Michael Phillips

The best of the movie lies in its hangout factor, when Levi and Grazer are discovering what Billy can do with electricity, or when the young actors playing Billy’s step-siblings — Grace Fulton, Ian Chen, Jovan Armand and Faithe Herman —get a chance to establish a rapport.

A fun-for-a-while attempt by writer-director Harmony Korine, American indie cinema’s effrontery kingpin, to go a little bit mainstream. Matthew McConaughey is the reason it’ll get by.

This movie also offers less: less wit, less charm, and only a few scraps of the old movie’s crucial songs (though “Baby Mine” receives its moment, in a campfire rendition).

Director James Kent’s pretty, frustrating picture has atmosphere in spades, and a diamond-like sheen, but its tale of hearts aflame is slowly clubbed into submission by an excess of taste.

Surprise! The Hummingbird Project basically works; it’s intriguing; the actors play it just straight enough to make it feel like a fact-based drama (though it isn’t) with a few darkly comic details.

As Halla/Asa, Geirharðsdóttir never forces a thing. The actress is the honest engine of this sincere, slightly off-kilter fable.

Jordan Peele’s Us begins so spectacularly well, and sustains its game of doubles so cleverly for most of its two hours, it’s an unusual sort of letdown when the story doesn’t quite hang together and “deliver” the way Peele managed with his 2017 debut feature, “Get Out.”

The film’s impressive as far is it goes, and Schoenaerts is a fine actor with considerable emotional resources. But it’s exceedingly tidy in its beat-by-beat developments, and outside Roman and Marcus, the supporting character roster struggles to make an impression.

A more threatening embodiment of that idea, of new times that seem like old times, comes to subtly provocative life in Transit, one of the most intriguing films of the new year. Written and directed by German filmmaker Christian Petzold, it’s an audacious reminder that there’s more than one way to adapt a so-called “period” novel for a new era.

But Haley Lu Richardson’s in it. She’s excellent. In fact, she’s reliably excellent. In “Five Feet Apart” she goes 10 rounds with dreckdom, and wins. Scene after scene the movie becomes a two-hour demonstration in the art, craft and mystery of what a performer can do to make you believe, in spite of the things they actually have to say.

A satisfying heist movie, animated or live-action, requires more selectivity and less clutter than this one. The movie dashes by door after door, but it lacks the key.

It’s fun. In various ways, some better than others, you can tell the film was made by people who weren’t mapping out their entire careers to lead to the big moment when they tackle a Marvel Cinematic Universe franchise.

The script by Jordan and Ray Wright, from Wright’s story, wastes little time in getting to what “Fatal Attraction” enthusiasts might call the bunny-boiling bits. But the movie frustrates. And it squanders Huppert, which really is a waste.

For all these self-effacing but highly valuable reasons, when the triumphs of the human, agricultural and engineering spirits arrive, they work. It’s moving, and it’s earned. Ejiofor is off and running as a director.

The Wild Pear Tree may be the one film out there with the uncanny, gorgeously ruminative ability to take you away from everything cluttering a Chicagoan’s head space right now.

In other words, nothing much held me back from enjoying writer-director Stephen Merchant’s engaging, charismatically acted underdog fable.

From the beginning, the animators got something very, very right with Toothless, who works with an artificial tail just as his human friend works with a prosthetic hand. He’s adorable, yes, of course. But he’s not conventionally flawless, and he’s all the better for that.

Everybody Knows finds Farhadi (working with longtime editor Hayedeh Safiyari) consciously going for quicker-than-usual cutting, rarely lingering over anything, always setting up the next part of the mystery. The acting’s uniformly strong, always at the service of a knotty story.

There’s not much kick to Isn’t It Romantic, even after it goes over the rainbow. It gets by, and commercially it may well be a modest hit — but has more to do with Valentine’s Day timing than the film itself.

If The Image Book is just a great whatsit, like the thing everyone’s trying to find in the Mike Hammer picture, why is it bracing and finally very moving?

The story is a lot harder on its female protagonist than the 2000 film was on its male equivalent. This makes a depressing amount of sense, given what women are up against in most workplaces. Henson’s Ali plays both the dramatic encounters and the slapstick opportunities for higher stakes than Gibson ever did.

Lord and Miller are two of a small handful of Hollywood screenwriters whose style is instantly identifiable. They’re adept at flicking a dozen jokes in different directions in the same minute of screen time. If “Lego Movie 2” tries too much, and gets lost in its own messages about familial cooperation, that’s the price of their brand of invention.

The film works best in its most acutely observed details of daily life in the trenches.

The movie delivers, in its chosen way. But it’s a soulless way. The violence may be for laughs, and many Neeson fans will likely respond to the larky brutality of Cold Pursuit, which is very different from the star’s previous mid-winter vehicles (“The Grey” is my favorite). But I don’t get much psychic recreation from this sort of action movie.

It’s a modest film, but a very good one, and by the end I was quite moved by its valiant belief in decency and in the duo’s eternal appeal.

The atmosphere in Serenity, by design, imparts a slightly uneasy and hermetic feeling. In Baker Dill, who sounds like a line of gourmet pickles, Knight has the makings of a compellingly messed-up antihero. That’s a start. If movies were all start, then this one might’ve worked.

It’s a choppy, frustrating affair, periodically bailed out by some very good actors.

Kulig comes with everything the role of this sullen, reckless siren demands, and then some.

It’s full of life, guided by first-time screen performers portraying versions of themselves. And because Esparza’s a dramatist, not a melodramatist, the experience of watching Life and Nothing More becomes truth, and nothing less.

Way back in “Unbreakable,” Jackson’s Mr. Glass bemoaned how comics superheroes “got chewed up in the commercial machine.” Glass proves it.

A tedious picture about a remorseless serial killer, played by Matt Dillon.

A sleekly fashioned true-crime story without much on its mind.

It's a crazy amount of ground to cover, but only rarely does 13th sacrifice clarity for cinematic energy.

What Baldwin does with words, Jenkins does visually. It’s what Blanche DuBois says in “A Streetcar Named Desire”: “I don’t want realism. I want magic!” In “Beale Street” that magic can be crushing, and soul-stirring, sometimes simultaneously. Jenkins’ epilogue, not found in the novel, may go a little far in its embrace of the affirmative. But that’s hardly the worst thing you can say about any film, let alone one as lovely as this one.

What Vice says, and how it says it, will have half its audience nodding in angry, contemptuous agreement, and the other half calling it a liberal smear. In other words it’s like everything else in the culture right now.

Good cast, nearly hopeless script.

Welcome to Marwen is a misjudgment only a first-rate filmmaker could make.

The original “Mary Poppins” was exuberant, fueled by terrific Sherman brothers songs. Mary Poppins Returns is often just pushy.

It brings me no joy to relay this: From an irresistible “tell me more!” of a true story, Eastwood and his “Gran Torino” screenwriter Nick Schenk have made a movie that feels dodgy and false at every turn.

This addiction drama is primarily a showcase for its superb leading performers, and in its compressed time frame (24 hours around Christmas) it feels like a well-made play more than a fully amplified feature film. The acting is enough, though.

Vox Lux is the sardonic yang to the sincere, heart-yanking yin of this season’s big awards fave, “A Star is Born.”

Watching this movie is like spending two hours and 27 minutes staring at a gigantic aquarium full of digital sea creatures and actors on wires, pretending to swim.

It’s zippier than “Incredibles 2,” and nearly as witty as the first “Lego Movie,” with whom it shares a very funny screenwriter, Phil Lord.

Roma gives you so much to see in each new vignette, in every individual composition, in fact, that a second viewing becomes a pleasurable necessity rather than a filmgoing luxury.

The results take neither the high road nor the low road, settling instead for an oddly bland middle course.

Throughout Becoming Astrid, August acquits herself brilliantly; the woman we come to know is a tangle of impulses and qualities, and feels vibrantly alive.

A languorous, catlike psychological puzzle from one of the essential international masters, Lee Chang-dong.

The result is a splendid black comedy that marks a stylistic leap for its director. Second only this year to the upcoming “Roma,” it’s a reminder of how the movies can imagine a highly specific yet deeply idiosyncratic vision of the past.

The Great Buster, filmmaker Peter Bogdanovich’s fond if slight appreciation of Buster Keaton, serves as the centerpiece of the Gene Siskel Film Center’s weeklong “Best of Buster” mini-retrospective starting Friday.

Dafoe never begs for attention or sympathy; he’s there, like the seasoned, craftsmanlike actor he is, as a conduit and a sort of medium.

A weirder and more interesting movie than “Wreck-It Ralph,” Ralph Breaks the Internet tells a lie right in its title because isn’t that thing broken already?

By the end, the movie has become a shameless and, yes, effective ode to fathers and sons everywhere.

A crowd-pleasing hit at the Toronto International Film Festival in September, the movie may not be accurate history (welcome to the movies!). It may not even be particularly interested in one of its two main characters, for various reasons.

It’s a strange, grimly comic collection offering many grotesque sight gags, the occasional moment of seriousness and a general wash of melancholic, photogenic, elegiac Old West atmosphere. I liked the least jokey tale the best; by the time it came along, in the fifth-out-of-six slot, I’d had it with the kidding.

Museo is the work of a genuinely creative directorial talent, and the early family scenes, richly detailed and shrewdly acted, provide just the right emotional context for this squabbling, indecisive gang of two.

For all its cynicism, the movie floats on a darkly exhilarating brand of escapism. It’s one of the year’s highlights in any genre.

It took J.K. Rowling’s Harry Potter-adjacent franchise exactly one film for the shrugs to set in, even with all those fine actors up there amid expensive digital blue flames.

The new film A Private War ranks higher than most, in the truth department and in cinematic storytelling. Whatever your personal interest or disinterest in Sunday Times reporter Marie Colvin’s line of work, the way she did it — and the bloody global conflicts she ran towards, full gallop — makes for a tense, engrossing account.

Uruguayan-born Fede Alvarez (“Don’t Breathe,” the recent “Evil Dead” reboot) handles the action breathlessly and well enough. The movie’s acted with serious conviction. But I kind of hate it.

Too much of Nobody’s Fool makes do with well-worn exchanges and contrived, overheard conversations.

The movie’s full of acidic wisecracks and zingers, though its attempts to be funny aren’t really funny. I found Paul Stewart, who dates back to Welles’ “Mercury Theater of the Air” days, to be the strongest human presence in this ghostly affair.

Vivid in bits and pieces, Mid90s feels like a research scrapbook for a movie, not a movie. The more Hill throws you around in the name of creating a harsh, immediate impression, the more the impressions blur.

Wisely, Heller doesn’t inflate the tone or impart an overt message. But by the end, Can You Ever Forgive Me? has truly brought you into this woman’s life, head-space, longings and tastes, and I found the whole of it quite moving.

Small but sure, this low-keyed actors’ feast marks the feature directorial debut of writer-director Elizabeth Chomko, who grew up in Chicago and the western suburb of Hinsdale, among other stops in a relocation-heavy childhood.

The tensions inherent in Honnold’s singular life are many. Free Solo gives you just enough of that life on terra firma to make the heights truly dazzling.

A lot of Beautiful Boy is necessarily hard to take, though the script softens the roughest of Nic’s travails. Is this why the movie’s anguish feels more indicated than inhabited? Still: You can’t fault the performers much. Or Chalamet, at all.

It’s a fairly engrossing bit of fan service, boasting many clever touches and a few disappointing ones. Director and co-writer David Gordon Green’s picture veers erratically in tone, and the killings are sort of a drag after a while, en route to a rousing vengeance finale.

Like Tarantino, Goddard is a clever structuralist. He attracts strong actors, and lets them stretch out and try things, and gives them juicy dialogue.

I’m glad Chazelle’s film offers some fresh points of view on its subject; it’s proof he’ll be able to keep his filmmaking wits about him, no matter what genre he’s exploring. He has made his Apollo 11 movie. And it’s a good one.

I hope Spacek gets a role as spacious and accommodating as Redford’s someday. By contrast, Spacek’s co-star delivers what he has been best at: a single, careful look, or mood, or understated note at a time. Redford is not a chord man. I wouldn’t call the film itself complex, but it’s sweet-natured.

Cooper is very much a real director, with a genuine facility with filming musical numbers. We believe in the characters’ talents, and spend time soaking them up without a lot of nervous, overcompensating editing. Between songs, he and Gaga make even the bluntest cliches about love and career and misery minty-fresh, all over again.

The marriage on view here, a little ridiculous, a little galling but full of interesting sharp edges, presents Knightley and West with a full array of emotions to explore. The tone remains deceptively light, but it feels both true and in period.

Amid this conundrum of a movie, the actors provide what the facile screenplay cannot: a human pulse, shrewdly underscored by composer Alexandre Desplat’s time-traveling musical landscape.

Movies about reckless, chemically addled men rarely have the nerve to go whole hog with the bad behavior, because it makes for alienating company. Still: Blaze comes closer than most to an honest look at this sort of troubadour and this kind of life.

The actors aren’t the problem with Night School; the material is.

Life Itself is an emotional mugging, not a movie.

The documentary Love, Gilda works different ways for different viewers. For older fans, it’s a welcome excuse to reminisce. For newcomers it’s an entertaining primer on Radner’s life, times, demons and famous inventions.

The ideas aren’t exactly new here, and one need only look at the entire career of Chicago filmmaker Joe Swanberg (a producer here) to realize the difficulty of shaping living, breathing, vital art out of gormless improv techniques. Here, clearly, the actors have been well and truly guided along the way, and Howard is a serious find.

Minding the Gap is an exceptionally reflective examination of the 29-year-old filmmaker’s life, and surroundings, and it works because the movie concerns so much more.

An unusually good adaptation of an unusually good novel.

Hunnam’s reliably charismatic in suffering and in joy, but with most of the political and wartime context shaved off the story, once again, we’re left with the basics.

The Happytime Murders is a one-joke movie, minus one joke. The year may cough up a worse film, but probably not a more joyless, witless one, raunchy or otherwise.

Forgettably entertaining/entertainingly forgettable.

The movie’s an artfully sustained guessing game, tense and rarely dull. It’s also afflicted with a jokey, jaunty tone as deliberate as it is limiting.

Much of Puzzle feels schematic and, in the convenient solution to the family’s financial problems, a bit lazy. Yet Macdonald is so good, on her own or with a scene partner, director Marc Turtletaub’s movie refuses to fall apart.

McKinnon’s apparent improvisations and inventions create a second, better movie in the margins.

The core human/bear connection is treated with respect. Pooh’s wisdom and kindness cannot be denied. The same impulses worked for the two “Paddington” movies, God knows. Christopher Robin isn’t quite in their league, but it’s affecting nonetheless.

Eighth Grade works you over, audience wincing followed by audience gratification, narrative tension followed by release, crises leading to just-in-time catharsis.

That’s Blindspotting all over: an exuberant, brightly colored, zigzagging portrait of a city, an uneasy transformation and a friendship.

McKay has worked mostly in episodic television in recent years, and “On the Seventh Day” marks his confident, neatly ordered but freshly observed return to feature filmmaking. He’s working with nonactors here, in a fruitful halfway point between documentary and conventional fictional narrative.

The movie sidesteps the conventional breadth of a documentary subject’s resume. We learn nothing about Sakamoto’s early years, and little about his private life. Yet simply by lingering with his pensive, compelling subject at the keyboard, or engaging Sakamoto (discreetly) in his thoughts on his life and his music, Schible casts a spell and captures the spirit of a uniquely gifted composer.

Some of it’s pleasingly old school in its reliance on formidable stunt work. Enough of it, though, gets a digital effects assist for the amazements to scale the heights of plausibility and then leap, like a gazelle, to the adjacent mountain of sublime ridiculousness.

It’s a provocative, serious, ridiculous, screwy concoction about whiteface, cultural code-switching, African-American identities and twisted new forms of wage slavery, beyond previously known ethical limits.

The latest “Purge” is an erratic, fairly absorbing and righteously angry prequel.

At its mean, snakelike best, it’s also a brutally assured commercial action picture, unburdened by the moral qualms or unnerving ambiguity of its predecessor.

It’s fun to hang out with these people for a while.

Wasikowska struggles to activate a vague notion of female disenfranchisement and victimhood, triumphant. She and Pattinson fill in as many blanks as they can, where they can.

Visually here’s the crucial thing with Ant-Man and the Wasp, and it sounds like a small thing, but really it’s a big thing: The sequel has upped the instances and exploits of the rapidly changing superheroes, and every time the movie cuts to a shot of the heroes’ miniaturized car, scooting around the streets of San Francisco, it’s good for a laugh.

The actors do most of their best work in between the lines. Krieps, especially, provides a subtle symphony of feeling, even as her role confines her to a prescribed range of narrative support. Director Peck’s work is handsome; what it lacks is a true sense of danger, a feeling of history roiling in the present tense.

I like the new “Jurassic World” movie better than the 2015 edition. Bayona’s direction is considerably more stylish and actively mobile than Colin Trevorrow’s was.

As Assayas himself has pointed out, the passing years have magically transformed a movie made in 1994 into a seeming product of post-1968 cultural turbulence and unresolved matters of the heart. It feels honest, in other words.

I kind of hate the movie’s mixture of bro comedy, sadistic practical jokes (don’t call it slapstick) and last-ditch pull for the heartstrings.

If you can forget about the movie’s general moral vacuousness, the extremely uneven digital photography and the slavish devotion to designer assault weapons...the screenplay by “Watchmen” scribe Alex Tse keeps the shifting alliances and power plays in clever circulation.

Bird’s rather strenuous sequel lands more in the camp of “Cars 2” and “Monsters University,” mistaking calamity and mayhem for real excitement and wit.

Without undue fawning, Neville’s moving portrait does a lovely job of presenting Rogers as two people, the public figure and the private one, sharing the same closet full of zip-up sweaters.

It’s essentially the Hotel Earle from “Barton Fink,” augmented by the latest in robotic surgical techniques for bullet extraction.

It’s smooth, and far from inept. But it isn’t much fun. That’s all you want from a certain kind of heist picture, isn’t it? Fun?

Above all, there’s Collette, who sometimes can overdeliver a dramatic moment or an aghast reaction, but in this storytelling context she’s fabulous. It’s a fierce performance with a human pulse, racing one minute, dead still the next.

Whannell is learning how forward motion can allow a filmmaker to get away with some pretty outlandish brutality. I wish the talk-dependent sequences weren’t so foreshadowed and clunky; only Gabriel transcends them.

They never quite got the script right, but director Kormakur toggles well enough. And Woodley sees it through.

The ending is very different from the novella, and I was surprised at its shameless, ruthless emotional effectiveness.

An act of spiritual inquiry, a coolly assured example of cinematic scholarship in subtly deployed motion and one of the strongest pictures of 2018.

When it works it’s enjoyable; when it doesn’t, it falls into a generic sort of bustle, missing the darker, more troubling layers underneath.

Alden Ehrenreich resembles a young, somewhat graver Robert Wagner, though he’s a better actor than the young Robert Wagner was. Ehrenreich’s contained, methodical brand of swagger matches up pretty well with the Han Solo we know from the ’77-’83 Harrison Ford edition.

Deadpool 2 is just like “Deadpool” only more so. It’s actually a fair bit better — funnier, more inventive than the 2016 smash...and more consistent in its chosen tone and style: ultraviolent screwball comedy.

The film itself isn’t dorky in the least. It’s an elegant and witty rumination on one woman’s quest for romantic fire.

The movie’s not as slapstick-dependent as advertised. It’s a less coarse and more heartfelt project than McCarthy’s disappointing headliner gigs, such as “Tammy” and “The Boss.” (The Paul Feig-directed comedies “Bridesmaids,” “The Heat” and “Spy” are far better.) The new movie renders matters of directorial finesse and comic technique essentially irrelevant.

Strange is a word that pops up frequently in Claire’s Camera, a lovely doodle and the latest from South Korean writer-director Hong Sang-soo. The strangeness extends to and suffuses most of the human interactions, which never go entirely smoothly.

Disobedience sometimes wants for rougher edges, and a fuller characterization for Weisz to play. But there’s real satisfaction in watching her, McAdams and Nivola inhabit a fraught and complicated relationship.

At its spiky, intermittent best, Tully is the best work Cody has done in the conventional feature format since “Juno.” And yet I’m all over the place on it.

Subtle, elemental and powerfully beautiful, writer-director Chloe Zhao’s The Rider is the Western of the new century, and the most enveloping film experience I’ve had this year.

The film has its momentary diversions, a few good throwaway jokes amid a tremendous amount of PG-13 maiming and destruction.

It’s just not funny or fresh enough, and that has everything to do with the material and how it’s handled visually, and nothing to do with the people on the screen.

Zama is a patient, delicately strange film chronicling an increasingly impatient man and a destiny beyond his control.

In the best way, this is a tough movie to shake, and while it believes in the kindness of strangers, Lean on Pete never forgets every other human failing, impulse and circumstance.

The story lurches forward in spasms. We’re fully in the head space of a messed-up, hollowed-out psyche. Backed by Jonny Greenwood’s sinister wash of a musical score, You Were Never Really Here feels like a waking nightmare.

Rampage is a drag.

A little of Barinholtz goes a pretty good distance for me, but sharing scenes with Mann (who has the timing of a wizard) and blocklike Cena (funny just standing there, with his “cop haircut” and perpetually aghast reactions), he’s what the movie needs: a relaxed wildcard.

Chappaquiddick misses that target. But it’s a fairly intriguing mixture of strengths and weaknesses, a case of a sharp cast and a careful director toning up a script best described as “a good try.”

My favorite moment, an encounter between Regan and one of the monsters in a cornfield, plays with sound and image and tension, creatively. Other bits are more shameless.

Some of the dialogue is on the clunky side; much of it comes straight (or nearly) from Lord’s memoir; and Hammer has yet to find a fully easy-breathing way of behaving naturally on screen. Rush, by contrast, has so much fun with Giacometti’s tetchy, restless qualities, you don’t always buy the “tortured” part.Yet Rush is such a formidable technician, he creates a Giacometti of substance both real and theatrical.

What’s frustrating about this worthwhile movie is pretty simple: All Anderson needed to do, really, was to let more of the characters, dog and human, female and male, have a say in how the story gets told.

Spielberg’s control of pacing, rhythm, action dynamics and tonal juggling is so astute that the story of Wade never quite gets lost in all the fly-by jokes and references. Sheridan’s highly skillful, as is Cooke.

This is the second feature from Maoz; his first, the superb “Lebanon” (2009), is one of the essential war pictures of the young century. Foxtrot qualifies as a war film as well, and as in all such pictures made by, and for, grown-ups, the psychic battles are no less intense than the literal carnage.

It’s a grubby, fairly intriguing genre exercise given a weird, did-it-myself-in-a-hurry visual quality.

Pacific Rim: Uprising may be not be much, but in the spirit of the film itself, let’s be realistic. It’s better than any of the “Transformers” movies, and shorter.

Mordant in the extreme, and often hilarious, The Death of Stalin somehow manages to acknowledge the murderous depths of Josef Stalin’s regime while rising to the level of incisive, even invigorating political satire.

An honorable, evenhanded but curiously flat interpretation of events.

The Lara Croft reboot Tomb Raider isn’t half bad for an hour. Then there’s another hour. That hour is quite bad.

For material that started out for the stage, Finley’s directorial debut really does feel like a movie. It’s elegant and well-plotted but not at the expense of the performances.

It has flashes of inspiration and raw emotion, and beyond the famous faces in the cast, Disney’s Wrinkle in Time is graced with a wonderful, natural Meg courtesy of the young actress Storm Reid. Now 14, she’s easy and versatile screen company. The movie around her is a little frustrating and rhythmically stodgy, however, partly for reasons inherent in bringing tricky, elusive material to a different medium.

For a while, director Roth plays this stuff relatively straight, and Willis periodically reminds us he can act (the grieving Kersey cries a fair bit here).

The cast excels at transcending its material. The script by Justin Haythe matches Francis Lawrence’s direction; it’s workmanlike and steady and pretty flat.

Game Night itself is not a long night; it’s reasonably snappy. But co-directors John Francis Daley and Jonathan Goldstein place a misjudged emphasis on keeping the violence and the action “real,” so at its most routine and generic, the movie forgets it’s supposed to be a comedy.

The movie feels torn between styles and intentions. It’s trippier than “Ex Machina,” and Garland makes a valiant go of its concerns, but Annihilation feels like a short-story amount of story pulled and twisted into feature length.

This dizzy sequel can’t match any of the first “Detective Chinatown” action highlights, such as the food fight at Bangkok’s floating market. Here’s hoping the third outing, which will take the main characters to Tokyo, returns to the amiable, artful high jinks of the first.

May Marvel learn its lesson from Black Panther: When a movie like this ends up feeling both personal and vital, you’ve done something right.

The Cloverfield Paradox is “Lost” in space — a faint, well-acted blip on the radar of your viewing life.

A Fantastic Woman is the likely front-runner for this year’s foreign language Academy Award. Its clarity of purpose translates to an effectively lean and straightforward story of adversity and survival, in any language.

It’s the last thing he wanted, I’m sure, but Eastwood’s latest ends up feeling like a stunt.

As a period ghost story, it’s pretty pallid.

In the end, as proven by that mixed emotional chord, any director this far along in developing an assured visual style truly is a director to watch.

A more honest script might’ve supported Reda Kateb’s laid-back, medium-effective portrayal of Reinhardt more fully. As is, he’s depicted as an artist man floating through his awful times, living for the music.

It fascinates both as film history and as a sobering reminder of how little credit a woman like Lamarr received, even at the peak of her popularity.

Mom and Dad may be a blood-soaked lark of uneven quality, but it has the good sense to use Reagan Youth’s punk anthem “Anytown” as an accompaniment to Cage’s parental … change of heart, let’s call it.

It’s a sidewinding but often effective L.A. crime thriller saddled with the wrong leading man.

12 Strong sticks to the basics, without much interest in the differentiating specifics of the men involved, or anything on a geopolitical scale beyond the impulse these Special Forces veterans shared in the wake of 9/11. It seems to me a qualified, limited success.

The script is just so-so, but Ball’s directorial eye, clear in the first “Maze Runner” film though largely AWOL in the second, saves the third and final adventure from its own bloat.

The movie, directed by Paul McGuigan, may be a bit tame and well-behaved for its subjects. But it’s a valentine, not a psychodrama.

Turns out to be every bit as deft, witty and, yes, moving as the first one.

The movie feels both expansive and confining, depending on the story chapter. Anderson’s visual facility by now has become so intuitive, so fluid and effortlessly right, if you’re at all susceptible to the allure of a moving camera you’ll fall headlong into Phantom Thread.

One of those movies with good things going in one direction, and cheesy things going in the other. The ever-valuable Farmiga is a faceless voice after her sole on-screen appearance, and director Collet-Serra’s frantic, hand-held technique ensures that every supporting player looks as guilty as possible.

It’s Blocker’s story, and Bale’s very good. But for Hostiles to fully make sense of its introductory on-screen D.H. Lawrence quotation — “The essential American soul is hard, isolate, stoic, and a killer. It has never yet melted” — we’d need a tougher, less comforting ending than the one Cooper provides.

The Post has a lot going for it, alongside a certain amount of hokum.

The best of Molly’s Game, however, is more on the “Social Network” level, edgy and rhythmic. This is Sorkin’s feature directorial debut, and I’m happy to say it doesn’t look that way.

As for Janney: Hers is a performance of such astute, subtle and compulsively watchable hamming, it’s guaranteed to win a supporting actress Oscar nomination.

Scott’s production works on the level of classy, confident yarn-spinning.

Chalamet is excellent, saving his purest acting for the killer final shot several minutes in length, when we finally see what these weeks with Oliver have meant to him.

Much will be resolved by the final chapter of the trilogy, to be directed by Abrams. As much as I enjoy his brand of canny populism, I prefer Rian Johnson’s wilder, generous, far-flung imagination.

A sexy, violent, preposterous, beautiful fantasy, co-writer and director Guillermo del Toro’s most vivid and fully formed achievement since “Pan’s Labyrinth” 11 years ago.

Darkest Hour pulls from both extremes of Oldman’s prodigious but often unexploited skill set, the subtlety as well as the flamboyance.

In code, Wonder Wheel dances along the edge of the writer-director’s off-screen life, namely the allegations by Dylan Farrow, Allen’s adopted daughter, of sexual molestation, and Allen’s controversial marriage to Soon-Yi Previn, the adopted daughter of Allen’s then-partner Mia Farrow.

Fans of “The Room” — they’re everywhere — will get something out of it, though I’d argue not enough; director Franco’s camera sense is neither quite in synch with Wiseau’s (thank God) or quite distinct enough in its own style.

Even when the movie loses its way narratively, Washington’s in there, slugging, building a living, breathing character out of Gilroy’s knight-errant.

Too often Coco mistakes chaos and calamity for comedy, and it’s a little perverse to prevent this particular story from becoming a full-on animated musical.

A vividly acted, dramatically rich depiction, harsh and beautiful, of life and death in 1940s Mississippi, following two families of intertwined destinies.

For a while it’s engaging but pretty thin. Then it gets more interesting, especially for the actors.

Midway through a middling film adaptation, like this one, you realize it’s the same old clue-delivery mechanism, in a darker mood but also a less lively one.

Philippe’s strongest work in 78/52 is the historical context, ranging from the images and roles of mothers in 1950s popular culture to a key handful of movies photographed in black and white (as was “Psycho,” partly to get the blood past the censors) released the previous year, 1959.

Watching Lady Bird is like flipping through a high school yearbook with an old friend, with each page leading to another anecdote, another sweet-and-sour memory. It’s a tonic to see any movie, especially in this late-Harvey Weinstein era, that does right by its female characters, that explores what it means to be a young woman on the cusp of adulthood, and that speaks the languages of sincerity and wit.

It wouldn’t raise questions about Harrelson’s prostheses and makeup, for starters, if the drama carried more urgency.

The performances by Pinnick and Spence are clean, vivid and honestly felt, with a lot of the best work emerging nonverbally in the spaces between characters closing a gap.

So it’s uneven, but the good stuff’s unusually lively and buoyant.

A movie can be unreasonably formulaic and still be reasonably diverting, and A Bad Moms Christmas is the proof.

The performances, including a sweetly sincere and easygoing turn from the deaf actress Simmonds, become the audience’s way into Wonderstruck.

There’s nothing vague about the narrative of The Killing of a Sacred Deer. Its strangeness is crystal clear. It plays out in ways both sardonically funny and extremely cruel.

This movie, a diary of a freewheeling, far-flung installation art project, combines chance and intuition and a humane eye.

More than a female singing cowboy, Vargas was ranchera incarnate, whether singing the material of drinking companion Jose Alfredo Jimenez or her own cathartic cries from the heart. The film is a fond but clear-eyed tribute.

It’s stark, unadorned drama, and it feels real, reminding us that these are fine actors, giving their all.

All the performances are terrific, even when some of the scenes sputter or reiterate the grievances.

It’s a lively and absorbing picture — intelligently sexy, tastefully salacious but serious enough to stick.

A workmanlike but vividly acted courtroom drama.

A dazzling mosaic, alert to the ebb and flow of human resilience in the face of everyday crises.

Director John Carroll Lynch’s quietly assured directorial feature debut works from a simple, homey script by Logan Sparks and Drago Sumonja, and Lucky feels like the work of Stanton’s friends, which it is.

Every effect, each little detail in the “Blade Runner” sequel’s formidable arsenal, creates the texture of a wondrously hideous near future, full of holographic accessories, slave-labor replicants and, as one character puts it, products and services of “the fabulous new.”

It’s fairly entertaining even when it doesn’t quite work, directed for maximum pace by Cruise’s “Edge of Tomorrow” cohort, director Doug Liman.

Now and then the Mulleavys capture a moment or glimmer of true mystery; more often, and certainly in dramatic terms, Woodshock feels like a movie that never stops buffering.

Kingsman: The Golden Circle offers everything — several bored Oscar winners, two scenes featuring death by meat grinder, Elton John mugging in close-up — except a good time.

The performances of Holly Hunter and Ron Silver had something Stone’s and Carell’s lack: true drive and animal energy, a sense of athletic competitors who mean business even when they’re kidding, or saying they are.

Stronger is a movie you need to see, no matter how much you think you don’t need to see it.

It’s one of the most imaginative and provocative documentaries on any topic I’ve seen this year.

Despite the actors hired to deliver the story, the superassassin of American Assassin isn’t quite human. He’s just revenge in a henley T.

The inevitable disappointing CinemaScore exit polls aside, it’s worth seeing — if you don’t mind a little insanity in escapism that offers no escape, only the promise of a new fairy tale on another page.

Much like Bonello’s previous film, “Yves Saint Laurent,” Nocturama revels in pure experience. But the sum total of its gliding abstractions is a mite brainless.

The movie is beautiful without wasting its time on cliched beauty. Kogonada, who edited as well as wrote and directed, collaborates intuitively with cinematographer Elisha Christian, who’s as good with faces as he is with sharp modernist edges etched in concrete.

That narrative change works fine in principle. The larger question is one of rhythm, and the diminishing returns of one jump scare after another.

When the actors get their chances, Crown Heights rises above the routine.

The film ticks a lot of boxes. Underdog triumph. Showbiz triumph. Working-class heroics. Flagrant, often effective filmmaking technique, from a first-time feature writer-director, Geremy Jasper.

The result is passable stupidity leaning hard on its wily leading men. The movie’s also pretty galling in its unceasing brutality for laughs.

The movie’s engagement is more about casual precision than cinematic exuberance, and the banter’s democratically distributed among all its characters, right on the edge of caricature.

Most crime movies, even alleged indies, make it easy for the audience to take sides and establish clear rooting interests. Good Time is better than that: It’s not always easy to take, yet you can’t look away.

Wind River is roughly 50 percent strengths, 50 percent contrivances. Often they collide in the same scene.

You watch the movie, and you wonder: What was this life like, really? That’s a sign of a movie not quite answering the question.

The result is an act of partial, tenderly observed guerrilla filmmaking. It works; it takes you somewhere, quietly but evocatively, and it’s affecting without pulling at your heartstrings with both hands.

Is the movie good enough to do what it’s designed to do? Not really. It’s designed as a launching pad for a “Dark Tower” television series, scheduled to star Elba and Taylor. So this is an hour-and-a-half TV pilot; it just happens to be a big summer movie too.

Kidnap probably could’ve played into its feverish, violent, trashy side more aggressively. As is, something seems to be holding it back from its own monstrously exploitative premise.

Landline follows the contours of a conventional ensemble comedy-drama. Which it is, from one angle. But the writing's often prickly and funny. The actors aren't tested or challenged, necessarily, but they're playing in comfortable grooves and there's a lot of satisfaction in watching the results.

A handful of films, from "The Battle of Algiers" to Paul Greengrass' splendid "Bloody Sunday," have met the challenge of dramatizing civil unrest and law enforcement outrages, memorably. Detroit comes close.

Besson's commercial instincts for sleek, violent fantasy are often sound, but "Valerian" is more sedative than show.

Throughout Lady Macbeth we see Pugh's eyes, full of possibility and optimism at the outset, gradually darken. Even her breathing changes. It's a wonderful performance in a very fine film.

With a bare minimum of dialogue, and a brutal maximum of scenes depicting near-drowning situations in and around Dunkirk, France, in late May and early June 1940, Christopher Nolan’s Dunkirk is a unique waterboarding of a film experience.

I liked a lot of writer-director Jeff Baena's picture; it may be a one-joke movie, but I've seen comedies recently that would've killed for that many.

David Lowery's film A Ghost Story is best seen a second time, though obeying the customary rules of time and cinema, you'll have the mysterious pleasure of seeing it a first time to get there.

Gripping, visually assured and working far above its summer-sequel paygrade, War for the Planet of the Apes treats a harsh storyline with a solemnity designed to hoist the tale of Caesar, simian revolutionary — the Moses of apes — into the realm of the biblical.

Modeled on Martin Scorsese's engaging first-person documentaries on the cinema, this one has its own avid personality and scholarly charm. Whoever you are, you'll learn a lot.

Linda Cardellini can play just about anything, with honesty and delicacy, so it's no surprise she makes even a semi-sweet nothing like Austin Found worth a look.

The Big Sick has the confidence to let the audience come to Nanjiani and Gordon's fictionalized real-life situation, rather than yank us in, kicking and screaming.

The Beguiled probably could've benefited from a little more energy in its telling. Still, Coppola offers some gorgeous images of the past made present.

Maudie works valiantly, and not entirely convincingly, to suggest a happy-ish marriage, all things considered.

The rhythmic assurance of truly bracing screen action, even if it's just a bunch of metal beating up a bunch of other metal, or clobbering humans, never gains traction. The cross-cutting suggests the editors took care of things via group text.

By Lithgow's standards this is pretty low-keyed acting, but he may have played one too many blowhards in his recent career. His performance works, but it lacks surprise and, as written, he's a bit much.

Rough Night is good one minute, weak or stilted or wince-y the next, though even with seriously uneven pacing and inventiveness it's a somewhat better low comedy than "Snatched" or "Bad Moms," or (here's where I part company with the world) the "Hangover" pictures. Yes, even the first one.

Cars 3, a reasonably diverting account of middle-aged pity, humiliation and suffering as experienced by Rust-eze-sponsored race car Lightning McQueen, is not the weakest of the Disney/Pixar sequels (I’d vote “Cars 2” or “Monsters University,” those sour, desperate things). But it’s by far the most guilt-ridden.

Weisz and the sharpest supporting players lift My Cousin Rachel to a higher plane. Holliday Granger as Philip's smitten family friend; Simon Russell Beale, a truly great actor, as the skeptical family solicitor; Tim Barlow, tottering around as the sublimely crusty servant: These are choice turns.

While the film's patient, moody progression into personal nightmare territory won't be for everyone, it's a genuinely evocative creation.

The mayhem in The Mummy feels desperate, mistimed, grueling in the wrong way (the film's violence is infinitely less appropriate for preteens than that of "Wonder Woman").

Martin's a smooth enough director to make fuller and more ambitious pictures than Dean. This one's a promising start.

For the first time in a long time, I came out of a DC comic book movie feeling ready for a sequel. It feels right, at this actual historical moment, when men made of something less than steel are bumbling around trying to run things. Paging Paradise Island!

The movie is all preening and very few laughs, though Daddario and Efron have a few moments, and Johnson remains a supremely likable slab of movie star.

It's a maddeningly uneven picture, with an action climax staged and executed with the air of a contractual agreement.

The Wall may be fictional, but at its occasional, patient best it feels truthfully scary.

Snatched, more about victimhood than women running their own show, is funny here and there, but in ways that make the bulk of the formulaic material all the more frustrating.

Optimism is nowhere to be found in Ritchie's movie itself. It is a grim and stupid thing, from one of the world's most successful mediocre filmmakers, and if Shakespeare's King Lear were blogging today, he'd supply the blurb quote: "Nothing will come of nothing."

The finished product feels tonally indistinct and plays as a bit of a grind.

This is a general-interest documentary, not one for the wonks or jazzbos. But the music, as we keep hearing from the cited experts, friends and admirers, covered so many different styles, Chasing Trane rides right past its own prescribed length of track.

This one's a step down from the original.

A beautifully spun and morally searching tale of interlocking compromises.

A vital and wily seriocomic odyssey. And Gere has never been better, more alive, on screen.

This is a really good film. It just isn't the traditionally rousing one many will expect, and the trailers promise.

This weird marriage of indie earnestness and matter-of-fact fantasy gives Colossal its moderately engaging distinction.

It's ridiculous but fun, as it careens from Havana to Berlin and icy, terrorist-ridden Russia played by Iceland, and a spit-ton of medium-grade digital effects. But the second hour gets to be a real drag, and not the racing kind.

This contrived mashup of "Proof" (earth-shaking algorithms), "Kramer vs. Kramer" (nerve-wracking custody battles) and "Little Man Tate" really isn't much.

Going in Style stays in the safe zone every second, nervous about risking any audience discomfort, as opposed to Brest's quietly nervy ode to old age and its discontents. Times change.

If you want a list of comics-derived spectacles less successful and worthy than this one, "Suicide Squad" heads the list. And that's the only list it'll ever head.

Frequently maddening in its reiteration and circularity, Song to Song nonetheless offers more of interest (along with the hooey) than I found in "Knight of Cups" or "Voyage of Time," his recent IMAX cosmos travelogue.

It's an intriguing premise, weakened by a script lacking in strong forward motion.

Warming up this material, as Johnson tries to do, doesn't make it warmer; it just makes it seem warmed-over.

A grim and fairly effective cross between "The Martian" and "Guess Who's Coming to Dinner"?

Like all good horror films (though it's more of a psychological thriller with a teeming, festering wealth of body-horror preoccupations), this one takes its central theme — cannibalism — as a way into a variety of other matters, other indicators of a society and a psyche under extreme duress.

The problems here, I think, are weirdly simple. The movie takes our knowledge and our interest in the material for granted. It zips from one number to another, throwing a ton of frenetically edited eye candy at the screen, charmlessly.

Any movie with the sense, the wit and the visual instincts to introduce Kong the way this one does is fine with me.

Logan is deadly serious, and while its gamer-style killing sprees are meant to be excitingly brutal, I found them numbing and, in the climax, borderline offensive.

It's a little of everything: unnerving, funny in just the right way and at the right times, serious about its observations and perspectives on racial animus, straight-up populist when it comes to an increasingly (but not sadistically) violent climax. That's entertainment!

The results offer a collective shiver (not a lot of shrieks here) for those in the mood for sprightly, short-form misfortune.

The Lego Batman Movie offers more mayhem and less funny.

The grace, elegance, carefully muted color palette and gradual acknowledgment of life's milestones lift The Red Turtle far above the average so-called "family-friendly" animation.

John Wick 2 stages its gun-fu melees sleekly and sometimes well, from the catacombs of Rome to the subway platforms of New York City.

The acting is wonderful throughout, but Alidoosti creates an especially haunting depiction of one woman's adversities in a country, and a marriage, that may not have her best interests at heart.

This movie isn't just a tribute to Baldwin. It's a warning bell regarding leaders who, in Baldwin's words, care only about "their safety and their profits."

Everyone in The Comedian deserves a better movie than The Comedian.