Marc Savlov

Well-paced and featuring a game cast, this is still a yawny yarn that steals outright from Hideo Nakata’s seminal "Ringu" and the more recent "It Follows," as well as several of Blum’s own prior productions.

A neon-drenched murder mystery – or is it? – for the selfie generation, set in the hipster hamlet of Silverlake. So it goes with this highly stylized slice of bad, black millennial noir, a post-mumblecore take on the shady underbelly of L.A. in which Los Angeles plays itself, very nearly upstaging the main characters’ plight.

All three leads give subtly wrenching performances that wouldn’t have been out of place in Ingmar Bergman’s oeuvre.

Utter rubbish compared to its 2013 precursor. Enter with low expectations and you might just have some rock ‘em, sock ‘em, let’s-ravage-Tokyo fun.

This new iteration of Ms. Croft, played in a far more realistic fashion by Vikander (of Ex Machina fame), is somewhat more serious in tone, but altogether more fun to watch.

The fact that Russians appear to have dash-cams as standard equipment in their four- and two-wheel rides is as foreign and fascinating as anything President Donald Trump could come up with.

If you’re expecting "Paddington"-level profundity and whimsical adventure you’re going to be sorely disappointed.

You’d think the sordid history of the Winchester house would have inspired a more evocative or even entertaining haunted house story but the Spierigs rely far too much on the sort of shock-cut du jour that has become the lazy and boring norm for so many PG-13 “horror” films of the past 15 years.

Taylor’s film works best as both a commentary on the viral limits of parental affection, and the terror of bringing up said juvies.

A studied but silly misfire from the director of the abysmal London Has Fallen that attempts to walk the walk without ever actually being a movie genre fans, or much of anyone else for that matter, would want to see.

As sequels go, Paddington 2 is up to the challenge. It’s neck and neck, or paw and claw as to which is the better, so why not just watch both back to back?

By turns entertaining, incomprehensible, goofy, and even on occasion unnerving.

A surface viewing of the film makes it feel like this is one of Scott’s lesser magnum opuses but on closer inspection this is a story that’s all but contemporaneous given its through-line of amoral acquisitiveness.

While Ferdinand isn’t a train wreck by any means, it does come off as an also-ran in a year now dominated by the truly marvelous "Coco."

Abysmal, unfunny, and ultimately, completely unnecessary.

A romance of fantastique proportions, a cautionary tale that revels in throwing caution to the wind, and a de facto monster movie with loose but loving ties to director Jack Arnold’s classic "Creature From the Black Lagoon" and Cocteau’s "Beauty and the Beast," del Toro’s latest is a masterpiece of compassion and insight into the (in)human condition and the transformative power of love.

A courtroom drama with a twist, this second feature from "Nightcrawler" writer/director Dan Gilroy features one of the best performances of Washington’s career.

Coco is animatedly empowering entertainment for anyone who’s ever had to go against the wishes of their family to achieve their most heartfelt dreams.

The film is being marketed to kids and their parents, and as such, it’s well worth mom and dad’s hard-earned sawbuck for the implicit lessons it stresses. Be kind, especially to the seemingly strange ones who might not look like you.

Director Margaret Betts’ superb debut feature arrives in theatres at perhaps just the right moment.

Stylistically, co-directors McLeary and Aldous were given complete access to the retreat and wield their cameras like voyeuristic lanterns in a tremendously dark place.

This is the hot-button topic of the moment and audiences will be divided, but there can be no denying the gut-punch power of Andrews’ directorial debut.

I like my shockers to be anything but predictable, and Saw is the very definition of predictability and, ultimately, tedium. That horse corpse has been flogged and flayed enough, already.

You may want to bring a handkerchief, so boldly manipulative the movie ends up being, but for fans of Pooh and the power of art as therapy during times of existential crises, the story is never less than interesting and melodramatically well-done.

Despite the game cast and some marvelously atmospheric cinematography from Oscar-winning DP Dion Beebe, The Snowman is a slog.

Not a single character or the jeopardy that they find themselves in – end of the entire human race and all – is likable, canine-in-peril excluded.

A roaring snooze that should by all rights be edge-of-your-seat, compelling cinema, Mark Felt lives and dies by Landesman’s laborious script, which revels in the minutiae of the scandal without ever managing an iota of passion.

As Marston once put it, “Frankly, Wonder Woman is psychological propaganda for the new type of woman who, I believe, should rule the world.” This reviewer concurs.

The screenplay by father-son team Jacob and Michael Koskoff, the latter of whom is also an actual trial lawyer in Connecticut, is tight and lean; even the courtroom scenes are punctuated by honestly unexpected revelations.

Is it a perfect movie? Not quite. The middle section drags a bit through no fault of the excellent performances, but ultimately it’s all of a piece, and the mid-mark pacing turns out to be a relatively minor quibble.

The annoyingly coy title of this non-epic about two people trying to survive a private plane crash in the high Rockies while a passive sort of romance develops during the descent pretty much says it all while simultaneously offering nothing of any great interest, much like the entire movie.

The first impression is definitely one of all style, and precious little substance.

For anyone of a certain age, the ending will come as no surprise, but, as always, half the fun is getting there, and cynical though it may be, American Made is undeniably a whole lot of action-oriented fun.

Ninjago’s sprawling team of screenwriters – nine credits in all – throw every joke they can at the screen, but few of them stick in your memory for longer than a moment.

The problematic issue of “keeping up with the Joneses” has rarely played as delicately or as honestly as it does here.

It’s an absolutely crazed fever dream of a film, and like a febrile infant it begins with a few odd notes and barely heard, often off-camera sounds, and then proceeds to build those seemingly minor instances of weird until it crescendos into an ear-piercing, panic-inducing visual and aural shriek.

There’s not a whole lot new here in this story of rival lifestyles and familial skeletons, but just allowing yourself to immerse yourself in the initially catty melodrama is pleasure enough.

It’s this hunger for the entirety of a person’s life that makes Marjorie Prime one of the most riveting, moving films of the year.

Although guaranteed to split critics and viewers alike, nobody can argue that Bravo and Gelman haven’t put their all into this absurdist, existential farce. The question remains: Will Lemon make or break that all-important first date comedy connection? (Personally, I’m sticking with Ruggero Deodato.)

Pennywise the Dancing Clown (Skarsgård) is as joltingly nightmarish as fans could have hoped for.

The end result? Compassion for the (literally) poor schmuck conjoined with a genuine sympathy toward his right-minded bunglings, noodle kugel and all.

The end result never really achieves much more than being exactly what it is: another horseshoes and hand grenades attempt to tell version ad infinitum of the legend of Bruce Lee.

While In This Corner of the World is bracingly honest in depicting the hardships and tragedies Japanese civilians endured during World War II, it steadfastly remains Suzu’s story all the way through to its – dare I say it? – hopeful conclusion.

The whole film rests on the increasingly prison-ink tatted shoulders of Coster-Waldau, Game of Thrones’ Jaime Lannister, who brings his A – as in ass-kicking – game to Waugh’s film.

Colorful, kid-friendly, and occasionally laugh-out-loud funny. ’Nuff said.

An Inconvenient Sequel does indeed speak truth to power, but the elephant in the room remains: The very powerful rarely pay attention to the utter truth.

Blame screenwriters Akiva Goldsman, Jeff Pinkner, Anders Thomas Jensen, and Nikolaj Arcel (who also directed) for trying too hard to cram so much of King’s original into a film format.

There are few wins and more than enough sorrow to go around here.

13 Minutes, which was released in Germany two years ago, is an earnest examination of personal conscience and the frequent necessity of the individual to monkey wrench the state. Or at least to try.

Nolan maintains gut-wrenching suspense throughout by cross-cutting between the various characters and their plights. I’d go so far to say that Dunkirk could easily serve as its own master class in the art of film editing. Add to that an absolutely terrifyingly discordant score from Hans Zimmer and the result is, well, a bona fide classic.

A glorious, action-and-pathos packed capstone to the rebooted Apes franchise.

Spall and Meaney are mesmerizingly watchable in a film that’s 40% gruff dialogue and 60% seething silences.

There’s plenty of nifty action set-pieces on display here – including a decidedly unamazing but hilarious gag involving Spidey and a kid’s tree house – but for the first time, the most popular of all of Marvel’s 1960s-era characters genuinely focuses less on the amazing and more on the boy behind the mask, and that’s a welcome change of pace.

The third time is definitely not the charm.

The Beguiled is a slow-burn tale of repressed sexuality and duplicitous doings. Its final twist, though, steals it from the realm of male-gaze fantasies into sheer nightmare territory.

This latest entry is simply dumb, dull, and pointless.

This is an interesting/odd take on the Cars universe, seeing as how this is a movie squarely aimed at pre-teens who likely have no concept of aging, let alone four-wheeled mortality, or for that matter Joseph Campbell’s monomythic “Hero’s Journey.”

It’s big, it’s slick, it’s very, very Hollywood, but it’s just not that good a film. It’s not even as much fun – and monster movies, as opposed to horror movies, should be fun – as the 1999 Brendan Fraser vehicle of the same name.

This is a film that can’t decide if it wants to be a war movie or a rescue dog melodrama and therefore falls into cinematic no-man’s/woman’s-land.

This, uh, wonderfully directed and near-perfectly cast iconic heroine female empowerment story is so similar in tone and feel to Marvel Studios’ "Captain America" that I was waiting for Stan Lee to show up, possibly as a eunuch.

It is, in fact, an instant classic, the sort of film that will make you check under your bed at night and then amplify into terror the midnight creaks and 3am breezes that unsettle every house at times, most especially yours. Highly recommended.

This ship has sailed, sank, and not to put too fine a bowsprit on it, sucks.

Winger is as good here as she’s ever been, and Letts, an actor whose face you know but whose name you can never quite remember, is terrific, communicating his lust for Lucy with dry aplomb.

As YA adaptations go, this isn’t quite "The Notebook," but its core demographic of teen girls will likely be more than satisfied.

Director Ben Young’s first narrative feature is loosely based on actual events, which makes watching this psychological horror show all the more harrowing.

It’s the sort of cat-and-mouse game that recalls certain elements of such disparate films as John Boorman’s "Hell in the Pacific," Larry Cohen’s screenplay for "Phone Booth," and, one key line in Dan O’Bannon’s "Return of the Living Dead," believe it or not.

Director and writer Gunn is a dab hand with space opera quippery and most of the set-pieces land bang on target, with collateral emotional damage to boot.

Like its protagonist, Sleight is a scrappy, semi-super origin story that lacks the existential heft of, say, M. Night Shyamalan’s "Unbreakable," or the grim comic nihilism of James Gunn’s "Super."

Phoenix Forgotten is borderline generic, desert-set found footage that apes the aforementioned Witchiness and genre constraints to a snooze-worthy T.

This is one fish tale that’s well nigh guaranteed to linger in the viewers’ midnight memories long after its cinematic nocturnal emissions have unspooled.

Armie Hammer slyly steals the show as Ord, a very chill American arms dealer.

There are blood-red visual motifs all over the place, but The Devil’s Candy isn’t particularly bloody in and of itself. It suggests acts of terrible evil far more than it shows, and is all the more intense for it. Highly recommended.

Hathaway and Sudeikis totally nail their respective roles (kudos to the great Tim Blake Nelson, to boot), and while Colossal falls shy of perfection, so does real life.

Gifted may rely on the extremely old-school lovable-orphan-and-adopted-parent template, but there’s a certain emotionally complex realism to both the performances and the storyline that lifts the film beyond the obvious and the cliched.

A strictly-for-the-kiddies animated reboot of the seemingly ancient Smurf brand, The Lost Village is so tame it hardly merits a PG rating.

Certain touches resonate and remain memorable long after the film’s conclusion – I’m talking to you, creepy robo-geishas – but for all its CGI bells, whistles, and Johansson, this simply can’t compare to its (highly recommended) Japanese forebears.

Theroux (who co-wrote with director Dower) manages to dredge up some new, albeit not particularly revelatory, intel on the litigation-happy group, and the tack they take to get there is interesting in and of itself.

As a parable about the inherently dehumanizing aspects of the rat race, it’s bloody good fun.

No one is having any fun here, despite the return of Iggy Pop on the soundtrack; T2 is rife with regret, melancholy, lost youth, and (of course) a new, nihilistically updated “choose life” speech from Renton.

All Nighter feels way too much like its own title, a soporific exercise in style over substance.

The masterful Land of Mine slowly, almost without notice, transforms into one of the most viscerally intense anti-war films since Dalton Trumbo’s "Johnny Got His Gun."

On the whole, though, Kong: Skull Island is great big dumb fun. It’s also shockingly beautiful to look at when you aren’t having creature guts flung into the camera.

In the end, Collide is a cheap genre product produced with an eye on foreign market box office. Wake me when Dominic Toretto torques his way into Havana.

It’s a history lesson wrapped up in a romance, gallows grim but far too often unnecessarily heavy-handed in a way that drives home the factual historical horrors it portrays while somehow managing to feel like a sizably budgeted but no less maladroit television movie of the week.

This pleasantly rambling absurdist father/daughter drama is also one of the most strikingly unusual films of the year, period.

Rings is an unfortunate and often incomprehensible mess that kicks off with a neat premise and then never fully explores it.

The Resurrection of Gavin Stone isn’t as exploitive as some recent Christian-based films – for that, check out 2014’s truly offensive "Heaven Is for Real" – and while it’s got its charms, it’s far from likely to bring in any new converts.

For the majority of filmgoers, Beckinsale is Selene. It’s not the worst legacy for an actor, and she’s managed to keep her character prideful yet vicious, film after backstabbing film. (Did I mention the catsuit? Va va voom!)

Toei Animation has done their usual bang-up job on the 2-D animation, filling nearly the entire running time with skirmishes, melees, and battles royal beyond compare.

It’s a tonally imperfect film that’s nonetheless ideal for holiday viewing, a respite from "Rogue One" perhaps, or simply an exciting, old-school explorer’s tale well told (for the most part).

This is Denzel Washington’s third at bat behind the camera while directing himself and, holy smokes, does he knock it out of the park with a vicious, visceral performance that fairly sets the screen ablaze.

Jackie has a nightmare vibe to it that’s palpable and unsettling, and Portman’s performance as the widowed first lady is a tour de force of conflicting emotions brought on by the impossibly ghastly reality bookending that sunny day in Dallas.

It starts off slow and somewhat clunky, but by the time the mind-blowing third act arrives, it’s all a fan can do not to stand up and cheer.

Slash is an endearing, sweet, and altogether badass ode to being young, weird, and subversively creative.

Incoherent mashup of previous demonized tyke films and unfailingly inept pseudo-science and the result is about as devoid of suspense, much less genuine horror, as this specific sub-genre can be.

The good news is that Moana is a wonderfully animated – in every sense of the word – tale of youthful female empowerment that dazzles the eye with an oceanic kaleidoscope of bioluminescent color, catchy songs, and a perfectly suited vocal cast.

It’s a narratively audacious, ultra-stylish, and at times queasily violent film that’s likely to polarize audiences even as they find themselves unable to tear their eyes from the screen.

Regardless, the upside is that Shut In is cinematic Sominex for those in need of a 90-minute nap, a thousand yawns, and zero thrills.