Steve Persall

The Comedian is a phony movie about funny people, starring a great actor understanding next to nothing about stand-up comedy.

Gold isn't a bad movie, just lifeless except for McConaughey.

Split is a tidy example of lurid understatement, its themes ripe for nastier treatment than Shyamalan offers, grindhouse stuff served with vegan restraint.

Even in repetitive or undernourished moments Keaton, Offerman and Lynch always entertain. Their performances have fallen through the cracks of awards season.

Only Scorsese could craft a film of such moral gravity for multiplexes and fascinate for nearly three hours.

Live by Night is ambitious to a fault, with so much material and technical pizzazz that a cable miniseries format might have been a better way to go.

Like Lone Survivor and Deepwater Horizon before, Patriots Day is a brawny procedural, more than the exploitation flick it could be. Berg and Wahlberg's commitment to details beyond death and destruction feels like a calling.

J.A. Bayona's exquisite A Monster Calls blends pathos and sophistication, fairy tales and harsh realities into a small masterpiece.

It's a lesson that African-American culture offers more inspiring stories than Hollywood has chosen to tell.

Chastain plows through this tangled scenario with an icy ferocity that's entertaining. You get the feeling that Miss Sloane would work better as a streaming or cable series, allowing more time to explore characters and issues, giving actors more room for dense dialogue. Maybe come up with a better way out of that corner.

If Fences occasionally feels cinematically inert, it's emotionally resonant thanks to Davis and Washington the actor, not the director as much.

Lion can't avoid seeming lesser in the second half after Davis' mesmeric first but it's solid storytelling nonetheless. Bring the Kleenex.

Yes, it's Meet the Parents time again but flipped and filthier, in a good way. Why Him? had me laughing louder, more often than most smutcoms do, a NSFW blusher delivered by a keenly comical cast.

Anchored by Natalie Portman's uncanny impersonation — wispy voice, aristocratic posture — Jackie fascinates and frustrates, sometimes at once. We can't be certain any of her actions here are true. Some don't seem likely.

This is science fiction needing more work on the fiction part, an intriguing premise running its course halfway through. Passengers is too smart for starters to devolve into green screen spectacle relegating its attractive stars to unconvincing gapes.

La La Land is a trove of references to musical milestones, not derivative but truly inspired. A more joyful movie for grown-ups can't be found this season.

Rogue One will engage such diehards but making new friends for the brand is unlikely.

Office Christmas Party contains enough lunacy from McKinnon, Bell and Vanessa Bayer to nearly recommend, then enough lame plot threads, Rob Corddry and Olivia Munn to reconsider.

Moonlight is a modest masterpiece, and quite possibly the best film of 2016.

Manchester by the Sea is a gracefully coarse ode to lives knocked down and if not bouncing back at least not splatting at rock bottom. There are also glimmers of humor shining all the brighter because of the darkness they cut through.

This is a soulless endeavor that would alarm if Ford devised it on his own. Instead, he shares blame with Austen Wright's novel Tony and Susan, adapted into parallel narratives; one empty, the other leaking blood.

We can now agree that Johnson is not only the Sexiest Man Alive but also our strongest, lifting Moana on his character's beefy shoulders, carrying it like other hits before. No movie left behind.

Rules Don't Apply is affably mediocre, even tolerable between brief pleasures. The movie's lone constant amusement is Beatty's madcap portrayal of Hughes, keeping aloft his Spruce Goose of nonromantic not quite comedy.

Any resemblance between Allied and a much better movie on the subject isn't coincidental but unfortunate.

It's just another example of technology intruding upon storytelling, that's been happening since kinetoscopes cranked one frame at a time.

Not even J.K. Rowling can say abracadabra and make a worthwhile movie franchise appear. The lightning that struck Harry Potter once merely grazes Fantastic Beasts and Where to Find Them, turning the sorcerer's mentor into a fantasy apprentice.

Christine is a movie as bleak and withdrawn as its protagonist, with Hall making the most of her best role in years, a slow death spiral that's hard to look away from.

It's one of a handful of movies that have legitimately fooled me; not with an abrupt twist but a dawning awareness of where it's going thematically, how deeply and how distanced from sci-fi as usual.