Leah Greenblatt

A movie seemingly custom-made for the era of alternative facts, American Animals feels like a new kind of true-crime thriller: one that shamelessly rewrites its truths in real time as it goes.

In an industry that defines “mature audiences” as anyone old enough to vote, a movie centered entirely on women over 65 — a sex comedy, no less — feels like some kind of small Hollywood miracle.

Director Dominic Cooke is mostly known for his Olivier Award-winning theater work, but Chesil never feels stagey or static. It’s beautifully shot, and he pulls lovely performances from both his leads.

It’s in Deadpool’s DNA to channel the wild id of a 12-year-old boy — a very clever one who happens to love boobs, Enya, and blowing stuff up. Which is dizzy fun for a while, like eating Twinkies on a Gravitron. Eventually, though, it just wears you out.

Its title sounds like the premise for some kind of high-adrenaline adventure about maze-running or outgunning a nuclear apocalypse. But The Escape is both less thrilling and much scarier, in its own way — a quiet domestic-drama chamber piece with a vein of pure desperation thrumming beneath it.

A charming and generally painless way to spend two hours. It’s not nearly as sharp as some of the best stuff she’s done, but it’s pointedly kinder too, wrapping even its nastiest characters.

The story works well enough in its own moodily familiar way, but it’s not only the movie’s palette that’s stylishly leached of color: Its main characters’ backstories feel perfunctory, the dialogue leans heavy on exposition and hard-boiled cliché, and even Owen looks worn down.

Overboard lists and wanders through the shoals of secondhand comedy and eventually, just drifts away.

RBG is an unapologetic valentine to Supreme Court Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg, but a sharp and spiky one too.

If the film itself feels like a little less than the sum of its provocative premise, it’s still moving in its own unshowy way: a quietly profound exploration of identity, sacrifice, and the connection all human beings long for, whether or not their God or their family or their community approves.

Kodachrome isn’t a bad movie, it just never for a moment feels like a real one: A road-trip dramedy so schematic and loaded for emotional bear it feels like it was generated by a Sundance screenwriting app.

There’s also something depressing about Schumer playing off her own looks as if, without the abracadabra of her bonked-head delusions, she were some sort of hideous gremlin. Magician, heal thyself.

Pete is no kind of fairytale; instead, it’s something far sadder and better and more real.

A clever, sharp-fanged mélange of classic midnight-movie horror and modern indie ingenuity.

Ejiofor’s performance make the movie; the rest, you may just have to take on faith.

The performances are strong and the story is absorbing; a smart diversion for adult attention spans.

What the movie doesn’t do, until it’s nearly over, is make any real case for why so much of America continued to put their faith in Kennedy long after the facts of the case were revealed.

When A Quiet Place has one finger on the panic button and the other on mute, it’s a nervy, terrifying thrill.

All style and mood, signifying not much.

The movie’s darker allegory of persecution and internment isn’t hard to miss, though, and the dogs themselves, with their tactile tufts of fur and Buster Keaton eyes, have an endearing, complicated humanity.

There’s some real, weird fun in secondary characters like Tony Hale’s desperate-to-be-down principal, Natasha Rothwell’s exasperated drama teacher, and Logan Miller’s Martin, a theater kid so eager to please he practically turns himself inside out.

Uthaug also manages to work in a few genuinely cool visual tricks, though the dialogue, from a serviceable script by Geneva Robertson-Dworet and Alastair Siddons is strictly standard; a mix of clunky action-movie exposition and winking Indiana Jones-style humor.

Despite the rich settings and crowded cast, the film can’t help feeling a little airless too: These players aren’t history’s masterminds, they’re wasps trapped in a jar, bumbling against the glass in sting-or-be-stung chaos.

What begins as a gleefully nasty piece of work gradually picks up more nuance as it goes, adding dimensions to characters who could easily have coasted on the story’s arched-eyebrow burlesque.

It’s the kind of film that leaves you dazzled and a little shell-shocked — and not entirely sure whether your own moviegoing DNA hasn’t been altered a little in the process.

McAdams, whose comedic skills have gone unsung for way too long, is dizzy fun. The whole movie is, actually, even if it pretty much evaporates on impact — a kooky, vicarious loop of Mad Libs meets Cards Against Humanity, where whoever’s holding the popcorn last wins.

The title of Loveless is no misnomer: It might just be the feel-bad movie of the year. A new word should be invented for the particular kind of poetic, politically-charged bleakness acclaimed filmmaker Andrey Zvyagintsev (Leviathan, The Return) brings to the screen, some Cyrillic-alphabet cousin to the Germans with their weltschmerz and schadenfreude.

[Coogler] infuses nearly every frame with soul and style, and makes the radical case that a comic-book movie can actually have something meaningful — beyond boom or kapow or America — to say. In that context, Panther’s nuanced celebration of pride and identity and personal responsibility doesn’t just feel like a fresh direction for the genre, it’s the movie’s own true superpower.

It’s heartbreaking, illuminating, and yes, fantastic, just to watch her (Marina) live.

There’s a pleasing sort of B-movie-on-an-A+-budget simplicity to Death Cure.

In the Fade is a flawed filmgoing experience, but still a viscerally affecting one.

It’s a minor-key tale by any measure: a May-December romance played out in the fading shadow of Old Hollywood glamour. But it also has the benefit of a thoughtful script, sensitive direction, and leads gifted enough to breathe fresh air into nearly every moment.

A smart, eminently watchable thriller, taut and stylish, and Plummer is remarkably good in it.

The result is a dadaist swirl of satire, pie-eyed whimsy, and speculative futurism — like "Gulliver’s Travels" through the wrong end of a telescope.

The movie never quite stops feeling like Moulin Rouge! written in extra-large block font, or Broadway projected straight onto a big screen, which certainly isn’t bad news if that’s exactly what you love.

Mostly this is all just pretext for dreamy postcard shots of Europe, a metric ton of slapstick, and as many highly specific vocal riff-offs as one empty airplane hangar can handle.

The skating scenes, too, are thrilling, but Robbie is the real revelation. In a performance that goes far beyond bad perms and tabloid punchlines, she’s a powerhouse: a scrappy, defiant subversion of the American dream. You won’t just find yourself rooting for this crazy kid; you might even fall a little bit in love.

It feels only appropriate that James Franco, an actor and director for whom weirdness is next to godliness, would be the one to tell his story.

It’s real life, heartbreaking and sublime.

The vividness of the narrative never quite matches the riotous swirl of color and culture on screen — and neither do the songs, sadly, for how central they are to the story. Instead, Coco settles into something gentler but still irrefutably sweet: a movie that plays safe with the status quo, even as it breaks with it.

A tar-black comedy so caustic it nearly burns a hole in the screen, Three Billboards Outside Ebbing, Missouri banks a lot on the gale force of Frances McDormand, and nearly pulls it off.

Thelma doesn’t play with pig’s blood and jump scares; its dreamlike dread is subtler and stranger, and much harder to shake.

Branagh executes his double duties with a gratifyingly light touch, tweaking the story’s more mothballed elements without burying it all in winky wham-bam modernity.

Gerwig doesn’t trap her protagonist in the oblivious underage bubble that most coming-of-age dramedies inhabit; Lady Bird’s parents, played by Tracy Letts and Laurie Metcalf, are fully formed humans with their own deep flaws and vulnerabilities.

What follows is another slapstick dose of hard-R ridiculosity with a soft-nougat center, but it also passes the Bechdel test maybe better than any other film this year, and its older generation of stars are too smart not to go to town on their stock roles.

First-time director Maggie Betts has said she based her story in part on extended research into the aftershocks of Vatican II’s new liberties — in its wake, devoted members left the Church in droves — and on personal biographies of the women who experienced it firsthand.

Even a ravishingly shot finale — Queens has never looked so enchanting — can’t quite paper over the weak resolution of the plot’s central mystery.

The movie does get some fun gory mileage out of its cracked-Pleasantville premise; but mostly it feels like broad farce madly in search of a cohesive center, and a soul.

There’s something uniquely, transcendently beautiful in Campillo’s particular vision and the unhurried way he unfurls it.

A tasteful, surprisingly sedate biopic slathered in the traditional signposts of heavy exposition, gold-toned cinematography, and note-perfect period detail.

The story begins to feel more like a series of strung-together anecdotes: an intriguing project, incomplete.

Una’s raw, deeply dis­comfiting dance between obsession and exploitation isn’t easy to watch by any metric; they make it hard to look away.

The real draw is seeing these two legends together again.

Even when its emotions risk running as cool as its palette, 2049 reaches for, and finds, something remarkable: the elevation of mainstream moviemaking to high art.

Uneven but endearing.

The symbolic power of what happened there — one small step, one giant leap for womankind — is still the movie’s truest ace.

There’s a raw, tangible humanity to nearly every scene that sets the film gratifyingly apart.

Strong builds a poignant, methodical portrait of loss.

Some of Status’s cringe comedy feels forced or simply wasted on soft targets.

It’s an artful, quietly affecting piece of filmmaking, more than worth the lessons learned.

Witherspoon can easily carry an entire movie in her dimples, but it’s hard not to measure Alice against a role as richly written as her recent turn on "Big Little Lies." Here, she’s mostly just a winsome proxy for midlife wish fulfillment — a bubbly brunch mimosa you drink up before the fizz is gone.

As Chadwick (The Other Boleyn Girl, Mandela: Long Walk to Freedom) piles on the coincidences and misdirections, the movie finally collapses under its own schematic weight, and wilts to the ground.

Between "Moonlight" and the upcoming "Call Me By Your Name," some are calling this the golden age of gay coming-of-age cinema; Beach Rats’ slow pacing and dreamy verité style doesn’t feel made for quite that level of mainstream appeal. But still it gets under the skin, and stays there.

The Hitman’s Bodyguard is strictly an Economy Coach experience, but it’s brainlessly fun enough in a late-’90s Brett Ratner buddy-comedy kind of way.

A clever, corrosive little trick of a movie, a neon candy heart dipped in asbestos.

For all its well-worn outlines, the narrative exerts its own fierce, clenched-jaw grip: a cautionary campfire tale that reminds us it’s not merely the end that matters, it’s the style and skill of the telling.

The film (shot mostly in Yiddish) has an unpolished intimacy, peeling back the surface exoticism of a cloistered faith to reveal the poignantly ordinary struggle of being an imperfect person in the world.

A sincere effort to illuminate a singularly dark chapter in history — and a stark reminder of exactly what gets lost when human beings fail to take care of their own.

In sweetly calibrated moments — a downtown drug deal gone wrong; Falco alone under strobe lights, swaying ecstatically to Donna Summer — Landline finds the analog joy it’s reaching for.

For young people suffering, the movie offers both hope and clarity; for more experienced viewers, it may come off a little too much like "Girl, Interrupted" through a Lifetime lens.

What shines through is the visual wit and innate sweetness of the storytelling, and Carell’s cackling, cueball-skulled misanthrope — a (mostly) reformed scoundrel who can still have his cake, and arsenic too.

A brightly contemporary retelling that is not so much an origin story as a coming of age: The On-His-Way-to-Amazing Spider-Boy.