Steven Rea

With its icy symphonic score (courtesy of Iceland’s Johan Johansson) and a palette of rainy-day colors, Arrival is at once majestic and melancholy. It’s a grand endeavor, and Adams, at the center of it all, brings pluck and smarts and a deep-seated sorrow to her role. This is her movie, no doubt.

Some of it is wistful, some of it whimsical, but it's all wonderful, impossibly so.

The movie is a winner. One of the commuter ferry men declares, as he starts plucking people out of the water, "No one dies today." And no one does. If that isn't hopeful, I don't know what is.

There's a playlike quality to Complete Unknown (Marston's cowriter, Julian Sheppard, has extensive credits in the theater). That's not a bad thing: The talk is smart. The actors doing the talking are easy to like.

Moretti knows how to orchestrate a good laugh when it's needed, but he can plumb more soulful, sorrowful depths, too. In Mia Madre, with its self-doubting director and wild-card American interloper, Moretti works a palette of shifting moods. Triumphantly.

You know how some kids just connect? Jake and Tony connect. And the adults in their lives, without really meaning to do so, make it difficult for that connection to hold. It is a measure of Sachs' talent and skills that such a seemingly small story can resonate in such big ways.

Just about the only cast member who doesn't go misty at one point or another is the horse that Down Under cinema charmer Bryan Brown takes for a trot late in the film.

A Tale of Love and Darkness loses itself in dreamy imagery, in its studiously crafted aesthetic. But there are times when Portman lets the toughness, the tenacity, the emotional heart of Oz's story shine through.

Moving within its wild and wacky and improbably true scenarios (some of them, anyway) are people you don't really want to know. Stop the presses: War makes people rich. Stop the movie: These people, who cares?

And Bridges? What's there to say about a man who makes it look so easy, and who - in one breathless, pivotal scene - runs through a range of emotion like a wild pony running across the land. Genius, any way you look at it.

Our Little Sister zooms in close, observing everyday rituals, the commonplace that suddenly turns significant.

Kunis, rebounding from the disastrous Jupiter Ascending (an unintentional comedy if ever there was one), demonstrates an easygoing comic flair.

The tradecraft is there, the film craft is there, but the craftiness of a great concept is gone. Any way Bourne can go through Treadstone again?

There is plenty in Star Trek Beyond for diehard Trekkers to enjoy, and director Justin Lin (Fast & Furious) guns the action sequences.

As solid as Cranston, Leguizamo, Kruger, Bratt, and all the rest are, the built-in constraints of the movie format don't do their real-life counterparts full justice.

McCarthy, Wiig, McKinnon, and Jones bring a spirit of spontaneity to their interactions; it's not exactly seat-of-the-pants improv, but it doesn't feel blocked-out and belabored, either.

In much the same way that the smash "Zootopia" demonstrated that creatures of different culture and class and species are better off when they come together, The Secret Life of Pets is a testament to teamwork and friendship and fixing the rifts that divide us. Let the fur - and the warm, fuzzy feelings - fly.

Swiss Army Man is a quest movie of sorts, and also a sort of modern-day piece of absurdist theater. Samuel Beckett by way of Monty Python, it is a story that is at once rooted in the fixations of adolescence (sex, the idea of sex, bodily functions, more sex) and in the loftier firmaments of the mind.

And tell me if I'm nuts, but another distraction: Doesn't the BFG bear a striking resemblance to George W. Bush?

It's great to hear a director talking candidly about the actors he's worked with, dishing out good, juicy stuff.

Much of Finding Dory is funny, and fun. But there's something kind of haunting about our heroine's memory thing. If you forget where you are, and who you are, and why you are - isn't that called Losing Dory?

It's the magic of movies, not a movie that comes close to achieving real magic.

Shameless in every way imaginable, Me Before You milks the pathos for all it's worth, but milks the comedy, too.

The final third of Audiard's drama falls into crime-drama mode. It is tense and violent. But even if it feels true, given Dheepan's history with the Tamil Tigers, it also feels a little beside the point.

This ninth installment in the Marvel mutant superhero franchise is rife with urgent and (dare we say?) apocalyptic comings and goings, with characters and confrontations that seem at once familiar and befuddling.

The Lobster is what would happen if Wes Anderson set about doing Franz Kafka, with a hefty dash of George Orwell thrown into the mix: surreal, comic, sad, strange, beautiful, sublime.

Like Shane Black's directing debut, "Kiss Kiss Bang Bang" with Robert Downey, Jr., his The Nice Guys borrows from noir traditions and pulp fiction, throwing a fresh coat of smart-alecky comedy over the whole thing.

One of the things that distinguishes Love & Friendship from the multitude of Austen adaptations - the worthy and the less so - is its heroine. Lady Susan Vernon, a widow of devilish charms, is as frank and fearless a character as Austen ever imagined.

Rogen and Efron's characters find a novel new use for automobile airbags, too. These guys are geniuses.

Guadagnino, who directed Swinton in the 2009 Italian gem "I Am Love," has kept the core premise - and the sensuality - of Jacques Deray's original. (Delon and Schneider go skinny-dipping, too.)

High-Rise feels like a throwback to a time when this kind of social commentary, in literature and film, seemed shocking and true. Not sure whether it's progress to say that in 2016, High-Rise doesn't shock at all.

Smart and gripping - at least until the third act.

Francofonia is a brilliant meditation on art, on war - and what happens to art when nations go to war.

With Sarandon in the title role, Scafaria has a winner: The actress tackles Marnie headlong, with heart and soul, trolling the fancy outdoor shopping mall for products to buy and for people to intercept and hang on to.

With every new installment of the comic book franchise, the scale gets bigger, relationships get trickier, new forces enter the fray.

Sitting in the theater, watching Knight of Cups, you hear an incredible amount of thought-balloon babble, but you don't hear anything approaching the sublime.

Maybe the best reason to see Papa: Hemingway in Cuba is to catch a glimpse of the real Finca Vigia, the property, with its house and pool, gardens, and tree-lined drive, where Ernest Hemingway lived and wrote - and famously drank - from 1939 until 1960. Pages of For Whom the Bell Tolls were banged out here; so, too, The Old Man and the Sea.

Green Room is just as accomplished a film, with the writer/director doing everything right: the cast, the music, the editing, the way he leads you one way and then clobbers you (and some of his ill-fated characters) when you (and they) are least expecting it.

All the elements of Eggers' story are there; the emotional and psychological resonance is not.

It's pretty much impossible not to love Sing Street's young hero as he stumbles around Dublin, dumbstruck and smitten, at turns clueless and confident.

Theron proves the master of operatic hissy fits, Blunt lets the pain show beneath the glacial cool, Chastain brings her usual Juilliard-schooled commitment to the occasion, and Hemsworth is Hemsworthian, if oft-times incomprehensible, delivering his lines in a gorse-y whorl of vowels and consonants.

Blending facts, anecdotes, and no little conjecture, Elvis & Nixon finally finds the two American icons face to face, sharing M&M's and Dr Peppers.

Miles Ahead is more a provocative character sketch than a meaty portrait, but it's a film that should be applauded for its daring, and for Cheadle's shape-shifting, soul-baring work.

Criminal, with its criminally lazy title, is mostly Costner's to growl and scowl his way through.

Linklater, drawing from his own experiences as a baseball player at Sam Houston State University, looks back with affection, a knowing wink, and maybe the beginnings of an apologetic shrug at the jerk behavior, the locker-room pranks. These guys smell freedom in the air - and maybe some pot smoke, too.

The feeblest kind of costume drama, where the costumes have more impact than the drama and where the period details serve only as distraction, reminding audiences that things looked different back then and not much else.

Wonderfully evocative, funny, sad, complex, and essential passages from a man's childhood and adolescence.

How the film plays out, and what happens to the boy and the adults in his company, may prove a revelation, or a disappointment, or something in between. But getting there is thrilling and wondrously strange.

Disarming, alarming, and more than a little impressive, Shults' movie was shot in his mother's Texas home, and the thing plays like a cross between Eugene O'Neill and a slasher pic. (It's cut like one; the soundtrack makes you feel jumpy like one.)

Batman v Superman lacks the levity (forced or otherwise) of a typical Marvel Universe entry. But Snyder's superpowered epic does have a sense of import and grandeur about it.

Resonant and surprisingly affecting.

Director Robert Schwentke and his writing team do their best to move things along. Actually, who knows if it's their best? Maybe they're suffering from Divergent fatigue along with the rest of us.

The Bronze, for all its crudeness and lewdness (Melissa Raunch, anyone?) and wonky comedy, is actually a good old-fashioned tale of redemption.

Wickedly clever nightmare entertainment.

Apart from its anthropomorphic, allegorical angle, Zootopia is also a tale of female empowerment and a classic noir, too.

An impossibly enjoyable live-action cartoon that plays on our real-life anxieties about vengeful cadres of foreign radicals blowing up people - and places.

The relationship between the young American and the old Frenchman is as rich as one of Perrier's sauces: the pupil and the teacher, the son and the father, the keen protégé and the stubborn classicist.

Most parties concerned maintain their grim countenances, their characters struggling to find the sweet spot between honor and greed, between doing the right thing and doing the absolute worst.

It's transformative.

A goofy conflation of Coenian elements: the numbskull huggermugger of "The Big Lebowski", the La La Land surrealness of "Barton Fink", the Old Testament overlay of "A Serious Man."

Try not to let the film's overbearingly jaunty score get in the way. The Lady in the Van is quite a feat.

Offers a crushing view of humanity at its most desperate, and a view of one man's fevered efforts to find grace and dignity amid the horror.

45 Years is a study in economy, in the beautiful symmetry of word and image and music.

13 Hours, by its very subject matter, can't help but tap into the confluent veins of politics and patriotism.

Ergüven's film, beautifully shot and beautifully performed, cuts its storybook tone with starker, more brutal truths. Anger - aimed at a conservative social order and those complicit in maintaining it - courses through this sad, striking tale.

One of those what-were-they-thinking projects in which good talent is on very bad display.

The Revenant is exhilarating cinema.

Joy's entry into the world of entrepreneurship has the crazy trajectory of a rocket gone haywire, and Russell's movie is kind of haywire, too.

An epic work of self-indulgence and smug riffing, stringing together tropes from TV and screen westerns and closed-room whodunits, The Hateful Eight announces itself with all the pomp and circumstance of a mid-century cinema spectacle.

Mara and Blanchett are each extraordinary, working in the most organic and soul-stirring ways.

Symphonic and cinematic, full of melancholy and hushed magic.

The Force Awakens is half reboot, half remake, and all fun.

If Macbeth comes off at times like a Classics Illustrated comic-book adaptation (there is one, from 1955), it can also be quite moving, quite troubling, haunting, even.

It looks lovely in an art-directed way, and Eddie Redmayne, who won his Oscar earlier in the year for his portrayal of Stephen Hawking in The Theory of Everything, looks lovely, too.

In-your-face polemic, with nowhere to go once the point has been made. Repeatedly.

Richly informative and fascinating.

An accomplished and compelling film by writer/director Josh Mond, James White is also pretty much a bummer.

It's a period piece full of colorful characters, natty costumes, jaunty music.

A kind of mad coming-of-age yarn embellished with lightning bolts and monsters made of cadaverous flesh.

Creed is corny like the old Rocky films, but riveting like the old Rocky films, too.

If Mockingjay - Part 1 is quieter and less flashy than its predecessors, that doesn't make it less satisfying.

Brooklyn is that rare period drama that doesn't lose itself in its dogged re-creation of another time.

Secret in Their Eyes is notable for its top-tier cast - Julia Roberts, Nicole Kidman, and Chiwetel Ejiofor are the leads - and for its utter lack of credulity and good sense.

If Mockingjay - Part 1 was walkier and talkier than its forerunners, Part 2 is pretty much all action - and lesser for it.

What Our Fathers Did is a movie about historical and filial responsibility, about repudiation, about acceptance, about the pain we inherit, and the pain that continues to be doled out.

Inspiring stuff, the stuff of Hollywood all the way back to Frank Capra and before: a story of scrappy underdogs, determined to get to the truth, and toppling the mighty in the process.

Ghosts haunt Heart of a Dog - but so, too, does love.

Barrymore and Collette bring life and charm to a screenplay that needs all the life and charm it can get.

Jafar Panahi's Taxi looks onto a world where the social order and the spiritual order are at odds, in flux, where the conversations are sometimes cutting, sometimes comic, sometimes troubled, sometimes profound.

It's business as usual, even if that business is pulled off with brilliant precision, ingeniously choreographed action, and an itinerary boasting some of the most photogenic spots on Earth.

If we now take a woman's right to vote and to hold public office for granted, Suffragette reminds us that it wasn't that long ago when things were different.

Amazingly - and this movie is amazing - Room is a story of hope, of possibility. Sure, your stomach will be in knots, your fingers clenched, your heart racing. But it will also fill that heart with a sense of the goodness, the courage, the enduring love that is out there to be discovered - and to be held onto with the fierceness of life itself.

The Assassin is not "Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon", and it is certainly not "Kill Bill". But Hou - a linchpin of Taiwan's New Wave movement, the director of "A City of Sadness" and "The Puppetmaster" - evokes the magic, the majesty, the artistry of the martial-arts movie tradition, and brings a Zen-like sense of observation to the proceedings

Singular and stunning.

Some projects are just too misguided for the star to mug and shrug his way out of. Consider Rock the Kasbah at the top, or the bottom, of that list.

Is Steve Jobs a great film? I don't think so. It's an achievement, certainly, full of Sorkin flourishes, breathtaking and brilliant one-liners that reveal a lot about the characters who deliver them.

The country goes unnamed, the warring factions aren't always clear, but the nightmarish exploitation of children is made specific in the most vivid, visceral ways.

Using a screenplay polished and honed by the Coen Brothers, Spielberg dips into John le Carré territory (you can't help but think of The Spy Who Came in From the Cold when Donovan looks onto the newly erected Berlin Wall, in the searchlights, in the snow).

A polished piece of advocacy filmmaking, He Named Me Malala begins - and is intercut with - beautiful animated sequences featuring Malala's 19th-century namesake, Malalai of Maiwand, an Afghani Pashtun poet who inspired her countrymen to rally against an onslaught of British troops.

In an extraordinarily inward and moving performance, Gere sheds every vestige of his silver-screen persona.

I'm not sure if leavening is the right word, but Brolin, as an enigmatic U.S. agent with a world-weary cynicism and a black-ops vibe, provides at least a dose of (very) dark humor to the proceedings.

As a celebration of agility, ability, and outlandish human behavior, The Walk is a winning thing. It may not get inside the head of its pole-balancing protagonist - it doesn't really even try - but Zemeckis' movie takes you skyward.

The Martian is never less than engaging, and often much more than that.

There'd be a lot less strife and starvation, disease and dread, if Nancy Meyers ruled the world.

Black Mass, a down and dirty crime drama based on the exploits of Boston gangster James "Whitey" Bulger, is thrilling for a number of reasons.

A story of companionship, loneliness, resilience. It's a small, artfully crafted thing, but it resonates in big ways.

Isn't the whole handheld "real-video" thing kind of old by now? Isn't the Shyamalanian-twist thing kind of old by now, too?

Chloe & Theo is a mess of a message movie, simplistic, sappy, silly.

There are some terrifically strong scenes and terrific actors contributing to them.

Brings home the complexities and contradictions of the man.

Digging for Fire, like last year's "Happy Christmas" (also with Kendrick) and 2013's "Drinking Buddies" (with Johnson and Kendrick), is not a film for fans of taut, crafted dialogue and definitive endings. Conversations drift and weave, as do the people having them. Narcissistic melancholy dukes it out with beer-and-pot-stoked merriment. There is longing. There is foolhardiness.

Although Mistress America is very much a New York movie, full of references to couture, pop culture, boutique hotels (to Antigone and Faulkner, too), its comic centerpiece is a brazen assault on a country compound.

A taut thriller about an American family touching down in an unnamed country just as a violent coup erupts, No Escape goes about its gut-churning business by playing (and preying) on our worst xenophobic tendencies.

Rosenwald tells the remarkable story of a remarkable man.

An honest and personal and unblurred examination (even through that druggy blur) of a tricky voyage into womanhood.

If you strip away all the gunplay, Hitman: Agent 47 would be about 10 minutes long.

Best of Enemies offers a bracing view of a pivotal time in our recent history, as Vietnam and race riots scarred a nation's soul, and as the Establishment and the Counter Culture exchanged epithets and blows.

A lot of energy and effort has gone into this endeavor, and I can't say some of it's not fun. But more of it, alas, is just tedious. Say uncle already.

There is intrigue. There is suspense. Guilt - a man's guilt, a nation's - hangs heavy in the air.

We're in the company of a great character here, with a lot on his mind, a lot to say.

Riley's film brings the American icon's career back into sharp focus.

Finally - and the news should really come as a relief - here is a role Streep should not have tried, in a movie that should not have been made.

It's overstating things to say the stars of Fantastic Four are Miles Teller, Kate Mara, Michael B. Jordan, and Jamie Bell, because I can't remember the last time four actors appeared less invested in a movie for which they've teamed up.

Although it often feels like a company-bankrolled promo film, A Lego Brickumentary answers all the questions both Lego novices and Lego nerds would want to know.

There's a difference between velocity and momentum, and while the chases, shootouts and close-quarters combat rarely flag, our interest does.

Baker gets great, sly, unforced performances from his two leads, but it's not all a rollicking good time: There are moments of quietude, inquietude, moments when a sense of wariness and loneliness settles over the women.

The movie name-drops the cool stuff, the rebels of word and song, but the essence of the story and the cardboard characters who inhabit it are as mundane as can be.

What keeps this cornball business from getting out of hand is the commitment of Gyllenhaal, whose performance is fierce and muscular, in and out of the ring.

There's humanity here, on all sides, and a gentle wisdom beneath the raging rhetoric.

Mr. Holmes is about how the past defines us. It is also very much about regret and trying to put things right.

Although its origin-story machinations get the better of it, Ant-Man isn't a bust.

Trainwreck is anything but.

All nutty, all nonsensical, all aboard.

Cartel Land offers a chilling glimpse into a world of violence and vigilantism.

You'd think a movie about transplanting human consciousness would be smarter than this.

Asif Kapadia's extraordinary documentary, Amy, is filled with similarly soul-stirring, heartbreaking moments.

Deeply personal and filled with love, Maya Forbes' Infinitely Polar Bear is nonetheless a hard movie to watch - hard to watch comfortably.

If Manglehorn is to be remembered at all, it shall be for the excruciating first date that its title character goes on with a chirpy bank clerk he has long been chatting up. Her name is Dawn, and she is played by Holly Hunter.

Students of sound design and horror-movie scores should see - or hear - Closer to God, which elicits more creepy scares than its transparent plot warrants, thanks to an unsettling audio mix and pulsing, percolating music from Thomas Nöla.

Inside Out is the first psychological thriller that's fun for the whole family. Really psychological. And really fun.

Bleak and painfully earnest.

Jurassic World, like its genomed nemesis, is bigger, and it is pretty scary. But it's not nearly as cool, or as smart, as "Jurassic Park."

I'll See You in My Dreams is delicate and nuanced, with writing that rejects, or at least reshapes, the cliches of movies about people facing the glare of their sunset years.

Feig, who wrote the Spy screenplay, encouraging his actors to improvise along the way, has his own stealth mission. For all the over-the-top comedy, zigzagging chases, and choreographed fight scenes, Spy is very much a tale of female empowerment.

Its daring dive into the mind of Brian Wilson feels right. God only knows (to borrow a Pet Sound song title or two), but you still believe in . . . Brian.

Let sleeping bros lie.

This peripatetic farce practically propels itself.

Fails to bring Giger to life in any kind of illuminating way.

Quite literally the blockbuster of the year.

Dreamy and impressionistic, full of debauchery, drugs, disco, and dazzling couture, Saint Laurent is a biopic that picks its moments, leaving backstory behind.

Opens the window on a pivotal time in 1960s (and early 1970s) pop culture.

Unlikely to be remembered in decades to come - or even in months to come, once the next teenage dystopian fantasy inserts itself into movie houses.

There's a fine line between bag lady and belle of the ball, and Apfel instinctively knows it. Her sense of style is uncanny.

Spinney comes across as a man whose warm spirit is literally at the core of the loving, if loopy Big Bird.

George Miller's Fury Road is a hundred things at once: a biker movie, a spaghetti western, a post-apocalyptic dystopian action pic, a tale of female empowerment (The Vagina Monologues' Eve Ensler was a consultant on set), a Bosch painting made scary 3D real, a Keystone Kops screwball romp, and an auto show from hell.

The line between ha-ha funny and sorrowful reverence has been crossed - more deftly than you'd think.

This quiet, aching film - punctuated by dead-on music choices, a blues song, reggae, the requisite Leonard Cohen - doesn't answer those questions. It's enough to raise them.

The thing's a behemoth. And as the franchise thunders on, it's also becoming more and more a bore.

A riveting sci-fi investigation into humankind's experiments with A.I. (with pages from Spike Jonze's Her and Stanley Kubrick's 2001), Ex Machina marks the extremely able directing debut of British writer Alex Garland, of the novels "The Beach" and "The Tesseract," and of the screenplays for Danny Boyle's "28 Days Later" . . . and "Sunshine."

Tcheng finds Simons in moments of haughty self-confidence and tremulous self-doubt.

After toiling for the likes of Ridley Scott, Ron Howard, and Peter Weir all these years, Crowe takes command of his own camera crews and castmates, mounting an ambitious and sentimental period drama.

Hugely affecting - and reflective and witty.

Never mind the facts. True Story, slick and shaky, doesn't know where the truth lies.

Unrelentingly grim, plodding, and close-to-incoherent adaptation of Tom Rob Smith's best-selling mystery.

Baumbach, whose films include the searingly funny, autobiographical "The Squid and the Whale" and the brilliantly uncomfortable "Margot at the Wedding," writes wry, sharp, poignant stuff.

White God offers a dark - very dark - take on the way humans exert authority, and superiority, over our fellow creatures.

The transformation of Reynold's lawyer from a bumbler and stumbler to a victorious litigator, sticking it to an entire nation, is the stuff of a Frank Capra/Jimmy Stewart pic.

Effie Gray is peculiarly compelling, even if the issue of sexual repression, all the Victorian manners, seem light-years gone and close to unfathomable.

Comedy, pathos, and some schmaltzy couplets about the changing seasons follow forthwith.

If Kumiko, the Treasure Hunter takes its time, it's time worth taking. The cinematography is lovely: great swirls of midnight snow, frosted trees in glinting sun, the bustling modernity of Tokyo, a big library, subway stations exquisite in their orderliness.

Merchants of Doubt shouldn't be a hard sell. The fact that it is should make you very mad.

A masterfully creepy and beautifully turned variation on the teen horror formula.

Serena is one long eye-roll of calamities and corn.

The polar opposite of the J.K. Simmons character in "Whiplash."

Like "Hope and Glory," Boorman's Queen and Country finds exhilarating comedy in places usually reserved for drama, violence, loss.

In fact, no one in The Gunman looks happy. And what happened to chivalry? If a fierce squad of goons is coming after you and your ex, whom you still love, and there's only one Kevlar vest to throw on, don't you offer it to her? Apparently not.

Watts' Evelyn is a tricky character - it should be entertaining having her around in the cloven-in-two-to-cash-in-at-the-box-office final installments.

Elkabetz, alternately resigned and raging, stoic and sad, bitter humor in her eyes, is riveting. Gett: The Trial of Viviane Amsalem takes its time to unfold, but like its star, the film presents its case in powerful, persuasive ways.

Madly entertaining and just plain mad.

The Salvation is severe and bloody stuff.

Although James and Madden are no Fred and Ginger when it comes time for the fabled ball, her breathy swoons and glitter-splashed décolletage and his personable imperviousness bode well for the couple's future.

Run All Night isn't dull. The pace is breakneck, and necks get broken. But the violence is relentless, ugly, unredeemed by any real humanity.

1971 is a testament to a generation's idealism, heroism, foolhardiness, fearlessness.

All manner of subplots weave their way through the film, which teems with "colorful" characters and saccharine cliches. But, like the first film, it's next to impossible not to find diversion in the company of such stalwarts as Dench and Nighy and Smith. And George Thorogood is, happily, never heard from again.

Chappie has a nothing-to-lose Roger Cormanesque quality about it, low on budget (except for the CGI robots) and low on meaning, but full of high-velocity chases, helicopter pursuits, and weapons blasting around empty warehouses marred by graffiti and trash.

It's a story of global consequences and historic proportions, and of astounding athleticism and synchronicity - and filmmaker Polsky ices it.

Amirpour clearly studied their films and listened to some Sergio Leone spaghetti Western scores while she was at it. The music in A Girl Walks Home Alone at Night pulses with a late-night Persian vibe, reverby and twanging, soulful, hypnotic.

The movie pulls off the worst kind of con: the one that disappoints.

The vampires in What We Do in the Shadows are symbolic of something else altogether: epic unkemptness.

There are good things to say about the inspirational Disney sports film McFarland, USA, starting with its up-from-the-scrap-heap story, which happens to be true.

In the future, in the past, at all points along the space-time continuum, the Theory of the Teenage Male Mind throws everything out of whack.

What's up in The Duke of Burgundy is a straight-faced homage to 1970s European erotica, full of soft-focus nudity and soft-core kink.

The haunting mastery of Leviathan comes not from these broad indictments of a social order, but from the specifics of the performances, the actors wearing their hurt and rage, their defiance and dread, like well-worn clothing.

There's real hypocrisy here. If a movie like Fifty Shades of Grey is supposed to offer a voyeuristic experience - and not a ridiculous experience - have some integrity about your nudity. Despite what the filmmakers may want to believe, there isn't a lot else going on here. Fifty Shades of Grey Matter, not so much.

As for Kunis, she gets to wear some out-of-this-world couture, and gets to make her entrance at a marriage ceremony on a floating dais, kind of like Katy Perry at the Super Bowl.

It's a good story, a sad story, a story of triumph and prejudice and terrible hypocrisy. And Cumberbatch aces it all - another smartly realized but deeply soulful performance from an actor who seemingly can do no wrong.

Tonally askew (Altman-esque one minute, Austin Powers-esque the next), Inherent Vice is a sun-glared, neon-limned muddle of noir plotline and potheaded jokery that not only doesn't make sense, but actually seems to try hard not to.

Mr. Turner is no barrel of laughs. It's a barrel of life - an extraordinary one.

Selma may be flawed, even spurious at points. But in its larger portrait of a man of dignity, purpose, and courage, and in Oyelowo's performance as that man, the film rings true.

A moody cyber-noir with not much on its mind but looking good, Blackhat is a must-see if you like your dialogue (romantic, dramatic, subtitled Cantonese) peppered with techspeak.

The Dardennes are aces at these small-scale human dramas, and Two Days, One Night is almost without flaw.

Directed in moody, downbeat tones by Daniel Barnz, Cake doesn't know when to stop piling on the angst.

With creepy sound effects (thuds and clangs and groans, oh my) and a mounting - make that sinking - sense of dread, Black Sea is at once fist-clenchingly suspenseful and, well, dull.

A boldly sappy melodrama that plays on - and off - racial stereotypes.

Mommy is too long for its own good, its sense of hysteria too relentless. But the headlong energy is intoxicating more than exhausting, and Freud would have a field day with Die and Steve. A mother and child, so sweet, so tender, so terrifying.

Gritty, suspenseful and almost poetic in its depiction of an unforgiving town, A Most Violent Year is just shy of being great.

Moore is nominated this year, and whether she wins or not, her performance deserves attention. It is one of this very fine actress' defining roles. And it resonates with humanity and heartbreak.

Beefed up and twanging like a true cowboy, Cooper nonetheless carries the full weight of his character's achievements - and the questions that come with them - as he tries to find his footing back on Texas soil. If American Sniper fails at being a truly great film, it is no fault of its star.

There's more tenderness in Big Eyes, and a playfully framed but nonetheless emphatic you-go-girl spirit to the proceedings, as we watch Margaret - a magnificent Adams - slowly emerge from her shell.

Johnny Depp, in bushy eyebrows, sinister mustache, and a suit and hat of fur, may be too cartoonishly lascivious for his own good as the wolf who pursues the girl in the scarlet cape to Grandmother's house. But then he gets to croon the couplet, "There's no way to describe what you feel / When you're talking to your meal." Delicious.

Whiplash is writer/director Damien Chazelle's hyperventilated nightmare about artistic struggle, artistic ambition. It's as much a horror movie as it is a keenly realized indie about jazz, about art, about what it takes to claim greatness.

The Night at the Museum tent pole has played fast and loose with history, and with our knowledge, or lack of knowledge, of the past. But I'm pretty sure a capuchin monkey never urinated on teensy-weensy figures of a cowboy and a Roman emperor as they ran for their lives from a lava flow in ancient Pompeii. That happens in Secret of the Tomb, and it seems like a fitting way to retire the show.

It seems sadly apt that the Daddy Warbucks figure played by Jamie Foxx in the new Annie is a cellphone mogul. Because Foxx is pretty much phoning in his performance.

If you want to see a Renaissance faire turned into an apocalyptic battlefield, this is the ticket.

Something about the way the film has been assembled doesn't feel altogether organic.

As for Bale, he seems to have lost his compass. His accent strays, his famous intensity wasted on clunky dialogue.

Footage from VanDyke's travels provides the first-person narrative thrust to Point and Shoot, but Curry's interviews with VanDyke, back in his Baltimore home, are what give the film its larger, more challenging context.

The Babadook, then, is a study in madness that lurks beneath the surface. But it is also very much (and amusingly) a look at the trials of parenting, especially single-parenting: those days when you just want to, well, get your child out of the picture somehow. Of course, you don't act on those impulses. That's what the movies are for.

Parental units who manage to remain conscious through the kiddie-centric proceedings can either savor, or groan at, Malkovich's bespectacled Octavius barking punny, celebrity name-dropping orders to his minions.

Foxcatcher is a story of wealth and the lack of it, of family connection and disconnection. But more than anything, it is a story of a mind unraveling. The result is devastating drama for those of us looking on.

At a certain point, The Homesman will take you by surprise. By the end, a ferry ride across the Missouri River, it will take your heart.

Directed by Terrence Malick's editor and protégé, A.J. Edwards, The Better Angels abounds with Malick-ian moments: upward-pointing cameras capturing bodies wheeling through fields, plaintive voice-overs punctuated by Jew's harp and birdsong, a tendency to drift toward the sky and its moody tableau of clouds.

Redmayne should be getting a lot of notice for his performance; it's palpable, it's poignant. Jones, too, is terrific. And Marsh, who won the documentary Academy Award for his Philippe Petit Twin Towers caper Man on Wire, brings a keen artistry to The Theory of Everything.

Einsteinian, Kubrickian, Malickian, Steinbeckian - Interstellar, Christopher Nolan's epically ambitious space opera, is all that. And more. And, alas, less.

Lieberher, a Philly native transplanted to L.A., is a reed-thin, wide-eyed wonder. There's none of that precocious Hollywood child-actor stuff going on; he's seriously thinking about what he has to say, assessing his words and their implications. It's rare to see any actor - let alone a novice, barely out of the single digits - so readily and naturally displaying inner thought in front of the camera.

Monaghan is stronger still. This is a performance that deserves to be noticed. She is crushingly good.

Although it's pretty much impossible to avoid the cliches and constructs of a war movie, Ayer pushes his actors to find the adrenalized fear, and fire, in their guts. Pitt brings "Wardaddy" alive in ways that put his cartoonish "Inglourious Basterds" Army lieutenant to shame. Lerman's rabbity dread is palpable.

With its improvisatory score (drummer Antonio Sanchez provides a hustling backbeat throughout), its seamless shots, its leaps into the surreal, and then back again into the excruciating, embarrassing real, Birdman ascends to the greatest of heights.

Men, Women & Children isn't a cartoon. It wants to be real, terribly. Instead, it's just terrible.

British screen stalwarts Bill Nighy and Imelda Staunton appear as locals - he twitchy and reticent, she chatty and full of cheer, both with their hearts in the right place.

This is Highsmith, and so things do not go as planned for her protagonists. The Two Faces of January - drop-dead gorgeous to behold - is not a merry tale, but a murderous one. Murderously good.

Sure, there's a witty reference to another, vastly more momentous legal drama (To Kill a Mockingbird, Robert Duvall's film debut). And yes, Farmiga gets to call out Downey, and stay in character, for "that hyper-verbal vocabulary vomit thing that you do." Small pleasures, in a bigger mess.

Even with a voice-over narration, and conversations with her dog, Robyn's nomadic quest is full of grand silences, all the better to take in the sky, the rocks, the world spinning underfoot. Wasikowska plays this wordless wanderer just right. That is, she makes her real.

If a movie with suicide as a central theme can be deemed funny, then writer/director Craig Johnson has pulled it off, mixing heartache and humor and giving Wiig, especially, the opportunity to shine.

That's something else Ridley and his actors do: make you appreciate what a life it was - impossibly short, impossibly brilliant.

It's a wondrous mix of the momentous and mundane, the profound and the perverse, with Cave blues-talking his way through the goofy juxtapositions, the darkness, and the light.

The Equalizer, which reteams Washington with his Training Day director, Fuqua, is an origin story, like the birth of Batman, or Daredevil. If audiences and star are so inclined, it's easy to see this premise and this character - a tough, taciturn gent burdened with regret and a very special skill set - going into Roman numerals.

It's bleak business, and as it hurries toward its explosive, expository conclusion, the film becomes nonsensical, too.

Love Is Strange has a gentleness about it, and an empathy, that inspire.

The film's conceit - mopey strangers meet, form a band, and take to the dance halls - has a Judy Garland/Mickey Rooney let's-put-on-a-show innocence, and exuberance.

A Summer's Tale is one of those movies where it looks like nothing is happening; there is a lot of walking and talking (against exquisite backdrops), dissections and discourse about the intricacies of romance, the false signals, the fickleness.

The Trip to Italy doesn't feel entirely new, but there's comfort in familiarity, too. And as Brydon and Coogan note in one discourse, it's the rare sequel (The Godfather: Part II) that's better than its forebear.

An efficient, if not exactly inspiring, espionage thriller, full of high-tech gadgetry (surveillance drones! flash drives!) and low-tech action (car chases! shootouts! a shovel to the head!).

If Matthew Weiner's Are You Here is good for anything, it's to illustrate how the themes and conflicts he has worked out with such depth and dexterity in all these seasons of "Mad Men" can go terribly amiss with the wrong actors, wrong backdrop, wrong tone, wrong time.

A delightful, oddball surprise.

Any movie that considers the possibility of an afterlife, or the possibility that there isn't one, without first getting all postapocalyptic about it, merits some respect. Stay, Mia, stay!

Filmmaker Maria Sole Tognazzi is going for a quiet, thoughtful character study: a modern woman, sure of herself, but still trying to come to terms with her place in the world.

It's all head-spinning and lovely - and a little exhausting, too.

A dark, shaky, standard-issue superhero picture.

Calvary is also just jaw-droppingly beautiful. McDonagh and cinematographer Larry Smith capture the four-seasons-in-one-day miracle that is Ireland, with its jagged stonescapes, roiling surf, fairie towns, and bracing skies.

What If boasts a couple of near-classic comic moments, one involving jalapeno peppers and a precipitous fall.

It would be curmudgeonly to count all the ways in which The Hundred-Foot Journey is unsurprising, unrealistic, unnecessary.

Nicely timed to cash in on the Ebola panic, Cabin Fever: Patient Zero - the prequel to the gross-out franchise about a lethal flesh-eating virus and its party-hardy victims - isn't going to do much for the tourism trade in the Dominican Republic.

Code Black is sobering stuff. The American health system, McGarry's film argues, is broken. But the film is undeniably inspiring, too: Despite everything that is wrong, there are nurses and doctors and technicians determined to do things right.

For all its visual delights, Magic in the Moonlight, the 44th feature written and directed by the admirably industrious Woody Allen, has to be one of his bigger duds.

Is it dumb to say, "Wow?"...I don't care. Wow.

The Killer Inside Me is tough, disturbing stuff: We're tagging along with a sociopath as he explains himself, reveals himself, works things out inside his head.

A Most Wanted Man's cast - a mix of Germans speaking English, Americans speaking English with German accents, Russians, and men and women from the Middle East - is uniformly stellar.

Wickedly smart and wickedly playful, Roman Polanski's adaptation of David Ives' Tony-nominated Venus in Fur works on so many levels, it's almost dizzying.

At a certain point in Dawn of the Planet of the Apes, you expect Caesar to say, "Et tu, Koba?" Maybe a bit obvious, but it would have shown some wit.

Supermensch is one of those truth-is-stranger-than-fiction tales.

In Don McKellar's remake of "Seducing Doctor Lewis", a 2003 French-Canadian comedy, the charm feels force-fed.