Ty Burr

The movie gets credit for showing the struggles he and millions of others with similar disorders live with on a daily basis. They’re not pretty, but — aside from Emma — they’re real.

George Nolfi directs with a TV-movie straightforwardness and at two hours the film is overlong, but the story is an eye-opener and the central performances are terrific.

The movie’s pretty great — not quite “Fargo” with lobsters but close enough, and about as good as regional filmmaking gets. Filmed in Harpswell, Maine and environs — the cobwork of Bailey Island Bridge curves through one scene — Blow the Man Down delves cleverly and suspensefully beneath the surface of a small, well-appointed fishing town in winter. There are bodies and there is blood. There are also a lot of quietly furious women.

The movie’s of a piece with shaggy recent westerns like “The Sisters Brothers” and “Slow West,” and it owes a debt of gratitude as well to the work of Robert Altman, especially the classic “McCabe and Mrs. Miller.” (That First Cow marks the final appearance of Altman regular and “McCabe” costar Rene Auberjonois is a lovely poetic touch.)

A clever, gory, often very funny piece of genre junk — a B+ movie — that carries a hidden warning: When we turn other people into cartoons of our worst fears, the only thing left to do is kill each other.

The Way Back is the first real Sad Ben film. It’s earnest and old-fashioned and sturdily made, and I wish that were enough to make it good.

A scattershot satire about the vulgar, privileged one percent, British division, that’s almost as funny as it is furious.

Wendy feels like a holding maneuver — a way for a gifted young storyteller to keep one foot in the innocence of childhood while figuring what he’s really going to do next.

The movie is almost wholly lacking in the Pixar touch — that extra oomph of wit, invention, creative craziness, darkness, depth of feeling, whatever, that makes the company’s products among the very few items manufactured for children in our sold-out popular culture to not feel like products.

It’s still a clever-clever cartoon version of the book, with broad physical business in place of wit and Austen’s insights on gender roles and social hypocrisy tossed overboard. But I guess if the Empire waists are high enough and the male leads strappingly repressed, nothing else really matters.

The movie is floating into a fierce war of wills between Iya and Masha, one in which their locked stares gradually seem to become an eerie, eternal bond of sisterhood. They can’t look away. Neither may you.

It’s a sly, twisty little chiller, not ashamed of its B-movie bona fides and better for it.

Leave it to James to sum up a legendary, culture-altering talent: “She turned her lack of self-awareness into a triumph.” Both sides of that coin live on in our modern culture, and Kael’s voice fills every self-satisfied corner of the Internet. Two decades after her death, she’s still the ghost in the machine.

Cancer dramas are not uncommon; what lifts Ordinary Love just enough out of the ordinary is its concern with how a married couple survives the ordeal. Intimate, unsparing, and attuned to the micro-nuances of a longtime relationship, it is made special by the two actors at its center, both out-size talents who here relish the opportunity to play close and draw from life.

The Traitor is a coolly epic appraisal of a country’s struggle with its dark side rather than a mobbed-up melodrama. If it’s “Godfather” clichés you want, there’s always “The Godfather.”

Céline Sciamma’s extraordinary fourth feature and a movie of body, heart, and mind.

The Assistant is a stealth bomb of a movie: It barely makes a noise but it leaves a crater in your heart.

Clemency observes its characters with a steady, unmodulated pace and a minimum of frills.

It’s rough and observant, stacked with finely etched characters whose sympathies keep shifting along with ours.

And while I understand Downey wanting to make a movie for his kids, the world might be better served if, at long last, he made one for himself.

An acceptable creature feature at best and a waterlogged “Alien” at worst, Underwater sneaks into town as a true January release: a shelf-sitting production that 20th Century Fox’s new owner, Disney, is putting outside the store like a loaf of stale bread. It’s there if you want it, and you could chew on worse.

As true-story dramas about innocent men on death row go, Just Mercy is just above average. I still hope it reaches the widest audience possible. To quote a statistic cited in the film, for every nine prisoners executed in this country, one is found to have been wrongfully convicted. That’s a number to shame a nation.

It’s the lack of depth that ultimately may keep you from committing to 1917 or even respecting it — the movie’s sense that war is simply something that happens to people rather than being caused by them. Don’t forget that World War I was once called The War to End All Wars. It wasn’t and according to the headlines it still isn’t, but this movie never stops running to bother ask why.

In Fabric is good bizarre fun, but after a while that’s all it is.

The achievement of this wonderful movie goes beyond the specifics of its production. Gerwig has reimagined the novel back to its roots, as the story of not just one woman but all the women Louisa May Alcott may have lived with or known or been. It is an offering — to her, to them, and to us.

Because Howard never stops moving, neither does the movie, and the effect is both exhausting and electrifying. Watching this latest bulletin from the Safdie brothers, Benny and Josh, is like grabbing hold of a high-voltage line: It doesn’t feel that great, but good luck letting go.

I truly believe our divided nation can be healed and brought together as one by Cats — the musical, the movie, the disaster. In other news, my eyes are burning. Oh God, my eyes.

The movie takes its place alongside Martin Scorsese’s “Silence” (2016) as a work of true solemnity, one that wonders what we owe the divine in our worldly life. If the Scorsese film is arguably about the profoundest of doubts, A Hidden Life is something different. It’s an act of faith. Maybe Malick knows we’ll be needing it.