Mick LaSalle

Unfortunately, as Pacific Rim Uprising wears on, the monsters and the machines take over — not the world, but the movie.

Unsane is Soderbergh in his best mode. As in “Haywire” and “Side Effects,” he takes what easily might have been a lowbrow genre entry and realizes it so completely that he turns it into something extraordinary.

Movies go bad in all kinds of ways, but in 7 Days in Entebbe the filmmakers found a brand-new way for their movie to commit suicide.

Story problems tank the new Tomb Raider — small, essential things like lack of motivation, lack of reasons for people to do the things they do, and lack of any reason for the audience to keep watching.

A unique and hilarious British comedy.

The pleasures of Gringo are the pleasures of genre: It’s a fun type of movie, but it’s not a good version of the type.

"Bombshell” tells the story of a triumphant and consequential life. And there’s more: Everybody interviewed on camera about her apparently really liked her, especially her children. That’s no small achievement.

There’s beauty here — Virzi is too humane to make a movie without beautiful moments. But a scattered eight or 10 minutes of splendor just isn’t worth an almost two-hour investment of time.

It’s conscientious. It’s watchable, and it’s never less than competent. But it seems to strive so hard to be inspirational, rather than letting the inspiration come through the story, that it becomes preachy and self-conscious.

Death Wish is easily the second best “Death Wish” movie ever made, and not a distant second.

Red Sparrow is a thoroughly entertaining movie that stays fresh and interesting for all of its two-hours-plus running time. But what kicks it into a higher level is that it’s a terrific vehicle for Jennifer Lawrence, one of the few movie stars who deserves one, who is a film star in the classic sense.

Thinking people also like a little drama with their science fiction. On that score, Annihilation comes up short.

It’s not a movie that will make you tired, but lack of ambition can sometimes be a strength. This is a comedy-thriller made simply to please in the moment, and it does, for almost every minute of its 100-minute running time.

The performances are heavy-handed, except for that of Jon Hamm, who benefits not only from playing something of a wise guy (a sports memorabilia salesman), but also from his own unsentimental instincts.

Shot in a glossy, appealing black-and-white and filmed in a single location, The Party generates a pressure-cooker atmosphere.

The pace is quick, very quick by American standards. The script blasts through reams of plot with lightning dialogue, and even if you have a fast eye for subtitles you may come to the end of the movie with no clear idea what happened.

It’s amusing to see what Ozon is up to, but the central character and her problems remain simply matters of curiosity mixed with indifference.

Chadwick Boseman commands every moment of this film, radiating probity and purpose, and it’s only later on that you realize that, with another actor, this wouldn’t have been a sure thing. The Black Panther is a superhero with lots of uncertainty.

Fifty Shades Freed has something extra going for it, in that it depicts something that movies and pop songs and pop culture in general tend to avoid, which is the romance of familiarity.

The writing is subtle and refreshingly without sentimentality — sentimentality being a common flaw in Middle Eastern cinema.

The movie’s one and only idea renders itself boring, with still half the movie left for the audience to endure.

This is the world of Maze Runner: The Death Cure, the third installment in the “Maze Runner” trilogy, a kind of destitute man’s impoverished cousin’s answer to the “Divergent” series.

Clocking in at two hours and 20 minutes, it seems intended to have been a crime epic in the vein of Michael Mann’s “Heat,” about two men of talent and spirit who happen to be on opposite sides of the law. And it’s sort of like that, if you can imagine a Michael Mann picture that has been set on fire and dropped from an airplane.

It is, for what it’s worth, a good documentary, though I imagine its true worth and true nature can only be revealed in time. At the starting gate of 2018, we can have no idea how this film will be perceived in 10 years, and maybe we don’t want to know. Then again, maybe we do.

It might be enough that 12 Strong makes you feel good that the United States still produces guys like this. Too bad we didn’t get to know about the real guys and their actual story.

Here and there, particularly in flashback, Bening gets a scene or a moment to invest in and shine, but for truly a surprising length of time, Bening plays a woman who is asleep, literally.

It weds all the winning aspects of the Neeson formula to a ticking-clock plot, full of tense moments and gripping sequences.

Paul Thomas Anderson is getting there. He is a great director of scenes, not of movies, but in Phantom Thread he has devised a film that hangs in from start to finish, his first since “Boogie Nights.”

The Post is on safe ground when it focuses on Streep as Graham — tentative, slightly affected, but growing by the day — and with Graham’s relationship with her gruff, hotshot editor, Ben Bradlee, played by Tom Hanks, against type but winningly. The movie’s challenge is the journalism story, which is not as clear-cut as Watergate and is therefore harder to dramatize.

Happy End is the latest from Michael Haneke, an uncompromising filmmaker whose work is sometimes brilliant and sometimes hard to watch, and sometimes both, but not this time. Happy End is just hard to watch.

This makes Hostiles something of a slog, but a movie-literate slog containing some impressive scenes.

It’s as realized a thriller as you are likely to find, not only in the precision of its performances, but in its evocative use of location (Rome, London), its period detail (especially Williams’ clothing) and the tension of the younger Getty’s months-long captivity.

By the end, Downsizing is one of those great ideas that should have just stayed an idea.

There’s idiotic, and there’s magnificent, but The Greatest Showman is that special thing that happens sometimes. It’s magnificently idiotic. It’s an awful mess, but it’s flashy. The temptation is to cover your face and watch it through your fingers, because it’s so earnest and embarrassing and misguided — and yet it’s well-made.

It’s buoyant. It’s bright. It has lots of pop music on the sound track, none of it from 1991 or 1994, and almost all of it from the late 1970s, mostly 1977 and 1978. The movie’s mix of music and era doesn’t quite make sense, strictly speaking, but like everything in this loose, inspired and yet tonally precise film, it feels right.

Armie Hammer’s performance is a brilliant exercise in subtlety, suggesting a genial yet inappropriate space-taking, the carelessness of the beautiful.

You don’t see many sci-fi action extravaganzas that are about late middle-aged disappointment, about wondering what it’s all about and whether any of it was worth it. It’s this element that gives The Last Jedi an extra something, a fascinating melancholy undercurrent.

In almost any other filmmaker’s oeuvre, this film would be considered a highlight. But for the director who made “Hannah and Her Sisters,” “Match Point” and “Blue Jasmine”? It’s right up there with “Melinda and Melinda” and “Scoop.” Good, not great.

Across the veil of years, we have seen tall Churchills, obese Churchills, sloppy Churchills, gross Churchills and scowling bull dog Churchills, and yet not one movie or TV Churchill has come close to giving us the man in full, both in look and spirit, until Gary Oldman in Darkest Hour.

The Shape of Water is brilliant, but sick — or maybe it’s sick, but brilliant. In any case, it’s something to see.

This movie is seriously funny, surprisingly funny, not funny in a way that you ever decide to laugh, but funny like you couldn’t keep quiet even if you wanted to. The laughs, as they say, keep coming.

Though it would be inaccurate to reduce Thelma to an extended metaphor, it’s fair to say that Trier uses the supernatural element to illustrate, in a forceful way, the power of lust, the selfishness of love, and the world-obliterating intensity of a first romance.

Rarely has a movie ever captured the importance of a writer’s having unbroken concentration in order to work.

Roman is bad at doing good, so when he starts showing promise in the other moral direction, it hardly seems like a tragedy. It seems like a smart career move. Plus, he gets to wear decent suits and finally starts looking like Denzel Washington.

The worst action movies, and this is one of them, are all about stretching out the action.

For the vast majority of its 113-minute running time, Wonder stays genuine and true.

The movie represents a leap forward for writer-director Martin McDonagh. Three Billboards is as clever and imaginative as McDonagh’s “In Bruges,” in terms of how it makes characters collide in delightful and unexpected ways.

The complexity, richness and fullness of what Leo does here is acting at its most illuminating and useful.

If The Square has a point — and it probably has several — it’s that the visceral aspect of life cannot be fully suppressed and shouldn’t be denied.

Linklater never finds a way to sustain a drama from these characters and their situation.

This is warm and intuitive work, striking that elusive balance between inspiration and control.

One doesn’t expect that kind of intensity in a sedate British murder mystery, but Pfeiffer brings it. On her own, she helps Branagh make the case for his remake over the original.

There is something of a Halloween costume about Woody Harrelson’s appearance in the film. He looks as if frozen midway into some morphing process between himself and Lyndon Johnson, a process that, by pure chance, happened to stop at the precise moment he began to look comical.

This time it’s not too big. Thor: Ragnarok has a lot of human appeal and a spirit of silliness that it never loses and yet always carefully manages, so that the silliness remains an ongoing source of delight without ever undercutting the impact of the action.

The tone of The Killing of a Sacred Deer is the best thing about it and the hardest to describe. You might call it skewed, except that what often is called skewed is extreme and outlandish, while this movie is quiet and precise.

BPM has vitality and directness, a sense of witnessing life in the moment.

The pleasures of Suburbicon are in the moment, and the moments fade before the next moment. There’s no build, just flashes of virtuosity — flashes ultimately in the service of nothing.

Wonderstruck should not be confused for a brilliant but challenging film. Rather, it’s narratively deprived and with entire sections that are completely charmless.

The Snowman is ugly and nasty, but that’s not the worst of it. The worst is that it’s boring and makes no sense.

It touches, in a way movies rarely do, on some essential current of life.

Never dull and never loses its audience, but there is, inevitably, a certain sameness to the scenes, with Garfield spending a lot of time just sitting there with a goofy smile on his face.

The movie also allows Chan to demonstrate that he can act. In between setting traps, blowing things up and rendering people unconscious, Chan plays grief in The Foreigner, and his face contains all the sadness of the world.

The results in an experience that is smooth sailing for the first 45 minutes, but then hits a slog that goes on for another 40, before the movie revives again in its last half hour. Obviously, a film can’t be great if you spend 40 minutes wishing the thing would end already. A 95 minutes, The Florida Project could have been a masterpiece.

As played by Boseman and Gad, Marshall and Friedman are a complementary pair, like something you’d see in a buddy movie — one fit and one fat, one black and one white, one tall and one short, one calm and one stressed, but both Americans working together in a just cause.

A story of courage and sacrifice, as well as a moving love story that’s really three love stories in one.

The film does have enough visual interest and occasional revelation to allow it to limp with dignity to its conclusion.

Watched today, in light of special counsel Robert Mueller’s investigation of the Trump administration, it has an extra intensity, as a possible preview of coming attractions.

Ultimately, The Mountain Between Us tries to pull the audience’s interest in a relationship direction. It’s a difficult task, despite two charismatic leads.

Blade Runner 2049 is long and slow. It’s never boring, but it’s a little too mired in one sustained note of sadness to break out as a great experience or to stand out as a great movie. Still, there are some remarkable scenes.

The story told in Victoria and Abdul is so far-fetched that it really helps to know that it is, in its broad outlines, true.

Even while we’re watching it, a funny feeling sets in. Lots of things happen in American Made, but it’s as if the frenetic pace is to keep us from thinking about what we’re watching.

All this is dramatized expertly and with a lightness of touch in Simon Beaufoy’s screenplay and in the direction of Jonathan Dayton and Valerie Faris, the team behind “Little Miss Sunshine.”

It’s less about music and more about how hard it is — and how bad it feels — to be absolutely and completely on the outside. And though the movie is uncompromising on that score — and shows its heroine going through a series of humiliations that are almost as painful to watch as they would be to experience — it’s not self-pitying. It’s dead-eyed accurate, and that’s its ultimate redemption.

An ideal vehicle for Aubrey Plaza, in that it taps into everything we know she can do and challenges her to do other things that she hasn’t done before.

Logan Lucky is not a contemptible piece of work. It’s a genuine effort by talented people that never quite comes off.

Salma Hayek stands out in a comic role as the hitman’s impossibly vulgar, assertive wife. It’s also worth noting that there are lots of car chases here, and they actually aren’t boring. That qualifies as a rare achievement.

An impressive effort and an impressive result that opens up a world that most of us have never thought about and renders it with sorrow and vividness.

False Confessions can be admired for its high style and distinct tone, but if you really want to enjoy it, you’ll have to force yourself.

In This Corner of the World is 129 minutes, an eternity for an animated film, especially one so wispy in look and so sparing in plot.

Still the spectacle of this, of beautiful, sensitive children at the mercy of damaged adults — this is what we take from The Glass Castle. It’s a universal awfulness rendered with truth and detail, and somehow that’s enough.

Actually, there is one other thing that’s unforgivable. After building up to the great climactic confrontation for two-thirds of the movie, it’s a letdown.

It’s imaginative and even brilliant at times, and then it starts to cave in. But then we think no, maybe not, maybe everything’s going to be made right . . . until it collapses completely. A cynical, smart movie about the dangers of mass culture gives way to a sentimental embrace of the very thing it’s criticizing.

It’s giving away nothing to say that the answers here are a mix of good news and bad news.

Detroit is a movie that will make you angry. It is designed to make you angry, and it does nothing to soften the blow or create some artificial uplift. But there is something about honesty that’s exhilarating. Detroit is tough, but it’s worth it, every minute of it.

It’s a mix of comedy that isn’t especially funny — offering something more like general high spirits, rather than laughs — and drama that isn’t really dramatic, except to the people on screen.

A lot of talented people with the best of intentions got together and made The Last Face, and yet it’s an almost unwatchable flop.

If you want to fall in love with Catherine Deneuve, don’t start with her youth. Start with her here, in her 70s, and then work your way back.

Girls Trip balances sincere sentiment and boisterous comedy with honesty and skill, and for people who like their comedy a little nasty, this one’s a blast.

This is a likable documentary that casts light on two respected but relatively unknown people, who made major contributions to film and managed to have a normal life — and in Hollywood, of all places. It’s nice to know such things are possible.

Barely 20 years old at the time of filming, Pugh has a surface poise and an inner turbulence, a capacity to command the screen with the spectacle of her watching and thinking. The last time something like Pugh happened, she was called Kate Winslet, and the movie was “Heavenly Creatures.”

It’s one of the best war films ever made, distinct in its look, in its approach and in the effect it has on viewers. There are movies — they are rare — that lift you out of your present circumstances and immerse you so fully in another experience that you watch in a state of jaw-dropped awe. Dunkirk is that kind of movie.

David Lowery has made a movie that is as outside the pattern of our current popular filmmaking as can be possibly imagined. That takes more than vision alone. It takes courage.

The music links it all together, creating the sense of some overarching, unseen logic connecting all human activity and making everything inevitable. Indeed, it’s that last impression that elevates Dawson City: Frozen Time to the level of poetry. The story of the town is interesting, without being scintillating.

In the new film, War for the Planet of the Apes — the best of the series, by far — the series’ viewpoint comes into focus, and it’s a lot more intricate and enlightened than some unthinking death wish.

Funny and disturbing in the best way, the comedy-drama Austin Found captures something beyond its story of a woman’s obsession with making her little daughter a beauty pageant winner.

This is one of the funniest movies of the year.

It’s written by six screenwriters, and it feels like it.

So this is fairly interesting history, not as interesting as we’d like it to be, but interesting all the same.

No film biography can capture or explain or add to the magic of Chaplin at his best, because these screen moments are perfect in themselves. But Chaplin, with dignity and some vitality, does what it can -- it holds up a light and points the way. [08 Jan 1993, p.D1]

Best of all is Richard Harris as Paddy O'Neil, an IRA spokesman. With his deeply lined and very Irish face, Harris has a wonderful look for the part. [5 June 1992, p.D1]

This laugh-out-loud comedy is set in the world of daytime television and is reminiscent of the sex farces that were popular in the early and mid-'60s -- except that Soapdish, unhampered by a desire to be perceived as sophisticated, is actually more sophisticated and much funnier than the movies that were around then. [31 May 1991, p.E1]

Nanjiani is engaging throughout, though the scenes of his standup routine are a little confusing. He’s not funny, not even slightly. Is he supposed to be? That’s not clear.

Having hooked us with style, Wright knows he has to deliver on the story, and he does. His plotting is tight and fluid, wild and ultimately satisfying. It’s the ultimate cliche to compare a movie to a thrill ride, but sometimes the cliche applies.

Frankly, we are left with nothing, except with a movie that insists that we love it — or worse, assumes we will — because its subject is so worthy. Even on that score, that of convincing us of the worthiness of its subject, Maudie falls down.

It’s all about as exciting as watching two drawings fight each other on a computer monitor.

In The Hero, as elsewhere, Haley really is dealing with the subject of heroism, but the kind of heroism not usually found in movies, the heroism of daily life.

Intermittently entertaining.

The magnificence of Weisz’s performance — yes, it’s another magnificent performance from Rachel Weisz — is that she is never hiding anything, beyond what a 19th century woman might conceal out of polite reserve. In her every moment on screen, she is an open book. We’re just not seeing all her pages.

There’s just one big problem here: It Comes at Night is about as enjoyable for the audience as it is for the people in the movie. On both sides of the screen, misery reigns.

Band Aid is her (Zoe Lister-Jones) first film as a director — she also wrote and stars in it — and something about her and this film is really appealing.

The Mummy is the rare Cruise film that doesn’t quite give audiences their money’s worth.

One-half of an unremarkable war movie, followed by a touching story about the importance of animals in people’s lives. Fortunately, the stronger part is saved for last.

Cox does a better than average job — almost everybody bombs when playing Churchill — capturing the leader’s seriousness of purpose and the weight of his responsibility. He gives us Churchill’s irascibility, but he doesn’t convey Churchill’s twinkle, his charm or his wit.

Johns is terrific, the heart and soul of the movie, playing the kind of guy that’s the heart and soul of any industrialized country on the planet.

Wonder Woman achieves touching and powerful moments that are unusual for a movie of this kind.

It’s original and idiosyncratic, but Swicord lets herself get away with things another director might not have allowed.

Baywatch should have been a lot more fun.

“Dead Men” is a jumble of half-baked impulses.

Its cinematic stylishness and its attention to modern-day anxiety raise it to something out of the ordinary.

This is a movie that can be enjoyed in different ways and for lots of reasons. It’s dramatic and it’s funny, and it has a warm humanity at its center.

A poorly acted, colossal bore of a film that strikes wrong notes from beginning to end.

The story itself is arresting, and if that’s all “Bang” offered, that would be enough. But “Bang” does more.

In a sense, Jacobs has made a movie about sex that’s not about sex at all. We often hear about “sexual sublimation,” but The Lovers depicts the reverse, which is probably more common, in which sexual adventure becomes the most available substitute for cherished lost dreams.

It’s a funny movie, but it’s also one in which Schumer becomes truly legible, as someone who could be headlining comedies for the next decade or more.

Ritchie aspires to be a great British director, but his working his way through British icons — Sherlock Holmes wasn’t even safe — does no one any good. He just reduces them to his own vernacular, his own level, and he ends up revealing nothing about them and everything about his own narrow vision.

It’s a sci-fi action movie that spoofs the form to strong comic effect, and yet it profits from every good thing about the genre it’s mocking. It tries to have it both ways, and it succeeds.

It’s also a film with horrific shots of open graves. By all means see it if you have the inclination, but do be aware of the experience you’re letting yourself in for.

The documentary takes Tower through his much publicized recent stint as the chef at New York’s Tavern on the Green, a rather hopeless assignment for a perfectionist.

The Circle is very much a plea for the preservation and sanctification of privacy, but it’s nicely constructed in that no one character expresses the film’s distinct point of view.

It doesn’t ascend to the sky. It’s not profound or great. But Vigalondo takes Colossal to all sorts of unexpected places and then brings it home, intact.

In Graduation, Mungiu takes a scalpel and dissects life in modern Romania. He shows what’s wrong with the government and the impact this has on people’s relationships.

It’s Miller, however, who gives the most affecting performance, in that we see the light fade from her eyes. What an awful thing this husband did to her — to praise her for courage and then use all her courage against her.

Ashkenazi is a terrific actor, commanding and grand-scale in his aura, but with an unmistakable warmth. And Gere, cast against type, couldn’t be better. In a career of only good performances, this is one of his best.

The Promise is hardly grotesque; and it has good things in it, but by the end, it just feels like a failed manipulation.

The action is not just big — big is easy. It’s creative. It’s choreographed. It’s unexpected and delightful. It’s lots of fun and a stark contrast to the previous film, “Furious 7,” which was huge but flat, just commotion without inspiration.

In its details, in its characters and their relationships, in the unfolding of its story, and even in the delicacy of its filming, Gifted rises above cynical expectation. Far from a canned piece of work, it feels sincere and inspired.

The Zookeeper’s Wife achieves its grandeur, not through the depiction of grand movements, but through its attentiveness to the shifts and flickers of the soul.

Ghost in the Shell is like an amalgam of 2017 anxieties. Fear of technology. Fear of big business. Fear of being spied upon. Fear of the sacred disappearing, and of the crass, the loud and the empty crowding into every corner of existence — crowding out life itself.

This new film is exceptional and one of Ozon’s best.

Song to Song is Terrence Malick’s first truly awful film. In it, he does all the things that Malick does, except for all the great things that Malick does.

No, T2 is not a great film, but its pleasures are great — and so rare and accomplished that they raise T2 to a level approximating greatness. There is something to be said for a movie this enjoyable. T2 is great enough.

As light entertainment goes, CHiPs is fairly accomplished, and Pena and Shepard make a good team. If someone wants to turn CHiPs into a franchise of some kind, worse things have happened.

Beauty and the Beast creates an air of enchantment from its first moments, one that lingers and builds and takes on qualities of warmth and generosity as it goes along.

It is funny in an absurdist way, but it’s heartfelt, too. It creates unease, but also sympathy.

Kong: Skull Island is a smart SciFi action movie that doesn’t rely on a handful of monsters and random scenes of computerized destruction to run out the clock. It has a smart script, imaginative filmmaking and a cast of fine actors that actually get to act.

This is how bad Table 19 gets: At a certain point in the movie, there is absolutely no reason that any of the characters would remain at the wedding or anywhere near it. So the movie devises a false reason to keep them in the general vicinity.

Get Out reveals an underlying unease. It diffuses tension, even as it points to its source. It may be somewhat rough and unrefined and even ill-considered in some of its particulars. Yet it may stand as a kind of pop culture document of this historical moment, a moment that’s not nearly as funny as this movie.

It’s not a bad film, just, strangely, not a good one.

The narrative is clumsy, and the monster scenes are ridiculous, but not ridiculous enough to be funny, just ridiculous enough to be boring.

For at least an hour of its hour and a half running time, Fist Fight is a complete failure, a sour comedy without laughs. But then something happens in the movie’s last quarter. It doesn’t exactly redeem itself, but it comes into focus and starts making sense on its own weird terms.

No, this is not good. This is just not good.

A strange good movie, bad in every way but its effect. And it’s an effective woman’s story, not exactly believable, but with another kind of truth, a truth of the heart. If that’s not enough, it’s close.

It presents a compelling situation, genuinely touching moments and pockets of strong acting ... and dialogue that has people in the audience turning to each other and laughing because it’s so absurd.

What keeps I Am Not Your Negro just short of greatness is, alas, the competition from Baldwin himself. Watching it, it’s hard not keep wanting to see more of Baldwin and hear less of Jackson.

All the movie’s finer points — of audience response, of interaction, of the dances between people — are conveyed with a specificity so expert that it seems offhand.

This is a movie you might want to talk about afterward, so try to see it with other people.

There’s really nothing else to say about Gold, beyond one general point: It is illustrative of what’s particularly fun about being a critic in January. For most of the year, bad movies have the same general ailments. But in January, they have exotic diseases. They have things wrong with them that you’ve never seen before.

It doesn’t help matters that the movie seems to end three times before it ends, and none of those ends are satisfying.

Keaton is fun to watch — fun and a little bit eerie. He plays Ray as all drive and no soul.

So the bottom line: This is an undeniably effective movie that I mostly enjoyed, even though I’m not altogether sure it should ever have been made.

20th Century Women is not especially dramatic. At times, it eschews drama. Every time the story is on a knife edge and can drop deeper into turmoil or recede back to the normal flows and ebbs of life, Mills chooses the latter. But this time, the strategy works. It feels real.

Almodóvar presents this material in a way that never splits our attention, even as he’s giving us a deluge of sensory and emotional detail. It’s as if he’s internalized the story so completely that he can’t make a gesture — can’t move the camera, can’t shape a moment — without saying something true.

Still, when you’re making a Christian epic and the best thing about it is the guy playing the inquisitor, you have a serious problem.

An Eye for an Eye may very well be the most unpersuasive documentary ever made.

Hardly a riveting experience. It has slow patches, but it has a cumulative effect, thanks equally to Hansen-Love and Huppert. We come away feeling enriched and expanded, without exactly knowing how or why.

Why Him? takes a comic situation and then does everything it can to undermine it. It’s more than unfunny. It’s anti-funny. It doesn’t provoke laughter or even neutral silence, but an increasingly stunned disdain. It is the movie equivalent of putting on a plaster life mask and letting it dry and lock your face into an expression of blank misery.

Washington delivers not only one of the year’s best performances, but one of the best self-directed performances in cinema history.

A pleasant surprise. What looked to be yet another science fiction movie turns out to be one of the year’s few romantic dramas, one which just happens to be set aboard a space ship.

It is old-fashioned in a good way, classical and well-acted, and that it has no surprises keeps it from being disappointing, even as it keeps it from being great.

In the end it all seems a little too glib, too easy and not quite true.

It’s a beautiful and hopeful film, coming at a time when there isn’t much beauty or hope in our movies, and it’s the type of picture — a sprawling, exuberant musical drama — that hasn’t been seen in decades.

It’s a downer. It’s morally tangled. The characters are as depressed as the scenario, and Michael Giacchino’s music can’t make it better.

Miss Sloane is one of the year’s handful of great actress vehicles, and Chastain takes this role by the throat, smashes it against the wall about ten times and then devours it while it’s still quivering. You want to see star acting on a grand scale? Miss Sloane is the movie to see.

It is a mess of a film, botched but also misconceived, with a central performance by Natalie Portman that evokes nothing about Jackie Kennedy, beyond the stylish clothes and the secret smoking.

Affleck is magnificent, but the movie is something less than that, because it can’t completely overcome some built-in challenges.

Rules Don’t Apply feels unbalanced in terms of story, and it has a big sag in the middle. But the good things in it are so good that they make it a fairly worthwhile experience.

He )Robert Zemeckis) creates a movie that is old-fashioned in every possible good way, but that in no way seems passe or cliched.

Verhoeven creates an elegant frame for his lead actress and lets her fill it, and what we end up with is Huppert’s best collaboration with a director since the death of Claude Chabrol.

There’s a mood, a feeling about life, that pervades Nocturnal Animals, one that’s expressed in visual terms.

Taking place mostly over the course of a single day, it’s a smart and languorous film that finds time to luxuriate in conversations and to create a feeling for small-town American life.

While The Edge of Seventeen does deliver on the promise of being funny, it’s mostly dead serious and deserving of respect and attention. It’s far from the usual thing — and better than the usual thing.

The atmosphere of Loving, the feeling it evokes, is the film’s most distinct quality. The mood is somber and restrained, and the characters — not just the principals, but the people they know — seem beaten down.

Hacksaw Ridge is one of the best films of 2016. And the victory is all the more sweet for Gibson in that he succeeds on his own weird terms.

Cumberbatch fleshes out a portrait of uncompromised and resolute selfhood. In that way, he carries us and the movie over some long stretches of blue-screen emptiness.

The result is a beautiful void, a structureless emptiness buoyed by some good scenes and performances.

Every year, we get only a few of these, movies that come out of nowhere, that are different, unexpected and wonderfully right. Moonlight is that kind of movie, one of the gems of 2016.

It is a satisfying but thoroughly idiotic film, in which relationships make no sense, character motivations change on a dime, and Tom Hanks has weird hair. But brainless as it is, it’s artful. It is a well-made bit of silliness, a piece of construction optimally designed to maintain audience interest while garnering absolutely no one’s respect.

We end up with a movie in which it becomes very possible to respect the intent and yet be frustrated by the result.

An earnest film, a well-acted film and, despite the presence of a star director, a generous film. As a director, McGregor is good to his co-stars and highlights them throughout. But the energy drops out of the last third of the picture, and takes with it much of its aura of importance.

Neither funny nor exciting. It’s at best incongruous, the kind of incongruity that seems delightful on the page but not in practice.

This is a superior and assured action movie, a quality product that makes the case for a franchise.

As a child, I worried about nuclear war. It never occurred to me that I should have been worried about a nuclear accident.

Much of it is enjoyable and has the aura of a superior action film, but it collapses into a laughable wreck and ultimately reveals itself as a mild waste of two hours.

It’s a satisfying drama that inverts the usual way of building interest and suspense. Instead of wondering what’s going to happen, we sit with the knowledge and wait for every character to react to what we already know.

Weisz’s conviction, passion and galvanizing outrage drive Denial. For a Jewish academic, this was no intellectual exercise, and Weisz lets us see it. Between the frames, Weisz likewise assures us that Denial is no routine movie for a Jewish actress.

The most exciting contribution to The Girl on the Train is that of Wilson. It’s exciting because it shows that it’s possible, despite the odds, for a distinctive screenwriter to express herself consistently and dominate a film. And it’s exciting because this is a unique voice, and very much a woman’s voice, that our cinema needs.

As a film, The Birth of a Nation is raw and ungainly, but it’s definitely alive.

What results isn’t a straight autobiography, obviously, but rather the autobiography of a career and, most importantly, the autobiography of a spirit.

Masterminds delivers for the most part. Kate McKinnon, as David’s wife, does her usual frozen-face, crazy-eyed weird thing, but this time she’s funny.

It has scale, spectacle and a cast of good actors who seem to believe in what they’re doing. But the movie springs to life only in spurts.

A Tale of Love and Darkness is a dead film, an eminently worthy corpse.

Southside With You proves once and for all that a romantic film doesn’t rely on suspense. We know these people are getting together. What holds us to our seats is wondering how it will happen.

The problem comes down to this: If you take the spirituality out of Ben-Hur, you take the Ben-Hur out of Ben-Hur.

The movie is as interesting as spying on your neighbors during the most interesting 85 minutes of their lives.

In the end, what makes Equity an intelligent and honest movie keeps it from being a total crowd-pleaser.

It’s mildly amusing when it should be funny, sentimental when it should be deep and all too easy when it should be unsettling. It’s still some kind of success, but a modest one.

Like the best wines and the best films, there’s a complexity to the finish, so that it reverberates with meanings beyond the obvious. Indignation has the disconcerting quality of truth and is an altogether adult piece of work.

It’s the kind of torment you can wish on your worst enemy without feeling too guilty, not something to inflict permanent damage, just two hours of soul-sickening confusion and sensory torment.

The complicated truth is that the Internet’s dangers are entwined with its pleasures, the allure of instant fame, the illusion of contact with masses of people. Nerve is the first movie to capture all that, and the result is a successful and memorable thriller.

The character motivations are weak, and the story is poorly structured. But its camera work, possibly intended to distract audiences from the movie’s flaws, only compounds its problems. It distances the audience and makes Jason Bourne a chore to sit through.

You can’t make a raunchy comedy and a sentimental paean to motherhood at the same time. You have to choose either one or the other. Raunchiness or sincerity. Try to do both, and you end up with a flailing, unfunny wreck, like the mix of contradictory and self-defeating impulses that we find here.

Lights Out presents actual characters that are interesting, that have rough edges, that act like real people, not victims in waiting.

With Star Trek Beyond, the rebooted “Star Trek” franchise that features the original crew of the Enterprise, settles into routine sequel territory. This isn’t terrible news, and it may have been inevitable, but it’s something of a letdown all at the same.

It’s a nice movie, and perfectly watchable — yet it’s hard to escape the sense that it should have been more.

To put it bluntly, Wiig and McCarthy are funny, but Kate McKinnon and Leslie Jones aren’t. McKinnon, in particular, is shockingly out of place, and she helps drag down the movie.

There have been many movies about cops working undercover, but The Infiltrator is different. It shows the difficulty of it, the almost-second-by-second stress involved in having to be yourself without being yourself, and having to seem relaxed without ever relaxing. It’s possible to get nervous just thinking about this movie.

The film’s thoroughness is a virtue or a problem, depending on one’s point of view.

From the movie’s first minute, viewers will know they’re in the hands of a sure-footed storyteller.

Comedy is getting more and more nasty and more and more funny. But it’s hard to imagine any movie more nasty-funny than Mike and Dave Need Wedding Dates.

The movie becomes inventive in new ways and even cheery. It’s a true delight.

For almost an hour, it keeps us off balance. But once we find that balance, the movie seems to coast.

In the end, what we have here is a Tarzan movie made by people who don’t understand the appeal of Tarzan. He’s about joy and abandon and the fantasy of living in harmony with creation. He’s not about the struggle in the Congo.

Therapy for a Vampire has nothing to say. It just has stuff happening, none of it repulsive and all of it performed by competent actors, but that’s just not enough.

It’s oddly worth seeing.

Free State of Jones is an extraordinarily ambitious film, and for that reason, it’s not perfect.

It’s a strength, not a weakness, of Jacquot’s that he makes movies about people. The ideas can take care of themselves.

For those interested in this rich period in American literature, it’s a treat.

The movie makes a point, but it doesn’t build on it. And so the movie becomes as dull and depressing for us as it must be for the central character.

Me Before You is just a little better than it had to be. It’s not so much better that it escapes being what it is, a sort-of romance, liberally sprinkled with moments of corniness and emotional dishonesty. But ultimately, when it matters, it’s truthful — about the people depicted, and who they are, and what they face.

“Popstar” has more going for it than outrageousness, though it certainly has that. It has genuine outrage, a good-humored but clear-eyed take on today’s pop culture as a morass of corruption, idiocy and relentless self-promotion.

There’s also a lightness in the tone that yet allows for real emotion and impressive performances. Maggie’s Plan doesn’t quite transcend the limits of the romantic comedy genre, but it pushes at them.

If you see Alice Through the Looking Glass, prepare to lean forward in your seat just to stay awake.

Love & Friendship looks splendid. If the costumes by Eimer Ni Mhaoldomhnaigh (“Cavalry”) were any more beautiful, they’d be too beautiful.

That’s all it is, a little bit funny.

Angourie Rice, who plays Gosling’s intelligent and highly moral 12-year-old, deserves a special mention. The character is an unexpected presence that adds dimension to the story, and Rice plays her beautifully.

A Bigger Splash takes four characters with strong needs, drops them into a single location and invites us to watch what happens. It’s strange how compelling that can be.

This is the best disappointing movie you will see all year.

Neither resting on formula nor audience goodwill, the “X-Men” series is going deeper and getting better as it goes along.

In a way it’s just another well-made thriller, but there are things here — currents captured, ideas frozen in time — that might make it more interesting as the years pass. For the time being, it’s good entertainment and deserves to be seen now.

The lively setting helps, but the main attration here is the familiar story, which has been around forever and yet never gets old.

L’Attesa — also known as “The Wait” — is atmospheric and moody, serious and full of portent; and if it weren’t so good, it would probably be unbearable.

Robert Downey Jr. gets to remind everybody that before this blockbuster turn he was actually a serious actor and may still be again. Stark’s frustration at the rigidity and short-sightedness of his confreres and his anguish at where it all leads are vivid and felt.

A remarkable treat. It contains information about the writer heretofore unknown, and though it’s a dramatic feature and not a documentary, it claims to tell the truth, without embellishment. Even better, it was written by someone who saw the events depicted firsthand.

Writer-director Lorene Scafaria based the movie on her own mother, and the clothes that Sarandon wears in the film actually belong to Scafaria’s mother. They fit Sarandon well, and so does the role.

The overall aura is kind of ... welcoming. It’s impossible to take seriously, but easy to take.

Shannon is worth seeing, and so is Spacey — hunched over, doing a funny impression of Nixon’s voice and body language. But this time the actors are better than the material.

A Hologram for the King has great energy, and also a languorous, lived-in quality.

Joachim Trier is a Norwegian filmmaker who made a strong debut in 2011, with his film, “Oslo, August 31.” Louder Than Bombs is his first English-language effort, and it’s disappointing.

A resoundingly unlovable movie that almost resists being watched.

A funny movie, but also a serious movie, and — who knows? — maybe an important one.

It’s a preening piece of work, aiming to flatter and please, while masquerading as something hard-hitting and daring. And because of all that, it’s a bore.

Criminal depicts a compelling situation, made rich and entertaining through its extreme characters.

Midnight Special is a sincere movie, but sometimes sincerity is half the problem.

Surely, there’s the potential here for a kind of Country and Western “Amadeus.” Instead we get I Saw the Light, which will do until something better comes along.

As Marguerite, Frot is a completely open vessel, ready to receive the muse that cannot come. She has a childlike quality here, but she also seems (and this is both funny and sad) very much the mature artist.

It’s a good, not great, movie, but it has some of the elements that make Linklater’s work special. Few filmmakers are quite as keyed into the passing of time, as the source of all sweetness and heartache in the human experience.

Nia Vardalos has such a warm, alert energy that’s impossible to hate My Big Fat Greek Wedding 2, even as it’s impossible to like it, even a little.

“Batman v Superman” is an insanely long and convoluted action movie, made worse by an air of importance. It’s dispiriting and visually bland.

There’s a nude scene that comes out of nowhere that’s almost embarrassing. Why is it there? Like the movie itself, it’s almost daring, except it’s not.

Combines the usual dumb ideas with one good one. And not just good, but impressive, in that it makes sense of much of what went before.

Eye in the Sky is refreshing in its lack of a political message. Mirren is chilling as the cold-blooded colonel.

Usually, with movies, you can imagine how they were made — how the idea came, and the process of its creation. But Knight of Cups seems as if it arrived whole. If there’s a better film this year, get ready for a very good year.

At one point, this movie had me so on edge that I had a fleeting impulse to run out of the theater. It might be weird to say that and mean it as a compliment, but good thrillers work that way sometimes.

An entertaining film. Few will agree with every word spoken, but Chomsky’s vision of history is worth encountering and considering.

Margot Robbie plays Tanya, Kim’s best friend and professional rival, and it’s a real asset to have someone with that kind of a star wattage in a supporting role.

Gods of Egypt is an epic — an epic disaster.

Maybe it’s unfair, but I came away feeling cheated by Eddie the Eagle. It’s a jolly real-life tale about an underdog who made a splash at the 1988 Winter Olympics, and it does make you feel good, but it turns out that the film’s story is 90 percent fiction.

Triple 9 is terrific melodrama, but it’s melodrama all the same, and shameless.

Whatever your religious affiliation, you will come away thinking that if all this did actually happen, it probably happened something like this.

This is a profound saga that makes for a great American movie.

How to Be Single is over a half hour before it’s over.

As a piece of filmmaking, Where to Invade Next gets off to a strong start and then sags in the last half hour, but it makes a lot of interesting points and, in the way it shows other countries, conveys something about the United States.

Sometimes unapologetically stupid and joyously crass, it’s often brilliant in its absurdity, one of those rare comedies where the audience sits there dumbstruck, wondering what crazy thing will happen next. It takes really smart people to make a movie this silly.

This is bad, borderline garbage, but disturbing, too, in that it’s just the kind of fake-clever awfulness that might be cinema’s future.

Compared with other Jane Austen movies, it isn’t much, but compared with other zombie apocalypse movies, it’s an intelligent, literate effort.

One of the Coens’ most inspired, bizarre touches is to cast Tilda Swinton as rival gossip columnists, twins who hate each other. She’s quite funny — blithe and vindictive in one incarnation, insecure and vindictive in the other.

45 Years is very much an English film and in the best sense. It’s subtle, understated and ultimately devastating, but only if you’re paying attention.

It does not follow the usual pattern of a Hollywood film. It goes to places that are desperate and irrevocable.

At 100 minutes, it feels about 80 minutes too long, and that’s not a good sign. Lazer Team might have made a fun and pleasant short.