Sharif is a paragon of decency and endurance, but his camera skills are limited and often constrained by circumstances. For the most part this roughness reflects the raw immediacy of the experience.

Channeling Nye’s own gift for making complex ideas simple and clear, the filmmakers edit together these various aspects of Nye’s life with deceptive ease, drawing on interviews and archival material and following him throughout his hectic schedule. This is not hagiography, however; they don’t back off from examining some of his more controversial endeavors and characteristics. That includes his fondness for the spotlight and his ambition, which in a couple of instances has backfired on him.

The chief weakness in the movement, and in the film as well, is Nora herself. Played sweetly by Leuenberger, Nora is endearing but hardly embodies the spirit of her Ibsen namesake.

How’s the movie? Extremely entertaining and fairly pointless, and it will probably be taken for a classic by a generation that has likewise never heard of Tim Burton’s “Ed Wood” (1994), a movie that plumbed the wayward soul of its misbegotten moviemaker to depths The Disaster Artist never manages to touch.

A decent biopic, rousing and well-made and unruffled by depth, with an expertly judged performance at its center.

Consistently intriguing as all the lit-process tidbits are, the film struggles to mesh footnotes and somber notes.

The film’s episodic nature, which serves to underscore the moments of grim drama, adds to the problem. One can only salute the filmmakers’ ambition and seriousness of purpose, but it’s hard to see who The Breadwinner audience is.

You’re left with another Denzel Washington performance that gets under your skin and stays there, rankling away. That’s a lot more than most movies offer — even the better ones.

Coco is a day-glo firecracker celebrating a country and a culture that has been (and continues to be) much maligned, and it’s at its most vibrant when it journeys into and beyond the shadow of death. That’s a paradox I can live with.

Mudbound is four-square and unshowy, and you might mistake it for old-fashioned. But the presence of an African-American director behind the camera affects everything in front of it.

As the story arcs toward its touching denouement, it’s those quiet moments — imbued with the windswept soul of the landscape — that harbor the most lyrical beauty.

Justice League may play well to hardcore DC cognoscenti, but if you’re not a fan, the movie’s failings are easy to enumerate. First off, the villain’s a dud.

The script is pungent and profanely funny while remaining rooted in strong and serious emotions.

Much as there is right with Wonder, there’s just as much that isn’t. Emotionally, the movie rarely feels false.

A touching but fairly clumsy effort that only acquires the depths of sadness and resilience it needs if you have the memory of the earlier film shoring it up. It proves that second-hand grace is, after all, still grace.

Though he might be uncertain about sex, or even kissing and cuddling, Scott is an incurable romantic. And steadfastly loyal and kind. The value of that is made clear when the filmmakers disclose the full tragedy and horror of what Dina has gone through, and when he sings to her “Before the Next Teardrop Falls.”

Returning director Sean Anders strings together mayhem-filled moments that just aren’t the howlers that they’re clearly scripted to be, never mind the fatherly foursome’s chemistry, or the tobacco-stained guffaws Gibson keeps busting out to sell these bits.

As debuts go, Lady Bird is as strong as they get: funny, ferocious, and wise. It does, however, drape its restless energy and witty observations atop an overfamiliar framework of coming-of-age movies.

By turns strikingly original and dramatically slick, deeply felt and a little cooked up. It’s well worth seeing, though.

The documentary is an absolute delight, but it has a faith in everyday folks that feels both stalwart and melancholy, aware that these are exactly the people being swept away by the tides of modernity. It’s a sociopolitical cri de coeur disguised as a vacation.

It’s an entertaining piece of Hollywood waxworks if you don’t set your expectations very high and it’s probably the best movie Rob Reiner has directed in more than a decade. (This only sounds like a compliment.)

The film confronts not just the expected issue of environmentalism but also explores themes of survival, separation, loss, and death.

Thor’s bloodsport detour diverts an inordinate amount of the filmmakers’ attention, and ours, from the whole end-of-days buildup. Hopkins gets short shrift, as does Idris Elba’s returning interdimensional gatekeeper, Heimdall.

What emerges from this pretentious if diverting mishmash is a story that is equally predictable and contrived, but nonetheless offers some worthwhile insights into the notion of the male gaze and the subjugation of women.

The cast is earnest and they almost convince us they’re doing important rather than self-important work.

Beautifully shot and deeply dispiriting, the documentary examines the global refugee crisis.

What’s most compelling is the near-documentary quality of Teller, Koale, and Bennett’s characters playing against a VA backdrop of prosthetic limbs and catheter bags, of desensitized clerks and overwhelmed therapists.

I walked out of the movie on a cloud of happiness that was only slightly dissipated after a night’s sleep. A critical acquaintance found the whole thing much too icky-sticky sweet. It may be a generational issue.

Suburbicon is George Clooney’s sixth feature as a director and the latest spiral downward in terms of quality.

Director Tomas Alfredson and cinematographer Dion Beebe have given The Snowman a gloriously subdued look.

These successes are inspiring, but deeper and more complex emotions are unexplored. It’s no fault of Foy’s performance; she brings depth, humor, and conviction to her role as the devoted wife. Garfield, on the other hand, labors mightily but can’t overcome the superficiality of the character as scripted by William Nicholson (“Shadowlands”).

The film concerns itself more with beauty shots of the region’s rugged, intimidating vastness than with “Backdraft”-rivaling imagery of combustion as art.

A stuffy, treacly, overproduced slab of High British twaddle, it nevertheless reduced most of a recent preview audience to what the film itself calls “blubbing.” Even a flinthearted movie critic could be seen to dab his eyes from time to time.

In the end, the film describes not so much an arc as a circle. Kim, who had criticized the World Bank for its callous approach to financing health care for the poor, is appointed its chairman by President Obama in 2012.

If the movie can’t maintain its interest in Chan, why should we? This narrative splice job simply doesn’t hold together. Call it a taut mess or a hot mess, take your pick.

In temperament and technique, the writer-director Noah Baumbach occupies a niche exactly between Woody Allen and Wes Anderson. Baumbach’s films are almost all about his own tribe of neurotic upper-middle-class white New Yorkers, but while he has a more novelistic distance on his characters than Allen, his visual style is less antic and whimsical — more traditional — than Anderson’s.

In nerve, guts, heart, and mind — one of the finest films of 2017.

About the only thing the title doesn’t tell you is that the movie’s a loving, sensitive exploration of S&M bondage techniques and polyamorous relationships.

More problematic for Hudlin is the nature of the case — only by proving that a rape victim is a liar can Friedman and Marshall win an acquittal for their client. Fortunately, the case (in the film, if not in real life) is resolved in such a way that racism and misogyny are found equally guilty.

Mark Felt is a drama about an aggrieved control freak, which would be fine if director Landesman openly acknowledged it. He’s torn, though between offering a heroic celebration of the republic’s underappreciated savior and a more damning character portrait of a man who, for complex reasons, ended up doing the right thing.

The film feels as if it’s drawing its characterizations far more from the appeal of its stars than from any prose.

The results are visually dazzling. The movie as a whole is something less.

The film is valuable for gently insisting on both the indignities and the dignity of old age, and it’s invaluable as a keepsake of a most individual screen presence. It is, simply, a lovely time at the movies.

So swollen with purpose, so titanically self-conscious in its mythmaking, that at times its nearly paralyzes itself with solemnity.

A woozy, wheezy impressionistic take on a woman’s nervous breakdown that aspires to the avant-garde but plays like a bad head-trip movie from the late 1960s. It’s dreadful. Worse, it’s not quite bad enough to be much fun.

There’s a reason the names in the title don’t appear in alphabetical order. Abdul is the far more interesting character, but it’s her majesty the movie dotes on. God save the queen? Oh yes, and God help the rest of us.

Ex Libris has no narration and it lasts three hours and 17 minutes, which sounds like torture (or, alternately, 3½ episodes of “Game of Thrones”). Somewhat surprisingly, the movie rushes by at the speed of life.

Battle of the Sexes is slick and wholly enjoyable, a pop provocation whose medicine goes down easy via outsize, engaging performances in the leads.

American Made really does deserve to be on a double-bill with “Top Gun,” and I’m betting Cruise knows it. The first film embodies the glorious shallowness of the Reagan Era. The second wallows in that shallowness while hinting at everything it cost.

With its inventively nutso action, youthful vibe, and subversive topicality, the “Kingsman” franchise feels more relevant than even Daniel Craig’s James Bond. Screen espionage doesn’t come any hipper these days.

In Brad’s Status, Stiller becomes the face of white male privilege — and its comeuppance.

Gyllenhaal’s excellent, but, playing his girlfriend, Tatiana Maslany (star of TV’s “Orphan Black”) is something special.

Swinton’s vocal performance as Bell is so vivid and absorbing it could be entered as evidence for the defense. Swinton makes Bell so compelling it’s easy to overlook what a paradoxical figure she was.

A sharper script would have been the real ultimate weapon.

Most of all, California Typewriter is an elegy. “The truth is, no good typewriters are going to be made again,” Hanks laments. There’s a reason that the title of the first tune on the fine musical soundtrack is “Stolen Moments.”

Year by the Sea is for audiences who don’t trust the shiftiness of nuance and craft, of messages that rise up from dramatic situations rather than being pasted on top of them, and who would prefer their life lessons stated loudly and for maximum applicability.

With mother!, Aronofsky throws caution to the winds and delivers his most abstract cinematic experience yet. It’s also arguably his worst.

Trouble is, the movie’s dopiness isn’t in fact something you can get past. “American Assasinine” is frequently more like it.

Jolie does not dwell on the atrocities, though a horrifyingly ironic battle scene near the end contains some gruesome imagery.

The movie tries to tell the whole story instead of just a good one.

After Love is like being stuck at a dinner with an unpleasant couple who won’t stop squabbling.

A glorious late-summer pendant.

Whose Streets? gives us more than enough stories from people not often enough heard, and their refusal to remain silent is invigorating.

Kogonada establishes a meditative tone and rhythm as his compositions parallel the building’s pleasing symmetries.

Home “again”? It seems that first-timer Meyers-Shyer isn’t setting so much as a piggy toe beyond familiar territory, and this listless rom-com shows it.

Ultimately, cast and crew conjure up horror that’s more efficient than terrifying.

That’s how the gifted young Argentine writer-director Matías Piñeiro makes his movies, in a style that seems casual and feels sure-handed — casual and sure-handed being about as good a combination as artistry, in any medium, has to offer.

After Lake Bell’s smart, unconventional debut, “In a World. . .” (2013), her new film, I Do . . . Until I Don’t (she apparently likes ellipses in her titles), is disappointingly ordinary.

The film has two big things going for it: Stanfield and Asomugha. Their characters could easily become capital-letter caricatures — Victim, Loyal Friend — but the actors give Warner and King a sense of personality, and deeply felt hurt, that stays with you.

Mostly people talk. Lovely to look at, In Transit is even better to listen to. The documentary tells us straightaway that what we hear matters just as much as what we see.

Ingrid Goes West doesn’t offer Plaza a breakout role so much as a dig-deeper role. There’s a bravery to her performance that recalls De Niro as Pupkin. Actors really, really like to be liked — and understood. Ingrid is intensely unlikable — and opaque.

Patti Cake$ charts a path of rise and fall, breakthrough and disappointment, montage and romance that would be woefully predictable if we weren’t having so much fun tagging along. What’s fresh is the central figure, her talent and presence, and an exuberance that all that concrete Tri-State armor can’t hide.

The main reason it does not seem contrived is the performances of Catherine Deneuve and Catherine Frot. Because of their authenticity, and Provost’s mostly sure hand at maintaining mood and tone, the film is a moving immersion into the mysteries of time, memory, and mortality.

Good Time is a prime example of what the cynical or the uninterested might dismiss as “feel-bad cinema” — low budget, kitchen-sink realism about unpleasant people in worse situations. It also happens to be one of the most uncompromising movies I’ve seen all year: vibrant and desperate and alive, it’s a work hanging on by its fingernails.

As an orphan who dreams of joining the Paris Opera Ballet in the animated feature Leap!, Elle Fanning really hears it about the artistry and precision required to become a prima ballerina. The makers of this cheery but subpar confection probably should have been taking notes in addition to scripting them.

Funny, heartbreaking, impeccably observed, and nearly flawless drama.

There aren’t sufficient words to describe the remarkable visual environment; suffice it to say that the production designers are the stars here as much as the cast. More so, really.

The painterly beauty of anime detaches the viewer from the terrible events depicted, but it also makes these cataclysms more accessible to the imagination.

New York looks very appealing: uptown, downtown, even the little bit of Brooklyn we see. Think of “Boy” as a Bridges highlight reel and Gotham travelogue, instead of precious coming-of-age story, and it’s not half bad. But it isn’t, so it is.

The proof that the “Trip” formula hasn’t become formulaic? How often, and hard, these two can make an audience laugh.

Even by the junk-food standards of summer action comedies, The Hitman’s Bodyguard is overlong, over-violent, and over the top.

The new movie, a heist comedy, has been described in some quarters as “Ocean’s 11” for the NASCAR crowd, and that’s not wrong. It also feels like the director is trying to reverse-engineer one of the Coen brothers’ loopier excursions and not getting every one of the pieces in order.

Step, the African-American competitive art that is the subject of Amanda Lipitz’s taut, intimate, passionate, and celebratory documentary of the same title, is not to be confused with its Irish namesake in “Riverdance.”

All three actors are excellent. So’s Gil Birmingham, as the victim’s father.

Sincerity turns out to be the default tone for Brigsby Bear, making this indie’s odd concept of an accidental man-child wrapped up in a Teddy Ruxpin fantasy world feel odder still in the execution.

If some light deja vu is the price horror fans must pay for a mainstream offering this spine-tingling, most will still come away feeling spooked and satisfied.

It’s a watchable disappointment that leaves mostly frustration in its wake.

The movie makes me finally want to test-drive one of the “Dark Tower” novels, if only to see what King himself was able to bring to the party. Maybe that’s been his evil plan all along.

The movie reaches its emotional climax with the signing of the accords. But even under the best of circumstances, climate change offers no quick solutions. “This is a mission I have dedicated myself to,” Gore says, a mission that remains “a constant struggle between hope and despair.”

Maybe if the filmmakers suggested that these villains were once children with mothers themselves, it might have made their crime, and the chase that ensues, less one-dimensional.

Lines are drawn and connections are made. The intentions are pure. The results are enraging, often in accordance with the filmmakers’ hopes, sometimes against. Personally, I came out of Detroit angrier than I’ve been at a movie in ages, and not entirely the way director Kathryn Bigelow probably wants.

Hirschbiegel and Friedel win credibility points for painting Elser as noble without painting him as a saint.

It’s just another wry New York family-dysfunction farce, with a stronger supporting cast and (slightly) better production values than Robespierre’s first film but also a propensity for playing it safe and dulling the pain just when the pain should be sharpest.

It’s film noir meets Jason Bourne with a dash of John le Carré, and its chief claim to your attention is our reigning lady badass at its center.

In short, Besson builds a dazzling alterna-universe — a bit of Terry Gilliam, a dash of “Blade Runner,” a smidgen of “Star Wars” (which, to be fair, was probably influenced by the original comic), and a lot of extra-strength Besson-ian whimsy. And then he strands us with the two least interesting people there.

Lady Macbeth” is thus simple in the telling while leaving us with a lapful of thorns; it’s as sensual as a tryst and as wintry as a grave.

Girls Trip is a hilarious reminder that we all need a Flossy Posse to make us laugh until our sides ache and give it to us straight when no one else will. Black girl magic, indeed.

This is a hard movie to watch, and even more painful to think about.