Leah Greenblatt

Director Cory Finley (who also helmed 2017’s great, underappreciated "Thoroughbreds") brings a light touch to Mike Makowsky’s script, nimbly balancing broader comedy and pathos.

The movie finds real power in its climax, a party that turns into a nightmarish orgy of leering white kids in blackface. And the end-credit photos of real parties just like it at schools across the country are a stark reminder of the ugliness that Dear White People, flawed as it is, wants to confront.

At 160 stately, glacial minutes, it’s also an endurance test — one that can feel like its own act of faith to pass.

Cary Fukunaga’s stark, beautifully shot drama was likely never meant to be a blockbuster; its brutal account of a child soldier in an unnamed African country is far too discomfiting for wider audiences. It absolutely does belong on a big screen, though, and more important, it just deserves to be seen.

Instead of melodrama, the movie finds its traction in parsing out micro-aggressions and mood: a sort of devastating slow-drip portrait of the power structures that allowed a man like Weinstein to happen — and keep more like him in place, untouched by any justice a hashtag can reach.

Beneath all the chinchilla and body glitter, there’s a smart, beating heart.

Director Marc Turtletaub pulls thoughtful, carefully shaded performances from Denman, Khan, and, most of all, Scottish actress Macdonald (Boardwalk Empire, No Country for Old Men), who refuses to let Agnes be an easy avatar for midlife longing and suburban discontent.

Mikkelsen has become perhaps Denmark’s most familiar face Stateside over the past decade. But he still feels most in his skin in roles like these, and in Round’s final ecstatic scene, the actor does what only true stars seem able to: Take the silly or messy or improbable, and make it fly.

Enter Shiva at your own risk then: a hell of Danielle's own making maybe, but still a witty, jittery trip.

It’s like a lost John Hughes movie with Irish brogues and cars that just happen to drive on the other side of the road. It’s also, sadly, exactly the kind of sweet little film that too often gets buried in a box office ruled by broader comedies and bloated superhero epics

Buckley and Plemons are left to carry that water for much of I'm Thinking's 134-minute runtime, and they're both fantastically game, infusing the movie's heady concepts with a naturalism that borders on heroic.

Pay no attention to the shades of late-night cable in the title; Speak No Evil is a lamentably generic name for a movie as stark and unsettling as Christian Tafdrup's queasy, inexorable thriller.

There's something lovely and quietly profound about where the film finds itself in the end: a generational love story that transcends old wounds and misadventures, and even, in its tender final moments, death itself.

Jenkins and a nearly unrecognizable Winger make the most of their small monsters, peeling back layers of callousness and calculation to hint at the messier motivations underneath.

Director Joseph Kosinski (TRON: Legacy) revels in the sonic-boom rush of their many flight scenes, sending his jets swooping and spinning in impossible, equilibrium-rattling arcs. On the ground, too, his camera caresses every object in its view, almost as if he's making a rippling ad for America itself.

It’s a smart, flawed movie about smart, flawed people.

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.

Moore — vulnerable but undauntable — lives every moment in her skin, fantastic to the last glorious frame.

Thompson is, unsurprisingly, a force: alternately brittle and vulnerable and mordantly witty, her whole body vibrating with a lifetime's worth of sublimated desire.

A raft of fine actors – including Amy Adams, Richard Jenkins, and Downton Abbey’s Jessica Brown Findlay – are wasted in a sour, callow family drama that mistakes constant yelling for emotional tension and fortune-cookie aphorisms for wisdom.

As Wick carves a path of stoic destruction across several continents, the series' longtime director Chad Stahelski, once Reeves' Matrix stand-in and longtime stunt coordinator, gets down to the business of what he loves best: creative kills, far-flung zip codes, and incalculable body counts.

Roadrunner, steeped in the jittery punk-rock style and verve of its famously omnivorous muse, registers as more than a requiem or a postscript. It feels like an essential document­, created in the radical no-reservations spirit in which he lived

The cast's chemistry never quite gels beyond their staged circumstances, and too much of the dialogue replicates actual life without finding a deeper resonance: the rambling anecdotes, latent passive aggressions, and aimless small talk of ordinary people just living their lives.

The movie largely delivers, splashing its ambitious three-hour narrative across a sprawling canvas of characters, eras, and not-quite-insurmountable challenges.

Sisters gets sadder and more eccentric as it goes along, and the ending actually tugs sweetly on a few heart strings, though it’s also hard not to wonder why exactly, with all the Westerns already in the cannon, this movie got made — other than to give its crew of excellent actors a chance to put on their boots and ride off, cock-eyed and whimsical, into some kind of sunset.

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 film belongs to Chapman and more than anyone, MacKay, a 27-year-old Londoner with the long bones and baleful eyes of a porcelain saint or a lost Caulkin brother. His Lance Corporal Schofield isn’t just a surrogate Everyman; he’s hope and fear personified, and you couldn’t look away if you wanted to.

Clemency does what few other movies about death row have, handling a thorny, infinitely complicated subject in terms that are neither moralizing nor melodramatic. And Chukwu’s clean-lined storytelling has an undeniable pull; something quietly incandescent at the center. In the end though, it’s hard not to wish that she’d let a little more light in.