By necessity, Black Mass begins in a hole it can never dig out of. It’s the portrait of a monster told in a flat line.

The movie makes us all want to stand up and cheer, “Shine on, Tina. Shine on.”

By telling a Mexican story, Lorentzen arguably speaks more directly to an American audience.

Home Alone is the apex, the pinnacle, the culmination of every bad bit Hughes has ever written or directed. It overflows with primitive, disastrously unfunny sight gags and neo-hateful familial humor.

Feels not only like a movie from another culture but from another world.

His effort to cram in every aspect of the history of late Medieval witch fever, from repression of women to fear of the outsider to mushroom trips, becomes a chore, and a grisly twist in the final chapter, fire, just feels shocking for shock's sake. A historical psychological study like this doesn't deserve a stomach-churning moment like that, especially when all it does is push Albrun even further away.

It is certainly the best button-pushing movie of the year.

Val, while often tragic, is also a deeply spiritual film: a benediction of forgiveness for those that wronged him, and a mea culpa to those he has harmed (most especially, it seems, ex-wife Joanne Walley).

Where "Finding Nemo" capitalized on the awesome splendor and danger of the ocean, this follow-up shifts much of its action to an aquatic park and becomes broader and sillier, or at least reality-busting, for it.

Wonderful performances steal the show in this film based on the real life of Karen Silkwood, a worker in a plutonium factory in Oklahoma, whose health and safety concerns prompt her public exposure of the company's practices which, in turn, lead to dire personal consequences.

There’s a degree of mythologization at work here, an attempt to frame the birth of the Texas oil industry as this great drinking game between old money and new money. What it lacks is a distinct perspective; for all its period details and solid acting, the underlying message about this time in Texas oil history – that it was right, that it was wrong, that it was necessary – is lacking. This makes The Iron Orchard a film that is both worse and better than it could have been.

The highlight of this satirical remake of ABC's mid-Seventies buddy-cop anomaly is named, unsurprisingly, Will Ferrell.

The cult of Iris caught like grassfire, and the film catches this nonagenarian nonpareil, ever in her defining owl glasses and heavy jewelry, at peak heat.

Summer was made for this kind of film, and Predators is almost exactly what you need to fix this otherwise busted summer cinema season.

As obvious as they get, and it wears its message on its bloodied jersey.

Ultimately, and as is to be expected, In Our Day is not revelatory or revolutionary. It’s a film about being comfortable from a filmmaker who is comfortable with who he is.

With 7 Chinese Brothers, Austin-based filmmaker Bob Byington has made his most accessible film yet. The humor is less arch than in his previous comedies (among them Somebody up There Likes Me, Harmony and Me, and RSO [Registered Sex Offender]), and it’s plentiful and less diffuse than in his earlier works.

The film begins to get a bit lost as the story develops and pushes toward a wobbly climax and conclusion. And what to make of that sled, which is the first bit of knowledge Jonas receives. Rosebud, anyone?

Courtroom dramas can be tricky, tetchy things, but director Jackson, working from a script by David Hare (The Hours) keeps the suspense and moral indignation peaking high throughout Denial’s slightly overlong running time.

10 Cloverfield Lane is a cinematic puzzle box that rewards your patience with three standout performances; a memorable, nerve-jangling score by composer Bear McCreary; and an escalating sense of disorienting confusion.

Not content to whisper its truths; it would rather flaunt its valuable lessons and its good intentions, proudly boasting its sentiments like a (rainbow-striped) badge of honor.

What A Walk in the Woods doesn’t have, however, is plot, character development, narrative conflict, and resolution – in other words, a destination.

Cinematographer Jean-Marie Dreujou has shot the ridiculously photogenic grasslands in truly spectacular IMAX 3-D, and rarely have I seen it done better.

The film also inspires, if unconsciously, the viewer to rethink what exactly constitutes art.

Rustin is filled with powerful performances and compelling speechifying, but it never quite manages to balance the onscreen potential of both man and mission.

To the delight of its young audience, juvenile humor abounds in Captain Underpants, but the movie is smart about the way it contextualizes this lowbrow comedy.

It's not the greatest movie about baseball ever made (and I'll keep my mouth shut on that one if I know what's good for me), but it's not the worst, either. Like the game itself, it's pretty darn fun.

The Alpinist works as a moving testament to Leclerc’s incredible life and the art of alpinism itself, while even finding time to tactfully wrestle with the difficult reconciliation of the reckless danger versus the peerless beauty of such an undertaking.

Even with all the conflations and simplifications, and a middle act that verges on an extended montage of guerrilla warfare and undercover intrigue, A Call to Spy is undeniably a heartfelt take on a fascinating and heartbreaking true tale of heroism.

Can faith and evidence coexist? That's an age-old question, and one that The Apparition, the latest from French director Giannoli, broaches without ever truly resolving.

This is an unpleasant film, but Argento, whose bloodline positively seethes with unpleasantness, is, in her own right, a master cinematic stylist of the first order.

That may be Beautiful Boy's biggest problem: That it's too emotional.

It all boils down to trying too hard, when everybody knows a good grift is one that appears effortless.

Isn't going to make anyone's head explode with joy, but it is sweet and sporadically funny in its own loopy way.

Aside from Segel’s grounding performance, the pleasures of Our Friend lie in some of its observational specifics about human behavior.

Detailed but, ultimately, one-sided.

Only a devotee of the original film or a hardcore sourpuss could find serious fault with this world romp.

A perfectly marvelous matinee option for young children.

A charmingly mounted, period romantic drama that benefits from the performances of a fine ensemble cast and the lovely location settings of Florence and Tuscany.

Border is a Venn diagram of a film: sometimes darkly comedic, sometimes wild honey sweet, sometimes a stomach-churning crime drama, with aspects of both Scandinavian mythology and contemporary queer cinema.

Finally recovered from the archive by the George A. Romero Foundation, and restored by New York's IndieCollect from two faded 16mm prints, its mere existence as a lost Romero is enough to make it worth watching. But it's not simply a dated curio: it's a fascinating if dated curio.

These women are marvelous, with ancient, creased faces and the kind of admirable f...-all attitude that comes with age. I couldn't take my eyes off them.

Ultimately, it’s the kind-of mystery that undermines Past Life’s emotional kapow. You can hardly fault writer/director Avi Nesher for trying to tease suspense out of the story, but he establishes early an ominous tone and stubbornly holds steadfast to it.

Remarkable and enlightening.

Yet Porges (who pops up as an expert talking head) and co-director Chris Charles Scott III never quite hit an even tone - or rather, there's a big divide, like bouncing along on a kiddy coaster that suddenly turns into a brutal corkscrew with a massive drop at the end.

Although a Norwegian production, the film has a muted Hollywood sensibility that keeps things real. It’s an absorbing and often lyrical piece of storytelling that doesn’t overembellish the facts or rely on a pumped-up score or whiplash editing to heighten the dramatic action.

A warm, comfortable, thoroughly inoffensive kidfilm.

Sometimes charmingly fantastical, Over the Moon definitely doesn't have the fairytale elegance of Keane's earlier work.

Most important, there are the photographs themselves – lots of them – which director Freyer freely uses to illustrate Winogrand’s genius in capturing the ambiguous now, urging the viewer to fill in the details of the story glimpsed in the shot.

Visually, this is a charming addition to Japanese interpretation of pastoral England, with the overall vision of manor houses and rural idylls feeling perfectly bucolic. There are moments when some elements of culture or set dressing ring a little false. It's in little details.

Greenwald's doc is pure partisan warfare of the liberal stripe, to be sure, but that doesn't make it any less disturbing.

Scott’s is the story of how Robin Longstride (and, no, that’s not a name made up by Mel Brooks), an archer in Richard the Lionheart's last Crusade, became Robin of the Hood, the wily defender of the overtaxed people of Nottingham.

With a few standout performances and production design that imbues it with a good amount of period shine, it may yet find a receptive audience.

Ten Canoes is as much a work of anthropology as it is a narrative, and its true strength lies in its exploration of ancient aboriginal hunting practices, death rituals, and legal traditions.

An admirable effort, but too many words, words, and more words, and not enough of the ache of that half-smile.

Caught with a mixture of cool reserve and neck-snapping energy by director Kim Jee-woon's longtime cinematographer Lee Mo-gae (I Saw the Devil, Ilang: The Wolf Brigade), Hunt is an ugly morality play, briskly told and given chilling, crackling energy by Lee and Jung.

A surprisingly fun throwback to Cold War thrillers.

Jumanji: The Next Level feels like a "BioShock 2" when we were hoping for "BioShock Infinite."

The film’s major drawback is the broad strokes with which the henpecked trio of males is presented -- they’re not quite caricatures, but their individual quirks feel as though they were cribbed from other, better films.

The lion’s share of the work then is on Bening and Bell’s shoulders to flesh out dramatically thin characters. That they do.

This sumptuous-looking film clearly spared no expense in its visual rendering; its optical flourishes and attention to detail aim for the Disney gold standard and, for the most part, come pretty darn close.

For all its stylistic flourishes and interlocking storylines, Inglourious Basterds is, at its bullet-riddled core, a bloody good war movie, twisting and twisted and full of wordy shrapnel but no less kickass for it.

And while the blond, youthful, and entirely sane-seeming Lomborg was initially pilloried for his calm, rational views by the global environmental movement, his ideas and solutions arrive as a refreshing tonic in the face of global warming's more vocal fearmongers.

Underneath the savage occult aspects of the story remains a constant exploration of what it means to see your loved ones as flawed, rounded humans, and ultimately as mortal.

The result is a well-cooked serving of meat-and-potatoes action filmmaking, but its main failing is an ultimate inability to distinguish itself by more than minor flourishes.

The game footage is as engrossing as the real thing, although it comes at the expense of diminished attention to the teen players and their emotional problems.

With so many soldiers interviewed, some only fleetingly, it's impossible to keep track of them all.

It's not the kind of story to win Oscars, but it will definitely make you want to pet a pupper.

When the film leans too heavily into violence, it undercuts the comedy; when the comedy takes center stage, it makes for an awkward bedfellow with the hard-R violence that defines the fight sequences. It’s a tricky line to walk for a Christmas movie – even one as unconventional as this – and Violent Night is not above the occasional stumble.

As it turns out, The Legend of Tarzan isn’t half-bad, and the film deftly put most of my fears to rest by creating animals and jungles that serve and enhance the story rather than detracting from it.

It's a knowing, dare I say sweet, little film that takes pains to let the characters speak for themselves, never rallying behind an implicit religious message, which may be the best message of all.

As a whole, the film has too little character and/or plot development to sustain narrative interest. What A Scanner Darkly excels at is mood and tone.

If the cast blurs together, the expert costume and production design, filmed in lusciously retro 16mm, give the eye plenty to enjoy.

Thankfully there are no weight-loss montage sequences; what you see with Muriel is what you get, like it or not. This refusal to change or convert the main characters makes the film so appealing.

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.

Perhaps this approach makes A Quiet Place II the cinematic answer to downloadable content, a standalone adventure that offers new levels but no new narrative.

The Tavern footage is terrific stuff – unstaged and unmediated and the closest the camera gets to penetrating the enigmatic yet magnetic chef.

Only a couple years removed from his screen super-success in Saturday Night Fever, Travolta struts his way through Urban Cowboy’s modern-West parable about machismo, cowboy manqué, and mechanical bulls. Travolta captures some of the confusion of a little big man on the new prairie, Debra Winger provides a vixenish challenge to his manhood, and Scott Glenn plays the guy in the figurative black cowboy hat.

Thanks to Susan Seidelman for reminding us that romantic comedy is suitable for any population or age group.

While The People Under the Stairs may leave some horror fans unsatisfied and other horror detractors repulsed, it ought to satisfy those viewers who appreciate a thoughtful and visceral movie entertainment.

The five days of togetherness are filled with challenges and enjoyment, and if the cast is willing, I’m sure other Meyers family reunions will follow, although none is likely to be as sweet as this sugar plum.

Subtitled “A Street Romance,” writer-director Singleton's sophomore effort touches the heart more when it's on the street than when it's making romance.

A confounding movie on many levels. For all its sophistication and sensitivity, it turns out to be little more than an upscale B-movie about getting even.

What's makes Tommaso stand out among thinly veiled autobiographical movies is that it’s not, like Tarkovsky’s "Mirror," an attempt to reduce an entire life into two hours; nor, as in "Fanny and Alexander" or "The 400 Blows," a portrait of the artist as a young man. This is Ferrara at this precise moment.

Gleefully silly fun, with a few core concepts on the nature of time, space, and la-la-la-love thrown in for good measure. And who can resist a puffin, anyway?

The Tunnel may be shrouded in blistering embers and fumes, but it never loses sight of the victims and helpers, of whom there are many. Just as it's an ensemble drama, so it's the community that saves what it can of the day, and gives a feel-good ending with a tinge of sadness.

Mutiny in Heaven would make a fitting pairing with White's 2012 TV documentary, Junkie Monastery, another tale of hedonism and cerebral discourse clashing.

In the end, trying to compartmentalize this movie in some neat fashion is folly. This is Todd Solondz and, refreshingly enough, you can’t teach an old dog new tricks.

In its strange and successful mixing of genres, Dust Bunny is arguably everything that Mockingbird Lane, Fuller’s misguided attempt at an edgy take on The Munsters, was not.

Any SNL fan, and I am one, is still going to get a kick out of the close access and cavalcade of stars like Tina Fey, Chris Rock, John Mulaney, Paula Pell, and Paul Simon giving testimony. By dint of that access, Lorne is by definition revealing. Revelatory? Not as much.

The movie is both harrowing and funny, but I’m not sure the filmmakers would agree with everyone about which scenes are which.

Although Moffie is competently executed, its genre-straddling will leave you vaguely unsatisfied if you decide too quickly the kind of movie it should be.

With an over two-hour running time, these side issues come across as unnecessary weight and threaten to turn off the very viewers the filmmakers worked so hard and so ably to win over in the first place.

Worth imbibing, if for no reason other than the bellyache it generates.

Capitalizes on the audience’s familiarity with the many players and their complex backstories, but never advances the ball down the field, tenders no new thought or wrinkle to the franchise. It’s the difference between a diverting entertainment, and a riveting one.

A gleefully gross adventure that bundles together all of wrestling-and-horror nerd Eisener's favorite obsessions (he's also part of the team behind VICE's The Dark Side of the Ring), Kids vs. Aliens is exactly the kind of age-inappropriate horror that kids will absolutely love.

Remarkably frank, Korengal espouses no one clear sentiment towards war.

The real joy of watching this movie is seeing a stand-up comedian who is incredibly comfortable with herself, her material, and her audience.