Nick Schager

A movie manufactured to tug at the heartstrings. That it does so this gracefully and movingly is a testament to Winslet’s understated stewardship and a script by her son, Joe Anders, whose manipulations are as gentle as they are affecting.

Yanking unashamedly at the heartstrings, however, it’s a manipulative and uneven tune that strains to elicit the sniffles it so hungrily seeks.

Proves a deliriously amusing vehicle for both glamorous, charismatic actresses. It won’t win Sweeney or Seyfried any prizes, but it’s the sort of hysterical thriller that, in the ’80s and ’90s, was a theatrical staple.

To a greater extent than its franchise mates, Avatar: Fire and Ash is drunk on its own extravagance, unaware that it’s offering up nothing new that might justify its absurd Sturm und Drang.

A tour-de-force of unbound creativity, its silky staging, enchanting performances, and playful inventiveness combining to make it one of the year’s undisputed big-screen highlights.

Its phoniness epitomized by Emma Mackey’s lead turn, it’s the biggest dud of the artist’s career, and the holiday season’s most egregious misfire.

A taut, tense, of-the-moment thriller with real (reel?) bite.

Strap in, hold on, and succumb to this ecstatically inventive one-of-a-kind film.

An assured directorial debut about media reliability that unnerves by embracing the unknown.

[Its] sole imperative appears to be boring its audience to death.

With star Imogen Poots vividly capturing the roiling contradictions born from her character’s crises, it’s a raw, rugged wound of a film.

The charismatic Pfeiffer deserves much, much better than this soggy stocking stuffer.

A breakneck rollercoaster—about ping pong!—infused with a manic desperation that’s almost as electric as its athletic centerpieces are taut.

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.