The Lady in the Van ultimately presents a number of facts that would seem to “solve” Mary Shepherd. I’d like to think Smith knows better than that. In her hands, the lady in the van remains complex and unknowable — a mystery to the end. And that, friends, is acting.

In his second directorial effort, Mojave, Monahan has no such map to follow, and he wanders in a land of sophomoric pretentiousness and banal profundities.

It’s a movie made for the kind of audiences who feel that movies aren’t made for them anymore — you know who you are. If you go, you might want to bring a raincoat.

Returning director Wilson Yip commits to this tone too late, getting lost in tangential conflict and stunt casting — in this corner, Mike Tyson! — at the expense of the drama and even the action.

He (Hui) does not achieve the surreal grandeur of Hayao Miyazaki’s animated films, but he has enough imagination and talent to engage his audience on its own level.

It’s tough to stay focused on the provocative bits when soapy talk of teenage yearning and angst keep making us snicker.

On the whole it’s daring and committed, and in Röhrig’s tremendously focused performance, it honors all the saints we’ll never know. And that’s worth any risk.

I emerged from the movie in a white-out haze of emotions, synapses overloaded, grateful beyond words to an actress who can convey so much with such subtlety of means.

Mustang is a damning portrait of the lot of women in rural Turkish society, but its outrage and empathy spill over the sides of the movie to embrace the planet as a whole — anywhere a woman is condemned for all the thoughts others have about her.

I’d like to think of the singer watching this movie somewhere, nodding in thanks at what it gets right and howling with laughter at what it misses.

Crump has directed Troublemakers with assurance and energy. Perhaps too much so.

Denounce the cynics who pander such pabulum as entertainment for children.

You’ll have to be satisfied with a modest assortment of energetically comic moments here, because the story sure isn’t a reason to catch this encore, and neither are who-asked-for-’em cast additions such as Ken Jeong.

A straight-up combat film. Not a very good combat film — it wallows in genre clichés and makes a hash of its action scenes — but one that does get you to empathize with its grunts, the “secret soldiers” of the title.

It takes a few minutes to catch on, and it would be indiscrete to specify what it is, but once you figure out what’s really strange about it you have entered the solipsistic prison of a tormented mind.

Zada gets credible performances from Dormer and Kinney, but their characters undergo such unlikely psychological contortions that these efforts are to no avail.

Iñárritu has his eye so firmly on the myths of America that he loses sight of the men who made them. But he’s hardly the first person to do that.

This is a movie that’s 168 minutes only because Quentin Tarantino is an uncontainable Rabelasian. He believes that more is more. And sometimes it is. But a truly great craftsman knows where to locate the line.

For all the adrenalizing positives in this reworked Point Break, inadvertent silliness remains

The movie’s a shambles, alternatingly agreeable and aggravating, held together by our interest in its heroine and by Lawrence’s tremendously sympathetic performance.

Carol is a movie to drink in with eyes, ears, and sensibilities.

I wish the movie were so good that I could say you have to see it; while Smith’s performance takes on a life of its own, the movie seems locked to its talking points.

Only occasionally, as in “Thank You for Smoking” (2005), do these men — and the audience — understand that bucking the system doesn’t always make you less a part of it.

Consider it a predictable movie with flashes of unpredictability, one that actually coaxes some early laughs with, yes, scatological wit, then makes us groan when it shamefully takes the low road back to poopville a bit later on.

It just feels misguided, not clever, when John Waters is dragged out for a cameo. That’s when you know the filmmakers must realize how hopelessly they’re caught in a loop-the-loop of punchless comedy.

When the new movie wings it, it sputters but clears the runway. When it sticks to the script, it crashes and burns.

Abrams understands what George Lucas never quite figured out: that we’re less interested in the science fiction future than we are in revisiting the past. We don’t really want to see what happens next in that galaxy far, far away. We want to recapture what it felt like the first time we arrived, in 1977, with a movie called “Star Wars.” We want to go home. Star Wars: The Force Awakens takes us there.

The fundamental problem with this Macbeth is that it insists on reducing the mystery of motivation to the pop psychology of a magazine article.

In the Heart of the Sea plays as if the joke was real and everyone on the production had caved in. The result, as a movie, is a joke.

Youth is, among many other things, a lovely valentine to both Caine and Keitel, two performers who have seen it all and know what to do with it.

It’s largely successful, if by nature all over the map.

The Danish Gir” wants to introduce us to a woman who helped forge a new way of thinking about what defines a person as a man or a woman. Mostly, though, it’s about the joy of sets.

A mesmerizing coming of age adventure in an elemental setting, Theeb becomes both more allegorical and more specific to our historical moment the more you think about it.

His carnival-esque filmmaking style, which can leave some Spike Lee joints in tatters, helps this one expand in sorrowful heart and indomitable wit. Chi-Raq is a vibrant community mural of a movie, and it stretches to the horizon.

The pre-Thanksgiving release of Jonathan Levine’s The Night Before celebrates those Christmas blessings that are beloved by all: scatological humor, smarmy sentimentality, and gross product placement.

Legend is more than a gimmick, but not quite enough. The movie’s a testament to the Krays’ ability to get away with everything — for a while, anyway. But it’s better evidence of Tom Hardy’s ability to do just about anything.

A very middling movie, it does have a nifty premise.

McAvoy’s performance is a deep, deep shade of gonzo and by far the most enjoyable aspect of Victor Frankenstein — you don’t often see over-acting this enthusiastic or this flecked with spittle.

After a long, long stretch in which the series’ attrition had come to feel like even more of a bummer than intended — no more Mickey, no Apollo, no Adrian — the franchise has welcome new life. But instead of going by Rocky, he goes by Creed.

Whether unclassifiable and inconsequential oddity, or overlooked key to the meaning of life, or both, The Creeping Garden is the slime mold of documentaries.

If the documentary isn’t especially deep, maybe that’s because its subject wasn’t.

Cranston’s performance is the motor that runs Trumbo, and that motor never idles, never flags in momentum or magnetism or idealistic scorn. At its entertaining worst, the movie’s a high-spirited game of Hollywood dress-up.

What’s ironic — and frustrating — is how precipitously the movie itself eventually goes tumbling down the intelligence scale. In the process, Chiwetel Ejiofor is wasted, along with some potent moments from costars Roberts and Nicole Kidman.

“If we die, let it be for a cause, not a spectacle,” the heroine barks at one point. If such a statement sounds fairly insane coming from a series that has grossed (to date) $2.3 billion worldwide, Mockingjay — Part 2 is sturdy enough to render it moot while you’re watching. After that, it’s up to you whether to swallow the irony or choke on it.

Angelo Pizzo knows inspirational sports drama. As the writer of “Hoosiers” and “Rudy,” Pizzo has made a career out of mining the genre and its themes of underdog determination and locker-room brotherhood. But he’s overmatched in his directing debut, the well-intentioned football biopic My All American.

Only in the epilogue does the film mention that none of the miners was compensated and no one was held responsible.

Enjoy the sense of never quite knowing when the movie is going to stick another pin in its balloon of sincerity, and you’ll like the Coopers well enough.

As often happens in Guzmán’s films, The Pearl Button keeps returning to the Augusto Pinochet dictatorship of 1973-90, during which thousands of Chileans were “disappeared,” taken away and never seen again alive.

Crowley and his creative team — cinematographer Yves Bélanger, designer François Séguin, composer Michael Brook, costume designer Odile Dicks-Mireaux — build a cinematic snow-globe of nostalgia, a portrait of two worlds that aches with family lost and freedoms found. It is a beautiful film to experience.

This prompts the perverse thought that By the Sea may simply exist as a movie for Angelina Jolie and Brad Pitt to watch. It’s two hours of vacation, voyeurism, and celebrity marriage therapy, and you and I aren’t actually invited.

The Wonders evokes many other films, but is utterly unique. It is like being privy to a marvelous story that Rohrwacher is telling herself.

Lively and loving documentary.

Sarah Silverman is far and away the best part of I Smile Back, a strained entry in the Mad Housewife genre.

Even with his glossy new look, Charlie Brown remains the Charlie Browniest.

Like another documentary set in North Dakota, Jesse Moss’s “The Overnighters,” they follow the story for months as it unfolds, offering no editorial guidance except dates and places and a soundtrack by T. Griffith that underscores the growing angst and pending horror. Welcome to Leith. Say goodbye to certitude.

One of the reasons that Spotlight is so deeply, absurdly satisfying to this newspaper writer — is that Tom McCarthy’s movie doesn’t turn its journalists into heroes. It just lets them do their jobs, as tedious and critical as those are, with a realism that grips an audience almost in spite of itself.

I know the opening credits for a James Bond movie are supposed to be silly, but the start of Spectre achieves almost orgasmic levels of kitsch.

Engrossing and occasionally moving, it doesn’t electrify like that other film about the press taking on a chief executive, Alan Pakula’s “All the President’s Men” (1976).

Those who’ve followed Panahi’s career over the decades will catch echoes of and references to his earlier movies, and at times Taxi is as much a tour of his filmography as it is of Tehran.

Despite this labyrinthine self-consciousness, the film, like its subject, keeps careful note of dates and places.

The Assassin achieves a pitch of the cinematic sublime of which very few filmmakers are capable, but it doesn’t make much traditional sense. Hou could do that, if he wants, but he’s after more rarefied game.

Green’s narrative confidence quickly kicks in, as well as the sharp dialogue by screenwriter Peter Straughan (“Tinker Tailor Soldier Spy”). More importantly, the film indulges in the unabashed goofiness that stoked Green’s “Pineapple Express,” and which Sandra Bullock demonstrated to raucous effect in “The Heat.”

Cooper swaggers as convincingly as always, the food-prep montages are mesmerizing, and we even get a couple of solid twists and an education on the sous-vide trend.

The movie, which is both formulaic and powerful, dramatizes a paradigm shift that has been largely smoothed over by history (which is hardly the same as saying all the battles have been won).

To Chu’s credit, he does work hard not only to legitimize 30-somethings’ halcyon recollections, but also to make the material relevant to a new generation.

Underneath its mea culpas lies a subtext that exonerates the post-Third Reich generations of its past.

Perhaps Poe’s tone poses a problem; the edge-of-hysteria voice does not hold up well over the course of a feature-length film.

The script’s messy seams also show in the parade of sidekicks that passes through Kaulder’s door as a new threat develops.

Immersive, enlightening documentary.

Rock the Kasbah is a pandering, poorly assembled botch that thinks it’s playing fair by Afghan popular culture but only manages to add insult to the countless other injuries inflicted upon that country. If it were any worse, they’d be screening it as evidence at The Hague.

It’s a showcase for an actress who wins us over by degrees and a reminder that there are no new stories — only fresh ways of telling them.

Room unfolds with the privilege of seeing and experiencing the world for the very first time, which is maybe the best we can ever expect from a medium like the cinema.

This feature adaptation of kid-lit author R.L. Stine’s best-selling horror-comedy series is out to thrill fans with a story that’s just as obsessively invested as they are, right down to Black’s meta casting as Stine himself.

This is a film that believes deeply in ghosts, and half of them are in its director’s head.

The idea that there may be life after war and murder, even for the murderers, and what that might look like — what burdens you might be allowed to put down and what you’ll carry forward forever. The movie’s too wise, and too weary, to have a moral beyond that.

We don’t go to Hollywood movies for hard facts, but it’d be nice to think we’re getting some kind of truth with our entertainment. Maybe Aaron Sorkin thinks we can’t handle the truth.

Most bewildering of all, Bridge of Spies is a moral drama driven by an insurance lawyer. That it works at all is a miracle — or would be, if anyone other than St. Steven were involved.

We may someday look back on He Named Me Malala as a film that told us much about a future world leader — or one that told us surprisingly little.

At the end, under the closing credits, Freeheld shows us photos of the real Hester and Andree, and we sense an immediacy the rest of the film lacks. These are the people we want to watch and not a movie simulacra, no matter how capably performed and earnestly felt.

Passable adventure that offers the occasional flash of real cleverness.

Greer and Lyonne play off each other well; the combination of readily corruptible innocence and reluctantly innocent corruption elevate the material. Their badinage and interactions suggest a genuine sisterly relationship, with a long history of resentments, betrayals, and co-dependence. Too bad the filmmakers try too hard at making you laugh, and not hard enough at making you feel.

Shot in a rich palette, the film does provide diversion with some of its funkily detailed sets and supporting actors.... Otherwise, the film distinguishes itself for its miscasting and misuse of its cast.

The movie works as a twinned character study, a moral suspense thriller, and an indictment of an America stacked against its working classes.

The dark nihilism of Sicario masks a reliance on easier solutions, ones we’ve been fed by decades of genre films and that feed our need for justice dispensed with violent, vengeful directness. The movie promises to clear the fetid air around the drug wars. In the end it’s just another drug.

This is no exercise in miserabilism. Instead Moverman and Gere take a problem and elevate it into a universal experience, turning social issues into existential insights.

Lawrence is an impeccable, commanding subject, not just because of his credentials but because of his presence and demeanor.

Some of Tarantino’s taste for brutish resolutions seems to have slipped into her otherwise nuanced, sensitive, and unflinching adaptation of this YA novel by French author Anne-Sophie Brasme.

Barber, who directed the neglected, unabashedly satisfying vigilante thriller “Harry Brown” knows how to get the blood pumping and stoke an audience’s craving for righteousness, vengeance, and vicarious sadism. What he lacks is the woman’s touch, if by that one means nuance, ambiguity, and empathy.

The Martian really, truly works — not as art, necessarily, but as the sort of epic, intelligent entertainment the mainstream film industry has supposedly forgotten how to craft. All that, and the movie’s a valentine to creative collaboration as well as an example of it. It’s enough to make you almost grateful.

A narrative feature can do what the documentary couldn’t: re-create the tightrope act in full, glorious motion, rather than editing together surreptitiously snapped photos. These dizzying IMAX 3-D visuals truly are big-screen magic.

After a period of creative drought, Zhang’s homecoming is a cause for celebration.

The movie, though, is not so good. If it came down to acting instead of chess, we might have lost the Cold War.

Roland Emmerich’s Stonewall reduces these events to a backdrop for caricatures that were already passé in William Friedkin’s “The Boys in the Band” (1970).

The film veers from farce to tragedy and relates a twisted variation on the American Dream.

For the haters out there, you could see where Sandler reprising his role as a cartoon Dracula in Hotel Transylvania 2 might just be the perfect metaphor: Yep, there he goes again, evilly sucking the lifeblood out of decent entertainment. Now come on, let’s grab the torches!

The Intern is bizarrely retrograde, implying that every working woman only needs a cuddly Yoda daddy to make it in the world of business. It’s soft in the heart — and soft in the head.

A kitchen, a guestroom, and swimming pool become battlegrounds. Though hardly revolutionary, “Mother” subverts conventions — both cinematic and social.

Güeros is brutal, ironic, madcap, and grim. Shot by Damian Garcia in black-and-white with the pristine spontaneity of Godard’s cinematographer Raoul Coutard, it is “Bande à part” (1964) meets “Los Olvidados” (1950).