Peter Travers

Even marking on a B-movie curve, Unhinged is running on empty.

The film is torn between a tough-minded plea for animal rights and edge-free, PG family entertainment. But its advocacy of kindness to man and animal is indisputable.

A striking film that frustratingly never coheres but still holds you in thrall.

Though Yeon can still deliver memorable frights, like the car horn that literally does wake the dead, he can’t decide what kind of movie to make. So he does a genre mashup, tops it with a sappy ending, and hopes for the best. The result is decidedly uneven.

Forget who wins or loses, Boys State is about that promise of change in the air. And it’s exhilarating.

The mutual grief and abiding love felt by the Irish actor, 68, and his son, 25, cuts close to home and brings the film a touching honesty it otherwise sorely lacks.

Rey deserves credit for comic observations that sting.

The desert outpost, mostly shot in Morocco by the gifted cinematographer Chris Menges (a two-time Oscar winner for his camera work on The Killing Fields and The Mission), becomes a powerful symbol of human decency trying to hold out under the brutal siege of alleged law and order. It’s thuddingly obvious who the real barbarians are.

Blunt honesty and rare introspection sets Howard apart from the usual cut-and-paste trips down memory lane.

Still, a movie that even glancingly grapples with questions of ethnic and spiritual identity, past and present, is hardly hack work. It’ll do in a pickle.

A sweet, soft-centered pastoral drama that’s never as tough-minded as you want it to be. Thankfully, in her feature debut as a filmmaker, playwright Jessica Swale shows a genuine flair with actors.

Never mind the curveballs that Radioactive throws audiences on its defiantly unconventional journey into a defiantly unconventional life. Maria Salomea Skłodowska Curie has been done proud.

What elevates The Rental is the dynamite acting from the four leads.

Extending its litany of horrors to nearly three hours, the film is certainly an endurance test. Yet its potent presentation, notably Vladimir Smutny’s striking monochromatic cinematography, gives the film the raw impact of a documentary.

The trouble does not emerge from the movie’s noble intentions, but from the stodgy manner in which they play out.

Relic marks an auspicious debut for Japanese-Australian director Natalie Erika James, who wants her slow-building thriller to seep into your bones rather than pound you with cheap scares.

Palm Springs suggests that repetition can kill sex drives, marriages, and even the will to live. Yet it still leaves you laughing gratefully at the resilience of love.

Theron has already showed her talent for bringing a deeper dimension to action as Furiosa in "Mad Max: Fury Road." Here, the actor reveals the toll that living forever is taking on Andy, who took a year off to heal emotional scars before her reluctant return to battle.

The Outpost gets it crucially right by bringing home the meaning of heroism as a collective action. The you-are-there ferocity of this sequence, brilliantly abetted by the prowling, handheld camerawork of Lorenzo Senatore, ranks with the best interpretations of combat on film. Your nerves will be shattered, guaranteed.

It’s the essential conflict between mother and daughter that brings The Truth into Kore-eda territory, where life is always a delicate balance. He’s lucky to have Deneuve and Binoche tempering the verbal fireworks with a tenderness that that allows for pain, regret and the hard-won knowledge that they must both face the truth to move on.

It’s an indisputable classic.

There is nothing distinctive about this toxic available-on-demand tripe except the absence of Mark Polish, though Michael didn’t spare his wife Kate Bosworth from acting duty in a thankless role. One thing’s for sure: This downpour of offensive ethnic stereotyping is a total washout.

It’s impossible for Ferrell and McAdams to top Stevens for campy pyrotechnics, so they’re left to hard-sell a Lars-Sigrit romance that’s too tepid to strike a jaja ding dong.

Movie junkies, rejoice. Director Peter Medak has made an instructive and nightmarishly funny documentary about how actor Peter Sellers drove him crazy and nearly trashed his career.

In a twist ending, Stewart leaves us wondering if gaming the system is preferable to changing it. Can a political satire that dances on the border between silly and profound really make us take off the blinders, even for a few hours?

In the hands of first-time feature director Shannon Murphy — who crushed it in both of the Season Three Killing Eve episodes she helmed — and screenwriter Rita Kalnejais, who adapted her own play, Babyteeth rips past the hackneyed tropes of illness drama to dig out what’s fresh in the familiar.

Your chances for enjoying this will depend on giving up a search for depth and just strapping in for a B-movie hell ride.

Fort Worth native Channing Godfrey Peoples, making a striking feature debut as director and screenwriter, knows this place in her bones. She’s crafted a keenly observant and emotionally resonant debut film that feels authentically lived in.

It’s slog, slog, slog, all the way.

The best way to handle this relentlessly nice movie that deserved a touch of nasty, is to enjoy the few flashes of what have been before the sheer heaviness of the production stomps out all the fun.

This is a lobbed grenade. But it’s also personal filmmaking at its prodding, profound best. This is a Spike Lee joint and a Spike Lee history lesson. Prepare to be schooled.

The result is both emotional and a comic knockout.

In the context this documentary provides for the cult classic, it makes you want to see "Showgirls" again regardless of whether you belong to that cult or not.

This ultra-violent, ultra-stupid smarm-bomb deserves to take a few lumps before shuffling off to the digital boneyard.

All praise to Elisabeth Moss, who brilliantly plays Jackson as a volcano on the verge of eruption, and director Josephine Decker, whose experimental "Madeline’s Madeline" reveled in leaving folks in a twist.

What makes it one of the best (and most unclassifiable) movies of the year is the hypnotic way it keeps re-inventing itself from scene to scene.

What does work is hearing Grace take the stage for a new song, “Love Myself” that shows Ross can hold the screen as if by divine right. Loving her is easy — it’s swallowing the movie’s sudsy, soap-operatics that’s hard.

In these times of pandemic isolation it’s no crime to look for the film equivalent of comfort food. Military Wives, though deeply reliant on formula and wrapped in a blanket of bland, fits the bill.

One adjective you don’t hear much anymore is “preposterous,” defined as “contrary to nature, reason or common sense.” Yet the word applies perfectly to Inheritance, a blithering botch job of a thriller that begs the question: “Come on, are you f**king kidding me?”

The Lovebirds knows how to send out a laugh with a sting in its tail. That’s what they call inspired lunacy.

A tale of alien abduction, Proxmity serves as an in-and-out impressive calling card for debuting feature writer and director Eric Demeusy.

From its generic title to an ending you can see coming from outer space, Blood and Money follows a path rutted with enough clichés to cover the three million acres of Maine forest land where the film is set.

Aside from Hardy’s full-on commitment, Capone seems too dramatically dull and laborious to support its ambition as a subversive biopic or a deeply personal take on public vilification.

All credit to O’Sullivan, Thompson and a tone-perfect cast for creating a film that moves to the rhythms of life as its lived rather than fantasized. Saint Frances retains its rough edges to that last. And that’s some kind of miracle.

Hope Gap is a deeply personal project for Nicholson, who is performing an autopsy on the marriage of his own parents, with him as the son trying to be faithful and fair to both combatants.

What does matter, besides the collection of deranged characters who can’t escape their limitations, is the southern-fried atmosphere so resonantly captured by DP Steven Meizler (Contagion).

It’s funny — as is a lot of this eager-to-please, all-over-the-place movie — thanks to the dry snap of Moran’s dialogue and Feldstein’s exhilarating performance.

Blue Story is a 91-minute assault of sound and image that leaves no doubt about the vicious cycle of gang violence it presents. Prepare to be wowed.

Despite its fluid sexuality, The Half of It turns out to be less of a love story than a funny, touching and vital look into the nature of friendship.

In the end, the audience is rewarded with a steadily riveting provocation that jabs at the culture of money that makes us all complicit.

Visually, however, True History speaks volumes. In tandem with MacKay, whose incendiary performance finds method in Ned’s growing madness, Kurzel and his crew of merry, malicious pranksters blow the dust off a calcified outlaw history to bring something elemental and transgressive to the screen.

No judgments here if you just want to hang back and let nonstop gore, gunfire, and explosions numb you into submission. Take that, COVID-19.

Though the movie stalls frequently before it finds its balance, Woodley makes us care.

Sergio is not a film about a saint or a sinner, but an attempt that succeeds more often than not to create a portrait of a man in full. Yes, it also occasionally puts him on a pedestal — but in these dark days, advocating for hope and idealism feels exactly right.

Trolls World Tour hits the home market at exactly the right time, celebrating music as a joyful, community experience that excludes no one. Nothing wrong with a movie, even this kiddie piffle, that steps up and does that.

For those who mistake Love Wedding Repeat for a comedy with actual laughs, consider yourselves warned.

Helms, a master jester on The Office, seems to have forgotten everything he’s ever learned about comic timing to judge by fiasco. Since Coffee and Kareem also credits Helms as a producer, he has only himself to blame.

Jakubowicz achieves maximum impact by keeping our eyes on the man in the invisible box, one trying to teach children that the power of art can literally be a saving grace.

Using their voices for demonstrations and protests, they helped pass 1990’s revolutionary Americans With Disabilities Act. This documentary proves that they are still changing the world.

There’s no doubting Potter’s laudable ambition to capture the swirling headspace of her brother, who died in 2013. But in trying to restore his dignity in fighting the dying of the light, she’s neglected to portray him in the human terms that would let us share his spirit.

The friendship at the heart of this film, as indelibly portrayed by two brilliant young actresses — Flanigan is a wonder to behold, while Ryder nails just the right notes of supportive and warmly sympathetic — is a thing of beauty. Hittman’s urgent film is an emotional wipeout. It’s hard to watch. It’s also impossible to forget.

What a bummer that a movie that paints itself as a scintillating, sexually-charged, art-world thriller ends in a swamp of failed intentions.

Cornball? Maybe. But it helps that O’Connor dexterously avoids the usual lump-in-the-throat tearjerking. And it helps even more that the star radiates a soul-deep belief that it’s the small steps that matter more than a rah-rah victory. He makes us root for Jack — just us The Way Back makes us root for Affleck, no matter how long the road ahead.

You’ll laugh. You’ll cry. But first you have to cut through the noise.

Wobbly but well-intentioned broadside against racism.

The Zeitlins have dreamed since childhood of bringing their version of "Peter Pan" to the screen. Their collective imaginative powers are indisputable. But what started as a visually gripping, fiercely funny, and emotionally centered take on Wendy’s mission statement (“The more you grow up, the less things you get to do that you wanna”) ends in a chaotic clutter that deserves, well, the hook.

The Invisible Man is a chilling mind-bender that strikes at our deepest fears — the ones we can’t see.

Ford is at his droll, grumpy-old-man best, so he can do his own acting without having his emotions computer generated. At least for now.

On film, The Last Thing He Wanted settles for just being hollow. It’s the last thing any of us wanted.

With the help of cinematographer Christopher Blauvelt, composers Isobel Waller-Bridge and David Schweitzer, and Alexandra Byrne’s spectacular costumes, the film captures the whirl of a predatory society that can no longer hide behind surface prettiness. That sounds a lot like right now.

The only genuine, blood-curdling scream incited by this stupefyingly dull time- and money-waster comes at the end, when the notion dawns that Blumhouse’s Fantasy Island is meant to spawn sequels. Stop it now, before it kills again.

The Photograph comes down with a teary case of "The Notebook," laying on flashbacks that yank us out of the present, where our stars live, and into a past riddled with sentimental clichés.

Downhill is sure as hell not the farce it’s been advertised to look like in the trailer. And you’ll search in vain for "Force Majeure’s" grounding in existential crisis. I don’t know what the Swedes would call Downhill. What’s Swedish for an unholy mess?

The fight scenes grow numbing as the birds take on the goons in melees that add up mostly to noise. All you feel is numb as Yan piles on one brawl after another to give the illusion that something is happening. Nothing really is. Birds of Prey and its ilk are empty calories, not meant to disturb when they dazzle. Joker, whatever its shortcomings, tackled a festering society that created its own monsters. Slapping the topical theme of female empowerment on a story that trucks in business-as-usual violence does not qualify as a game-changer — or a reason to go to the movies.

The Lodge strains credulity beyond the breaking point; “contrived” is the mildest word you could use to describe the plot. Luckily, Franz and Fiala are masters of setting a mood that makes your skin crawl. And Keough — she’s Elvis’s eldest granddaughter — is a subtle sensation.

You can feel the desperation of the filmmakers as they throw in fist fights, car chases, and, yes, more wig changes to give an illusion of momentum to a grab bag of botched ideas. No sale.

Green’s slow-burn style might not spell box-office windfall in a cinema era of short attention spans, but her artistry is indisputable.

Robinson means to leave you in tears, no matter how heavy-handed his approach. But the sentimental ending that suggests all loose ends have been tied up does a disservice to the battle ahead and a war still to be won in the name of the people left to pick up the pieces.

This out-and-out disaster dissolves in a puddle of botched intentions that will leave children sad and confused and adults scratching their heads.

It’s a bumpy ride for sure, but Smith and Lawrence haven’t lost their irresistible mojo and Bad Boys For Life plays like a blast of retro ’90s action. It’s like they never left.

What we have here is a comedy on life support, with Haddish and Byrne valiantly performing futile acts of resuscitation. Sorry to report: The patient died.

Shot three years ago, this soggy horrorshow gives credence to the belief that January is the month Hollywood uses to bury its mistakes.

If you want to see what great acting is, watch Alfre Woodard deliver a master class in Clemency.

It’s the actors who make this real-life legal procedural come alive.

The burning intensity of MacKay’s face, reflecting the ferocity and futility of war, leaves an indelible mark. His fervor, coupled with the creative passion that Mendes infuses in every frame, makes 1917 impossible to shake.

Surprisingly timely and enduringly timeless.

Attention, moviegoers searching for the worst movie of the year: We have a late-breaking winner. Cats slips in right under the radar and easily scores as the bottom of the 2019 barrel — and arguably of the decade. Even Michael Bay’s trash trilogy of soul-destroying Transformers movies can’t hold a candle. What happened?

The result is often chaos, but it’s also a euphoric blast of pulse-quickening adventure, laced with humor and heart.

In Seberg, Kristen Stewart gives a fully-inhabited, body-and-soul performance as a Hollywood casualty pushed beyond the limit. It’s such a stellar turn that she almost redeems this well-meaning but wobbly biopic — which earns points for trying to do her justice.

You could do way worse if you’re looking for a comic blast for the holidays.

An explosive piece of entertainment that also means to make a difference. Listen up.

Malick has created a war film without a single scene of war, of Jewish persecution, of the thought process that helped Franz hold steadfast. It’s one thing to fashion a film about one man’s blind faith; it’s another to keep audiences in the dark about the fundamentals that made him human.

Cheers, too, for the tangy bite Sam Rockwell brings to Jewell’s Libertarian attorney Watson Bryant, a rebel whose methods rile the status quo and sometimes his own client.

Oscar voters pretend not to see that Sandler’s a clown who can, almost by an act of will, stand toe-to-toe with the best we’ve got.

Imagine "Invasion of the Body Snatchers" for the age of antidepressants — that’s Little Joe, the seventh feature (and first in English) from Austrian provocateur Jessica Hausner (Lourdes, Amour Fou).

Portrait of a Lady on Fire is enthralling on every level. In her hypnotic and haunting film, alive with humor, heartbreak and swooning sensuality, Sciamma has created nothing less than a timeless work of art.

The Aeronauts is hobbled time and again by the attempt to add the juice of fiction to a story that could and should have stood on its own. The truth, in Hollywood terms, is never enough.

As the film moves toward its painfully inevitable climax, Queen and Slim fulfills the promise made by Waithe and Matzoukas to create a new form of protest art. Their film isn’t meant to lionize these two everyday people-turned-folk heroes, but to celebrate their strength and pride.

Want to see a master class in acting? Watch Jonathan Pryce and Anthony Hopkins show how it’s done in The Two Popes, a fiercely moving and surprisingly funny provocation that pivots on speculative conversations between the German John Ratzinger, a.k.a. Pope Benedict XVI (Hopkins), and Argentine Cardinal Jorge Mario Bergoglio (Pryce), the future Pope Francis.

What a kick to watch whip-smart director Rian Johnson shake the cobwebs off the whodunit genre and make it snap to stylish, wickedly entertaining life for a new generation. That’s what happens in Knives Out, a mystery that takes the piss out of Agatha Christie clichés.

What makes it a Haynes film, besides the evocative camera genius of Haynes regular Ed Lachman, is something intangible and mysterious. The director’s admirers will think immediately of "Safe," the 1995 indie classic starring Julianne Moore as a wife and mother who thinks she’s being poisoned by something unidentifiable in the environment. That feeling of dread pervades throughout, and deepens the film’s scarily timely themes beyond the usual demands of docudrama.

You leave this movie with questions about this odd-duck of a humanist, who eased children through the thorny feelings that come with fear, bullying, divorce, and trauma. You also leave grateful for how Hanks and Heller respect the privacy and complexity of a man who knew life was never as simple as it looks. A Beautiful Day in the Neighborhood is a movie that speaks from the heart. Let it in.

Disney delivers an uneven but sensationally entertaining sequel to the Oscar winner that pulls out all the stops.

We could give you 21 reasons not to see 21 Bridges — and not single one that’s worth the price of admission.

Luckily, Stewart, Balinska, and Scott are just the angels you need when a movie needs rescuing. They make the salvage operation that is Charlie’s Angels go down easy.

Guided by the fierce, fully committed performances of Driver and Bening,The Report is a bristling reminder that truth still matters. Naïve? Maybe. But, damn, do we need it now.

Luckily, Mangold fuels his true-life plot with enough flesh-and-blood action to leave you dizzy.

Even in the face of grievous misfortune, the characters created by Schults exude a tenderness that allows this achingly intimate drama to move past sorrow and hit you like a shot in the heart.

Emmerich can crack the whip on computer pixels like nobody’s business. But in sacrificing a reckoning on the human toll of war for cardboard characterization and showoff fx, he’s left an empty space where the soul of the film should be.

Doctor Sleep relies way too much on borrowed inspiration and eventually runs out of — pardon the word — steam. But this flawed hybrid and King and Kubrick still has the stuff to keep you up nights.

How does a small tale of love found and lost emerge as a major triumph and one of the very best movies of the year? Marriage Story is more than just a career high for writer-director Noah Baumbach (The Meyerowitz Stories, The Squid and the Whale); it’s a peerless showcase for its stars, Adam Driver and Scarlett Johansson, who turn this tale of a contentious divorce into a "Kramer vs. Kramer" for the 21st century.

It’s a big role, written with dimensions of sainthood that might defeat a lesser actor. But Erivo is up to every challenge, never losing Harriet’s compassionate humanity even as the film moves to the Civil War and pumps up the action at the expense of characterization.

It’s Norton’s own performance that brings emotional connection to Motherless Brooklyn. Always a consummate actor, with Oscar nominations for "Primal Fear," "American History X" and "Birdman" — he deserved another for "Fight Club" — Norton is at his very best as Lionel, seeing beyond the tics to the things that make him human.

With The Irishman, America’s greatest living director creates his late-career masterpiece, a deeply felt addition that vibrantly sums up every landmark in his crime-cinema arsenal, from 1973’s "Mean Streets" through "Goodfellas," "Casino," "Gangs of New York," and the Oscar-
winning "The Departed."

The film, bathed in gorgeous shadow and light by cinematographer Joe DeSalvo, gets more personal as it moves along. You can feel the romantic ache when Bruce and the missus duet on “Stones.”

The film stubbornly resists coming together as more than a series of hit-and-miss vignettes. Only near the end, in a stunning tableau that illustrates how individual desire laughs at the plans of God — and the ringmaster Frankie — does Sachs turn his wisp of film into something funny, touching and vital.

Black and Blue, hyped by Geoff Zanelli’s pumping score, moves along without actually getting anywhere. Harris deserves better. So do audiences.

Turns out a double dip of Zombieland goes down easy when you see it for the irresistible escapism it is.

This misbegotten sequel to 2014’s not-so-hot Maleficent is a torturous exercise in brightly-colored monotony that chokes on repetitive screenwriting, amateurish directing, paycheck performances and digital hardware for a heart. Kids under five (months) might be fooled, but sentient filmgoers know a scam when they see one.

You’ll laugh, you’ll cry — sometimes at the same time. But love or hate Jojo Rabbit, it’s damn near impossible to shake.

You’d have to search hard to find a movie this hypnotic and haunting.

All the green-screen magic it takes for Smith to mix it up with a mass of pixels passing for a Fresh Prince-era version of himself does not compensate for a dull plot, achingly familiar characters and dialogue that’s no fun at all.

With the Bard’s words, Henry roused his soldiers to action: “We few, we happy few, we band of brothers.” With this mediocrity, it’s more a case of how the war was wan.

The movie dissects the universal gap between the haves and the have-nots with shocking wit, stinging topicality and gut-wrenching violence. It’s explosive filmmaking on every level.

It’s always a downer when talented artists pour everything they’ve got into a film that stubbornly refuses to come to life. That’s the case with Lucy in the Sky.

Though the formulaic result comes up short as cinema, it’ll make you laugh you ass off. There are worse trade-offs.

The artful symmetry is an Almodovar hallmark, and his cinematic memento is filled with the intimate, indelible moments that made a life. You can feel his passion for cinema in every frame. Pain and Glory is not just his most personal film. It’s also one of his greatest.

As entertainment and provocation, Joker is simply stupendous.

Sadly, Abominable fails to carve out its own place in a crowded field. The movie huffs and puffs, but there’s no fear of any houses being blown down.

You’ll want to see this for Zellweger’s bravura turn alone. It’s one of the best performances of the year.

Tyrnauer’s flashes of compassion for this self-hating Jew and homosexual — taught from childhood to feel ashamed of what he was and who he was — remind us that his subject’s toxic, insidious amorality did not go to the grave with him. It’s all around us, among opportunists still looking for their own Roy Cohn — just one of several reasons why Tyrnauer’s doc hits you like a punch in the gut.

The actors have a ball with the fun and games. And you will, too, unless — as noted — you and the TV series have never crossed paths.

Gray’s filmmaking is tremendously exciting.

The only achievement in transferring The Goldfinch from page to screen is that it’s a botch job for the ages.

A Best Actress Oscar nomination for Jennifer Lopez? You better believe it. Her see-it-to-believe-it performance in Hustlers is that dazzling, that deep, that electrifying.

So what’s the problem? For starters, It: Chapter Two is an ass-numbing two hours and 50 minutes. That’s a good half-hour longer than Chapter One, proving the adage that less is definitely more. The dragging pace diminishes the film’s ability to hold us in its grip.

Official Secrets remains a compelling tale of injustice on an individual and global level. It’s a shame that it hasn’t been told better, but give it points for being told at all.

The wow factor of Ready or Not helps you jump the hurdles of any plot predictability.

Fiddler: A Miracle of Miracles makes itself essential viewing by chronicling the turbulent genesis of a global sensation. But its real miracle is demonstrating why it continues to entertain and illuminate, from Tokyo to a Brooklyn middle school where an African-American girl now plays the role of Tevye’s wife, Golde, and back to Broadway.

A fun ride, spiked with touching gravity, is not a shabby way to end the movie summer. Thanks to Jillian Bell, a comic force of nature with real dramatic chops, that’s what you get in Brittany Runs a Marathon.

This eyepopper from Russian director-writer-cinematographer-editor Victor Kossakovsky (¡Vivan Las Antípodas!) is like nothing you’ve ever seen. His free-form documentary on water opens by scaring us to death.

It’s the human devastation that gets short shrift in a movie that turns the hot, hilarious, out-for-blood Bernadette into the thing she hates most: conventional.

Sure it’s cornball, but Chadha revels in it. You will, too, as the movie becomes an irresistible blast of pure feeling.

Good Boys rides highest on the teamwork of its three young stars.

The proceedings are raised when Hodge is onscreen, using every nuanced look and gesture to jump the hurdles of a banal script and reveal the pain tearing up Banks. Having made a mark in films like "Straight Outta Compton" and "Hidden Figures," and on TV in "City on a Hill," Hodge hits new heights of commitment.

The Kitchen is deadly serious — and worse, deadly dull, even when it tries to act tough by laying on the violence and a heaping side of gore.

When the movie stalls, it’s Enzo to the rescue. Since the film covers a decade in the lives of its characters, two dogs take turns playing Enzo, at age 2 and 9. They’re both picks of the litters. And Ventimiglia contributes an emotional honesty that serves him well even when the plot sinks into marshmallow.

Whatever this is, it’s not a movie — it’s a product more deserving of a road test than a review.

It’s riveting from start to finish.

The swerve into bizarre melodrama in the final third knocks the film permanently off course, reducing a potentially rich examination of religious extremism into a missed opportunity.

Australian writer-director Jennifer Kent creates a woman’s revenge tale fueled by a righteous anger at the evil men do. There’s not a whit of audience coddling. You’ve been warned.

There are times when Skin can seem naïve and manipulative, almost in the same breath, which takes the film perhaps too long to get its bearings. But Bell is the binding force that locks us into Widner’s tumultuous journey.

All the actors, in roles large and small, bring their A games to the film. Two hours and 40 minutes can feel long for some. I wouldn’t change a frame.

What makes David Crosby: Remember My Name one of the best rock documentaries of all time is the no-bull immediacy of the filmmaking.

What’s missing? Let’s start with intangibles such as heart, soul and the faintest hint of originality.

The Art of Self-Defense sets itself up as the 90-pound weakling destined to live forever in the shadow of "Fight Club." The good news is that writer-director Riley Stearns gets in a few good licks at toxic masculinity before odious comparisons to David Fincher’s masterpiece blunt the film’s comic and dramatic impact.

Stuber traps two talented dudes — Kumail Nanjiani and Dave Bautista — in a car that’s going nowhere so fast that Thelma and Louise would hop right on.

In The Farewell, Wang builds a funny, touching and vital film about what makes a family in any culture. It’s simply stunning.

Ari Aster is a bold new voice in psychological horror, the kind that messes ruthlessly with your head. He proved that last year with "Hereditary," featuring Toni Colette in one of cinema’s most memorable meltdowns. And now, with the hypnotic and haunting Midsommar, he ventures into fresh territory without losing his grasp of what nightmares are made of.

There’s no contrived digital sleight-of-hand in Spider-Man: Far From Home that can match what Holland does: He makes the MCU feel new again.

Some of the footage, shot by crew members, radiates hold-your-breath suspense, especially when the Maiden pushes through the ice floes of the Southern Ocean, near Antarctica. You’ll have your heart in your mouth as the yacht enters the final stretch.

Yesterday has its heart firmly in the right place. It’s the challenge to take it to the next level that’s missing.

The gore, which is plentiful, grows repetitive and dull.

For a series that began nearly 25 years ago, this classic in the making couldn’t go out on a more fitting note of tender, tear-drenched resolution.

This classically trained Irish singer and actress was a runner-up on a BBC singing competition and won roles in film (Beast) and TV (War and Peace, HBO’s Chernobyl). She’s a skyrocketing talent — and the full range of her gifts are on display here.

It’s part tour diary, part trickster handbook and totally mesmerizing. Rockumentary-wise, you’ve never seen or heard anything like it.

(It) feels like a pale facsimile of Jarmusch. There are a few lovely, random laughs and a resonant political subtext, but the tone is off.

Hemsworth and Thompson, who has the makings of a major star, do the heavy lifting. And, miraculously, they keep it light, breezy and watchable. Memorable? That’s asking too much.

By the end, when the three Shafts hit the streets in identical long coats like something out of The Matrix, the message is clear. Rough justice is back to stay. Women are out of the picture, except for sex. Dinosaurs again walk the earth with misogynistic and homophobic impunity. These are the laughs, folks. Don’t be surprised if they stick in your throat.

Sad to say, the bloom is off the rose.

Dark Phoenix doesn’t just suck big time. It’s the worst movie ever in the X-Men series.

Thompson, Kaling and up-for-anything director Nisha Ganatra spin comic gold.

It’s an irresistible romantic romp that turns the familiar into something sweet, sassy and laugh-out-loud funny.

So it’s a kick to see Spencer dig into the title role in Ma, a Blumhouse scarefest that tries but rarely lives up to the irresistible dynamo at its center.

The chance to see giant monsters go apeshit — a few more are added near the end — is almost worth the price of admission. Seeing, however, is part of the problem. Godzilla: King of the Monsters is often so lost in the shadows of digital muck that it makes the squinting chaos of the Battle of Winterfell in "Game of Thrones" look like a lightshow.

The film owes its success less to shock value than to sheer cinematic inventiveness and Egerton’s total immersion in the role.

It’s “The Bad Seed meets The Omen,” and it’s predictable, plodding and dim-witted every step of the way. To be fair, if you like watching someone pull a shard of glass out of her eyeball, you won’t be disappointed. But there’s a difference between gory and scary that this movie doesn’t seem to grasp.

Ignore the film’s foolish framing device and Halston emerges as a fascinating study of a fashion artist who allowed women to live an idealized vision of themselves.

That the movie itself is a treat, beyond its good intentions, is icing on the cake, though clichés and ethnic stereotyping still sneak in.

Booksmart changes the game and opens the genre up to greater possibilities. Directed by the actor Olivia Wilde in a smashing feature debut, this femcentric spin on Freaks and Geeks is high on girl power.

Written and directed by the bracingly brilliant Joanna Hogg, this delicate, dazzling memoir traces her own origin story, and there is something superheroic about her struggle to look back without hitting the brick wall of formula and weepy nostalgia.

Wick 3, starring Keanu Reeves in the role he was born to play, hits you so hard in the thrill zone that instead of feeling exhausted when director Chad Stahelski calls a halt at 130 minutes, you’re panting for Chapter 4.

A bit of a stiff as cinema, rich in atmospherics but starved for the human spark that might uncover the man behind the myth.

Branagh’s performance is a triumph of ferocity and feeling that shuns Shakespeare the literary rock star to find the flawed, touchingly human man inside.

They say it’s all in the timing, especially when it comes to funny business. But in The Hustle everyone’s inner comedic clock is calamitously off. The setups are flat, the jokes don’t land and the actors don’t — or won’t — connect.

It’s clear that a verité, fly-on-the-wall record of these SNL livewires on vacation would have made a hilarious documentary. What we have instead follows the Sitcom 101 formula.

In his second film as a feature director, following the mess that was "Book of Shadows: Blair Witch 2," Berlinger loses his way in a game of let’s pretend that ends in a tangle of tonal shifts and missed opportunities.

The famous Assayas light touch keeps his film above the fray of didacticism. So dig in as an expert cast puts a scintillating spin on every verbal volley. Non-Fiction is a bonbon spiked with delicious wit and malice.

The fighting spirit of this female quartet blazes through every frame of this galvanizing film. “We did this without knowing shit,” says Vilela. That’s just a beginning. Way before the movie ends, you’ll feel their fire.

The result is a gleefully retro and raunchy funfest that walks a minefield of sexist traps it can’t always dodge. That the rom and the com both land is a tribute to Theron and Rogen.

Part thriller, part meditation on life and art, part portrait of a man on a tightrope, The White Crow may be juggling more themes than it can handle. But Fiennes makes the result a thing of bruising beauty and an exhilarating gift.

The movie hits you like a shot in the heart.

But fantasy elements aside, this Disney movie has the one essential that makes a nature documentary fly: a thrilling sense of wonder.

The film’s most powerful asset is Thompson (Sorry to Bother You, Thor: Ragnarok) in a performance that cuts through the script’s cliches to find the heart of a character that reflects the plight of a woman alone in a man’s world.

The tightly-focused origin story of Ruth, played with ferocity and feeling by Gugu Mbatha-Raw, is still one hell of a heroic odyssey.

Not even the haunting images and Garfield’s haggard intensity can disguise the gaping void where the film’s soul should be. There’s no there there.

The dialogue starts at risible and descends from there.

The movie pulls you in through the sheer immersive force of its filmmaking. In Long Day’s Journey, the search is everything with meaning as elusive and haunting as a dream.

Still, the moments that hit hardest concern Leo’s relationship with Ahd (a very fine Eric Bernard), another male hustler who claims he’s only “gay 4 pay.”

Alternately smarmy and achingly familiar, Little squeezes "Big" for one more run through the Hollywood grinder.

Her Smell is a berserker infused a mad poetry. In her third film with Perry, following "Listen Up," "Phillip and Queen of the Earth," Moss takes a character who makes Courtney Love look like Mother Teresa and exposes the shards of humanity that once vitalized and defined her music. The effect is shattering.

You can kill the vibe of Minghella’s film with nitpicking, but Fanning rides the movie home to glory. She is simply sensational.

Estevez leans toward sacrificing dramatic power for blatant crowdpleasing. Still, his intent is refreshingly uncynical. Clearly, the quadruple threat doesn’t think audiences will sit still for his message without sugarcoating and a feelgood ending. At worst, you can dismiss him as a naïve do-gooder. At best, you can commend him for actually believing a movie might raise public consciousness and maybe even change things. Your call.

Leigh’s visceral staging, especially in the climactic moments — brilliantly shot by his longtime collaborator/cinematographer Dick Pope — brings home the significance of a 200-year-old bloodbath that still speaks urgently to the disenfranchised.

With Denis there’s always more than meets the prism of snap judgements. Let the movie mess with your head.

It’s the closest thing to witnessing a miracle — just some cameras, a crowd and a voice touched by God.

The movie honors King by raising fresh hell for a new generation. It will make you jump out of your seat, but what matters are the provocations you take home and can’t shake. That’s the stuff of nightmares.

This breezy, funny entry keeps things light with a hilarious and heartfelt package of nonstop kid-friendly kick-ass.

What’s never in doubt, however, is the compassion the movie shows to its protagonist, partly based on the women in the filmmaker’s own family and embodied by a great actress at her intuitive, indelible best. In capturing what Jones calls “the rhythm of living” even in the face of death, he has turned this character study into a shattering portrait of resilience — and an essential work of art.

This live-action re-imagining of Disney’s 1941 animated classic may be the sweetest film Tim Burton has ever made. It’s also the safest.

Aussie director Anthony Maras, in his feature debut, brings a Hitchcockian feel for suspense and a documentarian’s eye for detail to the brutal events that transpired over three days in November 2008 when the Islamist militant group Lashkar-e-Taiba initiated an attack on the city of Mumbai.

There are times when the film grips us with such hallucinatory terror that you may think it’s another of Adelaide’s PTSD-induced nightmares. Maybe it is. Or maybe it’s a ghastly reflection of the way we live now.

Nguyen can stir up all the sturm and drang he wants, but Hummingbird feels as humdrum and impersonal as a blueprint.

Clermont-Tonnerre comes from a place of defiance, and her fearless instincts surge through every frame. Each time you think you have this movie pegged, it’ll knock you for a loop.

A stuffy, soggy slog of a movie that fails to generate sparks or a lick of dramatic sense.

Hollywood retreads of foreign films are rarely a good idea (did you see Miss Bala?), but Gloria Bell is a playful, pleasure-giving exception.

Somewhere along the road of development hell, the movie settled for delivering standard-issue jolts for jocks.

The film’s low-key charm and quirky humor grow on you and create a rooting interest in what happens next. It doesn’t take the Supreme Intelligence of the universe (who we always figured would resembled Annette Bening) to know it’s wise to play the long game. Captain Marvel is not just another wonder woman. She plans to build an army.

Wherever you find yourself in the Perry equation, Medea herself deserves a final high-five. Perry hints that she may come back in a younger version, not played by him. But Medea will never be the same without her creator. In A Medea Family Funeral, she hosts a memorial service that defines the term hellzapoppin. And Perry correctly and adoringly gives her the last word in which she lets all the women have for letting any damn man abuse them. Hallelujah, sister!

What’s missing are the moments in between that actually make up a life and give it emotional resonance.

Jordan, working from a script he conjured up with Ray Wright, is in it for suspense tinged with laughs. But with these two dynamo actresses front and center, this nail-biter keeps you riveted.

The Hidden World is the best Dragon yet — an animated action phenom with moonstruck passion in its heart and a spirit that soars.

Thanks to the comic tornado at its center, Isn’t It Romantic is still your best bet for a Valentine’s date at the movies. You could do worse.

Ruben Brandt, Collector is always a feast for the eyes, but it’s the intellectual curiosity on display that raises the bar.

Now, after a deluge of comic book epics and other CGI-filled sci-fi fantasies, the movie feels like it’s way past its sell-by date. Alita: Battle Angel looks ready to rock, but time has sucked the life out of the party.

Henson looks ready to come out firing on all cylinders, but the comic cowardice of What Men Want leaves her shooting blanks.

Working in Spanish for the first time, the filmmaker somehow allows the interweaving threads of his plot to get tangled into a jumble even he can’t satisfactorily unravel. It’s a damn shame.

The fans show up for this kind of movie to watch Neeson knock heads with bad guys, and Moland lets him rip. There’s no dawdling over sentiment. If you want to see a snowplow used as a weapon of mass destruction, you’ve come to the right movie.

There’s even a new song called “Catchy Song” that you can’t get out of your head no matter how hard you try. (And you will try.) Another tune, “Super Cool,” plays over the end credits simply to extol the coolness of end credits. Lego 2 never stops, which is part of the problem. Can there really be too much of a good thing? [Pause.] Nah.

Velvet Buzzsaw is never less than a feast for the eyes even when it reduces the plot to B-level butchery. What’s missing is the potent provocation that Gilroy seemed to be developing at the start.

What takes Arctic to the next level is Mikkelsen’s stirringly expressive face. Known for playing villains — the dead-eyed 007 nemesis Le Chiffre in "Casino Royale" and the title killer in the TV series "Hannibal" (2013-2015) — Mikkelsen invests Overgård with a bracing humanity that you root for every step of the way.

Technology has allowed Jackson to erase the barriers of time and speak to a new generation about what war does to youth. His humane and heartbreaking film is a profound achievement.

The batshit bonkers Serenity fails on every level, first as entertainment and then as a new-agey thumbsucker about a magical, mystical tour through the subconscious. Serenity finds new definitions of bad that almost make the damn thing worth watching for its magnificent flameout.

Lit with a poet’s eye by Deschanel and given dramatic heft by von Donnersmarck, Never Look Away lunges at the primitive forces that define our lives. Even when it trips up, it’s never less than exhilarating.

An opportunity missed.

Kudos to Coogan and Reilly, not just for their gifts of impersonation, but for detailing the bedrock connection at work and play between the two men.

Call it RBG: The Early Years.

This is Kidman’s show. She neatly negotiates every twist the script throws at her, even when the plot slams into too many dead ends. This is a movie star who knows how to stay the course, no matter how twisty, tangled or down and dirty it gets. She’s dynamite.

You wouldn’t be wrong if you’re thinking this wish-fulfillment tale of a working-class woman bum-rushing the corporate world is trying to be a "Working Girl" for millennials. And while it can’t deliver the boundary-pushing kick of that seminal 1988 Melanie Griffith-vs.-the glass ceiling smash, the charms this movie does possess — its star being chief among them — will get you over the gaping plot holes and lackluster dialogue.

The writer-director based the couple on his own parents, who bear the same names as his characters. It’s not their story, he’s said — what he’s given us instead is a love story that’s as sexy as it is savage, as tough as it is tender. It’s a spellbinder with a fever that won’t quit.

When Blunt and Miranda cut through the film’s glucose overload and take off into the wild blue of their own unique and extraordinary talents, Mary Poppins Returns shows it has the power to leave you deliriously happy.

In Vice, the writer-director is tossing grenades every which way — it’s a movie that’s ferociously funny one minute, bleakly sorrowful the next.

Aquaman is a mess of clashing tones and shameless silliness, but a relief after all the franchise’s recent superhero gloom. Any budget-busting epic that finds time to show us an octopus playing bongos gets a pass in our book.

The Mule is more character study than "Dirty Harry: The Emeritus Years." It’s the detours on the road — the stops along the way that show an old man dealing with the dim possibilities of change near the end of his life — that reveal this drug-mule-in-winter drama as a deeply personal reckoning.

The sorrow inherent in this tale would be unbearable without the film’s flashes of humor and performances by a cast of nonprofessionals that are moving beyond measure. Capernaum suffers from being overly long and chaotic in structure, but there’s no mistaking its cumulative effect as an emotional powerhouse.

The haunting, hypnotic, palm-sweating score by Trent Reznor and Atticus Ross promises way more than the film delivers. By the way, the birds in the box are meant to set off alarms when the monsters approach. They see way more than we do, which is part of the problem. Why should birds have all the fun?

Not only the coolest Spider-Man epic ever, it’s one of the best movies of the year.

It’s the sort of cinema that feels steeped in the past, completely of the moment and timeless all at once.

A well-researched and richly observant documentary from Alexis Bloom about the climate of lies and systemic abuse that nurtured Ailes and allowed his behavior to flourish.

Ronan (Lady Bird) and Robbie (I, Tonya) were both nominated for a Best Actress Oscar last award season, and even when the pace of the film falters, these two performers hold you in thrall. That’s royalty.

Ben Is Back ends up becoming into a penetrating look at how addiction wrecks lives from both sides of the parent-child equation. It’s unflinching and unforgettable.

You should prepare to be wowed by Natalie Portman, who delivers a take-no-prisoners performance as Celeste, a swaggering rock diva who tends to burn down everything in her path, especially when she’s crossed.

Mirai casts a spell that works on children and adults alike, but in different ways. Its creator’s artistry and empathy are the connecting links. It may be the animator’s smallest film, but it stands tall. You’ll be enchanted.

In short, this is a genre mash-up has no agenda except providing escapist fun. Mission accomplished.

Arriving just in time to win a place among the year’s worst films, Robin Hood — bursting with an entitled sense of its own non-existent coolness — falls flat on its fat one.

It’s impossible to experience the deep-seated compassion of this film and not be moved to tears.

You know how some costume epics can be such a bloody bore? Not The Favourite. It’s a bawdy, brilliant triumph, directed by Greek auteur Yorgos Lanthimos with all the artistic reach and renegade deviltry he brought to Dogtooth (2009), The Lobster (2015) and The Killing of a Sacred Deer (2017).

If a thing of beauty is a joy forever, as John Keats famously said, then the surpassing loveliness and bracing brilliance of Alfonso Cuarón’s Roma will never pass into nothingness.

At 134 minutes, Grindelwald can feel like an overload of homework on which we’ll we tested later. Fine for Pottermores, but a trial for us Muggles.

As the director puts it: “This movie is an accumulation of scenes based on Van Gogh’s letters, common agreement about events in his life that parade as facts, hearsay and scenes that are just plain invented. This is not a forensic biography about the painter. It is about what it is to be an artist.”

Green Book is a movie about class as well as race, and Farrelly rightly refuses to paint a pretty picture.

The filmmaker brings everything he has as an artist to this raw, resonant thriller. The screen damn near explodes as his genre caper suddenly encompasses a whole social strata (race, class, politics, gender). You’re in for a hell of a ride.

The Grinch offers a solid service to anyone with kids in need of a nap under a blanket of bland.

The Girl in the Spider’s Web, directed with gun-to-the-head urgency by Fede Alvarez (Don’t Breathe), settles for being a tension-packed, go-go-go thriller that will pump adrenaline into your nervous system for nearly all of its suspenseful if implausible 117 minutes.

Saddle up for a rowdy, rip-snorting, hilarity-and-hellfire western full of riding, fighting, hanging, shooting, gold prospecting and bloody massacres — plus silly songs, a limbless poet, cowboy love rituals and philosophical musings about the inevitability of dying. Yes, it’s all in one movie. Who does things like that? Try Joel and Ethan Coen.

Not even Jackman, one of the most persuasive actors around, can sell the argument that personal weakness doesn’t stain public character in the era of #MeToo.

No narrator, no talking heads feeding you insights, just the lady letting it rip on stage and off. What Volf, a French photographer now working on his third book about the acclaimed soprano, misses in perspective he gains in intimacy. His film fawns shamelessly and fumbles a few salient points, but it’s indisputably up close and personal.

Slow torture for kids and grownups alike, The Nutcracker and the Four Realms gives a bad name to the very concept of family entertainment.

The chaotic, jumbled The Other Side of the Wind isn’t for everyone — just folks who care about the history of film and the master builder who helped make it great.

The rousing life that Malek brings to this extraordinary recreation deserves all the cheers it gets. Screw the film’s flaws — you don’t want to miss his performance.

The reason that Boy Erased hits you like a shot in the heart can be found in Jared’s relationship with his parents. Kidman brings stirring compassion and a growing strength to a woman who learns about herself the more she learns about her son. And Crowe is magnificent as a believer who can’t quite storm the barricades his faith erects around a true reconciliation with his son.

At two-and-a-half hours, Monrovia, Indiana often feels static and low-key to a fault. As always, Wiseman is working hard at being fair, refusing to condemn or even condescend to what his camera sees.

This stunning, slow-build thriller from South Korean director Lee Chang-dong sizzles with a cumulative power that will knock the wind out of you.