Michael O'Sullivan

Birthright suggests that the loss of women’s bodily autonomy — via laws limiting access to abortion — is a human rights issue. But it raises the alarm in ways that are as unflashy as they are disturbing.

Lessons will be learned about teamwork and reconciliation, and many jokes will be told along the way. Some of those jokes are pretty funny.

In tone, School Life feels like a recruiting film for prospective students. It isn’t exactly profound, except perhaps in the way it makes a case for the theory that happiness comes first, and then learning.

This very thinly sliced character study of beautiful if benighted adolescence is more a pre-coming-of-age tale, one that takes us close to, but not through, the transformative acquisition of good judgment.

If it doesn’t rewrite the rules of horror, it calls attention to them, in a manner that is not just flamboyant, but also baroque.

As Polina, Shevstova delivers a performance that feels wonderfully unforced, if that’s the right word, in a role that can only be called “driven.” There’s almost an emptiness about her character. Polina’s expression of self is all on the surface — at least initially.

About a musical genre not known for quiet contemplation, “Rumble” asks us to be still for a moment and to listen to the heartbeat — at once familiar and newly strange — that pumps the lifeblood that flows through the songs this country is known for.

Ingrid Goes West doesn’t quite go south, but in diving headfirst into the swamp of Internet addiction, its vision gets a little murky.

Despite all the mayhem, The Hitman’s Bodyguard is a surprisingly bland dish.

Horror works — or it doesn’t — in the flickering, moving images of the screen, not the page. Sandberg knows that. His artistry, for that’s what it is, is like that of the dollmaker Sam Mullins: to take inert material and create a living, breathing thing.

How ironic then, in a movie about wordsmithing, that The Only Living Boy in New York is tripped up not by tawdry behavior, but by terrible writing.

The Dark Tower isn’t frightening, or even, despite some serviceable action and special effects, very interesting, except perhaps for viewers too young to know better, or for Stephen King fans especially susceptible to outright pandering.

Escapes is an eccentric portrait of a not especially eccentric — or even terribly interesting — subject: Hampton Fancher.

The new documentary about Al Gore’s continued climate crusade lacks urgency.

Provost’s film is, in the end, a story about attaining the wisdom that comes from forgiveness and the acceptance of those things — namely the past and the future — that none of us can control.

Ultimately, Atomic Blonde is, like its heroine, something of a machine. Lit by glowing neon, fueled by the rhythm of ’80s power pop and fashioned from stiletto heels, cigarettes, guns and sunglasses, it looks and sounds good, but it isn’t much of a conversationalist.

"Valerian” is an expensive, handsome but dozy invalid of a movie.

Dunkirk isn’t comfortable to watch; it never relents or relaxes. At the same time, it’s impossible to look away from it.

The most interesting parts of this conversation come when Dorf­man talks about the art of portraiture.

By the standards of the traditional ghost story, A Ghost Story isn’t much of one. By the standards of the moody art-house meditation on love, loss, memory, forgetting, attachment, letting go and the nature of eternity, it’s pretty darn great.

War for the Planet of the Apes may have the body of an action film, but it has the soul of an art-house drama and the brains of a political thriller.

In the end, 13 Minutes isn’t about the timing or logistics of one man’s plot to kill Hitler at all, but about what made that man tick.

The film, for much of the first two acts, takes itself just about that unseriously, maintaining a jokey, self-aware tone that is nicely evocative of the original comics.

Sami Blood is a beautiful, haunting film, anchored by a startlingly accomplished lead performance.

Despicable Me 3 disappoints, if only mildly, not because it’s bad, but because it only aspires to be good enough.

In addition to presenting a parable about the collapse of society, Amirpour’s film is also a kind of postmodern Adam-and-Eve story.

Hawke is good at playing bad, but Hawkins is better, rendering, in Maudie, a portrait of a woman that feels raw, real and revelatory.

What little dancing we do see is lovely to watch, but it’s also lovely to see a performer who once seemed to have an iron grip on the barre finally learn how to be gracious and let go.

It’s the filmmaking equivalent of a monkey with the head of a goat, the tail of a fish, wings and teeny-tiny rat claws.

There isn’t quite as much pep to the film’s narrative engine on this trip.

I wouldn’t call Band Aid profound, but it’s wiser and deeper than the average pop song, if not by much.

For much of its brisk running time, It Comes at Night teeters between delicious atmosphere and almost unbearable tension.

Stenberg and Robinson are enormously appealing young actors, but charisma only goes so far in a story that manages to be, as directed by Stella Meghie (“Jean of the Joneses”), sterile and wildly far-fetched.

Cranston is consistently watchable in the title role, although Howard’s journey into — and, at least potentially, out of — madness is a tough one to keep up with.

Loud, overstimulating and hard to take in all in one sitting, it feels like the vacation that you’ll need a vacation from.

While Last Men in Aleppo could stand a trim here and there, it mostly uses its length to good and heart-rending effect, delivering a lingering, close-up — and ultimately tragic — look at the misery and joy taking place, side by side, under the eyes of the world.

The Wall is a fairly hopeless film. In a sense, the fragile structure of the title acts as a double metaphor: for a barrier between enemies that keeps them from killing each other, as well as one that must come down if true understanding is ever to occur.

King Arthur: Legend of the Sword is a fun, if sacrilegious, first step in a franchise creation — one that observes the first commandment of storytelling: Thou shalt not be boring.

It’s crazy and ridiculous at times. But I can’t help agreeing with Assaf, who observes, of his companions’ rescue plans, “I like it. It has the logic of a dream.”

The new film is more expansive, more beautiful, funnier, nuttier and — this is the most difficult trick for any comic-book movie to pull off — more touching than the first film.

[A] well-told tale.

The film looks handsome and expensive, building up a nice head of suspense before sputtering to a less than wholly satisfying conclusion.

Tommy’s Honour is never boring, but at best it invites a smattering of polite applause, not an upturned barrel of Gatorade.

Truman avoids preachiness as scrupulously as it evades certainty.

Frantz contains revelations unrelated to the manner in which it protects, and then peels away, its central mystery. Ultimately, it addresses the question: Why go on living when life itself betrays us?

It is redeemed by an appealing cast, tart dialogue and the preponderance of genuine emotion over the manufactured variety.

Your Name is still highly watchable, even when this mystical Young Adult love story cloys — or confounds.

Though Kidman delivers a workmanlike performance, the story manages to be soppy and ploddingly dull, told via a screenplay that drives home the fact that it’s not really about momentous events, but momentous feelings.

[A] solid yet subtly sphinxlike new drama from filmmaker Hirokazu Kore-eda.

The Blackcoat’s Daughter is a visually striking masterpiece of mood and carefully calibrated storytelling. If only its technical gifts...were in service of a better — or at least more original — story.

Life has cool effects, real suspense and a sweet twist. It ain’t rocket science, but it does what it does well — even, one might say, with a kind of genius.

There’s a story here, all right, but it’s a heartless and bitter one.

Betting on Zero makes such a strong and effective case that the company does, in fact, engage in shady business practices that it’s likely to leave viewers in a state of Documentary High Dudgeon (that brand of cinematic outrage that is not entirely unmixed with a pleasurable feeling of moral superiority).

Depending on how you take your twee — sparingly or, as is the case in this preciously concocted tale of English misfits, slathered like marmalade over a crumpet — it will either delight or quickly cloy.

Director Mark Pellington (“I Melt With You”) at least recognizes that the setup is little more than a freakish showcase for Mac­Laine do her blunt-spoken-battle-ax thing.

It has, simultaneously, the exhilarating feel of a departure and the finality of a full stop.

It may not sound like it, but calling this barely 70-minute Swiss stop-motion film “heavy” — as in substantial and almost swollen with feeling — is a true compliment.

There ought to be no lack of firepower in telling this shameful tale. Too often, however, Bitter Harvest is guilty of overkill.

The slapsticky, sight-gag-heavy yukfest, which is filled with the kind of phallic humor you may have sniggered at when you were 16, floats like a dead butterfly and stings like a B-movie.

When the climax does come, it arrives with a bra­cing blast of campy absurdity so flamboyantly deviant that it glows with a kind of perverse brilliance. But the setup is starved of logic, the film’s vital oxygen.

Like a miniature universe made entirely of millions of tiny plastic bricks, The Lego Batman Movie looks and feels like it could only have been put together by a roomful of mad geniuses, moving in a ballet of well-choreographed creativity: It’s simultaneously epic and humble.

It isn’t easy to explain the appeal of the “John Wick” movies, and they are inarguably not for every taste, but there is a purity to them that transcends their barbarity and has something to do with the central character.

The real problem, when all is said and done, isn’t the movie but the man with the microphone in its spotlight. Despite two comedy consultants who worked on the film, De Niro’s Jackie never comes across as especially funny on stage (or especially likable off).

Even if you agree with the film’s argument that teenagers shouldn’t be locked up for life when there are other ways to save them, “Monsters” doesn’t offer a convincing argument that a screenwriting class is that lifeline.

The purpose of A Dog’s Purpose isn’t to solve philosophical riddles but to warm the cockles of dog lovers’ hearts. That, it does — as well as a wet kiss from a slobbery tongue can.

The most ironic thing about Gold is this: For all its efforts, the movie seems to know it’s sitting on a gold mine of a backstory, but it just can’t figure out how to get the stuff out of the ground.

For all the outrageousness of Kevin’s alters, the movie falls oddly flat: less tantalizingly enigmatic “et cetera” than “blah blah blah.”

After dispensing with the sluggish setup of the film’s first act, Berg shifts into high gear, powerfully evoking the feelings of dread and white-knuckle excitement that much of America no doubt felt as the manhunt progressed.

The morale of [Scorsese's] story is ultimately both tough and nuanced.

Sing ends, predictably and without straining, on a high note, with everybody’s problems resolved. If only real life could so easily be realigned, by a singing pig.

It’s incrementally more fun than it is silly.

For sheer inventiveness of story, language, visuals and theme, The Brand New Testament is, quite nearly, a divine comedy.

The film’s success is due to the twinkly commitment of the large and talented cast.

The Eyes of My Mother looks marvelous.... But that’s about all this absurd, illogical and underwhelming thriller has going for it.

As the espionage plot surges toward its nail-biting conclusion, the path it’s traveling feels less open-ended than preordained.

Jokes about race, women’s anatomy and little people are sprinkled, like rancid pepper, over a script that depends on the inherent humor of cuss words. Not that coarse language can’t be funny, but here it appears to be evidence of a toxic mix of laziness and sociopathy, not defiance of seasonal propriety.

Kennebeck may be a newcomer to feature filmmaking, but her grasp of the material is accomplished.

It’s a tale bluntly told that arouses intense, evanescent emotion and then leaves you haunted, long afterward, by provocative but arguably answerable questions.

The plot thickens, along with the emotional tension, which was always the best part of the Potter universe, and not the dazzling special effects.

By looking closely, clinically and ultimately compassionately at one eccentric practitioner of a dying way of life...Peter and the Farm nevertheless manages to harvest not just understanding of one peculiar, broken little man, but a broader wisdom about the cycle of seasons that we all must endure on this planet.

Despite a solid central performance by film veteran Lynn Cohen and a Detroit setting that will please expats and current residents of the Motor City, there is little here to lift this film beyond its regional appeal.

All in all, Doctor Strange is a fun and trippy excursion to a place where Marvel rarely seems to go: that is, to the retinal roots of the comics.

Say what you will about Dan Brown’s books. They may be, as some have noted, poorly written, formulaic and pretentious. But at least they hold a reader’s attention, in ways that this excursion — as sleep-inducing and rigidly predictable as a train ride — does not.

As far-fetched as it sounds, such torque-y plotting works, catching the audience off guard, even if the quasi-feminist payoff is less satisfying than it should be, thanks mostly to the film’s puerile fascination with girl-on-girl action.

A great performance does not necessarily make for great tragedy, and Christine remains mired in the minutiae of its portrait of a doomed, bitter young woman.

Long Way North combines thrilling ad­ven­ture with a slightly somber mood. It’s a beautiful trip, even if it’s a little chilly and sad when it finally gets to where it’s going.

Arnold also brings to bear a euphoric appreciation for the spirit of freedom and the optimism — if not the innocence — of her subjects, who can seem at once world-weary and hopelessly naive. Call it a form of ecstatic naturalism, one that revels in the ugly paradoxes of life.

The relatable theme of the magical misfit may not be entirely original. But as brought to life by Burton, Riggs’s fictional vision of a world in which the nonconformist can flourish serves as both a self-portrait of the auteur and a “Wonderland”-like looking glass in which many in the audience will no doubt see a reflection of themselves.

Far from being a historical cautionary tale, Command and Control looks forward, not backward. Kenner’s unsettling film casts its worried gaze not at the accidents that already have taken place, but at the ones yet to happen.

Storks delivers its package, but it’s a bundle of just-okay, not joy.

At times, In Order of Disappearance is a bit too self-consciously clever. But what saves it, paradoxically — even, at times, delightfully — from skidding off course into cliche is the profound appeal of its middle-of-the-road, but never dull, protagonist.

Disorder is, in other words, more of a technical achievement than an artistic one. The movie is at its best when it recreates what it must feel like to be in a constant state of paranoia and pain. If only that feeling were accompanied by one or two other emotions.

In order for the trick of the film to work, however, one must hold Morgan to a standard that the movie is unlikely to live up to.

Moretti mostly avoids weepy melodrama, choosing instead to focus on a side meditation about the slippery nature of reality.

"Kubo" is both extraordinarily original and extraordinarily complex.

Bekmambetov and Co. have created a redesigned product that is at once inferior to the original and a slavish imitation.

With a firm grasp on the duality implicit in its title, Little Men is a story that’s neither tragic nor triumphal in the way it resolves itself, but rather one that’s sadly, even satisfyingly true.

Despite the vastly improved visuals, the new film is just as soft-hearted — and, unfortunately, just as mush-headed — as the earlier one.

Sadly, Suicide Squad feels like a watered-down version of what could have been a stiff drink.

There’s an appealing quaintness to the storytelling that calls to mind the Tintin books of the artist and writer Hergé, especially that series’s old-world charm.

Jason Bourne belongs to Damon and Greengrass, whose admirable — and entirely appropriate — goal of playing it for kicks comes across, this time around, as an oddly joyless chore.

It may not boldly go where no “Star Trek” film has gone before, but it gets there at warp speed, and with a full tank of fresh ideas.

For a movie that relies so heavily on a single, not especially groundbreaking visual effect — now you see the bogeyman, now you don’t — Lights Out is crazy scary.

It’s pretty obvious, with the controversy surrounding Trump’s political ascendancy, that there is a built-in market for a film that makes him and his business surrogates out to be both callous bullies and buffoons.

Microbe and Gasoline doesn’t reinvent the wheel, but it just might ride four of them into your heart.

The vérité style of filmmaking is slow and sometimes monotonous, making it all the more surprising that you will probably find yourself bawling your eyes out — without ever knowing how you got to that state — at the film’s profoundly, heartbreakingly somber conclusion.

The humor is generic. And the film’s most obvious comparison — it’s been called “Toy Story” with animals — only points up the one thing “Pets” lacks, and that any animal lover will tell you their furred and feathered friends have, in spades: personality.

There’s little of the poetry that Perry teaches in the script, but the story’s mechanics are solid.

Is The Shallows a thriller for the ages? No, but it’s decent popcorn fare. It’s about as deep as the titular lagoon on which it’s set, but the breakers promise a short and heart-pounding ride, with no wipeout.

If Refn is trying to skewer our cultural fixation with youth and good looks, his blade isn’t up to the task. The Neon Demon attacks, but indiscriminately. It’s sharp-looking but dull, hacking and plunging every which way, yet drawing no real blood.

The Conjuring 2 satisfies more than it disappoints.

The film is, at times, almost sinfully fun, assuming you have a taste for self-indulgently logic-free hedonism.

The climate change documentary A Time to Choose takes what often seems like an oblique approach to the subject of global warming.

"Out of the Shadows” isn’t going to win any awards, good or bad. Neither an embarrassment nor a triumph, it is nevertheless an improvement over the last film.

Director Rodrigo Plá, working from a spare yet jangly screenplay by Laura Santullo, steadily builds suspense, craftily calibrating subtle shifts in perspective that allow us to alternate, seamlessly, between impartial observers and, as it were, active participants.

At times, “Apocalypse” can be great fun, even if it doesn’t know when to hand its car keys to a friend and ask to be taken home.

It’s hard to know which of the film’s many flaws to cite first, so here’s one thing it does fairly well: scare the bejesus out of you. That’s assuming you have read nothing about the subject of vaccines and autism, and are of a generally lax and incurious mind when it comes to the rigors of scientific inquiry.

Sunset Song is a gritty and gorgeous film. Perhaps a little too gorgeous, in fact, and not gritty enough.

The overly schematic nature of High-Rise does not entirely diminish its pleasures as a story, which include, in addition to Wheatley’s richly lurid visual sensibility, an effective metaphorical tool in Laing.

There’s something admirable about the fact that Being Charlie exists at all. It’s a testament to Nick Reiner’s survival. That doesn’t mean it’s a great movie.

The director Alexander Sokurov is a visual virtuoso. So it’s odd, not to mention a bit disappointing, to find that the Russian filmmaker’s latest project, Francofonia, is so talky and, with rare exceptions, visually dull.

The story is slightly melodramatic, but director Paddy Breathnach finds ways to make it surprisingly moving at times, in the same way that he makes the Havana slums look paradoxically beautiful.

The Man Who Knew Infinity tells a great story. It’s just that it’s a little too by-the-book to make anything other than a so-so movie.

Mrazek, who certainly knows the workings of this city from his 10 years in office, has written a script that feels accurate in its depiction of the mudslinging, lobbying chicanery and constituent grumbling that come with the job of politician. It’s just that little of it is terribly fresh or funny, and it draws no blood.

Garrone has created a world of both rich and ugly textures — visual, narrative and imaginative — that transports, delights and imparts disturbing lessons.

Nina filters the singer’s voice — and her life — through tinny-sounding speakers and an out-of-focus lens.

Along with his regular co-writer Eskil Vogt, Trier has crafted a profoundly beautiful and strange meditation on secrets, lies, dreams, memories and misunderstanding.

Aficionados of gore and guts may not mind the comfortably lived-in feel of this blood-spattered Green Room. But anyone looking for the ferocious originality, and unexpected humanity, of “Blue Ruin” will be disappointed by Saulnier’s uninspired cover version of a song we all know.

Although genuinely gripping — at times, uncomfortably so — the tale of Lena and Daniel’s efforts to escape from Colonia and expose its abuses suffers from a heavy-handed telling.

Like its brain-damaged protagonist, Criminal just shouts and shoots its way into, not out of, an oblivion of illogic, plot holes and emotionally unengaging scenery-chewing.

The sense of goofy, if gory, good humor [Copley] brings to Hardcore Henry goes a long way toward mitigating the film’s tedious barbarity.

I Saw the Light isn’t just incohesive, but ultimately — and far more frustratingly — incoherent.

It’s slightly fussy, in-your-face filmmaking, but it’s viscerally effective.

In the end, Marguerite isn’t a comedy so much as a love story. True love, it seems, isn’t just blind; it must be deaf, too.

There’s a whiff of autoerotic indulgence that carries over to the entire film, which despite its handsome black-and-white aesthetic and gloss of social critique seems a bit too smugly self-satisfied for its own good.

Everything is needlessly tangled and bewildering.

The filmmaking, by first-time feature director Dan Trachtenberg, is suitably claustrophobic and suspenseful, working up to a level of stress that may be unhealthy for anyone with a weak heart.

Fans of Greenaway’s work — a mix of the brainy, the controversial and the grotesque — won’t necessarily be surprised by any of this. They may, however, be disappointed at how little of it actually works.

Small moments take on larger meaning in this exquisite memoir. That’s as true of the plot — in which nothing terribly significant happens, except life — as it is of the visuals.

A startlingly inappropriate tragedy in the final act drives home the film’s pacifist message, while virtually ensuring that the youngest and most sensitive viewers will be left in a puddle of tears.

That A War both delivers the results one might wish for and denies a sense of closure is not a failing but its chief virtue.

Toward the end, the film veers a bit out of control, as the residents engage in behavior that is incomprehensible, even given their previous transgressions.

Winter on Fire has all the immediacy and power of drama. If it lacks the dispassionate context of more balanced journalism, it makes up for it with a complex, contradictory emotional impact that is simultaneously demoralizing and hopeful.

It’s a voraciously self-aware comedy, one that dines out on the inherent inanity of its own premise as much as it does the movies it’s competing with.

Monday at 11:01 a.m. would probably work well as a half-hour television episode or a short story. As a feature film, unfortunately, it feels a bit like clock watching.

The make-believe world of Boy and the World is confusing, scary and gorgeous. But then again, so is the real one.

Somewhere in here, there’s a pretty decent movie. The Finest Hours is probably the best of a bad bunch of recent releases. But it’s a shame that this terrific story’s engines keep flooding in the face of wave after wave of narrative inertia.

As an action film, it is intense and gripping. As a drama, it is bombastic and unsubtle.

Neither Grint nor the hoax subplot are compelling enough to hold our attention. Perlman, on the other hand, is a commanding, if peripheral, presence, diverting the focus of the film from silly historical speculation to the tale of a damaged psyche.

Even Lawrence, in the end, is a letdown. As entertaining and committed as she is — and she’s easily the best thing about Joy — the actress ultimately can’t sell a souffle that’s half baked.

There are a few laughs here and there. Most come at the expense of Ferrell, who plays the kind of hapless (and occasionally shirtless) straight arrow that the actor could turn out in his sleep.

This cinematic Macbeth possesses a terrible beauty, evoking fear, sadness, awe and confusion. Presented with the aesthetic of a dark comic book, it’s also a mournful masterpiece, rendering Shakespeare’s spectacle with all the sorrow and majesty that it deserves.

Youth is intoxicating, I’ll admit. Had I never tasted this wine before, I could easily see myself yearning for another glass. But this time it feels like an old vintage in a new bottle, one that’s grown slightly stale rather than better with age.

As this film’s engrossing character study makes clear, this woman of extraordinary tastes and appetites was ahead of her time, in more ways than one.

Hardy is extraordinarily good at evoking the fraught fraternal connection between the Krays.... But the film is ultimately unable to plumb the Krays’ deepest souls, if they even have any.

The themes of love, loyalty, ambition, honor and legacy that lend sinew to the story are delivered with such a clean punch that they as feel as fresh as they did in 1976.

Just when you’re about to write off your investment in Criminal Activities, the third-act dividend pays off, in spades.

Most of the pleasure of Mockingjay — Part 2 comes from watching Lawrence, not the story around her. Her aim is true, even if the narrative arc of the movie traces a long, wobbly path toward its eventual, and not exactly happy, resting place.

My All American plays like an extended highlights reel, not a movie.

After a somewhat tedious and overly episodic first half...Trumbo becomes a far more successful movie.

When Miss You Already works, it’s because of the cast.

The movie, for all its uneventfulness, is intensely memorable.

The Armor of Light is a fascinating little piece of storytelling.

Sexist, racist, overlong, dull, visually ugly and, worst of all, unfunny, “Kasbah” squanders its cast.

As Kaulder, Diesel does what he does, rumbling out lines of silly dialogue in his subwoofer of a voice. As far as acting goes, there’s not much.

In some ways it plays like a horror movie, in other ways it’s almost a documentary. The most interesting thing about the movie is the balance of tone that Laurent strikes between recognition and repulsion.

The film by the stylish fantasist Guillermo del Toro looks marvelous, but has a vein of narrative muck at its core.

Simultaneously violent and droll, The Final Girls is a way to have your blood-soaked cake and eat it, too.

If there’s a quibble with the film, it’s that it glosses over what it’s like to grow up in the glare of worldwide celebrity.

It’s hard to say what is most difficult to digest about Prophet’s Prey.

Peace Officer piles up evidence of outrageous excess, provoking what is likely to be a response, from its audience, that is far less measured than that of its main subject.

It’s a masterful example of genre filmmaking’s ability to transcend its limitations, leaving a viewer not just frightened, but also changed.

As Finders Keepers gets weirder, it also gets better and deeper. Somehow, Carberry and Tweel have managed to fashion an inspirational tale out of what one local newscaster calls a “freak show.”

It’s Rainn Wilson who steals the show as the cocky physical education teacher who takes charge when the pint-size monsters corner him and his fellow educators.

It’s not a bad movie. It’s like several pretty good ones.

Everest gets several things right, but it fails to find a way to make the average viewer relate to the people on the mountain.

The cast of mostly unfamiliar actors also serves The Visit well. Shyamalan has a gift for eliciting strong performances, even when his material is lacking.

The first “Transporter” delivered an unexpected kick, courtesy of Statham, who made for a brooding, magnetic — and reliably kinetic — action hero. Skrein is an inferior stand-in, scowling like his predecessor, but lacking Statham’s cool, coiled power.

The picture that emerges is fractured, making for a portrait that’s as fascinating as it is baffling.

Rosenwald isn’t just a portrait of a great, selfless American and his powerful company, but an excavation of an ugly strain of our own history, and a reminder of what one person can do to uproot it.

The acting is strong, with Robbie and Ejiofor turning in performances that feel powerfully authentic, even in moments of ethical confusion. Maybe especially in moments of ethical confusion.

American Ultra has a clever premise. But it misses several opportunities to at least comment on, if not skewer, the spy movies that it only halfheartedly pokes fun at. As it is, it’s content to generate a low-grade buzz, rather than deliver a true high.

The film is full of quiet little truths.

The threat that this mess of a movie might be followed by a sequel is enough to make anyone cry uncle.

A surprisingly intelligent and effective (if slightly pulpy) psychological thriller.

The special effects look cheap, the acting is wooden, and the shouted dialogue consists largely of throwaway action-movie cliches (“Let’s do this”) and B-movie sci-fi jargon (“His bioenergy is off the charts!”).

Although Gameau’s film includes a fair amount of science, he and his helpers sweeten the film’s statistics, delivering them in clever, accessible ways.

Thorpe doesn’t flinch from whatever awkward or controversial findings his subjects offer up, especially when they concern himself. The filmmaker’s curiosity as a reporter is tempered by an unapologetically subjective perspective.

You’ll be glad that A Hard Day isn’t happening to you, but you won’t regret observing it all from a safe distance.

If the movie is cheesy at times, it more often presents an understanding of life’s contradictions and compromises.

One wonders what someone who has never heard of the guy...would make of the film, which is defiantly, even, at times, obnoxiously, obtuse. Which, come to think of it, is actually kind of like the Russell we see in the film.

The second half of this nearly two-hour film is a pure delight — fast-paced and funny and filled with special effects and humor as great as any recent Marvel movie, with the possible exception of “Guardians of the Galaxy.”

Batkid would be easier to swallow if it focused less on self-congratulation than on the epidemic of unselfishness that inspired the magic in the first place.

Cartel Land reveals a culture that spans the border, full of death and dismaying behavior on both sides, but thriving all the same.

Sure, there’s an undeniable pleasure from watching Pacino and Hunter work the screen, but the syrupy, symbol-heavy script by first-time feature writer Paul Logan is weighed down further by cliches and false notes.

I, too, once enjoyed the Minions, in the small doses that they came in. But the extra-strength Minions is, for better or for worse, too much of a good thing.

Artful yet agonizingly unhurried at times.

Genisys goes back to what made the franchise work in the first place: not the machine inside the man, but vice versa.

What Polar Bear really lacks is hindsight. It is a little girl’s valentine to her father, without the benefit of bittersweet wisdom that comes with age.

Despite the overplaying, Max gets its job done, which is to celebrate the sacrifices of military dogs, while warming the cockles of your heart.

Servin and Vamos clearly have a healthy sense of the absurd, which they use, like good satirists, to highlight hypocrisy, greed and corruption.

More than a testament to the power of cinematic storytelling as food for the human spirit, The Wolfpack also is a portrait of a family that has had to rely on each other to survive.

Live From New York! is a fun, not academic walk down memory lane.

There is a quality of enchantment to When Marnie Was There that can’t be faked, and that the studio behind this animated feature is justifiably famous for.

Vikander never goes for the easy emotion, though, choosing instead to play against what conventional melodrama would dictate her reaction should be. This understatedness is always the right choice, and it makes for a far more effective — and affecting — film.

The “Insidious” franchise, after three attempts to exorcise its real demons, still can’t seem to shake what really haunts it: the ghost of B-movies past.

The characters in Aloft seem to float over their strong passions, like birds riding on columns of air, without ever alighting. I kept waiting for the sharp sting of a talon to take hold of my heart, but it never came.

While the movie is best viewed as an examination of a specific place and time, it also can be seen as a celebration of a larger, more generic cultural phenomenon that one might call creative foment.

Although he comes across as a sort of elfin crypt-keeper in this intriguing portrait by documentarian Belinda Sallin, Giger was also, quite literally, close to death.

What happened to almost an entire generation of musicians in Cambodia isn’t a scandal. As “Forgotten” makes powerfully, passionately clear, it’s a tragedy.

The dialogue in San Andreas is lame, its plot both predictable and implausible, and the character development beside the point. Even Dwayne Johnson, that force of cinematic nature and rock-ribbed charisma, doesn’t have enough charm to dig this mess of a movie out of the rubble of cliche it’s buried in.

To call Poltergeist laughable is not the same thing as saying it’s bad (although it is that, too.) It’s just that it seems less interested in scaring you than in making you chuckle. At least on that score it succeeds.

That we almost don’t question the plausibility of this oddest of odd couples is a tribute to the sensitive direction of French Canadian filmmaker Maxime Giroux, who wrote the relatable yet keenly observant script with Alexandre Laferrière.

The movie by Jean-Pierre Améris milks the tears in the home stretch, making little effort to hold the melodrama at bay. The result is a story that everyone can feel great about feeling terrible about.

[A] meandering, deliberate and tearless — yet oddly moving — western vehicle.

To say that there is also a monomania to the film is, if anything, an understatement. But it is precisely that sense of tunnel vision that makes Fury Road such a pulse-pounding pleasure.

The Christian-themed Where Hope Grows wears its heart on its sleeve, hawking its message of salvation through faith to anyone who’s in the market for cheesy uplift and saccharine sentiment. It’s a soft sell, to be sure, but it’s salesmanship all the same.

As she demonstrated in “The Skeleton Twins,” the former “Saturday Night Live” comedian has grown so adept at rendering troubled characters without offering sideline commentary that you can’t help but fall in love with her, even as laughter gives way to uncomfortable silence.

I would call the movie a trainwreck, except it’s really four or five separate trainwrecks.

The film suffers a bit for its slowness. But once you get used to the fact that this is not “World War Z,” it has its small pleasures, which are both cerebral and emotional.

Georgian writer-director Zaza Urushadze avoids histrionics or moralizing, relying on a strong cast that expresses the film’s central argument about war’s absurdity largely through taciturn action, not words.

See You in Valhalla, which is being released simultaneously in select theaters and on demand, is as deadly as its funereal subject matter.

Little Boy is a as phony as a game of three-card monte.

Black Souls has a deep and startling soulfulness that, despite its shocking conclusion, is profoundly moving.

If you can hang on for close to two hours with almost no resolution, it’s worth the ride.

There are goofy, primal pleasures to be had in the first two-thirds of the film. But Beyond the Reach exceeds even its humble grasp in the final act, collapsing in a clatter of blockheaded manhunter-movie cliches. Crazy is one thing, but dumb is unforgivable.

The bigger mystery is whether the models actually work. Though the Armstrong partisans in the film strongly suggest that they do, director Marcus Vetter struggles to convince the lay viewer.

Although Kill Me Three Times includes a few murders, it does nothing to justify its title. Mostly, it just shoots itself in the foot, over and over.

The movie marches so quickly past the many milestones of Welles’s career and life that it doesn’t have to time to linger — lovingly or otherwise — on any of them.

Stirring at times, soggy and overly sentimental at others, the film moves surprisingly slow, even though its action, which takes place over many years of legal maneuvering, has been condensed for narrative expediency.

The film’s steady accumulation of little quirks... soon grow tedious. After a while they’re less delightfully oddball touches with a promise of more to come than dead weight with no payoff.

Like a fat slab of pastrami, Deli Man is the cinematic equivalent of comfort food: warm, generous and made with love.

Weber’s main point — that bullies are often victims of bullying themselves — gets lost in a tsunami of sorrow and sadism.

It Follows sticks to you — yes, even outside of the theater — with a grim unshakability that is at once stylish, smart and deadly serious.

In the end, An Honest Liar becomes a far more layered tale than it starts out to be.

There is, however, a certain urgency to the action that will prevent most people from noticing the film’s flaws.

Despite some cool camera work and the kind of noir-lite moral ambiguity that barely gets your shoes dirty (courtesy of a shallow script by Brad “Out of the Furnace” Ingelsby), the movie is the cinematic equivalent of junk food. It satisfies the craving for the sensation of nihilism, without its substance.

While by no means a masterpiece, the comedy, by Canadian director Ken Scott, is a careful calibration of crass gags and genuine sentiment that succeeds more often than it fails.

Yes, it’s all in good fun. And there’s a certain verve to the way Lynch handles the violence, even if he’s less of a stylist than Tarantino. But the film’s brutality... is so excessive, even if tongue-in-cheek, that it leaves a bad taste in the mouth.

Despite Blomkamp’s efforts to make some kind of commentary about the human soul, which the auteur bolsters with his trademark social consciousness — a tone of preachiness that, after three films, has worn out its welcome — the movie exhibits precious little humanity.

Despite the seemingly uncinematic nature of this inert, even claustrophobic scenario, the film mesmerizes, utterly.

Szifrón handles the tone and presentation masterfully.

Despite classy lead performances by Mark Duplass and Olivia Wilde, the movie, from horror factory Blumhouse (known for cranking out sequels in the “Paranormal Activity” franchise, among others), relies too heavily on reanimated monster movie cliches and scientific gibberish to keep it alive.

The film’s writers, directors and stars lovingly impale bloodsucker mythology with the sharpened wooden stick of comedy. As with “Shaun of the Dead,” their satire is a crude but effective tool.

The film isn’t bad, although it is somewhat repetitive. If it has plot holes, conceptual laziness and an overreliance on dumb-insult humor, the film at least seems to know it. There are lots of self-referential jokes that acknowledge its own stupidity.

Kingsman delivers on its promise of escapist fun, with a touch that alternates between Galahad’s old-school polish and Eggsy’s roguish charm. Like the rookie who knows that you have to make a few mistakes while following the master, the movie shrugs off its missteps with a wink and a smile that makes them easy to forgive.

The film’s patina of richly textured grime lends the film a gloomy, claustrophobic beauty that serves its mood, as well as its satisfyingly misanthropic message: Greed isn’t good, and most people aren’t either.

Without at least the tawdry pleasure of a little bodice ripping, the film moves along sluggishly, even though it is well acted and handsomely shot.

Enchants on every level: story, voice work, drawing and music.

The Boy Next Door plays best as unintentional comedy.

A fascinating, funny and informative documentary.

It is the four young actors who play the students who truly shine, and who elevate the formulaic film above and beyond its familiar proceedings.

Blackhat is also one of the most visually unattractive movies I’ve ever seen.

The battle scenes are alternately tense and thrilling, especially during one climactic sequence.

The film dutifully cleaves to the contours of a well-established and viscerally satisfying formula.

It’s a haunting story of love between two misfits who shouldn’t be together. In its doomed yet somehow hopeful spirit, it’s closer to the noir sensibility of “Let the Right One In” than the pop-horror of “Twilight.”

Not quite documentary, yet by no means drama, Inside the Mind of Leonardo is what might be called poetic biography: maddeningly fragmentary and idiosyncratic, but 100 percent true.

Unbroken may not exactly be mired in sanctimony, but it’s standing, almost up to its ankles, in an unhealthy sense that its subject — about whose simple humanity the film otherwise goes to great lengths to illuminate — is a candidate for sainthood.

The aptly subtitled Night at the Museum: Secret of the Tomb is a blast of dead air and mummified humor.

Jackson’s storytelling at this point is so driven by green-screen trickery and digital legerdemain that he seems to have forgotten about human emotion.

The feature debut of writer-director Jennifer Kent is not just genuinely, deeply scary, but also a beautifully told tale of a mother and son, enriched with layers of contradiction and ambiguity.

The air inside the pyramid isn’t the only thing that’s stale in this ludicrous yet mildly likable horror film.

Yes, it features some of the most rapturous footage of calving glaciers and ice floes — alternately freezing and thawing — that you’re likely to have seen (much of it captured on equipment designed and built by the filmmaker). But it is the simple glimpses of ordinary life in an extraordinary place that are the most stirring moments in the film.

Miss Julie is a strangely clinical movie experience. It’s a story that makes an impression without leaving a mark.