Nick Schager

If its melodrama is unabashedly manipulative, it’s not altogether ineffective at eliciting waterworks.

Largely faithful but unwilling to pick a funny or nasty lane, it’s the most impersonal film of its writer/director’s career, and a revolutionary thriller that too often falls back on establishment conventions.

Its most impressive feat, however, is finding a way to somehow be even duller than its predecessors.

Undone by storytelling that, however well-intentioned, coats its real-life tale in a corny Hollywood sheen.

A film about the unremarkable that’s anything but.

A story about home, inheritance, and fiction’s ability to reveal truths capable of bringing alienated individuals together, it’s a tumultuous, moving triumph.

The series’ second-best installment and a rousing start to what appears to be a grand new franchise future.

With an uninhibited fieriness that’s rooted in profound need and longing, Lawrence—opposite a beleaguered Robert Pattinson—delivers one the finest performances of her career, energizing the writer/director’s portrait of feminine rage, sorrow, and mania.

A raucous mélange of the demented and the degrading, indulging in the very garish, grotesque, X-rated madness it condemns.

Save for a single sterling jolt, his compendium of clichés is a case study in knowing a genre’s tricks but doing absolutely nothing of interest with them.

Stone is a mesmerizing riot in this bleak satire of our current state of disorder—as is her co-star Jesse Plemons, who matches her intensity and manages to outdo her craziness.

Even at its stagiest, it’s a film that, courtesy of both its director and star, burns with unbridled passions.

A film whose tension (and inventiveness) waxes and wanes, although courtesy of Hawke’s unforgettable masked fiend, it continues to boast an iconic horror movie visage destined to ruin viewers’ sleep.

If [Cooper’s] third behind-the-camera venture rarely gets completely under the surface, it nonetheless hits a sufficient number of wise and witty notes.

A caustic portrait of the rat race as legitimately killer, and another feather in the cap of one of world cinema’s true maestros.

A thriller in name only, it has all the grace and cunning of an anvil to the head.

A sly, sinister film about self-loathing, sacrifice, and the things people will do to survive—with a great tormented performance from Dakota Fanning at its center.

In an age of bland, unimaginative cookie-cutter blockbusters, there’s something refreshing about a movie that puts a premium on looking and sounding badass.

Buoyed by a superb cast headlined by Adam Driver and Cate Blanchett, it’s a film of quiet, droll grace, even if it’s delicateness occasionally veers into slightness.

[Its] vignettes are uneven and occasionally repetitive and yet, at their best, deliver the sort of macabre mood and mayhem that make the series an enduring spooky-season pleasure.

With an aesthetic ingenuity to match its pooch’s impressively expressive performance, it’s a thriller that ably justifies its central gimmick.

While its humor often sticks, its mayhem fails to land.

Mistakenly assumes that the woe-is-me routines of the rich and famous are the stuff of great drama.

A timely cautionary tale whose overwhelming suspense is apt to leave viewers sick with dread.

Though its daring gestures don’t always pay off, it’s a tale of internal and external brutality, of fathers, sons and clans scarred by violence, that serves as a sturdy showcase for its exceptional star.

Affords Julia Roberts with her best part in years as a professor whose role in a burgeoning scandal threatens to expose her deep, dark (related) secrets. She’s not enough, however, to make this wannabe-conversation starter coherent, much less insightful.

Saying little but speaking volumes about American disaffection, apathy, self-interest, and foolishness, [O’Connor’s] performance bolsters this askew heist film and cements his status as cinema’s most magnetic new leading man.

It builds to revelations that speak emphatically to social shallowness, pressures and prejudices—even if, in the end, its bombshells resonate as less surprising than inevitable.