The senseless violence of a Jean-Claude Van Dammer, no point to that, but this, this has purpose. This is an ass-kicking a girl can get into. So why do I feel like crying mea culpa?

It's mean, gritty, and brutally nihilist, its mystery unwrapping before it strangles you with its perfect meanness. If noir is about, as the old saying goes, bad people doing bad things for good reasons, then Sympathy for the Devil bleeds in all the right ways.

The elusive musician is in the spotlight, even if he's not that fond of it, and Kijak manages to keep him at a reverent distance, the film padded with gushing interviews from musician fans.

A neon-drenched murder mystery – or is it? – for the selfie generation, set in the hipster hamlet of Silverlake. So it goes with this highly stylized slice of bad, black millennial noir, a post-mumblecore take on the shady underbelly of L.A. in which Los Angeles plays itself, very nearly upstaging the main characters’ plight.

Frankly, it feels strange that a movie with so much to say about loss wants to wallow in it when a chance at joy was right there.

Best yet, there’s a mid-film bedtime story, made to look like stop-motion, that’ll take your breath away.

This successful characterization is definitely a team effort among actor Jared Leto (the brooding Jordan Catalano of television's "My So-Called Life"), writers James and Eugene Corr, cinematographer Peter Gilbert, and musical director Mason Daring.

For truly affecting, there is Margherita’s teen daughter, Livia (Mancini). I don’t know if Moretti cares about catharsis, but Livia’s silent sob broke me, in the best way.

It's just that audiences are going to have a hard time tidily summarizing what it is they just experienced (and I suspect the same holds true for Soderbergh himself).

The House of Sand is a more transparently ambitious, prestigious "woman's picture" than Waddington's previous feature, 2000's "Me You Them."

Charlie’s Angels isn’t revolutionary by any means, but for today’s Gen Z, it’s a jumping-off point.

It's an utterly contemporary film that forces - and rewards - hard reflection on the nature of truth, goodness, and identity.

It’s a message movie, as are all kids films these days, but these environmentally-aware messages are sweet and unforced, and well worth hearing.

It neither embarrasses the original, nor is superior to it in any way.

A solid, intermittently excellent, and extremely exsanguinatory take on what Stephen King famously referred to as the "Spam in a cabin" genre.

Me Before You isn’t going to win any awards for sophistication in storytelling or direction, but it tenderly reproduces the book’s most iconic scenes, and their tearjerking effect.

Director Watts has a background in comedy direction, and a thin, sticky stream of exceptionally dark humor flows through the otherwise gut-churning realism of Cop Car.

Feuerzeig has made a fascinating documentary about a fascinating occurrence. Author implicitly stokes so many of the moral questions the incident inherently raises.

Thorough and competent, The Dissident works as an essential political documentary. It covers Khashoggi’s assassination in detail, and very clearly makes it known that Saudi Crown Prince Mohammed bin Salman is the one behind it. However, it’s certainly a step down for Fogel, and while its production is glossy and polished, the lack of inertia keeps The Dissident from reaching its full potential.

It's also and most interestingly about the writing process itself, a difficult feat to pull off on film, which Wagner and co-screenwriter Fred Parnes manage to display with unvarnished realism.

A bit of a letdown in some ways, The Birdcage nonetheless features some scene-stealing performances.

There are significant stretches of talky tedium, more than a few “huh” moments for neophytes – especially whenever anyone starts nattering on about Dust with a capital D – and the ending plays abruptly, but there’s plenty here to hang a franchise on.

Everybody Knows is not Farhadi’s best work, but he does deliver an affair to remember.

Funny People – sensitive, shaggy, a little bit draggy – is as much about the maturation of Ira as a performer and George as a man as it is about Apatow’s maturation as an artist.

Indignation, however, is not really about sex, but rather, the cataclysms that can result from the most banal of choices.

That rarest of creatures: a coming-of-age dramedy whose (nearly) teenage stars are natural actors, whose direction is unforced, and whose sexual themes are treated with candor and humor.

Though visually lovely and ambitious, never soars to the heights achieved by "Unforgiven." Costner’s film lacks the moral complexity that might earn it a solid berth in the canon of the American Western.

Although it’s no doubt intentional that Driver plays Jones as tireless and single-minded, the overall narrative of The Report might have been helped by more character-building.