Justin Chang

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.

A peculiarly potent story about life’s unexpected little ruptures — those odd coincidences, repetitions and shifts in perspective that can set off aftershocks in the human heart.

Lover for a Day, which completes a thematic trilogy of sorts with Garrel's "Jealousy" (2014) and "In the Shadow of Women" (2016), is one of his more enchanting specimens.

What makes the extended trip-tastic finale ultimately disappointing is that it remains a resolutely exterior experience, a set of wild but recycled gestures that reminds you just how tedious watching someone else’s LSD high can be.

A movie of no small generosity: It offers audiences the pleasures of a screenplay whose every acerbic line is firmly rooted in character, and it hands Michael Douglas one of his best roles in years.

A biographical drama steeped equally in grace and horror, it builds to a brutal finale that will stir deep emotion and inevitable unease. But the film is perhaps even more accomplished as a theological provocation, one that grapples fearlessly with the intense spiritual convictions that drove Turner to do what he had previously considered unthinkable.

You brace yourself for a numbing catalog of stupidity — the title isn’t exactly encouraging — and are instead greeted by amusement, suspense and a curious aftertaste of sweetness and melancholy. You might even call it grace.

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.

In its strangest, most arresting moments, Spider-Man: Far From Home doesn’t just pull the rug out from under you; it tumbles down its own rabbit hole, winding up somewhere in the vicinity of Pixar’s “The Incredibles” (whose composer, Michael Giacchino, also wrote this movie’s bustling score) and Chuck Jones’ classic animated short “Duck Amuck.”

In its most rewardingly complicated moments, this absorbing, incomplete documentary reminds us that there is nothing definitive about what we think we know.

A strange and often startlingly inspired media/mental-illness comedy.

Fair Game serves up impeccable politics with a bit too much righteous outrage and not quite enough solid drama.

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.

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

Not least of the surprises here is that even when The Monster is trying to scare you witless, its every scene insistently reaffirms its characters’ humanity.

The conventionality of Happiest Season might be the most radical thing about it. The movie boasts the usual surface delights and yuletide setpieces: It has competitive ice skating and a white-elephant-gift party, shticky running gags and acres of throw-pillow-heavy production design. It also has two lead performances of remarkable grown-up complexity and moment-to-moment coherence.

Deliberately paced, sparely imagined and suffused with mystery, writer-director Rodrigo Garcia’s seventh feature is nonetheless quite lucid and accessible in its themes of empathy, compassion and sacrifice, and grounded by a Christ/Satan dual performance by Ewan McGregor that plays vastly better onscreen than it sounds on paper.

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.

Surely the truth (or something close to it) of who these men and women were must have been more fascinating, and more worth mythologizing, than what transpires in this strained mashup.

In taut, gripping and deeply disturbing fashion, writer-director Craig Zobel measures the depths to which rational individuals will sink to obey a self-anointed authority figure in Compliance.

A watchable enough picture that feels content to realize someone else's vision rather than claim it as its own. Any real sense of risk has been carefully ironed out: The PG-13 rating that ensures the film's suitability for its target audience also blunts the impact of the teen-on-teen bloodshed.

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.

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

Uneven but not unpleasant.

With a few exceptions . . . Borat’s satirical jabs don’t land with quite the same cringe-making force this time; the setups are too convoluted, the anonymous targets too genial, the payoffs too meager.

A sensationally entertaining old-school freakout and one of the smartest, most viscerally effective thrillers in recent memory.

The experience of watching Ask Dr. Ruth is a bit like that of meeting someone unaccountably delightful and almost being knocked backward by the gale-force strength of her personality, and then wanting to go out and buy one of her books so as to actually learn something about her ideas.

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

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

The movie welds subtly pointed social commentary onto a straightforward but satisfying narrative of self-discovery.

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.

John Slattery makes a wobbly transition into feature filmmaking with this drab and uninvolving dark comedy.

Although ostensibly set in the present day, this odd, frightening and entrancing little movie seems stuck in a moment out of time.

The horrors of Collective are sickeningly specific; the implications, as suggested by its comprehensive indictment of a title, are universal.

Slithering along as deliberately as one of Vic’s snails, Deep Water runs hot and cold; it’s sometimes a self-aware hoot and sometimes a disjointed drag.

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.

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.

You may long for a more disreputable, less buttoned-up telling, but there is something about this one’s sleek, streamlined conventionality that feels both appropriate and pleasing.

The director, David Bruckner, doesn’t just mindlessly apply the electrodes; even when he jars you to attention, he always seems to be drawing you into something deeper and more atmospheric. He delivers a scare you can sink into.

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.

Despite a few tonal and structural missteps, this intelligent, perceptive drama proves as intimately and gratifyingly femme-focused as Polley's 2006 debut, "Away From Her."

For those with little prior knowledge of Farhadi’s earlier work, Everybody Knows will play like an intelligent, engrossing drama about a sudden family tragedy that reopens past wounds. The director’s admirers, myself included, might find it harder to get past a dramatic approach that, sturdy though it may be, is starting to harden into formula.

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.

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.

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

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.

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

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

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.

Again and again, “F1” finds fresh pathways into familiar material; it keeps its surface-level moves unpredictable even though its overarching trajectory isn’t.

There’s a tension, too, between the observant realism of Layton’s style and the derivativeness of the plotting, though the three leads, all superb, smooth it over with considerable skill.

Undeniably impressive as a visual-psychological construct, The Double is ultimately a rigid, one-joke movie that feels hard pressed to sustain any sort of momentum over the course of its 92-minute running time.

To merely describe what happens in Rafiki would be to overlook its transporting sense of place, its striking visual pleasures and its credible and moving performances.

The movie is almost exactly what you’d expect: It has stirring speeches, infuriating setbacks and a tendency to overstate the obvious.

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.

This queasily funny and suspenseful movie is more than a smirking exercise in ideological deck stacking, and to praise it for its political relevance would be to understate its subtlety and specificity.

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

The lines between good and evil are clearly demarcated at the outset and remain more or less fixed as the story progresses, a strategy that in no way compromises the filmmaker’s ability to mine fresh complications and surprises from his story.

It’s marvelous to have Cronenberg back and to behold his undimmed, unparalleled skill at welding the formulations of horror and science fiction to the cinema of ideas.

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.

Like the young Natasha herself, Black Widow feels as though it’s been programmed into submission — and scarcely allowed to live and breathe before it’s suddenly over.

This high-end softcore thriller is juicily watchable from start to over-the-top finish, but its gleeful skewering of the upper classes comes off as curiously passe, a luxe exercise in one-note nastiness.

An audacious premise gets dangerously unstable execution in Four Lions, a ballsy but wobbly high-concept farce that sends up the bumbling schemes of a Blighty-based jihadist cell.

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.

More than any great movie I can remember, Andrew Haigh’s All of Us Strangers captures the eerie, disorienting and utterly sacred experience of encountering a lost loved one in your dreams.

This isn’t an easy movie, which is to say its meanings and motives have no interest in announcing themselves. But neither is it especially difficult, and if you let it, Schanelec’s gentle, supple stream of images and their attendant associations will bear you dreamily aloft. The meanings, if not necessarily the motives, will follow.

The result, while fragmented by design, is a politically astute, emotionally layered examination of a violent death and its lingering psychic residue.

An exuberantly crafted chase thriller that pulses with energy from its adrenaline-pumping first minutes to its muted bang of a finish.

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.

Emotionally harrowing and gentle by turns, this well-acted winter's tale is a more narrative-driven experience than Green's more lyrical Sundance entries, "George Washington" and "All the Real Girls."

While Chris Kelly’s semi-autobiographical writing-directing debut gets off to a painfully broad start, it does intermittently find its footing as it progresses, gathering enough well-observed moments and details to counterbalance its otherwise flailing stabs at humor and pathos.

The movie doesn’t just feel coldly analytical; it’s raw and enveloping, darkly funny and terribly alive.

Brigsby Bear becomes a winning tribute to the joys of amateur filmmaking, one whose lovingly crafted sets and props recall the handmade sensibility and do-it-yourself spirit of other independent movies.

The writer-director invests a tricky narrative juggling act with an intensity of human feeling that is the opposite of skin-deep. He tears through the veil of slick, self-admiring style that has both unlocked and at times obscured his very real merits as an artist.

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.

Two documentary filmmakers infiltrate a mysterious cult, only to find themselves drawn into the leader's insidious grip, in the taut, compelling low-budget feature Sound of My Voice.

Society’s rampant sexualization of preadolescent girls is one topic that Doucouré subjects to tough critical scrutiny; she’s made an empathetic and analytical movie, not an exploitative one.

With a canny balance of empathy and exploitation, Halloween treats its heroine’s lingering trauma with surprising emotional realism and only a hint of comic exaggeration.

The problem is not that this film is upsetting (it should be), but that it ultimately seems more interested, and skilled, at dispensing regular shocks than fresh insights.

A slow-building shiver of a movie, The Little Stranger tells a familiar but pleasurably engrossing story.

Director Alex Gibney delivers not just a detailed, full-access account of his subject, in all his defiance, hubris and tentative self-reckoning, but also a layered inquiry into the culture of competitiveness, celebrity, moral relativism and hypocrisy that helped enable and sustain his deception.

It’s a measure of Bateman’s skill in front of and behind the camera that his performance here betrays nary a shred of actorly indulgence, operating instead in a subdued register that achieves quietly aching moments in the final stretch.

A willingness to subvert expectations is one reason this ungainly, ingenious and altogether fascinating collaboration works as well as it does.

Sandler isn’t doing a strained meta riff on his persona; he’s playing an honest-to-God character, plagued by stress, uncertainty, and an unfashionably big heart. There’s art to his performance, and no shortage of life.

The film conveys key information and makes important distinctions not generally known, and its effectiveness probably depends on the viewer’s tolerance for poorly executed kitsch and manic physical intrusions by the filmmaker.

Its strength lies in the way it continually collapses the distance between people and cultures, forcing its characters to reckon with what they perceive as strange and unfamiliar.

Paring down narrative and character concerns in favor of a breathtaking application of pure thriller technique, Soderbergh's latest picture is a lean, efficient exercise tossed off with his customary sangfroid and wickedly dry sense of humor.

It’s hard not to feel stirred, even moved, by the sheer improbable fact of this picture’s existence: Moment by moment, you’re held by its loony flights of lyricism and gorgeous images (shot by Caroline Champetier), and by the mix of sincerity, irony and Sondheimian dissonance that animates every sung-through line.

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.

Junger has emerged with a worthy companion piece in Korengal, a less harrowing, more reflective dispatch from the front lines, and an equally vital examination of the strange crucible of selflessness, courage, bloodlust, rage, confusion and fear endured by the brave men interviewed here.

The King of Staten Island works hard to strike its own artful balance of humor and heartache, qualities that both seem permanently etched in Davidson’s face. Part of the movie’s inevitable fascination is the question of how much is made up and how much might be rooted in lived experience.

The moments of wit and feeling that occasionally steal into the frame. . .feel like emotional outliers in a flat, inexpressive void.

Intriguing but overly portentous drama, which seems far more taken with its own cynicism than most viewers will be.

As a director, Park stages his scenes with an unadorned flatness that strives to approximate the humdrum workaday poetry of Tomine’s comic-book frames but sometimes allows too much dead air to coalesce around the jokes and arguments.

What comes through most in Hawke’s brilliantly internalized performance is Tesla’s intense commitment to his work, as well as his weariness about having to continually explain and defend it to men of deeper pockets and lesser minds. The progress of human civilization can be infuriatingly banal, which doesn’t mean our biopics have to be.

Even as she preserves the essential particulars of an oft-told story, de Clermont-Tonnerre draws out Lawrence’s feminism and class rage with a welcome forthrightness that occasionally translates into some overly emphatic dialogue. But as in any decent reimagining of this story, the emotional and sensual force of the central romance renders language irrelevant, body language excepted.

Wonder Woman emerges as not only the strongest movie in the present DC cycle, but also the first one that feels like an enveloping, honest-to-God entertainment rather than a raging cinematic migraine.

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.

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

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.

A well-observed but emotionally muted costume drama that might well have been titled "My Week With Marie Antoinette."

Van Sant pays tribute to the restorative power of faith, discipline and perseverance, but he also resists the temptation to follow these themes into an overly pat or complacent groove.

A movie needn’t be a work of art—and "The Final Reckoning," the baggiest, least satisfying film of the McQuarrie quartet, falls well short of the mark.

It’s telling that both the first “Black Panther” and this messier if seldom less engrossing follow-up are at their strongest when they resist or even flat-out ignore their franchise obligations.

The results may delight those who believe recycled gags and endless cameos to be the very essence of great screen comedy, but everyone else will likely recognize Stiller’s wannabe Magnum opus as a disappointment-slash-misfire, the orange mocha crappuccino of movie sequels.

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

Develops into an endearingly scrappy and romantic romp that serves up some nice soul-searching moments alongside a steady stream of laughs.

Rather than defaulting to either condemnation or absolution, Nancy instead holds out the fleeting possibility of love to someone who has never known it before — and asks why we should begrudge her the impulse to seize it.

Levine’s script does a clever job of keeping numerous balls in the air over the taut 99-minute running time, and the writer is especially good at using the information he feeds us in unexpectedly resourceful, double-edged ways.

The ever-perceptive writer-director further hones her gifts for ruefully funny observation and understated melancholy with this low-key portrait of a burned-out screen actor.

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.

The movie derives its energy almost entirely from the bristling quality of the dialogue and the easy ensemble flow of the performances.

Joel David Moore leads a cast full of token minorities and bickering bimbos, whom writer-helmer Adam Green dispatches with knowing glee and an obvious love for genre conventions that almost overcomes the derivative scripting.

There's little doubt that Kazan has written a sly, amusing portrait of male self-absorption and artistic tyranny.

Emotionally, dramatically and perhaps most of all visually (it’s worth seeing in 3D), this delightful trilogy capper is almost as generously proportioned as its cuddly warrior hero, restoring a winning lightness of touch to the saga while bringing its long-running themes of perseverance and self-knowledge to satisfying fruition.

A certain exhaustion sets in well before the end, collapsing any meaningful distinction between camera-hogging self-indulgence and critical scrutiny.

This middling melange of Child biopic and contempo dramedy feels overstuffed and predigested as it depicts two ladies who found fame and fulfillment in their respective eras by cooking and writing about it.

Offering a more straight-faced brand of idiocy than its cheerfully dumb 2009 predecessor, G.I. Joe: Retaliation might well have been titled “G.I. Joe: Regurgitation,” advertising big guns, visual effects and that other line of Hasbro toys with the same joyless, chew-everything-up-and-spit-it-out efficiency.

Unsettles without illuminating, marred by narcotic pacing and a blank lead performance.

Result is far less abrasive than some of its predecessors, but for that very reason seems unlikely to generate the attention needed to meet Solondz's already modest commercial standards.

If it lacks its predecessor’s bracing sense of emotional discovery, it nonetheless understands and impressively re-creates the chief source of that movie’s delight: a group of characters who, for all their stresses and struggles, were a warm, easygoing pleasure to spend time with.

By the end of this clumsy, audacious story — the title of which turns out to have a doozy of a double meaning — Ben will be stripped of every last secret and falsehood, left with no more room to run or hide. You believe him at long last, even if believing the movie is a trickier proposition.

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.

[Hancock] turns the unlikely subject of a fast-food chain into a quasi-religious satire, a parable of American striving and, ultimately, a study of artisanal integrity gradually caving in to commercial compromise.

One of the movie’s persistent problems is that it often seems to be nothing but lessons — most of them bluntly spelled out, swiftly absorbed and almost automatically rewarded, in ways that short-circuit tension and emotion.

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.

[Stillman] takes the inherent sophistication of Austen’s worldview and introduces just the right note of sly, self-deflating mockery.

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.

The story does build, in its second act, to an unsettlingly persuasive indictment of a society that teaches even its youngest members to hate, condemn and destroy women. But did the movie have to fixate so lovingly on that destruction, or make its chief destroyer so compelling?

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

Provost’s movie jolts to life whenever its two great Catherines are sharing the screen, whether driving each other crazy or collapsing in tears.

Cyrano slips in and out of that realm fitfully; it’s not always the most graceful retelling of this oft-told tale, and its ardent defense of love for love’s sake can feel paper-thin one moment and swooningly sincere the next. What gives the movie its sustaining pulse is Dinklage.

Absent the infectious live-audience energy of Chris D'Arienzo's legit hit, this affectionate glam-rock-a-thon reps a visually bland staging of frankly insipid material, never tapping into the raucous, go-for-broke energy that would spin the show's cliches into gold, let alone platinum.

Despite the compromises that typically attend a studio-made family entertainment — especially one that has been adapted, however lovingly, from a sharper, edgier piece of source material — The BFG also possesses a rich and unmistakably Spielbergian understanding of the loneliness of childhood, and of the enduring consolations that friendship and imagination can offer. Not unlike its title character, the movie can be cloddish and clumsy, but it is also a thing of wily cleverness and lithe, surprising grace.

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.

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.

Certainly you expect a good time from Bateman and McAdams, who give their banter just the right sly, sportive rhythm even when the lines and situations themselves come up short.

While Cemetery of Splendor is unabashedly a work of slow cinema, the oft-hurled pejorative of “difficult” seems a particularly poor fit for a film whose unforced lyricism could scarcely be more graceful or inviting.

Del Toro’s empathy for the Creature is total—and so, owing to the aching poignancy and underlying rage of Elordi’s performance, is ours.

A consistently amusing and not entirely vacuous stunt.

The keenly focused intelligence and low-boil intensity that James Vanderbilt demonstrated in his screenplay for “Zodiac” are on impressive display in Truth.

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

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

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.

[Alvarez is] a master at orchestrating tension in close quarters, at painting his characters into a corner one minute and dangling them out a window the next.

It’s a movie of alternately promising and frustrating half-measures, in which Reeves’ shrewd storytelling instincts and the usual franchise-filmmaking imperatives repeatedly fight to a draw.

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.

Excessive reverence has killed many a well-meaning adaptation, but this “White Noise,” at once wildly mercurial and fastidiously controlled, somehow winds up triumphing over its own death. It’s too full of life — and also too funny, unruly, mischievous and disarmingly sweet — to really do otherwise.

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.

This robust, action-packed adventure benefits from a headier sense of forward momentum and a steady stream of 3D-enhanced thrills.

Out there, to say the least, but rescued from risibility by its well-matched lead performances and crazy low-budget ambition.

An exquisitely tender tale of two young Euro immigrants trying to find themselves (but not each other) in contempo London, Unmade Beds has a lively, romantic spirit that recalls the playfulness and spontaneity of the French New Wave.

Challengers, in other words, comes at you like an amped-up, Adidas-sponsored “Jules and Jim”—a funny, tempestuous, and exuberantly lusty story about how three athletic demigods see their destinies upended. And Guadagnino tells it the way he knows best, with a sometimes exasperating but ultimately irresistible surfeit of style.

Mid90s possesses just enough sensitivity and feeling to make you wish it had more. Hill’s script aims for, and often achieves, a fleeting, fragmentary portrait of group dynamics, but it’s stymied in its attempts to distinguish Stevie’s pals as individuals rather than types.

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

It never quite comes together — the decades-spanning connective tissue somehow feels both overstated and thin — but Husson’s skill with actors, among them Colin Firth, Olivia Colman, Ṣọpẹ Dìrísù and the great Glenda Jackson, yields undeniable dividends.

A pleasant if fairly pedestrian viewing experience, one that more or less gets the job done in terms of balancing the requisite ooh-ahh moments with another unsurprising reminder of man’s capacity for selfishness and destruction.

It both benefits and suffers from the relentless commercial logic that has, for the moment, placed a bit of a stranglehold on its own considerable magic.

As a vehicle for the impudent comic stylings of Ryan Reynolds, this cheerfully demented origin story is many, many cuts above “Green Lantern,” and as a sly demolition job on the superhero movie, it sure as hell beats “Kick-Ass.”

Delamarre knows his way around an action scene and keeps the proceedings moving briskly enough, even if the picture clocks in at about 10 minutes longer than its taut, 81-minute predecessor.

[A] delightfully voluble new comedy.

A comic thriller with a delectably hard shell and a soft, hollow center.

It’s Cranston’s most accomplished and subtly layered film performance to date.

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

As it is, so much obvious care has been taken to reproduce and update the charms of the Robert Stevenson-directed original — to deliver an old-fashioned yet newfangled burst of family-friendly uplift — that Mary Poppins Returns winds up feeling both hyperactive and paralyzed. It sits there flailing on the screen, bright, gaudy and mirthless, tossing off strained bits of comic business and all but strangling itself with its own good cheer.

The movie largely benefits from Abu-Assad’s natural talent for building suspense and rhythm; if the story’s elisions and fabrications occasionally feel too tidy, it more than earns its emotional impact on the strength of its excellent young cast.

It's not the personal, distinctive portrait of misfit girlhood it could have been.

Hope Springs is an altogether pleasant surprise: a mainstream dramedy that frankly and intelligently addresses the challenges facing a couple after 31 years of marriage.

A tougher, wiser film might still have extended the characters a measure of compassion, but it might also have left the audience with a deeper curiosity about where life’s challenges could take them next.

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.

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.

Summer of 85 has the matter-of-fact sensuality and youthful focus of so many of Ozon’s earlier films, but it’s also a startlingly specific greatest-hits compilation from across the director’s tirelessly productive career.

The story floats along like an intoxicating cloud of vice — an effect that Wood achieves with a throbbing, surging soundtrack and an alternately propulsive and hypnotic sense of camera movement. By the time the sensory rush dissipates and the hangover sets in, only Wood’s sharply observant social critique remains.

For once, truth in advertising: Dealin’ With Idiots spends 83 minutes doing exactly that.

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.

Its title a sly reference to what distinguishes men from beasts, Staying Vertical hinges on the tension between primal instincts and socially proscribed behavior. Guiraudie isn’t just trying to decimate sexual taboos; he is also taking gently comic aim at the overly rigid roles into which people tend to lock themselves.

The movie before us may be far from perfect, but with some crucial narrative and thematic tissue restored, it plays much more clearly, and satisfyingly, as an evocation of Ismael's emotional and psychological rupture, in his life as well as his art.

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.

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

As an exercise in sustained claustrophobia, the movie is not without its grisly accomplishments. Its effectiveness lies not in those moments when its characters are struck down without warning, but rather in the lingering sense that death has slowly, quietly taken up residence among them.

Beneath its off-color jokes and curse-laden rants, Last Flag Flying offers a pointed consideration of the hard choices that Americans of all generations have made to serve their country, and of the betrayal they have felt when that country has not risen to the level of their sacrifice.

Wan has a gift for investing even the creakiest cliches with shivery élan.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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

Heigl’s performance as a coolly murderous model housewife is the only real reason to even consider watching Home Sweet Hell, an otherwise flailing and risible tale of adultery, extortion and suburban malaise that suggests a poor woman’s “Gone Girl” — one stripped of all tension, style and subtext, and instead rendered with a level of over-the-top gore that would give even David Fincher pause.

This isn’t just a remake; it’s an act of cinematic upholstery, with all the padding that implies.

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

After undergoing some unfortunate mutations in recent years, a beleaguered Marvel movie property gets the smart, stylish prequel it deserves in X-Men: First Class.

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.

This movie may be a convulsively entertaining throwback to Scott’s glory days, but to look upon Fassbender, with his icy and seductive post-human gaze, is to behold this franchise’s future.

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.

Even when the story mechanics feel more than a bit secondhand, the exquisite interplay of vibrant pastel hues and almost photorealist textures (smoothly but not crucially enhanced in 3D) makes the film a continual pleasure to behold.

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.

As with “Annihilation” before it, the more surreal Men gets, the less frightening and more melancholy it becomes; it’s as if the movie were peeling back the skin of its chosen subject to reveal the diseased, writhing and frankly pitiable mess underneath. And Garland, like a coroner performer an autopsy, surveys his specimen with clinical rigor, gallows humor and the faintest hint of sorrow.

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.

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.

The more the shape of the story comes into focus in the final stretch, the less intriguing it becomes, although Eisenberg’s verbally and physically adroit performance never loses its unpredictable edge. Like any good martial artist, he knows just how to keep you off-balance.

As anthropology lessons go, Knuckle is strong stuff, and it's easy to accept Palmer's conclusion that the problem he's showing us may well have no solution.

What it isn’t is especially insightful or memorable. Just because evil is banal doesn’t mean a movie has to be.

A brutal study of physical extremity and psychological meltdown built around an entirely astonishing lead performance from Jonathan Majors.

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.

There’s a special thrill in seeing an actor known for her own eerie perfectionism playing a woman who can’t abide imperfection in herself or others.

Really, the problem with Eddington is not that Aster judges his characters. It’s that he barely finds them interesting enough to judge, and his boredom proves infectious.

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

Coherence devolves into a noisy, cluttered portrait of dysfunction, all clenched fists and shouted expletives. The twists may be novel, but the talk, and the upshot, are all too dispiritingly familiar.

It’s odd how effectively the movie winds up accomplishing what some of the best sermons do — heightening our compassion, stirring our emotions and intermittently earning our awe.

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.

Although assembled with consummate care and obsessive attention to visual detail, Pacific Rim manages only fitful engagement and little in the way of real wonderment, suspense or terror.

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.

While a more thorough archival survey of Choi and Shin’s work together (pre- and post-abduction) would have allowed for a deeper perspective, this real-life romantic thriller/escape saga still boasts enough fascinating details and angles to qualify as essential stranger-than-fiction viewing.

Carey Mulligan gives an affecting, skillfully modulated performance that lends a certain coherence to this assemblage of real-life incidents, composite characters, noble sentiments, stirring speeches and impeccable production values — all marshaled in service of a picture whose politics prove rather more commendable than its artistry.

Writer-director Sean Baker’s sun-scorched, street-level snapshot is a work of rueful, matter-of-fact insight and unapologetically wild humor that draws a motley collection of funny, sad and desperate individuals into its protagonists’ orbit.

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.

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.

Director Chris Weitz's problematic new picture, which, despite Demian Bichir's affecting lead performance and a strong feel for Los Angeles' Mexican-American communities, emerges an earnest and overly programmatic heart-tugger.

Elaborately conceived from a visual standpoint, Ridley Scott's first sci-fier in the three decades since "Blade Runner" remains earthbound in narrative terms, forever hinting at the existence of a higher intelligence without evincing much of its own.

As a study in atmospheric seclusion, The Other Lamb is beautifully crafted enough to hold your attention, but you can’t shake the feeling that Selah’s next chapter — and Cassidy’s — might well be the more interesting movie.

The filmmakers’ undeniable chops and bizarre tonal shifts fail to transform the material into anything more than a stylishly gruesome exercise.

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

By the time the phantasmagorical finale arrives, you are flooded with blood and viscera, yes, but also something even more unsettling — a sudden onrush of feeling, a deep, overpowering melancholy.

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.

To complain that “Elvis” is basically a compilation of musical-biopic conventions is a bit like complaining about a greatest-hits album; it also misses one of Luhrmann’s strengths as a filmmaker, which is his ability to suffuse clichés with sincerity, energy and feeling.

Its glimmers of comic rage and generous helpings of battlefield carnage, though patchily entertaining on their own, never coalesce into a coherent reason for being.

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.

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.

Forbes brings a marvelous warmth and specificity to this story of a mixed-race family struggling to survive, aided considerably by one of Mark Ruffalo’s richest, most appealing performances.

Part character study, part PSA, the movie chronicles a brief but meaningful period in its protagonist’s healing journey, and if there are few surprises along the way, there are equally few easy answers or miraculous breakthroughs.

See this smart, showboating movie now, before its simmering sense of justice begins to feel like a thing of the past.

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.

Reed’s movie succeeds well enough as a genial diversion and sometimes a delightful one, predicated on the rarely heeded Hollywood wisdom that less really can be more.

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.

There’s something undeniably sharp and buoyant about Moore’s globe-trotting, grass-is-greener approach that compels indulgence and attention.

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.

This rambunctious paean to pot retains the trademark Apatow sweetness even as it careens from messy vulgarisms to even messier violence.

While I’m generally inclined to applaud an action movie that seeks to be more than just an exercise in carnage, The Villainess turns wearyingly stop-and-go whenever it tries to fill in the void of its protagonist’s emotional and psychological history.

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.

It’s an affectionate, sometimes downright slobbery career salute with a soft, unexamined center — a moving experience for all involved, no doubt, but one of limited interest outside the celebrity bubble it depicts.

Among other things, “The Disciple” is a decades-spanning chronicle of an entertainment industry in constant technological flux, which means it’s fascinated by the ephemeral as well as the eternal.

We are not not entertained.

It’s telling that, in a picture that exudes more than a whiff of artistic fatigue, the newcomer to Lanthimos’s company supplies the freshest impact.

A disappointingly anemic tale of forbidden love that should satiate the pre-converted but will bewilder and underwhelm viewers who haven't devoured Stephenie Meyer's bestselling juvie chick-lit franchise.

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.

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.

An uneven but enjoyable trio of films that take affectionate (and sometimes literal) aim at the Japanese capital.

Lee’s movie at once examines and embodies the complicated riddle of cultural identity: Beneath its boozy antics and largely predictable narrative developments, it offers warmly perceptive insights into how difficult it can be for so many first- and second-generation Asian immigrants to define themselves.

Corsini leans a little too hard on narrative convenience, but she also has a gift for illuminating everyday racism — the matter-of-fact microaggressions, the unspoken anxieties — in a story of youthful alienation and restlessness. Whenever believability falters, Corsini and her fine actors manage to pull you back in.

The movie, to its credit, harbors few illusions about Diana’s people skills. And it has, in Bening, an actor with a natural affinity for rough edges and sharp retorts, plus an ability to make emotional sense of a character’s fury.

This one, written by Fellowes and directed by Simon Curtis (“My Week With Marilyn,” “Woman in Gold”) with the same workmanlike efficiency, affords its share of passing pleasures. And not just of the usual luxury-porn variety, although those who watch “Downton Abbey” for the pearls, frocks and waistcoats, the posh furnishings and elegant dinners will hardly be disappointed.

The trouble with this muscular, fitfully absorbing, confusingly titled action movie — a bigger, brasher and less memorable picture than its predecessor in every respect — is that its cynicism too often feels like a put-on.

The result doesn't feel evasive so much as vaguely incurious, and its focus on the message over the man himself can be as impressive in its single-mindedness as it is frustrating.

Atomic Blonde may be a delirious exercise in outré nonsense, but it can also be a brutally effective action picture when the inspiration strikes.

[A] beautiful, engrossing and potently subversive new crime thriller.

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.

The filmmakers fully retain their offbeat sensibility and attentiveness to character while providing perhaps the sharpest showcase yet for Zach Galifianakis' outsized talents.

[Pesce’s] sense of horror craftsmanship is at once meticulous and oblique.

Yet for all its expected highs, the adaptation has been managed with more gusto than grace; at the end of the day, this impassioned epic too often topples beneath the weight of its own grandiosity.

The more you realize where Shyamalan is leading us — and by this point, it’s not exactly a surprise destination — the more difficult it becomes to locate a worthwhile point. Perhaps the point is in the impressive discipline of the filmmaking, though if anything, given its premise, the movie wants to be a grislier, more nastily unhinged piece of work than it manages.

There is something inspired about the idea of fusing old-school aesthetic brio and revisionist politics, but the instant you see what Damsel is up to, its power begins to dissipate.

The possibility of redemption hangs over this movie, as it does in much of Schrader’s work. But for the first time in this trilogy, that possibility is resolved in a manner that feels neither fully examined nor earned.

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.

This is very much Foy's movie, and if the role of a woman trapped and surrounded by crazies couldn't feel farther removed from Queen Elizabeth II (or could it?), this superb English actress brings furious conviction to every agonizing moment of Sawyer's journey.

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

In the blunt, sprawling, nearly 2 1/2-hour Triangle of Sadness, [Östlund] ascends to new levels of moral disgust while descending to new lows of topical unsubtlety. It’s a pretty good tradeoff.

Split doesn’t just revive Shyamalan’s career; it resurrects his brand.

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

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.

An initially amusing but fatally overstretched action-comedy that marks a lamer-than-expected big-screen outing for Keegan-Michael Key and Jordan Peele.

Beau Is Afraid offers arresting confirmation of Aster’s talent and fresh evidence of his limitations. It’s a big, wildly ambitious swing of a movie, one that seems eager to liberate itself and its characters from the conventions of form and genre. But that more expansive energy is at odds with and ultimately constrained by the story’s mother/man-child dialectic.

Gorgeously shot on location by cinematographer Haris Zambarloukos, “A Haunting in Venice” is easily the best of Branagh’s three big-screen Christie adaptations, largely because it is also the most flagrantly unfaithful.

Comes off as a derivative wisecracking machine rather than a feat of sustained imagination.

Aiming for an Alexander Payne-style synthesis of wry comedy and unflinching character study, pic has been made with the utmost sincerity, but the frankly lugubrious material and barely compensating spasms of humor are all but impossible to warm to.

Maddin's singular humor and fabulous black-and-white mise-en-scene can't sustain this fever dream beyond its initial fascination, making for an intriguing transitional work unlikely to broaden his audience.

Neither a particularly good movie nor the pop-cultural travesty that some were dreading.

For a movie that’s ostensibly about casting off the shackles of old age and embracing excitement in life, there isn’t a single moment here that feels original or spontaneous.

The individual stories that make up One Child Nation, the worthy winner of the Sundance Film Festival’s grand jury prize for U.S. documentaries, illuminate an entire history of institutional corruption, medical brutality and pervasive misogyny — a history that was both masked and advanced by a national propaganda campaign of near-Orwellian absurdity.

Higher on stylistic dazzle than originality or coherence.

A work of both modest enchantment and enchanting modesty, grounded in a classically Spielbergian realm where childlike wonderment crosses paths with the tough realities of young adulthood.

Ehrenreich isn't given much to work with here, but his sly comic reserve and devil-may-care attitude give you reasons to keep watching, well after the story has stopped doing anything of the sort.

An underwhelming survival thriller.

The workplace dramas intended to animate Hind’s story wind up distracting from it.

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.

Though its absurdist inventions occasionally border on twee, this affectionate slow-blooming romance mines an understated vein of comic melancholy that the actors' wistful performances perfectly capture.

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.

It starts throwing details at you almost immediately, each one building on yet also undermining the last, as if it were deliberately trying to confound your sense of what kind of movie you’re watching.

A serviceable picture that offers all the sumptuous visual pleasures of a historical costume drama, yet little in the way of actual history.

Franco pursues this nihilistic thesis with a single-mindedness that one might call rigorous if it didn’t also feel so lazy.