Kyle Smith

A great American movie about the greatness of ordinary Americans, Patriots Day combines an electrifying manhunt with the intimacy and feel for character writer-director Peter Berg showed in his brilliant TV series “Friday Night Lights.”

The Will Smith weepie Collateral Beauty couldn’t be more calculated and manipulative if it slapped you on the back, shoved a giant lollipop into your mouth and immediately tried to sell you a time share in Tampa.

Honorable, worthy and windy, Fences is essentially a PBS episode of “Great Performances” that is inflated for the big screen without ever quite belonging there.

La La Land deserves credit for high spirits even if it’s essentially a collection of glamorous throwback music videos for so-so songs.

Clipped, controlled and composed, Jackie Kennedy was a woman of her times, but since composure doesn’t win you Oscar nominations, Natalie Portman opts to play the part with a sort of emotional incontinence.

This is a true story, and at times a gut-wrenching one, even if it necessarily sugarcoats some aspects of the plight of lost children.

This is Beatty’s first film in 15 years, a project he’s been working on for 40 years, and it’s immensely pleasing to see him in such fine form. Or, as his obsessive-compulsive subject would say, such fine form. Such fine form.

Bad Santa 2 is vulgar, nasty and offensive, but it has flawed aspects also.

Allied is slow-footed and tepid, its plot twists dopey and soapy. I was rooting for things to get interesting, but I would have settled for a few surprises.

Affleck eschews all the actors’ clichés — burning intensity, soulful suffering, haunted brooding. It’s a magnificently interior performance, the sort of acting that doesn’t call attention to itself but draws us in to peer closer.

I’d love to tell you Tom Ford’s Nocturnal Animals is a cinematic masterpiece, and for most of its running time, that’s what I was planning to do. You must see it. But a great movie requires a great ending, and Nocturnal Animals doesn’t have one.

Dramatically inert, satirically inept and thematically insufferable, Billy Lynn’s Long Halftime Walk is the most disappointing film of the year.

If the makers of Trolls must keep going, I won’t be present for the next entry unless it’s “Trolls Meet Smurfs.” With chainsaws. In the Thunderdome.

War was both cruel and magnificent, as Churchill once put it. To Gibson, it still is.

The film is never gripping, but at least it moves. Director Ron Howard does his best to spark excitement with cheesy horror-movie editing — brief shots of the damnation in store if the virus is unleashed — and there are a couple of twists to keep things lively. Nothing is what it seems, unless it seems ridiculous, in which case it’s exactly what it seems.

Any parent who has ever scrambled desperately to find a doll to appease a wailing child as though it were a life-and-death situation will appreciate the wit of this multilayered, dread-soaked chamber piece.

Lacking either the narrative shiftiness or the trashy thrills of “Gone Girl,” this one is the kind of flick few will watch twice: It has about as many twists and turns as an L. The third act of a movie shouldn’t make you feel as though the first two acts were a waste of time.

Both broader and deeper than the relentless and monotonous “12 Years a Slave,” it’s one of the few important movies to hit cinemas this year.

Burton may give us a bland hero, a tepid love story and a muddled plot but, hey, at least he’s got a skeleton army doing battle with giant tentacle monsters at an amusement park.

It’s told in a woefully pedestrian way, with talking-head footage forming the bulk of this slow-to-develop film. Still, it’s a creepily fascinating tale.

"The Titanic" is now the second-biggest disaster Kate Winslet has ever been associated with. Her new one, The Dressmaker, is like some hellborn alloy of film noir, campy melodrama, “High Plains Drifter” and the Darwin Awards for people who die in moronic accidents.

Less enjoyable than making a baby but more enjoyable than raising one, the animated feature Storks delivers a bouncing bundle of blah.

Running and screaming may be essential to a lot of horror movies, but as Blair Witch shows, they’re not scary in themselves. For that, you need the stuff between the running and screaming.

A cute, spunky found-footage thriller undone by a lumpy plot and a weak ending, Operation Avalanche revisits the urban legend that the moon landing was faked, with some fresh twists.

Snowden could have been a character portrait, but instead it’s like “The Bourne Identity” minus the chases and fights, which is like a ham and cheese sandwich minus the ham and cheese. As a consequence, I suspect, this film will make no bread.

Deeply personal screenwriting and a superlative performance by Molly Shannon as a dying mom lift Other People above the level of many similar tragedy-inflected indie comedies.

This movie is resolute about being as homey and obvious as it can possibly be. Somewhere, Norman Rockwell is thinking, “Sheesh, even I was edgier than this.”

A dopey psychological thriller that combines elements of “The Sixth Sense” with an overbearing sentimentality, The 9th Life of Louis Drax flat-lines from beginning to end.

Beautifully photographed and acted, with a somberly affecting tone, the film, by Derek Cianfrance, is nevertheless marred by severely contrived elements.

A dull, listless, derivative chunk of celluloid lacking any spark or even basic storytelling ability.

A pleasingly low-key effort pitched at fans of the first couple.

A gooey morass of indie-movie clichés, the wacky-family dramedy The Hollars marks yet another egregiously cutesy attempt to rekindle that “Garden State” magic.

Apart from its thin characters and occasional trite moments, as well as a silly attempt to set up a sequel, Don’t Breathe is just about perfect. It’s as lean and relentless as the best John Carpenter films.

Trite and vulgar boxing flick.

It’s a small movie, but in his third feature, indie writer-director Chad Hartigan proves he is a major talent, imbuing the interactions with wit and warmth and charm.

After an hour or so, when the would-be comedy War Dogs finally gets around to a point to focus on, it’s stale ammunition that’s been sitting in a dusty Albanian warehouse for 40 years. I assume the movie got its jokes from the same place.

A desperado drama wrapped around a Bernie Sanders campaign speech, Hell or High Water overcomes its vapid political leanings with loads of West Texas atmosphere, smart dialogue and acutely observed relationships.

A cinematic enchantment, a low-key 1970s-style kids’ movie brimming with sincerity and heart. It’s one of the best films of the year.

Borrowing a few tricks from Martin Scorsese, the film isn’t a slavish imitation but an engrossing and grounded drama. It’s a pity, then, that director Federico Castelluccio, best known as Furio of “The Sopranos,” can’t deliver a powerful conclusion.

Like a Pixar movie shorn of the cutesy and manipulative aspects that marred “Inside Out,” the animated remake of The Little Prince, hitting theaters and Netflix, is as fragile and beautiful as the beloved rose guarded by the wee fellow of the title.

If it has a genius for anything, it’s disorganization: What promised to be a Super Bowl of villainy turned out more like toddler playtime.

Bad Moms is like “Sex and the City: The Sneakers-and-Minivan Years,” a good-natured girl-power comedy that balances a bland sitcom structure with some weird and hilarious moments.

Indignation is devastating, haunting and important.

The sharpest, wildest and most unpredictable thriller I’ve seen this year.

I love the series, but Jason Bourne is the worst of the five.

Two dull people have a dull love affair in Summertime, a French drama that drags on like an August afternoon.

They should have called it “Star Trek Into Drowsiness.”

Cheesier than a Kraft Singles truck but half as subtle, Dinesh D’Souza’s documentary Hillary’s America: The Secret History of the Democratic Party is an attack on all things Democratic whose many valid points get buried under bluster

A scrapbook of bits from better Allen films that builds up to a hearty shrug.

Doremus can’t quite make the emotional breakthroughs rewarding enough to justify the slow buildup, but the icy beauty of the film makes it worth watching.

At the end the film turns into an infomercial for President Obama’s Iran deal, but Gibney delivers plenty to think about — and fear.

For John Cusack in Cell, the bad news is that his phone just ran out of juice. The good news, sort of, is that those who are on their phones were just attacked by a piercing signal that turned them into flesh-munching zombies.

As filthy as the back of a sanitation truck — but it has heart, too. Most of the comedy is funny, some of it is hilarious.

A dismal, low-energy affair.

The Purge: Election Year imagines that, right now, laws are being ignored, people gun each other down with impunity and the death toll is horrendous. It’s too bad the title “Chicago” was already taken.

Life, Animated oversimplifies the situation, contriving to use endless clips from Disney movies to make a case that movie magic really can better people’s lives. Unfortunately, by the end of the movie it’s clear that Disney can’t help Owen negotiate sex, breakups or many other challenges he faces as an adult.

Written and directed with compassion by Noah Buschel, the film is a low-key chamber piece better suited to television. But don’t let its restraint fool you: As unshowy as it is, The Phenom has an impressive collection of tools.

Free State of Jones is enticingly difficult to chart. It’s anti-war, anti-plutocracy and anti-racist, but it’s also pro-Bible, pro-gun, anti-tax and sympathetic to the poor whites who usually get tagged as racist. Its hero is an avowed Republican named Newt.

Quotable, controversial, anarchic, charismatic and handsome (in an ugly way), the zany avant-garde rocker Frank Zappa had everything one needs to be a star, except talent.

The girl kept talking and strategizing as heavy string music played on the soundtrack. This was doubly weird because: a) it made me feel like the bad guy; and b) life doesn’t normally have a soundtrack. Somehow the bitch got hold of a flare gun. Ever had a flare gun fired into your hide? Unpleasant.

If it’s possible to make a morally old-fashioned film about teen orgies, writer-director Eva Husson has done so with Bang Gang, a quietly chilling look at the sex lives of a group of bored high-school students.

Imagine “Moby-Dick” rewritten in crayon, and you’ll get the idea.

Sharp, funny and as mesmerizing as the master’s notoriously languorous suspense scenes.

No, Warcraft isn’t a ridiculous mess; it holds together on its own musclebound terms. It neither tries to be jokey nor undercuts itself by being unintentionally funny. And it offers a bit more complexity than some other nonstop action flicks adapted from video games. It’s a real movie, just not a good one.

The climate-change documentary Time To Choose makes the disaster movie “The Day After Tomorrow” look like a model of judiciousness and restraint.

A movie that sets out to make boy bands look silly. The conceptual error is obvious. There’s low-hanging fruit and then there’s fruit that’s already on the ground, rotting underfoot.

You certainly get your 20 bucks worth of spectacle out of Alice Through the Looking Glass. So breathtaking are the landscapes, so whimsical are the creatures, so marvelous are the marvels that I wanted to give a standing ovation to whoever signed the check to pay for all this. Expensiver and expensiver!

It’s kind of cute but mostly just awkward, somewhere between watching bros who slept through French class trying to work their game in Nice and endless CBS sitcoms about nutty guys ruled by exasperated, boring women.

I tried squinting. Didn’t work. I turned my head slightly to the side. Uh-uh. No matter what I tried, I could not, cannot and never will be able to see Ewan McGregor as Jesus Christ.

Davies’ quiet, painterly film largely eschews musical cues that would heighten its emotional impact, but as it is, Sunset Song is captivating in its sincerity.

Loaded with dazzling ideas that don’t ultimately pull together.