Ty Burr

The final shots are both majestic and damning, and they lift the film with a kind of gentle contempt into a surrealism that makes an awful kind of sense, the world in its lushness swallowing Zama as it will swallow us all. Some movies unfold as dreams; Zama dances us playfully toward the edge of nightmare and then asks us to open our eyes.

One of the more entertaining yet profoundly disturbing documentaries of this or any year.

Damsel, goofy, absurdist, and subversive, feels like a brave step in an uncertain direction.

How do you make a boring movie about this guy? Beats me, but director Ben Lewin has managed to pull it off. Based on Nicholas Dawidoff’s 1994 biography of the same title, The Catcher Was a Spy is a decorous, dutiful dogtrot that tells Berg’s story with excellent production values and a conspicuous lack of energy. In its tastefully dull fashion it wastes not only a fascinating subject but the mercurial actor playing him.

You can go see Jurassic World: Fallen Kingdom or you can save yourself the time and money by chugging a six-pack of Red Bull and running through the dinosaur exhibits at the Harvard Museum of Natural History until you can’t breathe. As experiences go, they’re equally adrenalizing and equally ephemeral.

It’s unnerving in ways that elude easy explanation and that slip under your skin and stay there.

Hearts Beat Loud is gentle, funny, humane, and predictable, kept from becoming tiresome by a cast of pros that includes not only Offerman but Toni Collette as Frank’s landlady and possible love interest and a frisky Ted Danson as a philosophic stoner who owns the neighborhood watering hole.

Nancy is an eccentric, pungent gift of a film about a woman without identity played by an actress without persona.

The result is a clattery, unfocused affair that at times is more irritating than fun.

High-concept, low-budget, proudly set-bound, Hotel Artemis shouldn’t work at all. Somehow, miraculously, it does.

It’s an eerie mood piece that slowly and surely tightens the thumb screws before all hell breaks loose; that and the fact that much of Hereditary takes place in one rambling dark house is evidence that Aster has spent a lot of time studying “The Shining,” “The Exorcist,” and “Rosemary’s Baby.” It’s nice to have a classicist back in town.

We go to heist films to see the suckers get taken in high style. This one just robs us bland.

Throw out any expectations you might have of coherent narrative structure or directorial control, and you might have a pretty good time.

If Mary Shelley disappoints, it’s only because al-Mansour sticks to the tried and true bones of the bio-pic genre and plays it stylistically safe. Maybe the filmmaker hopes to prove her skill with a big-budget period piece; if so, she easily succeeds.

The film casts Annette Bening as the vain, aging stage actress Irina Arkadina, Saoirse Ronan as the naive country beauty Nina, and Elisabeth Moss as bitter Masha, dressed in black “in mourning for my life.” Those are three excellent reasons to see the movie, and the filmmaking fights them almost every step of the way.

Audiences should feel free to lower their guard — to adjust expectations into B-movie territory. And as a B-movie, “Solo” delivers, sometimes in a way that reminds a viewer of this franchise’s roots in classic Saturday matinee adventure serials and sometimes simply as proficient, dutiful, time-passing entertainment.

This feeble excuse for a comedy made me angry, and if you have any cherished cinematic feelings for the quartet of actresses at its center, you may feel angry, too.

Pope Francis: A Man of His Word is an essay in radical humility capable of moving a viewer regardless of his or her religious persuasions, or lack thereof.

Deadpool 2 is very good at what it does, which is flattering the audience into feeling like it’s in on the joke. If you’re a doubter, though, you may wonder if the joke’s on us.

Sadly, it’s not quite as fun as that sounds. If you’re up for something deeply and unsettlingly strange, though, Bruno Dumont’s portrait of the saint as a young zealot has genuine oddball pleasures amid stretches of real tedium.

Plays a little like “Sex and the City” as reconceived by a Minimalist composer. That makes the movie sound like a threat, when actually it’s a dry, lightly sad, and very French comedy of romantic neurosis, brought to us by two great artists, director Claire Denis (“Chocolat,” “Beau Travail,” “White Material”) and star Juliette Binoche.

It’s an inane, absurd, fitfully amusing time-waster that ranks low on the believability scale and somewhere in the middle as mindless entertainment.

A documentary love letter to Supreme Court Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg, and it assumes you love her too.

Theron is so good that when Tully climaxes by revealing whole new depths to her character, an audience can’t help but feel cheated. Maybe the rosy, complacent final scenes can fool the filmmakers, but not us, and certainly, one senses, not Theron. The movie’s over, but it feels like the star’s just getting started.

Picking up where Joss Whedon, director of the first two “Avengers” films, left off, sibling filmmakers Anthony and Joe Russo have so many pairings and sparrings to work through that the movie is essentially a mixed martial arts extravaganza with a severely overcrowded undercard.

The movie’s a mixture of good intentions, a wobbly tone, and a plastic script, and it debuts a somewhat kinder, softer Schumer than the in-your-face comic trainwreck of “Trainwreck” (2015). I’m not sure that’s an improvement.

You’ll be in the mood for it or you won’t. 24 Frames is slow cinema at its slowest, and as meaningful as you want to make it. Above all, it breathes with the sensibility of an artist who saw beauty in people and places where most of us never thought to look.

It is violent, sad, tender, and alive, and it is as assured a piece of moviemaking as you’ll ever see.

By the end of The Peacemaker, you feel you’re watching a Samuel Beckett character furiously trying to improvise himself out of the play. In the process, he’s bringing the rest of us along.

It is hard and empathetic and bleak and often beautiful — not far off from a prairie “400 Blows.”

The film is arriving on these shores in the wake of such successful foodie nonfictions as “Jiro Dreams of Shushi,” a 2012 art-house hit about an 85-year-old master of raw fish. Like that film, Ramen Heads reaches for the lyrical with slow-motion shots of roiling broth and soaring classical music on the soundtrack. Unlike the earlier movie, it goes so far overboard in ladling out praise that viewers might wonder if they’re being sold a bill of goods.

The smarter, scarier horror movies know it’s not how much you show an audience but how little. A Quiet Place takes that maxim in a surprising direction: The tension in this movie — and it’s nearly unbearable at times — comes from how little we hear.

An entertainingly brutal portrait of feckless privilege and buried tragedy, hewing reasonably close to those points we know to be true and juicily provocative about what happened in rooms you and I weren’t privy to.

Isle of Dogs is a fascinating (and furry) place to visit, but visit is all it does. It’s a good boy. But it’s not a great one.

Writer-director Maoz is best known for his 2009 film “Lebanon,” based partly on his own experiences as a tank gunner during the 1982 Lebanon War. Like that film, Foxtrot brings a coolly critical, occasionally surrealist eye on the assumption that Israel’s military efforts have made for a better, wiser people.

It overuses ’80s nostalgia as shorthand for genuine emotional involvement, and it presents us with a rapturous digital wonderworld only to sternly lecture us that reality is the better value.

A deft, disturbing piece of work, as cold around the heart as the Kubrick film, if infinitely more dismissible. It gets in, it messes with your mind, and it vanishes, leaving only an unsettling aftertaste of unresolved narrative. It’s an exercise, but some exercise leaves you gasping.

After a brisk and promising opening half-hour set in London and Hong Kong, the movie devolves into a Saturday matinee B-movie, and not in a good way. It’s pure product, and a waste of a savvy leading actress.

Buscemi is magnificent, but all the players rise to the occasion; you may especially cherish Rupert Friend (“Homeland”) as Stalin’s demented alcoholic son Vasily and Olga Kurylenko (“Quantum of Solace”) as pianist Maria Yudina, the film’s elegant and only note of genuine conscience.

As with the simpler and stronger “Rivers and Tides,” there are moments where you may want to stop the film to assure yourself you’re seeing what you’re seeing, so disordering to the senses are Goldsworthy’s re-orderings of nature.

It’s a twisty dark comedy in the action-suspense vein, piled high with talented actors playing cretinous fools and featuring enough betrayals, mistaken identities, and narrative switchbacks to keep you pleasurably befuddled.

Seems on the face of it to be one of Zvyagintsev’s simplest and saddest stories, but it widens in the mind like ripples spreading out from a body dumped in a lake.

So how’s the movie already? Not terrible, not great, something of a disappointment after what feels like a geological epoch of hype.

The penultimate moments of “Bombshell” are moving, re-creating the lost Vienna of Kiesler’s childhood and overlaying the voice of the aging Lamarr, interviewed by an Austrian news team in 1970, as she speaks of never being understood in America. Adrift in the Land of the Lotus Eaters, she spent a lifetime being looked at and never once being seen.

Mirrors loom large in this movie, and Marina reflects back an image that too much of society refuses to see, to the point where she herself starts to doubt her own reflection. Yet the film’s most potent and lasting image involves a hand mirror and a steady gaze, and it serves as a breathtaking poetic metaphor about gender, identity, love, and the human soul. All you have to do, says Lelio, is look and see.

The new film is a lightly poisoned amuse-bouche that’s made with tasty high-end ingredients, but at 71 minutes it leaves you hungry for more.

The Insult is optimistic enough to leave the door open to hope. But it’s also realistic enough to only leave it ajar.

Honestly, the chilly dog days of February are crying out for a good, smart, silly stop-motion family film, the kind you can fully enjoy under the pretext of spending an afternoon at the movies with your kids.

No, Black Panther isn’t the greatest movie ever made. It’s probably not even the greatest superhero movie ever made. But it’s very, very good — in its best scenes, exhilarating.

A movie about ordinary American heroes that stars ordinary American heroes. About 15 minutes of the film concerns the actual heroics. The rest is . . . ordinary.

The movie’s a social history, a love story, and a call to arms. It’s very sad and it’s very good.

Worth seeing as further proof that Annette Bening can do anything and for a touchingly flummoxed performance by Jamie Bell, once the kid of “Billy Elliot” and now a strapping romantic lead. But if it sends audiences back to explore the filmography of Gloria Grahame, the movie will have truly provided a public service.

A by-the-numbers B flick with a preposterous script and a good cast trying their best.

The film’s chief flaw is that it’s in the room but never really in the room — the key figures talk about passionate interoffice policy arguments, but we never actually see them. Still, The Final Year takes in setbacks, breakthroughs, gaffes, and a steady drumbeat of talking-head criticism from televised outsiders, heard on the film’s soundtrack but not seen.

Absurdly pleasurable to watch and to listen to, an effortless display of poise from its camerawork and costumes to the characters and the things they say.

As a movie, The Post is engrossing and enjoyable, if falling slightly short of “All the President’s Men” and “Spotlight.” As a period piece, it couldn’t feel more eerily of the moment.

Despite the film’s length and aspirations, its anthropological correctness and historically accurate gore, Bale’s transformation from stone killer to empathetic ally is unconvincing.

It’s tempting to think of Molly’s Game in poker terms: Sorkin’s holding a queen, a king, and at least a couple of aces, but the tell is that he talks too much, and in the end you realize he’s bluffing.

A richly detailed sexual and emotional coming of age story, the movie’s based on a novel and it unfolds novelistically, through glances and asides and slowly accreting observations.

The film’s ultimate message — help other people, basically — is, while useful and necessary, dramatically rather slack, and you notice with a shock that the film’s central conceit has almost entirely dropped off the table by the final third. Payne’s microcosm is so like our macrocosm that after a while he simply forgets to make the distinction.

One of the year’s surprises, a defiant, funny, and multi-layered saga of talent and class resentment, marred only by some technical oddities and a certain smug awareness of everything the moviemakers are daring themselves to do right.

There is nothing especially wrong with it other than that for some of us it represents 105 minutes in hell.

In a subtle but wily performance, Strang never loses sight of his character’s innate sense of resistance. By drawing his way out of the closet, Tom of Finland drew a door for others to come out as well.

It’s not a perfect movie, but it may be a great one.

Wonder Wheel, Allen’s new film, is one of the Very Bad Ones. Set in a post-WWII Coney Island that glows with the hues of popsicles at sunset, it’s a strained adultery melodrama that appears to have been written poorly on purpose, as a sour parody of 1950s theatrical clichés.

Fairy tales hew to time-honored story lines, and some may fault The Shape of Water for the traditionalism that underlies its phantasmagoric surface. It’s the getting there that bewitches, though, and a performance by Hawkins that’s smart, scared, furious, profoundly erotic, and regal — all without saying a word. Love doesn’t speak in this movie. Instead, it swims with unparalleled style.

How’s the movie? Extremely entertaining and fairly pointless, and it will probably be taken for a classic by a generation that has likewise never heard of Tim Burton’s “Ed Wood” (1994), a movie that plumbed the wayward soul of its misbegotten moviemaker to depths The Disaster Artist never manages to touch.

A decent biopic, rousing and well-made and unruffled by depth, with an expertly judged performance at its center.

You’re left with another Denzel Washington performance that gets under your skin and stays there, rankling away. That’s a lot more than most movies offer — even the better ones.

Coco is a day-glo firecracker celebrating a country and a culture that has been (and continues to be) much maligned, and it’s at its most vibrant when it journeys into and beyond the shadow of death. That’s a paradox I can live with.

Mudbound is four-square and unshowy, and you might mistake it for old-fashioned. But the presence of an African-American director behind the camera affects everything in front of it.

Justice League may play well to hardcore DC cognoscenti, but if you’re not a fan, the movie’s failings are easy to enumerate. First off, the villain’s a dud.

The script is pungent and profanely funny while remaining rooted in strong and serious emotions.

A touching but fairly clumsy effort that only acquires the depths of sadness and resilience it needs if you have the memory of the earlier film shoring it up. It proves that second-hand grace is, after all, still grace.

As debuts go, Lady Bird is as strong as they get: funny, ferocious, and wise. It does, however, drape its restless energy and witty observations atop an overfamiliar framework of coming-of-age movies.

By turns strikingly original and dramatically slick, deeply felt and a little cooked up. It’s well worth seeing, though.

The documentary is an absolute delight, but it has a faith in everyday folks that feels both stalwart and melancholy, aware that these are exactly the people being swept away by the tides of modernity. It’s a sociopolitical cri de coeur disguised as a vacation.

It’s an entertaining piece of Hollywood waxworks if you don’t set your expectations very high and it’s probably the best movie Rob Reiner has directed in more than a decade. (This only sounds like a compliment.)

The cast is earnest and they almost convince us they’re doing important rather than self-important work.

I walked out of the movie on a cloud of happiness that was only slightly dissipated after a night’s sleep. A critical acquaintance found the whole thing much too icky-sticky sweet. It may be a generational issue.

Suburbicon is George Clooney’s sixth feature as a director and the latest spiral downward in terms of quality.

A stuffy, treacly, overproduced slab of High British twaddle, it nevertheless reduced most of a recent preview audience to what the film itself calls “blubbing.” Even a flinthearted movie critic could be seen to dab his eyes from time to time.

In temperament and technique, the writer-director Noah Baumbach occupies a niche exactly between Woody Allen and Wes Anderson. Baumbach’s films are almost all about his own tribe of neurotic upper-middle-class white New Yorkers, but while he has a more novelistic distance on his characters than Allen, his visual style is less antic and whimsical — more traditional — than Anderson’s.

In nerve, guts, heart, and mind — one of the finest films of 2017.

About the only thing the title doesn’t tell you is that the movie’s a loving, sensitive exploration of S&M bondage techniques and polyamorous relationships.

Mark Felt is a drama about an aggrieved control freak, which would be fine if director Landesman openly acknowledged it. He’s torn, though between offering a heroic celebration of the republic’s underappreciated savior and a more damning character portrait of a man who, for complex reasons, ended up doing the right thing.

The results are visually dazzling. The movie as a whole is something less.

The film is valuable for gently insisting on both the indignities and the dignity of old age, and it’s invaluable as a keepsake of a most individual screen presence. It is, simply, a lovely time at the movies.

So swollen with purpose, so titanically self-conscious in its mythmaking, that at times its nearly paralyzes itself with solemnity.

A woozy, wheezy impressionistic take on a woman’s nervous breakdown that aspires to the avant-garde but plays like a bad head-trip movie from the late 1960s. It’s dreadful. Worse, it’s not quite bad enough to be much fun.

Ex Libris has no narration and it lasts three hours and 17 minutes, which sounds like torture (or, alternately, 3½ episodes of “Game of Thrones”). Somewhat surprisingly, the movie rushes by at the speed of life.

Battle of the Sexes is slick and wholly enjoyable, a pop provocation whose medicine goes down easy via outsize, engaging performances in the leads.

American Made really does deserve to be on a double-bill with “Top Gun,” and I’m betting Cruise knows it. The first film embodies the glorious shallowness of the Reagan Era. The second wallows in that shallowness while hinting at everything it cost.

Gyllenhaal’s excellent, but, playing his girlfriend, Tatiana Maslany (star of TV’s “Orphan Black”) is something special.

Year by the Sea is for audiences who don’t trust the shiftiness of nuance and craft, of messages that rise up from dramatic situations rather than being pasted on top of them, and who would prefer their life lessons stated loudly and for maximum applicability.

With mother!, Aronofsky throws caution to the winds and delivers his most abstract cinematic experience yet. It’s also arguably his worst.

The movie tries to tell the whole story instead of just a good one.

Whose Streets? gives us more than enough stories from people not often enough heard, and their refusal to remain silent is invigorating.

Patti Cake$ charts a path of rise and fall, breakthrough and disappointment, montage and romance that would be woefully predictable if we weren’t having so much fun tagging along. What’s fresh is the central figure, her talent and presence, and an exuberance that all that concrete Tri-State armor can’t hide.

Good Time is a prime example of what the cynical or the uninterested might dismiss as “feel-bad cinema” — low budget, kitchen-sink realism about unpleasant people in worse situations. It also happens to be one of the most uncompromising movies I’ve seen all year: vibrant and desperate and alive, it’s a work hanging on by its fingernails.

The new movie, a heist comedy, has been described in some quarters as “Ocean’s 11” for the NASCAR crowd, and that’s not wrong. It also feels like the director is trying to reverse-engineer one of the Coen brothers’ loopier excursions and not getting every one of the pieces in order.

It’s a watchable disappointment that leaves mostly frustration in its wake.

The movie makes me finally want to test-drive one of the “Dark Tower” novels, if only to see what King himself was able to bring to the party. Maybe that’s been his evil plan all along.

Lines are drawn and connections are made. The intentions are pure. The results are enraging, often in accordance with the filmmakers’ hopes, sometimes against. Personally, I came out of Detroit angrier than I’ve been at a movie in ages, and not entirely the way director Kathryn Bigelow probably wants.

It’s just another wry New York family-dysfunction farce, with a stronger supporting cast and (slightly) better production values than Robespierre’s first film but also a propensity for playing it safe and dulling the pain just when the pain should be sharpest.

It’s film noir meets Jason Bourne with a dash of John le Carré, and its chief claim to your attention is our reigning lady badass at its center.

In short, Besson builds a dazzling alterna-universe — a bit of Terry Gilliam, a dash of “Blade Runner,” a smidgen of “Star Wars” (which, to be fair, was probably influenced by the original comic), and a lot of extra-strength Besson-ian whimsy. And then he strands us with the two least interesting people there.

Lady Macbeth” is thus simple in the telling while leaving us with a lapful of thorns; it’s as sensual as a tryst and as wintry as a grave.

Taken as a whole, Dunkirk invites comparisons to the works of Kubrick and Spielberg, but it’s neither as scalding as “Full Metal Jacket” nor as clear-eyed, as aware of war’s terrible randomness, as “Saving Private Ryan.” Instead, a streak of honest sentiment, earned under the most hellish of circumstances, courses through this movie and provides it with spine and a soul.

War for the Planet of the Apes plays like a mash-up of about five different movies, but at least one of them feels like a masterpiece.

The time for poetry is past, the director seems to say, as his camera looks deep into the eyes of the mob in the film’s final image. The chaos may be just be getting started.

Spider-Man: Homecoming, a superhero movie is adolescent in all the right ways: limber, reckless, full of youthful brio and uncertainty. Trying on new identities, overreaching, doubting, starting over again.

No one, but no one, makes movies like Bong, a South Korean master who combines baroque concepts, epic visuals, international casts, and a sense of humor that can make you laugh out loud in the middle of the darkest doings.

Trust me on this: Go.

For all its smarts, however,the film feels the slightest bit impersonal and risk-free. Coppola has been faulted in various quarters for dropping a female slave from her remake.

Baby Driver is the best time I’ve had at the movies in months, and, if the world is too much with you (as it is for many of us these days), you may feel the same. It’s a dazzling diversion, a series of cinematic highs that achieve the giddiness of not great art but great entertainment (and thus art through the back door).

Amirpour has the potential to see things as no other filmmaker does, but she doesn’t yet have a vision, and she may not as long as she keeps fiddling around with genre conventions laid down by others. She’s an eccentric magpie of a director, and this time the pieces she collects glitter but never quite cohere.

The plot is a canvas on which to bludgeon the audience with action sequences that have been shot for maximum overstimulation.

What’s nice about this movie, actually, is that you can get a few shameless laughs out of it and then forget you saw it at all.

The plot proceeds from the charming to the manipulative to the shameless to the demented in gentle steps that may lull some audiences the way a frog can be boiled to death by degrees.

The Hero may not be a great movie but it’s a welcome tribute to a lanky, taciturn presence — a love letter to an actor that reminds us of why we ought to love him, too.

Beatriz at Dinner has been directed with subtle but damning chamber-comedy finesse by Miguel Arteta (“The Good Girl,” “Chuck & Buck”) and written by that great deadpan satirist Mike White (“Chuck & Buck,” “School of Rock,” TV’s “Freaks and Geeks”).

My Cousin Rachel is a well-turned, well-acted literary adaptation that suffers from a built-in problem: The hero is a twit.

A clever and heartfelt comedy-drama that remains aloft as long as it retains its sense of humor; when the going gets serious, the dialogue turns therapeutic and heavy. Still, it’s a decent debut and an ambitious attempt to juggle tones.

The final scenes are both ambiguous and terrifying, and they left a preview audience as shaken as any I’ve seen. I had the distinct feeling, though, that a lot of them wouldn’t be recommending the movie to their friends. It gets very far under the skin.

Because the movie’s carrying a heavy load of corporate expectations, it gets pulled in different directions by competing agendas before eventually collapsing into incoherence.

It’s the latest from Cristian Mungiu, one of the leading lights of the New Romanian Cinema and the director of “4 Months, 3 Weeks and 2 Days,” by general critical consensus one of the finest films of the new millennium. Graduation is a more quietly damning drama; it doesn’t eviscerate you like the earlier movie but instead sticks with you like a nagging doubt.

Unfortunately, Churchill the movie is simply dreadful, a stiff, melodramatic “Great Man” travesty that gets both the larger history and the details wrong while encouraging its star’s most overwrought excesses. What Cox serves in this movie is ham, poorly sliced.

The first two hours run the gamut from interesting to delightful. The final 20 minutes are roaring, ridiculous business as usual. We should be thankful the tide of mediocrity is held back as long as it is.

Paris Can Wait is Coppola’s feature solo writing-directing debut, filmed in her 80th year. It would be cheering to report that it’s a great movie, but you can’t have everything.

Vanessa Gould’s charming and soulful documentary Obit should convince the doubters and cheer those who already know. As someone who takes great pleasure in both reading and writing valedictions to the recently deceased, I can personally attest that the movie’s dead on.

What separates the good teen romances based on young adult novels from the soppy, ridiculous ones? Emotional conviction, mostly, and committed performances. Everything, Everything is mostly one of the good ones, even if it has everything (everything) that makes these movies head south for everyone (everyone) but the target audience of teenage girls.

There are a number of reasons “Covenant” works where “Prometheus” struggled to work. The characters are more incisively drawn this time, and their relationships inherently more dramatic.

A lot of the humor, sage as it is, comes from the players, Winger and Letts in particular.

Debuting at last year’s Cannes Film Festival and updated in light of recent events, it’s a failed film whose failure makes it interesting; it’s less a portrait of Assange than an account of how the scales fell from one admirer’s eyes as she looked at him.

King Arthur: Legend of the Sword is stupid enough to send you back to the one movie that did the saga right by ripping it to shreds, 1975’s “Monty Python and the Holy Grail.”

According to the closing credits, My Entire High School was six years in the making and is clearly something that Shaw felt he had to get out of his system with his feature film-directing debut. Mission accomplished, and very stylishly, too.

An acrid family affair that has been aggressively over-directed by the talented Oren Moverman (“The Messenger”) and brought to intermittent life by a very good cast.

The sharp comic timing and devil-may-care breeziness of the original only return intermittently, and the new film’s emphasis is on family feuds and forgiveness. It’s heavy on the feels. There are hugs.

The dialogue is as subtle as a placard, the drama manages to be both cooked-up and dull, and the movie’s fear of brainwashed, tech-addicted millennials is so broad as to be unintentionally funny.

The title itself is a marquee-buster that bites off more than it can chew. So does the movie’s main character and so does the movie. But the chewing’s interesting and there’s food for thought here, not to mention a central performance that may stick to your ribs for quite some time.

The movie is 141 minutes long but you rarely feel its weight; that’s how confident a filmmaker Gray has become. All The Lost City of Z lacks is a great leading actor, someone magnificent and flawed like a Peter O’Toole.

Because Free Fire is a essentially a comedy of bad manners — a bedroom farce that only happens to take place in a warehouse, with volleys of gunfire rather than slammings of doors — it’s a highly enjoyable 90 minutes, especially if your tastes run to the violent, the absurd, and the violently absurd.

About halfway into Colossal you may experience the novel vertigo that comes when you genuinely have no idea where a movie is taking you but understand you’re in competent creative hands. That sensation holds until you’re deposited, happy and a little worse for wear, at the end.

No matter how you feel, we still get the poetry, stitched throughout the film and occasionally soaring above it like an uncaged bird: hard, far-seeing, and waiting for the day it will be understood.

In no way, shape, or fashion does Queen of the Desert qualify as a good movie, but for fans of Werner Herzog — those of us who have followed cinema’s Teutonic imp of the perverse since the 1970s, when he was staging all-dwarf fables and sending conquistadors across mountains — it is fascinating and something close to a must-see.

A small-scale, satisfying human drama that backs gradually into larger matters.

The 1979 film was both more casual and much darker about the realities and infirmities of old age, and it had one of George Burns’s better performances. It was a funny, touching experience, and it was a bitter pill. The new movie is a placebo, with Hallmark emotions put over by a cast of solid-gold professionals.

And there you have the problem with The Zookeeper’s Wife: Dialogue and plotting that keep this inspirational, mostly true story earthbound by hitting every note with a hammer.

Frantz is pleasurable slow going, developing its themes at an amble but with a measure of suspense, sympathy toward its characters, and a lasting faith in filmmaking craft.

Personal Shopper is as coolly, beautifully ambiguous as we’ve come to expect from France’s Olivier Assayas, and it contains the kind of mysteries that can leave adventurous audiences tingling pleasurably while others spit out their gummi worms in frustration.

At times in Song to Song, the effect is mesmerizing, mostly when Mara is onscreen in all her tremulous bioluminescence.

T2 Trainspotting wears out its welcome slowly, like a group of old men running out of stories to tell in an afternoon pub.

Like Life itself, this alien is nasty, brutish, and short.

Neruda is a dream of Chile, of what it was and might have been, brought to the screen by a master dreamer.

In short, there’s plenty of spectacle in Beauty and the Beast, which will be enough for many if not most young audiences. But there isn’t much magic, and what there is coasts on 26-year-old fumes.

Kong: Skull Island isn’t a remake or a reboot or a re-anything. It’s just a Saturday matinee creature feature with a smart, unpretentious script, a handful of solid supporting players, and a digital Kong who feels big enough and real enough to provoke the necessary awe. This is all to the movie’s credit.

It’s well worth seeking out for older kids who don’t mind reading subtitles, their parents, and any adults who can appreciate a good story movingly and creatively told.

It’s the classic modern dynamic of lefty parent and tightly-wound yuppie spawn, but Toni Erdmann takes it out of sitcom territory and into something longer, richer, weirder, and ultimately a great deal more affecting.

Here are great swaths of Baldwin’s prose, read by Samuel L. Jackson in a vocal impersonation that is actually a rather brilliant piece of acting — he convinces you it’s the writer you’re hearing.

Older moviegoers may also recognize The Space Between Us as a dress-up variation on the old Jeff Bridges/Karen Allen movie “Starman” (1984), and by far the best parts have to do with Gardner’s often comic adjustments to life on Earth.

The stand-up routines — from Jackie and the pros alike — are funny and blue enough to shock a few laughs out of you, sometimes in spite of your better judgment, and the star seems once again genuinely invested in creating a character.

The movie's an easy, engaging watch, even if it's literally all over the map.

A fairly standard coming-of-age saga on its face, with an effectively pained performance by 15-year-old Lucas Jade Zumann holding center stage.

It’s not a gimmick if it works, and “Tower” works unnervingly well. The film is essentially an oral history, with firsthand accounts from those who were there — survivors, responders, and onlookers — with their words read by younger actors.

The Founder is a solid, smart, worthwhile film and the only remaining mystery is why the Weinstein Company is burying it with a quiet January release rather than pushing its much-loved star into the awards race with the usual fanfare.

Paterson the movie doesn’t mine the dross and drab of our everyday lives for gold — it says they already are gold, and all you have to do is look. “Say it! No ideas but in things.” See it.

Affleck the screenwriter seems to have dumped the story onto the kitchen table and pushed it around like dough, hoping for some shape to emerge. It resists.

The movie’s being promoted as the third in the director’s unofficial trilogy of faith, after “The Last Temptation of Christ” (1988) and “Kundun” (1997), and it feels like a self-conscious masterpiece, a summing-up from a filmmaker who, at 74, may be thinking of his legacy.

The film’s made with more heart than art and more skill than subtlety, and it works primarily because of the women that it portrays and the actresses who portray them. Best of all, you come out of the movie knowing who Katherine Johnson and Dorothy Vaughn and Mary Jackson are, and so do your daughters and sons.

You don’t get groundbreaking cinema from Fences, but what you do get — two titanic performances and an immeasurable American drama — makes up for that.

Lion is shameless and heartfelt and you’ll probably have a good, happy cry at the end. When a story pushes buttons so deeply wired into our consciousness...craft seems almost beside the point.

At best, it's unnecessary. At worst, it's vaguely insulting.

Fred Astaire and Ginger Rogers they ain’t. Stone’s singing voice is a soulful wisp of a thing. But this is the moment that convinced me the film’s writer-director, Damien Chazelle, knew exactly what he was doing. What his stars lack in training they make up for in relatability. They sing and dance just a little better than we would.

The cast does good work, despite a less-than-great screenplay.

Jackie is a chamber drama rather than an epic; an impressionistic work of emotional opera rather than a chronological parade. What is this movie trying to do? Simply dramatize everything that can go on inside a woman simultaneously marginalized and revered.

Manchester by the Sea is an experience worth having, not for the magnificence of its impact or the far-flung grandeur of its settings but for the way it illuminates with quiet, unyielding grace how you and I and our neighbors get by, and sometimes how we don’t.

Elle may be the purest distillation of his worldview yet, and it’s a terrifying thrill.

This is not a well-made film but it is an enjoyable one, in part because it’s genuinely unpredictable and in part because it’s a pleasure to see one of the great stars of his era on a movie screen once more.

I don’t mean it as a cheap shot, but Nocturnal Animals is very like an exquisitely rendered window display. It’s something at which you pause and peer into and catch your breath — and then move on.

Directing the film version, Lee gets lost in the grotesque pomp of the halftime spectacle and its lead-up. He gets fine performances from the actors playing the soldiers and a terrible one from Stewart, who flails her arms like an amateur. Martin’s role is beneath his talents, while Vin Diesel’s, as a Zen warrior of a sergeant, is almost beyond belief.

Teller is cornering a market on recklessness in the roles he chooses -- the energy from that demonic drum solo at the end of “Whiplash” seems to carry over into the ferocity with which Vinny pounds at life. He’s not very smart, he’s kind of a jerk, but he never, ever stops, and Bleed for This earns your respect for him.

The new film is a juicily enjoyable crowd-pleaser that works hard at expanding to fit the size of its ambitions and that wants to give the audience a high old time while slipping in reminders of how low some people may sink in the pursuit of power.

I like this movie a lot, but it may be too intimate, too slow for some moviegoers.

Arrival would be nothing without Adams.

If Gimme Danger never quite solves the secret of Iggy’s onstage atavism — how he pushed the myth of sheer, unhinged rock ’n’ roll abandon until he embodied it better (or worse) than anyone else, ever — it reminds us of when he was, verily, the velociraptor of popular music.

In its quietly radical grace, it’s a cultural watershed — a work that dismantles all the ways our media view young black men and puts in their place a series of intimate truths. You walk out feeling dazed, more whole, a little cleaner.

Elegantly depraved and immaculately degenerate, Park Chan Wook’s The Handmaiden is an astonishment. The filmmaking is masterful, very near to Hitchcock in its sly, controlled teasing of the audience.

A new movie based on Roth’s 1997 novel “American Pastoral” offers proof yet again that this writer’s great literary gifts are almost impossible to translate to the screen. Roth is a protean American inner voice. The movies, sad to say, remain better at exteriors.

Inferno is the exact cinematic equivalent of an airport paperback, which is what’s fine and forgettable about it.

Braga has hardly stopped working since, on either continent, but Aquarius is a comeback, a homecoming, and a character film in which both the heroine and the actress playing her are characters of the first order.

Is Kelly Reichardt the most under-acknowledged great director working in America right now? Her new movie, Certain Women, is one of the glories of this or any other year, but it stays true to Reichardt form, which is to say it’s low-key, allusive, lit up with implied meanings without ever leading us by the hand.

The Accountant keeps you hanging on all the way to the looney-toon ending, well past the point where your higher brain functions have called it a night. It’s not a good movie but it’s not a bad way to kill a few hours.

Ironically, the film itself is as gentle and unexploitative as they come. Yes, it deserves the rating, and yes, it depicts teenagers doing things the grown-ups would rather not admit they actually do, but it does so with a poetic curiosity and a sense of what it’s like to be young, poor, and rootless — both future-less and free.

If only the movie had the courage to be as gonzo as it wants to be!

Produced, co-written, and directed by its star, The Birth of a Nation is very much a first film, its hesitancies disguised as bluntness, and the best things about it are Parker’s acting and his ambitions.

There’s a lot of talent here and a lot of enthusiasm; also a lot of influences that haven’t been successfully reprocessed into something convincing or fresh. It’s a mess, but a reasonably charming one.

It’s weird-stupid more than good-stupid.

A taut, engrossing action movie about real-life heroes, so why is it a disappointment? Because director Peter Berg is telling the wrong story.

Lupita Nyong’o (“12 Years a Slave”) finally gets a movie role worthy of her status as an Oscar winner. She isn’t hidden behind pixels, as in “Star Wars: The Force Awakens” or “The Jungle Book.” You can see her. She’s magnificent.

It ain’t Shakespeare, or even Kurosawa. But it’s an acceptable remake of a western that itself was an acceptable remake of one of the greatest movies ever made. Enjoyable, even, until the last act proves how dull an overextended gun battle can get.

It’s a long, jangling, melodious soak, rich with backstage incident and wall-to-wall hits.

These are some of the questions raised and left on the table in the fascinating but frustratingly murky Author: The JT Leroy Story, a documentary by Jeff Feuerzeig that’s worth seeing if only to argue with the movie and with yourself.

“Baby” is to Helen Fielding’s original 1996 novel and its 2001 movie adaptation what “Sex and the City 2” was to the HBO series — a cause not for celebration but overdue burial.

The upshot is that Blair Witch comes to the party very late and very tired, and it doesn’t improve from there.

As always, it’s a good idea to do your homework before or after seeing an Oliver Stone movie. You may come out convinced of his point of view and still feel hustled by how he got you there.

While Morris From America trundles along familiar tracks, Hartigan’s eye for detail and individuality yields enough dividends to keep the film moving tartly and congenially along.

As with “American Sniper,” Sully gets a little gooey in the final scenes, opting for a simplistic celebration of American know-how, where everything up to that point has been darker and more nuanced. Whether you want to accept it or not, Eastwood remains one of the best and most quixotic filmmakers we have, torn between jingoism and doubt, exceptionalism and despair.

Sachs doesn’t push the tragic aspects of Little Men, but they’re there, looming behind the life-goes-on vibe of the final scenes and waiting for you to work it out on the way home.

A sweeping romantic period drama, heavy with themes of love and duty and fate, lifted up by cinematic craft and great performances.

All right-thinking minds will properly detest the movie. I have to admit I laughed my asparagus off.

The strength of Kopple’s film (as opposed to the strength of Sharon Jones, which is mighty) is that it honestly depicts the vulnerabilities of an indomitable woman.

She (Portman) has filmed the book according to its emotional meaning to her, and that’s fine. What she hasn’t done is whip it into shape as a compelling movie.

The movie is genuinely creative, genuinely outside-the-box, and often genuinely scary; parents of toddlers and nightmare-prone children are herewith warned.

[A] stagy, troubling, bizarrely entertaining movie.

The dialogue is terse and funny while hinting at much larger matters, such as the way poverty can be handed from generation to generation like a bad gene or a disease.

Don’t Think Twice is comedy inside-baseball, and it’s pretty delicious.

Suicide Squad prides itself on being “dark,” but it’s really just jokey, cynical, and violent, not to mention visually ugly as sin. It’s as subversive as milk. But the cast and the pacing keep it moving.

There’s a line between enjoyably stupid and stupid-stupid, and Nerve sails over it right around the halfway mark.

For most of its running time, the movie works as a sharp, generous human comedy about fear of family (among other things), with Page once again reminding us that she’s one of the most deft and underutilized actors of her generation. You’re already sold on Janney, I hope.

It exists for no other reason than that people like Matt Damon, they like him as this character, and the producers know audiences are willing to see more of him.

Charming, melancholy, and, in the end, not terribly memorable.

The Fits is what independent moviemaking should be and can be in this country. Like its heroine, it’s slight but it’s built to last.

Star Trek Beyond plays like an episode of the old “Star Trek” TV series. This, I submit, is what’s enjoyable about it.

Half melodrama, half Holy Minimalism, mostly engrossing, the film is guided by the idea of two women moving slowly toward each other in friendship and understanding, one an atheist doctor and the other a worldly bride of Christ.

The movie is genial, sloppy, slightly above average summer movie fun.

Mike and Dave Need Wedding Dates lopes along with bumptious likability but no real energy, urgency, structure, or wit.

This is a buddy movie in which one of the buddies is dead. Yet, if anything, the emotional bonding is — or wants to be — more resonant than ever.

It all might wash in a Johnny Weissmuller “Tarzan” movie from the 1940s. It no longer suffices today. Filmmakers, it’s time to pack up Greystoke Manor. Tarzan is dead.

Too eccentric to be a massive box-office hit yet too mainstream for a cult following; it nevertheless deserves to be seen. Mostly, it works as a singular and slightly wobbly mash-up of two creative artists and their differing sensibilities, and it benefits greatly from the contributions of one brilliant actor and one little girl. Maybe I’m squibbling, but I think it’s pretty delumptious.

The movie must be bad, right? Worse, it’s a bore.

The result is rather a mess, but it’s an honorable one, and very much worth wrestling with.

De Palma is a cinematic sampler that makes you want to gorge on the whole unholy buffet.

The film itself is painless, strained, occasionally amusing, and utterly disposable — just another studio buddy comedy/action movie that forgot where it put the script.

The quiet strength of Dheepan is how it shows these lives — the people in our midst we never see — rolling on forever, adapting, struggling, and finding their way.

This is the rare occasion when one of these brittle, neurotic social comedies serves as the vehicle for a woman’s sensibility rather than a man’s. In the process, Miller quietly but forcefully reinvents an entire movie genre.

Genial, silly, and instantly forgettable, Popstar: Never Stop Never Stopping is just another piece of product from the larger “Saturday Night Live” universe, a way for a former cast member to try to prove he’s capable of carrying a movie.

The movie’s a galvanizing, tragicomic work of 21st-century schadenfreude, marred only by a barely repressed giddiness on the part of the filmmakers.

To watch Alice Through the Looking Glass is to witness an army of smart, creative people dumbing themselves down into delivering what they think the market wants.

Point is, the property is running on bald tires, and, for all its ear-splitting racket and lavish effects, “Apocalypse” is the barest of retreads.

The performances are uniformly excellent, but pride of place goes to Bennett’s Sir James, an upper class twit of Pythonesque proportions. Rarely has a character this moronic been this happy.

For a movie predicated on slapstick forward momentum, we spend an awful lot of time driving backward.

The movie sprawls, almost entirely in a good sense, and it lets the audience draw its own conclusions. None of them is likely to be rosy.

The performances are expert.

An acceptable time-waster for a slow day in a movie theater or a slow night on cable. But it never makes you mad as hell, so what’s the point?

As visually overstuffed as a hoarder’s apartment, the movie improves as it goes.

They’ve built up a vast ensemble of character types, all of them played by better-than-average actors, and that they can mix and match the drama, comedy, or action as they see fit.

If you’re in the right mood and seeing it with the right crowd, Keanu can put you close to a giggle coma, even as you realize the material’s far beneath the talents of its stars. They’re Key and Peele, but the movie treats them like Abbott and Costello.

Directed from the center-left with an ear to parties on both sides of the West Bank separation barrier, it’s knowledgeable and unhysterical, openhearted without seeming naïve. Those on the extremes will probably hate it.

Elvis & Nixon strains itself to bring the title duo together and then relaxes — finally — while Spacey and Shannon perform the actor’s equivalent of a waltz.

Violence in Green Room is just bad. Unfortunately for its heroes and for us all, it’s also sometimes inevitable.

The filmmakers have made this for the purposes of near-term celebration rather than long-term understanding, and they’re probably judging their audience well.

It’s all deeply felt and just as deeply unfocused, and that, more than the invented story line, betrays the movie’s subject.

The chief attraction of the film is the ersatz India created by the pixel pushers at special effects houses WETA Digital and the Moving Picture Company.

What keeps you interested in Demolition is accompanying Davis as he solves the mystery of himself. What keeps you checking your watch is that the character’s not terribly interesting to begin with.

A delightfully deranged steampunk adventure.

The truth is that this is a mystery movie, and the mystery is trying to figure out exactly what the heck is going on here.

A nice long soak in the Proustian detritus of its era.

Marguerite strives for ambiguity and settles for a muddle. It piles too much on its serving plate, and at 129 minutes it’s definitely overlong.

Krisha sucks you into its gradually worsening family dynamic with a confidence of style and a maturity of observation that is remarkable in a home-brewed Kickstarter movie. At times you laugh in horror. At other times you shrink from the screen. There are truths here.

It plants a flag for a new corporate entertainment franchise and it will make international containerships of money, so does it matter that Batman v Superman: Dawn of Justice is joyless and incoherent? Probably not.

You realize the movie isn’t nearly as clever as it looks.

Its strength and limitation is that it’s a gimmick that works.

In the Shadow of Women, a portrait of a troubled French marriage, has the simplicity and subtle punch of a good short story.

If you can adjust to its rhythms, which move according to the seasons and to long-held family grudges, you’ll find it quietly funny, sometimes quite sad, and ultimately rather profound. If you can’t, you’ll be left in the cold with the sheep.

Lubezki is arguably this movie’s secret star, and he invests the movie’s Los Angeles settings with the strangeness and newness of a NASA rover traveling across Mars.

The movie plays like a global-political farce made by people who’ve never left the Upper West Side.

There’s a reason the movie has been pushed off the back of the truck into late February. It’s damaged goods.

Takahata and his animators balance aspects of nostalgia and the present day, urban modernity and rural timelessness, love and regret with a visual and aural sensitivity that draws a viewer in from the first frames.

A lot of this is naughty, overproduced egghead fun, and the scenes between Eisenstein and Canedo simmer with sexual tension. But too much is never enough for Greenaway, and while the leading men give bravura performances, the supporting cast is weak — Lisa Owen as Mrs. Upton Sinclair is actively dreadful — and the film’s hyperactivity ultimately wears you down.

Race wants so badly to get every last bit of the big picture that it dashes past the little details that actually tell a story. Like an over-trained athlete who pulls a hamstring in the big race, the movie tries to do it all and comes up short.

This startling, assured feature debut from New Hampshire-born, Brooklyn-based writer-director Robert Eggers has one foot in early American history and another in legend and fairy tale.

In its occasionally over-gentle way, the documentary testifies to the ego necessary to be a great star and to live a great life.

This needless sequel amps the silliness to DEFCON-4 levels of frantic surrealism and overstuffs the running time with famous faces. It’s a pop quiz instead of a movie, and it’ll be dated by tomorrow morning.

Dreams Rewired is scattered by necessity and intent, and it throws off enough sparks to set your brain reeling.