The film is a sharp and keenly etched study of a man who would be the sidekick to kings.

It’s the sort of cat-and-mouse game that recalls certain elements of such disparate films as John Boorman’s "Hell in the Pacific," Larry Cohen’s screenplay for "Phone Booth," and, one key line in Dan O’Bannon’s "Return of the Living Dead," believe it or not.

The movie feels out of whack, as if big chunks were excised to ensure its relatively short 90-minute running length. Clearly, Emily and Linda aren’t the only things that go missing in Snatched.

The story never drags – it’s too frenetically paced for that – but it’s still kind of a drag.

Director and writer Gunn is a dab hand with space opera quippery and most of the set-pieces land bang on target, with collateral emotional damage to boot.

In the end, however, Poitras’ portrait of Assange in exile exudes a less acute sense of history unfolding before our eyes than does "Citizenfour."

A Quiet Passion’s manneredness overwhelmed me at times, but it is very effective – chilling, even – in its charting of one woman’s disappointed journey to the rhetorical coda of her own life: “Why has the world become so ugly?”

The quartet of actors are all high-caliber pros, and the performances are marvelous, especially Linney, whose Claire hides depths of self-deception.

There isn’t one false move in Tomàs Aragay and Cesc Gay’s beautifully modulated screenplay. Es perfecto.

Like its protagonist, Sleight is a scrappy, semi-super origin story that lacks the existential heft of, say, M. Night Shyamalan’s "Unbreakable," or the grim comic nihilism of James Gunn’s "Super."

The movie is utterly ineffectual as a techno-thriller.

The humor is both broad and lowbrow, yet often extremely funny.

The film feels like the spirit of a zine come alive – with a few over-the-top, Muppet-esque explosions.

First-time director Michael O’Shea, like his bloodthirsty cinephile protagonist, tempers his killer instinct with moody introspection.

Graduation may not occupy a place at the top of the class of contemporary Eastern European cinema like some of Mungiu’s other films, but it definitely sits above the curve.

Phoenix Forgotten is borderline generic, desert-set found footage that apes the aforementioned Witchiness and genre constraints to a snooze-worthy T.

As breathtaking as the imagery is, however, the script, which is narrated by John Krasinski, is a mess of anthropomorphic goop.

This is one fish tale that’s well nigh guaranteed to linger in the viewers’ midnight memories long after its cinematic nocturnal emissions have unspooled.

The film gets there eventually, but one wishes it weren’t so timid about embracing the inherent schlockiness of the genre.

The Promise may not be the greatest movie of its type since "Hotel Rwanda," but purchasing a ticket to this solid if predictable movie is a sure way to thumb one’s nose at deniers of the Armenian Genocide.

Despite its best intentions, The Lost City of Z never finds itself, doomed to aimlessly wander to an unsatisfying conclusion of a dream that betrays the best of men.

It results in very little fresh insight that might allow us to feel that Linda Bishop didn’t die in vain.

Armie Hammer slyly steals the show as Ord, a very chill American arms dealer.

There are blood-red visual motifs all over the place, but The Devil’s Candy isn’t particularly bloody in and of itself. It suggests acts of terrible evil far more than it shows, and is all the more intense for it. Highly recommended.

Hathaway and Sudeikis totally nail their respective roles (kudos to the great Tim Blake Nelson, to boot), and while Colossal falls shy of perfection, so does real life.

For fans of full-throttle gore, The Void delivers, but for better or worse, it doesn’t really stop along the way to explain itself.

Seeing what St. Andrews’ greens must have looked like in their native days before all golf courses became zealously manicured is refreshing. The film’s action, however, is rarely filmed in a way that highlights the action, and the story’s biographical elements lack dimension and drama.

Their Finest may ultimately be the best words to describe the amalgamated work of all participants in this film.

Gifted may rely on the extremely old-school lovable-orphan-and-adopted-parent template, but there’s a certain emotionally complex realism to both the performances and the storyline that lifts the film beyond the obvious and the cliched.

What sets apart this eighth outing is its giggling bouts of male henpecking, all puffed feathers and nyah-nyah taunts.

A strictly-for-the-kiddies animated reboot of the seemingly ancient Smurf brand, The Lost Village is so tame it hardly merits a PG rating.

The geezer humor is just as funny here as it was in the original version of this film, which starred George Burns, Art Carney, and Lee Strasberg. I mean this as a compliment, although it’s, admittedly, a bit backhanded.

The film sucks you in with its exquisite cinematography (shot in lush black-and-white, with a handful of carefully curated moments in color), and a heavy influence of Thirties and Forties Classic Hollywood filming techniques.

Given its nonlinear structure, Your Name requires your trust, but once you place your faith in screenwriter/director Shinkai’s expert hands, the reward will come. (Not surprisingly, the film is the fourth-highest-grossing film in Japan’s history.)

Despite its inadequacies, however, The Zookeeper’s Wife conveys a tale of courage and opposition to authority that provides valuable inspiration for any era.

Certain touches resonate and remain memorable long after the film’s conclusion – I’m talking to you, creepy robo-geishas – but for all its CGI bells, whistles, and Johansson, this simply can’t compare to its (highly recommended) Japanese forebears.

Theroux (who co-wrote with director Dower) manages to dredge up some new, albeit not particularly revelatory, intel on the litigation-happy group, and the tack they take to get there is interesting in and of itself.

Not surprisingly, the best thing about The Boss Baby is Baldwin’s imperious vocalization as the authoritative rugrat with a head the size of a bowling ball, punctuated by Margaret Keane eyes.

A reasonably enjoyable, if utterly predictable, romp.

By the end, however, the movie’s predictable wind-down and ho-hum twist at the end make this Life hardly worth living. In space, no one can hear you yawn.

The investigation is dull, the jokes dispiritingly flat-footed, with Ponch’s sex addiction and squirminess over male intimacy supplying most of the setups for CHIPS’ puerile humor.

As a parable about the inherently dehumanizing aspects of the rat race, it’s bloody good fun.

You can’t stop watching this film, even if you can’t always express in words what you’re seeing. Intuition fills in the gaps.

Harrelson is mostly game, channeling a more abrasive version of Harvey Pekar, but time and again, the film pulls its punches or becomes bogged down in cliches.

No one is having any fun here, despite the return of Iggy Pop on the soundtrack; T2 is rife with regret, melancholy, lost youth, and (of course) a new, nihilistically updated “choose life” speech from Renton.

Alas, the younger actors in the Sixties stretch are no match for the senior set, weightless and blank next to the gravitas of Broadbent, Walter, and Charlotte Rampling.

If only the movie that encases this character were as sharp and distinctive as Harriet.

All Nighter feels way too much like its own title, a soporific exercise in style over substance.

The film aims to be a cautionary tale, but it doesn’t seem that the filmmakers have absorbed the lesson.

The movie brims with unexpected zest, an enthralling joie de vivre that seduces despite any reservations you may have.

Even though there’s a great deal to admire in Ducournau’s debut outing, Raw will mostly appeal to the taste buds of horror connoisseurs. Skittish consumers should consider other dining options.

The masterful Land of Mine slowly, almost without notice, transforms into one of the most viscerally intense anti-war films since Dalton Trumbo’s "Johnny Got His Gun."

Ultimately, this is a movie that’s more about the Ottoman Lieutenant’s Woman than The Ottoman Lieutenant himself – another example of the film’s epic misdirection.

Director Ceyda Torun was born in Istanbul and lived there as a young girl, leaving the city with her family at age 11 to live in Jordan and later New York City, but it’s abundantly clear her heart has never left her birthplace. Kedi is a valentine to her childhood home.

On the whole, though, Kong: Skull Island is great big dumb fun. It’s also shockingly beautiful to look at when you aren’t having creature guts flung into the camera.

This French movie uses remarkably expressive stop-motion animation to create an honesty and sense of whimsy that help offset the darkness of the intrinsic story.

"Avatar’s" Worthington is adept at playing a tortured soul, but his American accent and dramatic range are both wanting in this movie.

As light on his feet as he is as a musical-comedy showman, Jackman is perversely even more pleasurable when he’s popping neck veins from the effort of heavy drama.

Blitz, however, brings no visual snap to Table 19’s proceedings, and maintains a distant relationship with its characters.

Before I Fall puts all its excellent elements in service to a story that’s well-told and has a valuable lesson.

In the end, Collide is a cheap genre product produced with an eye on foreign market box office. Wake me when Dominic Toretto torques his way into Havana.

It honors this extraordinary couple’s defiant and unwavering love for each other, but it doesn’t celebrate it much beyond a cliched falling-in-love montage and a chaste wedding-night scene. You can look, but you better not touch.

Although the plot is thin, Rock Dog nevertheless charms with its engaging central characters and unencumbered storyline.

It’s a history lesson wrapped up in a romance, gallows grim but far too often unnecessarily heavy-handed in a way that drives home the factual historical horrors it portrays while somehow managing to feel like a sizably budgeted but no less maladroit television movie of the week.

Not only does this genre exercise deliver the little jolts and inside laughs that keep modern horror fans pleased, Get Out is also one of the smartest, funniest, and most socially astute films to come around in a while.

Whether it’s a case of miscasting is unclear, but without a willing hero to anchor this already dubious movie from start to finish, The Great Wall hits a brick wall.

Fist Fight is not a complete dud, but it does grasp at the lowest hanging fruit for its humor.

This pleasantly rambling absurdist father/daughter drama is also one of the most strikingly unusual films of the year, period.

This is a strange and beguiling film to the end.

Whatever your perspective, there’s one thing for sure: The Red Turtle is unlike anything else you’ve seen in a while.

The horror that lies at the heart of the film is fairly obvious, and with no characters for whom we have a rooting interest, A Cure for Wellness is as difficult to swallow as castor oil.

Apart from a few moments of fleeting suspense, Fifty Shades Darker resembles a Facebook feed of someone you kind of knew in high school who maybe went on to have a glamorous future, but everything seems a little bit off and contrived.

It’s a rat-a-tat-tat animated comedy that rarely lets up, clever and silly and funny, and yes, a bit batty.

There is a certain sweetness to this teen romance and Gardner’s naive fascination in the newly discovered wonders of Earth. But there is so much that is dopey, on both a scientific and emotional level, that The Space Between Us strikes with the impact of a crash landing.

Rings is an unfortunate and often incomprehensible mess that kicks off with a neat premise and then never fully explores it.

John Wick: Chapter 2 also has a very good humor about itself.

Rana’s voice comes roaring back in the film’s held-breath third act, in which these amateur actors return to their old apartment to enact a drama with life-or-death stakes. This final 30 minutes are the film’s pièce de résistance.

The film is drab and epileptic.

Ideas and their visual illustrations come at the viewer in a cascading torrent. The editing by Alexandra Strauss deserves its own recognition for its painstaking exactness.

The performances are uniformly good and Kelly’s effort to tell an unbiased story is admirable, but I Am Michael ultimately delivers more in the way of talking points than drama.

While occasionally engaging, The Comedian isn’t very funny.

Not only is it a film about a poet, Paterson transcends its story to become a work of poetry itself.

Collette – usually a delight – sounds like she’s phonetically speaking a foreign language. Not even Judi Dench could sell these lines.

One thing about this extremely talented artist: He never sees anything in just black-and-white.

Often seen in his crummy underwear, and almost always with a cigarette and drink in hand, McConaughey brings a knowing fleshiness to the character. Yet the film’s uneven tone leaves us with lasting uncertainty about his character and the events we have witnessed.

An actor most at home playing devilish, Keaton’s got the last-reel Machiavellian shrug down cold. But neither he nor the filmmakers do much to illuminate the neural pistons fired from brain to bodily shrug.

A misguided and utterly tone-deaf Hallmark card to the canis lupus familiaris and the people who love them.

As far as cinema’s long love affair with DID dramas goes, Split ain’t a half-bad contribution.

The Resurrection of Gavin Stone isn’t as exploitive as some recent Christian-based films – for that, check out 2014’s truly offensive "Heaven Is for Real" – and while it’s got its charms, it’s far from likely to bring in any new converts.

This movie is delightful – funny and dreamy and sometimes desperately sad.

Sleepless is a passable thriller, but it won’t keep you up for nights.

The most distressing thing is the complete lack of accountability for Tripp and Creech’s destructive joyride, which results in a significant amount of vehicular damage and possible human injury.

For the majority of filmgoers, Beckinsale is Selene. It’s not the worst legacy for an actor, and she’s managed to keep her character prideful yet vicious, film after backstabbing film. (Did I mention the catsuit? Va va voom!)

To its credit, the film doesn’t linger unnecessarily over the horrors, and quickly turns into a police procedural. As the FBI takes over the investigation from the local authorities and sets up a command center, the details of this process are fascinating to observe.

Before a foot of film was ever shot on Live by Night, Affleck had already made a decision that would be the film’s undoing. He cast himself as the lead.

The borderline campy The Bye Bye Man is a horror movie in search of an urban legend. Based on a chapter in the 2005 collection of allegedly strange-but-true paranormal tales "The President’s Vampire," the premise is second-rate Stephen King.

Essentially a chamber piece for Brian Cox and Emile Hirsch (and Olwen Kelly, who plays the lifeless Jane Doe), the film benefits from the actors’ skills and their believable father/son rapport.

Toei Animation has done their usual bang-up job on the 2-D animation, filling nearly the entire running time with skirmishes, melees, and battles royal beyond compare.