Even in its disassociation, The Great Beauty ingratiates itself as a witty and compelling companion – much like Jep Gambardella.

The original was indeed ludicrous, but it exuded warmth, vitality, and belief in itself. The 2.0 update splashes up on shore DOA.

In Carol, all the elements dovetail perfectly to create a movie that is as irresistible as its title character.

At its best, Joy celebrates the passage of a demoralized woman who finds the steel in her spine. At its worst, it panders in the name of female empowerment, occasionally delivering moments of pseudo-inspiration that ring so falsely it’s difficult to hear anything else.

Overall, it’s a satisfying wintry treat, as only Quentin Tarantino can do it.

Daddy’s Home is one of those comedies that is not terribly good, but not nearly as terrible as it might have been.

If Concussion had focused on Omalu’s tireless efforts to expose CTE to the world, it would have been a powerful film. As it stands, it’s just second-string.

McKay makes moral outrage wickedly entertaining.

Still, as a nostalgia trip that knows exactly what die-hard Star Wars fans want and then layers in some memorable new characters, The Force Awakens is exactly what it needs to be: an old-school Saturday afternoon sci-fi matinee writ big.

Sorrentino’s film tackles the most important of all life’s questions with wit, wisdom, and no small amount of often-surreal humor.

Sisters has a patchily funny first act but unleashes pure comedic chaos once the party gets started.

Despite The Danish Girl’s lack of specificity regarding what motivates Einar’s transformation into Lili Elbe, the film is still quite lovely. Its compositions are lovely to look at, and the performances engaging.

Alvin and the Chipmunks: The Road Chip has sporadic laughs for the under-10 set and absolutely nothing for the poor parents sitting next to them.

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.

The characterizations are sincere, but overly familiar.

Dougherty appears determined to work his way through the underbelly of our most cherished seasonal festivities. Plus, it’s an extremely welcome change of pace from the “found footage” barrage of the past 10 years.

Director Howard, his actors, and indeed the entire salty sweep of the film are all aided tremendously by visual-effects supervisor Jody Johnson and his team’s spectacular combination of live action and flawless, awe-inspiring CGI creations, chief among them the great, white whale.

The religious charlatans who are the primary characters in Don Verdean are ripe for comic deflation, but the film’s unsteady tone has no discernible target.

Chi-Raq constantly shifts tones from comedy to drama and back again, while most of its dialogue is delivered in rhyming couplets. The transitions can sometimes be bumpy, but never when Samuel L. Jackson pops up as nattily dressed and off-color one-man Greek chorus.

This time out, Nakashima plays it fast, loose, and seriously fucked-up with a father-daughter tale of Tokyo woe that makes Paul Schrader’s "Hardcore" look like a picnic.

Sergio Leone and John Ford would likely both recognize Nowar’s film as an echo of their own Monument Valley adventures.

The movie simply trudges along, tirelessly making its rounds, just like its holy sister walking impoverished streets with grim purpose.

Creed isn’t a complete TKO, but it goes all 12 rounds with vitality and flourish.

Daniel Radcliffe cleans up nicely as Igor, the man behind the madman who makes the monster in this, the 60th (thereabouts) film to adapt or riff on Mary Shelley’s prescient 1818 sci-fi/horror novel. Happily, director Paul McGuigan, working from a script by Max Landis, takes the story in some new directions by choosing to retell the tale from the perspective of the famed hunchback.

Mostly Legend just lurches.

The Good Dinosaur may not be as revolutionary as 1914’s “Gertie the Dinosaur,” but as Jurassic World already demonstrated this year, we never tire of these prehistoric critters.

Trumbo certainly has pep. Theodore Shapiro’s jazzy score doesn’t just boast a tom-tom – you could choreograph it with pom-poms. Maybe Roach worried that general audiences wouldn’t cotton to a yellowing story about the Red Menace, so he ginned it up with a jazz-hands idea of midcentury Hollywood, with everyone mugging like it’s a lobby-card photo shoot

Spotlight is a great newspaper movie, ranking up there with "All the President’s Men" and "Citizen Kane", and it’s certainly the best of its kind since "The Paper" in 1994, which also happened to star Michael Keaton.