossing and bluntly persuasive. I was less convinced by the family dynamics.

I’ll admit that I found much of Babylon mesmerizing, even when (maybe especially when) I also found it naive, bludgeoning and obtuse. Chazelle’s demolition of the Dream Factory may be rather too taken with its own naughtiness, but coming from a filmmaker who until now has been precociously well-behaved, it can be a welcome blast of impudence and sometimes just a blast.

Individual moments are not without their felicitous touches -- mainly due to the cast, which is rich to the point of improbability.

The gender politics are as appealing as the rock-solid trio of lead actors (Melissa McCarthy, Tiffany Haddish and Elisabeth Moss), even when the movie itself proves less than persuasive.

It's hard not to appreciate the visual and thematic scope of "Downsizing's" reach. But it's harder not to see the chasm between its strange, misshapen story and the grand, towering vision to which it aspires.

Even the flaws of Thank You for Playing have the effect of underscoring its humanity; the movie may immortalize a creative endeavor, but it never loses sight of the fact that it’s also honoring a life.