Leah Greenblatt

The fighting, when it comes — from competing tribes, and from white colonizers steadily advancing an international slave trade — is viscerally satisfying too, even as the screenplay, by Dana Stevens (Fatherhood) and actress Maria Bello, works mostly in the broad strokes of genre storytelling.

Mass, as maddening as it can be, still feels like an urgent and necessary movie, if not at all an easy one — and an exceptional opportunity too to watch four great character actors, finally called up from the sidelines to center stage, do what they do.

If Bening’s genteel British accent sometimes feels a little wobbly, her character is by far the most vivid force in the film.

A nervy, deeply felt drama that gets a little lost on its winding path to redemption but still finds a way home.

Ejiofor is eminently relatable as an analog man who can't seem to understand where it all went wrong, and Clarke's eyebrows knit with such pained expressiveness, it's as if they're having their own wriggling monologue throughout the movie.

Like its muse, the movie feels a little like a black-box experiment, one that can be both frustratingly opaque and achingly lovely: a still-waters mystery whose ripples, even up to the last frame, only hint at what lies beneath.

There’s really no not-terrible term for smart, silly female-bonding movies that are somehow considered subversive just for acing the Bechdel Test.... Sisters earns a spot in that pantheon, however it’s defined—even if it’s never quite as good as its leads.

As an attempt to scale the craggy heights of a marriage in crisis, Downhill may be more bunny slope than black diamond — a force mineure, but still worth the trip.

Ultimately though, it’s all secondary to Saunders and Lumley’s riotous chemistry together.

Even as the story descends into full bloody camp at its crescendo, Spencer holds the more ludicrous plot threads together.

Cage, so great and unexpectedly subdued in last year's small-scale indie drama Pig, has a ball with his own myth-making, a star contracting and expanding in the movie's fun-house mirror of fame and destabilized celebrity. Not that he ever went anywhere.

The film, while gorgeously shot, is schematic and wholly implausible. But Skarsgård saves it; wild and funny and ferociously alive, he’s a crucial bolt of color in all that tasteful gray.

Gyllenhaal, bright-eyed and brittle, brings her signature intensity to the role, though Lisa’s true inner world remains murky; it’s never quite clear if she’s just deeply unhappy or certifiably ill. Instead, the movie remains an intriguing but ambiguous portrait of a flawed, fascinating woman who knows herself either too well or not at all

Halftime is often hagiography, but a keen and sympathetic one too, designed to humanize a tabloid-headline life and remind us once again that where she comes from (the Block, the boogie-down Bronx) is as integral to her success as beauty or talent or sheer tenacity.

The sheer awesomeness of Villeneuve's execution — there might not be another film this year, or ever, that turns one character asking another for a glass of water into a kind of walloping psychedelic performance art — often obscures the fact that the plot is mostly prologue: a sprawling origin story with no fixed beginning or end.

It’s British stage actress Erivo who feels like the real star. Her steely charisma and gorgeous powerhouse of a voice (Goddard takes every plausible opportunity to let her loose on a classic 1960s songbook; can you blame him?) is what gives the movie not just a different kind of heroine, but a heart.

It's nice to see actors like these do such subtle, sympathetic work for a gifted young director — and to find an outlet for storytelling that doesn't demand neat redemption, but still allows for grace.

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.

Shot by cinematographer Shabier Kirchner in hazy, endless-summer half-light, Kitchen finds a kind of urban poetry in the swooping parabolas of the skate park and the rumbling scrape of wheels on pavement.

Jon M. Chu (several Step Up movies) has taken over directing duties from Louis Leterrier, and he has a lighter, goofier touch. He seems to get that the silliness is baked in.

Woman could use some of the quieter character nuance of a movie like last year’s "Wind River," another fact-based drama that reflected the struggle of indigenous people with a sensitive, unvarnished kind of naturalism; White’s well-meant version is undoubtedly incomplete, and gilded with a certain amount of Hollywood silliness.

By trading in all its intrigue and emotional subtleties for the gotcha moment it’s clearly been waiting for, Tree wins the battle but loses the war.

To see a black female over 40 holding the center of a story about ordinary, unsung lives makes Support a low-key pleasure; one that transcends its own shaggy narrative.

If the setup feels quotidian, the tension still climbs steadily, egged on by Edna's increasing confusion and cognitive decline and Kay and Sam's conflicting ideas of what should be done about it. But it's the final scene, it turns out, that James has saved her chips for: a haunting tableau both gruesome and beautiful and somehow, full of love.

Love’s most radical act may be the simple fact of its Blackness — that the faces at the center of the screen are ones that for so many decades we’d mostly see only in the margins of a movie like this, or not at all.

Aniston has a great time as the vampy, Krav Maga-ing Bitch Who Stole Christmas, and Miller’s willful idiocy is weirdly endearing.

If Davis hadn't already taken home Oscar gold so recently, she'd almost certainly claim another prize here for the raw transformative verve of her performance; it's more than possible she still might. It's Boseman, though, in his final appearance on screen, who makes both the bitter and the sweet of the story sing: a pointed arrow of hurt and hope and untapped fury, heartbreakingly alive in every scene.

Director Paul Weitz is mostly known for lighter, more observational stories like "About a Boy" and "Mozart in the Jungle," and the strongest moments in Bel Canto are the small ones.