It's not so much the individual storylines that grab you, but Curtis’ unrelenting optimism. In the end, it's nice to know that love, actually, does conquer all.

There are no easy answers in The Territory, just a plea for awareness, for intervention.

A compendium of really neat stuff and nifty sequences, and it will just have to do until Vol. 3 or reunification comes along.

Truthfully, it's hard to imagine a better screen adaptation of this queer household. Addams would have been proud.

The film is wickedly hilarious but more in a droll and knowing kind of sense than a har-de-har-har manner.

It’s such a simple story but told with such grace, tenderness, compassion, and wonder, that all its strangeness seems familiar and welcome.

The pictures are gorgeous, and the words, well, if you listen hard enough, the words say exactly what one needs to hear: that is, to wake up and live.

Most anthologies have the framing mechanism simply service the stories they contain: Instead, Spindell weaves each tale into the bigger fabric, like bloody fat quarters making up a gruesome but surprisingly snugly quilt. When the pieces all are sewn together, the fully assembled The Mortuary Collection may well be the most wickedly fun anthology since Trick'r Treat.

The director is notorious for not having a working script, writing the day’s scenes the morning of, and improvising at any given moment. The internet tells me that this film was shot in two weeks, and while Hong’s off-the-cuff style seems restless at times, it coagulates like a small scab that never quite stops itching.

The middle is terrific, especially in a lengthy, unassuming scene in which the three leads sit, sip drinks, and have a good chat: It marks one of the great celluloid pleasures of the year, so virtuosically written, performed, and filmed is it.

For those up for an adventure into the LSD-influenced world of counterculture animation, Belladonna of Sadness is a curious artifact that, after 43 years, remains a glorious mindf--k.

He's like the bizarro version of Wes Anderson’s same meticulous attention to detail, but while you can tell Anderson wants to entertain you with a story, Refn is clearly more interested in mood and highly stylized provocation. With The Neon Demon, he more or less succeeds.

The poverty that is at the heart of the situation is in prominent relief, yet there is a happiness about their lives that defies sheer gloss. Here is a brother and sister who truly love each other and are bonded by their complicity.

A relentlessly entertaining exercise in putting Cruise’s Ethan Hunt through his paces again. And again. And again. But hey, there’s much pleasure in watching him continually fall off things.

The less said about The Ring, the better for you, the sooner-to-be-freaked-out.

Petite Maman is a fine balance of heartache and whimsy.

It's a shame if the controversy surrounding Bubble Boy distracts people from what a smart, subversive, and genuinely good-hearted film it is.

A funny, seductive, and surprisingly honest dramatization of the ways we snooker ourselves into incompatible love.

The film is very funny, but a thoughtful Reitman is just not as funny as when he used to blast into space.

Silence is Scorsese’s mode of sharing the Holy Communion. To that, every cinephile will say, “Amen.”

This is a Farrelly film for adults, if not the entire family, and its a charmer, honest both to the nature of the loves we choose in haste, and the fear that makes us so hasty so often.

A surprisingly warmhearted examination of hypocrisy and social insecurity, unlikely camaraderie and stutter-stepped formation of adult identity.

The real delight here, however, is Broderick’s mensch, a middle-aged man painfully aware that he’s become a loser.

Seemingly taking its cue from Belfort’s shenanigans, the film is completely without modulation. It starts with all the knobs cranked up to 11 and remains that way for the next three hours. While what’s onscreen is never uninteresting, its unrelentingness is exhausting.

Scrappy, powerful, and shocking.

While Hidden Figures is likable and illuminating, it is, nevertheless, routine and predictable.

Reality has overtaken the movies here, which, I suppose, makes T3 all the more cathartically appealing. At least onscreen we have Arnold Schwarzenegger in our corner.

Mostly succeeds in spite of the apparent strain to serve the agendas of both its loyal audience and its fledgling stars.

The story has a welcome sense of continuous momentum, and what’s more, DeMonaco has a better handle on both his skewering of the entitled upper class (not as pointed as Paul Verhoeven’s ultraviolent satire, but a start) and the righteous anger of the targeted lower class (personified by Michael K. Williams’ resistance leader, Carmelo).

With its fine performances, gorgeous sets, incredible special effects, imaginative story line, beautiful score (by frequent David Lynch collaborator Angelo Badalamenti), and knockout cinematography, The City of Lost Children is very much worth seeing.

Cobweb's greatest achievement is in ambiguity, in leading the story to its inevitable ending without ever sacrificing that unnerving quality.

Even when the film doesn’t hang together perfectly, MacDougall maintains its momentum as his character painfully journeys toward a sense of acceptance. It may be only a few days into 2017, but this is a performance that you’ll remember for the rest of the year and beyond.

With centrifugal force on his side, Spider-Man dips, weaves, and whooshes past, up, and around the camera -- it's a rush, and it plasters a grin on your face even after you've left the theatre.

With its period-perfect recall of Seventies fashion and cocaine consumption, Chuck’s rise-and-fall story bears greater resemblance to "Goodfellas" than "Rocky" or "Raging Bull."

Amirpour could have reined in her penchant for laconic coolness at times, but where’s the fun in that? This fractured fairy tale of the marginalized have-nots and the bonds they forge continues the director’s obsession for the genre films she grew up with while adding her own contemporary sensibilities, and the result is an ultimately satisfying journey.

Hero dips into the world of Capra's Meet John Doe, and comes up with an even more repellant visage of the Media/Citizenry connection than that film.

Mehta and her cameraman Giles Nuttgens capture the area's rich interplay of light and color, land and water, and riches and poverty.

Smith's film is a celebration of quirkiness, eccentricity, and certain individuals' tendency to let it all hang out, and damn the consequences.

Földes manages to balance the potentially dissonant tones of the diverse source material and create something akin to a story, one with diversions created as side characters relate elements of some of the smaller chapters within the books as anecdotes and memories.

It's a gripping and wild film that can't be tamed.

A consistently entertaining parody that never once makes you feel like an idiot for laughing out loud at its idiocy.

Unlike any coming-of-age movie you've seen before. Equal parts sweet and perverse, this Scottish film is unpredictable in places where it might be twee, and subversively fanciful in others where it might be punishing.

A slam-bang, sci-fi actioner, relentlessly paced and edited, with a pounding soundtrack and some ingenious aliens courtesy of Berni Wrightson and KNB Effects.

No doubt some viewers could find fault with the slack pacing, though it's hardly inappropriate for a film that's fundamentally about emerging from frustration and stasis into a state of grace.

It's not quite as relentless as Henry: Portrait of a Serial Killer, but Bride of Chucky is still sick and wrong in all the right ways.

It's all fab, baby, a kicky, wiggy sequel that scores on all levels, from the sexy to the sublime.

A charming surprise, the kind of neat little low-budget movie that seems more like a collaboration among friends than it does a corporate investment.

Now, with Seven Pounds, the transformation of Will Smith is complete: Gone is any trace of love-me impishness, replaced by one of the sourest pusses Hollywood has seen since Joaquin Phoenix got his Screen Actors Guild card.

Eye in the Sky maintains nerve-racking suspense throughout its running time and explicates some of the unknown nuances of drone warfare. Plus, you know, Alan Rickman is reason enough to see it.

Like Night of the Living Dead, The Crazies offers no hope, no comfort and sure as hell no happy ending.

Sisley is a former stand-up comic, although you'd never guess it here: Finding himself in the eye of a colossal shit storm of his own making, his Vincent is brusque and action oriented, his face, a picture of ulceration in progress.

It sounds high-minded, but 3-Iron is in fact simple and economical, blessedly straighforward, absorbing, and hard to forget.

As romantic comedies go, Danish helmer Susanne Bier’s follow-up to her Oscar-winning "In a Better World," percolates more than it froths – but that’s a good thing.

It's a humorous film, to be sure, but there's also a stringent vein of giddy realism to it.

Tully, along with cinematographer Wyatt Garfield and composer Michael Montes, has crafted an elegantly creepy pastiche.

This is the main movie that built the house of Troma, Lloyd Kaufman's production company devoted to low-budget camp. The Toxic Avenger tells the humorous story of a geeky weakling who is turned into a superhero when he is slimed by some toxic waste.

Its adult themes of familial separation and societal betrayal are head and shoulders above much of the director’s previous popcorn work -– more hurt, more heart, more unassailable hope.

The film, a distinctly secular take on Waugh's religiosity, is far more interested in the battle of blind faith vs. rigid unbelief and its devastating effects. Herein, everyone is complicated – by their station, their philosophy, their God – and everyone is complicit.

What makes The Innkeepers such an unnerving experience isn't the outright horror but rather the lack of it. West mines every single floorboard creek and shadowy corridor for maximum frisson; this film ventures far beyond creepy and into the rarely explored land of genuine, incremental fear.

Thompson and Kaling spark, while still leaving space for the rest of the cast to deliver blissful, blistering one-liners (I, Tonya's Hauser predictably steals the show there as the dopey gag writer Mancuso) and moments of true pathos (most especially from Lithgow as Katherine's ever-supportive husband).

A pure distillation of the great director's ongoing themes of the frailty of the human psyche and mankind's willful inability to accept the inevitable, whatever that may be.

It's a winning formula, and when done right like it is here, it transcends the clichés and moves audiences.

Mangold, Phoenix, and Witherspoon, all excellent in their roles.

It’s in the semi-improvised or captured moments, like the looks of desperation and abandonment on the faces of old men on the streets of a mining community, that Caught by the Tides is most striking.

It's childhood done just right: part cotton candy angels, part gurning adult frighteners, and all wide-eyed kidhood bravado.

The trouble comes, and not just for Fassbender, when it’s time to tackle the actual text. The toil of it is exhaustingly felt. The lines are spoken, but their weight sometimes is as vaporous as that Scottish fog.

Bardem injects a shaggy, compassionate humor throughout, aided by a wry and moving ensemble cast and co-writer/director Fernando León de Aranda's eye for the offbeat.

As atypical a summer film as they come -– no explosions, no car chases, no Arnold -– but immensely more pleasing than films with all three of those summertime staples.

What's most memorable about Wilde is Fry's near-perfect encapsulation of the artist. It's a performance equal to the legend it portrays.

Krisha is an exceptionally well done slow burn that ushers a striking new talent onto the film scene. Let's hope that Shults retains that black-sheep sensibility for his future projects.

What further sets Friendship apart from its predecessors is the sincerity at its heart. This is a movie, essentially, about the contemporary issue of male social isolation and its nasty consequences.

Fans of all that has come before (excluding Roger Corman's premature-ejaculation version of "The Fantastic Four," natch) will weep tears of giddy joy at how crowd-pleasingly cohesive – and ridiculously fun – this film is.

Because of the episodic nature of the material, Klown Forever feels more like a series of events rather than a cohesive whole. That’s fine with me, as I enjoy spending time with these bumbling, emasculated males grappling with their ultimate insignificance in the world.

Where Shinkai remains peerless is in taking those big, magical, melodramatic swings and landing them with a gentle, compassionate touch.

The result is a climactic scene that is pretty near perfect: both laugh-out-loud surprising and endearingly inevitable.

It isn't about where you get, but how you get there -- and the getting there is a chewy delight.

In its bloody denouement, Bacurau feels like a Spaghetti Western, playing with post-"Seven Samurai" idea of peasants learning to be soldiers at the hands of warriors. But it's also a subversion of that idea, and brings in elements of the old horror conventions about bloodthirsty killers in remote places.

As the goofily endearing Doris, Field is perfect. She makes this movie work.

Chappaquiddick portrays the “incident” with the delicate meticulousness of an autopsy – which is ironic because the body of Mary Jo Kopechne never got one.

Shirley is probably too niche to attract the Academy’s interest in Moss – how has she never been nominated? – but it’s a big, messy, masterfully itchy performance and yet another notch in her belt.

What it conveys, quite beautifully, is the essentialness in sharing your life with others, through joy and grief.

Although the film tends to suffer from a severe case of overt preachiness in the third reel (shades of James Cameron's "The Abyss"), it's still a wonderfully visual, exciting ride.

Still, for a film that is so much about the healing power of words expressed and feeling brought into the light of day, Monsieur is strangely reticent.

A riot of colors, Kika is sometimes sick, sometimes playful, but consistently hilarious and entertaining in ways that few films have been lately.

A lauded Shakespearean actor and adapter who won an Oscar last year for his collaboration with director Steven Spielberg on "Bridge of Spies," Rylance portrays the body (via motion-capture) and certainly soul of this gentle giant. In his mournful, lyrical cadence, he makes poetry out of the BFG’s gobbledygook command of English.

Possessor is queasy-smart near-masterpiece of psychotronic slippage. Like its protagonist’s risky psychogenic recollections, it’ll stick with you whether you’d like it to or not.

When Eastwood is at the top of his form -- as he is for much of this film -- there's no more spellbinding storyteller in American cinema.

The Nightmare Before Christmas said that it’s all right to wrap a few scares up under the Christmas tree. Terrifier 3, the latest in the extreme gore franchise, sets fire to the decorations, cuts off your eyelids, and makes you watch the whole house burn.

In this charming, funny, tear-inducing, and instantly recognizable world, and through the (in)actions of Grace, Elliot tells a gentle, touching, bitter-but-ultimately-sweet fable with a warming message: It’s OK to leave your shell behind.

It is a brilliant high-wire act. Yoaz is utterly unpredictable at any given moment, and so too, is Synonyms.

Before lapsing into the land of the insipid,... John Hughes actually made a few movies that shined some light on the trials of modern adolescence. The Breakfast Club is one of them.

Good performances elevate the material.

Watching Bloodlines is like watching a nature documentary where a woodland creature is ripped to shreds in graphic detail. If you’re someone who roots for the prey over the predators, this might not be the movie for you. Otherwise? Cut loose, friend.

As Lo and Behold anecdotally lays it out, in the blink of the eye of human history, this invention has become essential, and in another blink – a solar flare, or cyberwarfare – its failure could trigger a civilization’s collapse.

We the Animals isn’t the sort of film that much concerns itself with the more usual conventions of filmmaking, such as the passage of time or even plot itself. It’s more of a mood, punctuated by clear whacks of emotional trauma. It’s a little bit like watching a poem.

Not only the best date movie of the year, it's also a -- dare I say it twice -- delightfully charming -- and totally American, I might add -- slice of comedic bliss.

Though writer Bill Kelly’s script takes extreme liberties with plot development and never really leaves you guessing about who’ll get the girl, the jokes rarely miss and the result is a refreshingly sardonic fairy tale.

If anything, Ross’ work reminds us that the camera need not be God’s unblinking eye on a story. He has crafted an exceptional film driven by captivating performances.