Writer/director Moshé (South by Southwest 2017 selection The Ballad of Lefty Brown) grounds the tension of the various ethical dilemmas in Aporia by focusing more on his characters than on the gimmick of his delightfully lo-tech time murder machine.

Despite these quibbles, Django Unchained offers an embarrassment of riches (and actors in tiny cameos).

This The Naked Gun never tries to lampoon or merely copy the original beloved films. Instead, director Akiva Schaffer and his co-writers, Dan Gregor and Doug Mand, get to the heart of the humor in a non-ironic, non-revisionist fashion.

Broken Flowers is as elliptical as the haunting jazz music by Mulatu Astatke that permeates the soundtrack.

A tight, compact, and visually sumptuous origin story that revels in the surrealistic vision of Doctor Strange’s legendary creator and artist Steve Ditko.

A complex and fascinating look into a convergence of creativity, money, and iconoclasts, Meow Wolf: Origin Story is a tale that to my knowledge has no precedent. And while Meow Wolf might not be to everyone’s tastes, they are trailblazers. I’ll take their elaborate and inventive installations over pastel desert paintings of horses and clouds any day of the week.

It plays very much like it advertises itself: a mixtape – Fear of a Black Planet, then and now.

Stays remarkably true to a kid's-eye perspective and dormant fears.

It's Stiller's knowledgeable use of these smaller touches that (along with the excellent cast -- it's great to see Winona relinquishing period gowns and back where she can do some real damage) pushes the film along a solid, fresh line and toward its admittedly Hollywood conclusion. Stiller and company imbue their film with an honest, sarcastic wit that's all too familiar: apparently, somebody's been filming our lives. Does this mean we'll all be getting royalties?

Blood Quantum operates from a place of tribal identity and that no white audience members will truly be able to understand. In this way, Barnaby’s film rejects the default white gaze of so many horror films, choosing to tell a story through an unapologetically Indigenous lens.

Gunn’s script grasps two major aspects of the Superman mythology. One, that journalism done right will save the day as much as punching bad guys will, and two, that immigrants will often subscribe to the principles that Americans claim are so self-evident more than most Americans will. Corenswet embodies both in a way that no one since Christopher Reeve has, willing to be the gosh-darning nerd if that means doing the right thing.

It’s fine; it works. The future is bright.

Ranks as one of the season's most intelligent and polished films.

Two Lovers is an intensely felt, character-driven film, and there's no stronger character onscreen – not even Leonard – than Leonard's wise, Jewish mother, Ruth, played with effortless, pure perfection by Rossellini.

Reilly, Phoenix, Gyllenhaal, and Ahmed – a murderers’ row of outstanding character actors who all moonlight as leading men – take the script’s raw materials (daddy issues, the trauma of being bullied, the civilizing effect of a toothbrush) and forge new bonds with a few words, a light look. The film treats their growing intimacy, in all its permutations, like an objet d’art, to be turned over and examined, delicately, from every angle. When they’re together, the film is electric.

McKellen – now in his mid-Eighties, still sporting – hasn’t brought this kind of twinkling malevolence to the screen since his starring role in 1995’s Richard III, which coincidentally transposed its story of power grabbing and backstabbing to 1930s, fascists-rising England, the very same milieu of this acidic drama.

Hacksaw Ridge is drenched in the blood of the fallen and the mud forever caked on the boots of those who survived to tell the tale. It’s the closest thing to feeling as though you’ve marched a mile in those shoes.

Even if it doesn’t manage to be quite the "Hunger Games"-level hit its producers would clearly desire, it’s the best of the wannabes we’ve seen so far.

The horror imagined by Évolution does not depend on the genre’s familiar tropes but instead its arousal of dread and fear, not unlike Guillermo del Toro in "The Devil’s Backbone," in which the peril is intuited rather than defined.

As always, the tale is in the telling, and Standing Up tells it well.

From the moment Shula first appears in On Becoming a Guinea Fowl, director Rungano Nyoni lets the quiet charisma of actress Susan Chardy subtly dominate the screen.

Part 2 is something else altogether. Such digital effects as the marauding giants that squash baby wizards like bugs or the inky terror that is the Death Eaters – acolytes to the mad, bad wizard Voldemort (Fiennes) – are magnificent and experienced in one long, clutched breath. But what's missing is what has been the chief pleasure of the series: the chemistry between its young leads.

In the game of eXistenZ it's not whether you win or lose, but how you play the game.

The movie’s wit and energy hold your interest, but they don’t spark the pleasure of the unexpected, the thrill you felt in "Laura," "The Last of Sheila," "Chinatown," "The Sixth Sense," or the 1974 adaptation of Christie’s "Murder on the Orient Express" (not Kenneth Branagh’s inept remake), movies whose big reveals surprise you in their elegant simplicity.

While Fantastic Beasts suffers from some symptoms we’ve basically taken as par for the course in recent high-profile Hollywood spectacles: too many set-pieces, various plotlines stitched together like a quilt, and one-note supporting roles (pretty sure Jon Voight – playing a newspaper mogul – is just there to introduce himself for subsequent entries), it is also really fun.

The movie doesn’t stand in judgment of its characters, which will probably disappoint audiences who think it ought to, but its breezy tone and ultimately affirming message should please comedy fans with an appreciation for the offbeat.

Stone makes it virtually impossible to leave the theatre convinced, beyond all shadow of doubt, of the lone gunman theory.

A political thriller with topical currency, Spartan delivers the goods.