A wide-ranging new survey of the toy’s global subculture and appeal.

What’s somewhat unique about Jojo Moyes’s weepie, which the writer scripted from her 2012 bestseller, are the provocative dilemmas it explores to coax those tears.

It’s vintage Shyamalan, with a twist.

The chief attraction of the film is the ersatz India created by the pixel pushers at special effects houses WETA Digital and the Moving Picture Company.

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.

Star Trek Beyond plays like an episode of the old “Star Trek” TV series. This, I submit, is what’s enjoyable about it.

War for the Planet of the Apes plays like a mash-up of about five different movies, but at least one of them feels like a masterpiece.

The loosey-goosey fun might be a bit much at the finish, but it’s still a laugh watching McCarthy try to get back on her feet.

There’s a similar shared joy among the participants, a similar sense of discovery for the viewer, and, of course, a killer soundtrack.

Lowery’s update turns out to be one of the summer’s best surprises, a gorgeous, magical reworking that deftly strikes that once-elusive balance between contemporary and quaint.

Though the narrative of “Marnie” bogs down toward the end, this does not diminish its spell.

In short, the film owns its immaturity. And the argument it appealingly offers in defense is that it’s healthy, even vital, to be able to laugh at scatological silliness, adults included.

What it feels like, mostly, is a Whit Stillman movie made by someone other than Whit Stillman.

It is a film about Los Angeles, culture and coexistence, the American dream. It is the opposite of narrowcasting.

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

It’s predictable in many places and acerbic in others, sentimental when you expect it and poignant when you don’t. But it stars Lily Tomlin, and that’s all you really need to know.

Slow West doesn’t really go anywhere we haven’t been, but because Maclean is discovering the genre for the first time, we see through his fresh yet jaundiced eyes.

Despite outstanding performances, the characters lose subtlety as they grow more extreme, and their secrets when spelled out become anticlimactic. Maybe with a little more mystery, the evil would seem less banal.

The movie only looks like a coming-of-age freak show from the outside; in reality, it’s unexpected proof that flowers can grow even in a prison.

Much of Meru is about that second attempt, filmed with such grandeur and intimacy that sometimes attempting to figure out how they made the incredible shots almost spoils them.

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.

As always, it’s a good idea to do your homework before or after seeing an Oliver Stone movie. You may come out convinced of his point of view and still feel hustled by how he got you there.

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.

The result is rather a mess, but it’s an honorable one, and very much worth wrestling with.

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.

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

The Founder is a solid, smart, worthwhile film and the only remaining mystery is why the Weinstein Company is burying it with a quiet January release rather than pushing its much-loved star into the awards race with the usual fanfare.

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).

Inspiring, or amusing? Appealingly, Eddie the Eagle invites both tags.

A documentary lovingly and somewhat shambolically directed by James D. Cooper, gives the duo their due and in so doing opens up a singular view on an era, its energy, and its excesses. For fans, it’s a must-see; for others, a slightly overlong tour of a seminal pop explosion and the men who made it.

So despite Tcheng's effort to add a metaphysical layer to the film, it pretty much repeats the narrative seen in many other documentaries about the fashion world, from Wim Wenders's “Notebook on Cities and Clothes” (1989), to “Unzipped” (1995), to “Valentino: The Last Emperor” (2008).

In addition to directing outstanding performances, Edgerton also suggests psychological processes by means of space, architecture, and décor, exploiting the walls, doorways, windows, and mirrors of the new house to indicate the status of a relationship or self-image.

There’s no backstage dirt, then — for that, pick up the 2002 “uncensored history” written by Tom Shales and James Andrew Miller — but there is an honest appraisal of the show’s peaks and valleys over the years.

Related with stolid majesty, with long shots of brooding landscapes and close-ups of opaque faces, the film provides poor preparation for the subversion of genre conventions to follow.

Lively and loving documentary.

The movie is sufficiently in touch with current comic books that it’s keen to explore Batman’s psychology — breezily, but still.

There is a surprise waiting in Don’t Think I’ve Forgotten, a labor of love that Pirozzi painstakingly assembled over a span of close to a decade, although the story it tells holds no mystery.

The result is a story that’s awfully scattered thematically, but one with such inventive wit and screwball-quick pacing that issues like spongy motivation hardly seem to matter.

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.

The film captures both the claustrophobic and melancholic mood of Giger’s house, and also, perhaps, his mind.

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.

Polar chaos notwithstanding, “Fate” delivers action with more consistent visual precision than in the last couple of films, as newly enlisted director F. Gary Gray accesses the flair he brought to 2003’s “The Italian Job.”

A bittersweet, wryly comic, keenly observed look at senescence.

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

In the Shadow of Women, a portrait of a troubled French marriage, has the simplicity and subtle punch of a good short story.

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.

The quiet strength of Dheepan is how it shows these lives — the people in our midst we never see — rolling on forever, adapting, struggling, and finding their way.

If you can adjust to its rhythms, which move according to the seasons and to long-held family grudges, you’ll find it quietly funny, sometimes quite sad, and ultimately rather profound. If you can’t, you’ll be left in the cold with the sheep.

This walkabout ends less dramatically and not as tragically as the one in Roeg’s film, but perhaps with a greater poignancy. And Gulpilil, four decades of hard living later, is as magnificent as ever.

Behind the cool, nonjudgmental gaze of Cartel Land is a despair that never comes to terms with itself.

Religious allusions aside, Alleluia is like “Psycho” combined with “Bonnie and Clyde,” with Norman and Norma Bates as the conjoined criminal couple on the run.

David Sedaris contributes a story about talking to a hotel clerk over the phone, which doesn’t add much to the discussion but is very funny.

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.

What Meet the Patels could use is a little more meat.

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.

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.”

The group’s thematically, comedically broad inversion of the source material is consistently entertaining, and squeezes in some nicely played character growth to boot.

Like her subject, Kempner’s film doesn’t try to be flashy or stylish. She adheres to the Ken Burns school of old footage, photos, period ads, newspaper stories and cartoons.

The performances are expert.

Its strength and limitation is that it’s a gimmick that works.

Because it stoops to obvious editorializing (a voice-over of Margaret Thatcher on capitalism?), it never quite rises to the top.

This is the rare occasion when one of these brittle, neurotic social comedies serves as the vehicle for a woman’s sensibility rather than a man’s. In the process, Miller quietly but forcefully reinvents an entire movie genre.

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.

Egoyan ekes out an engaging and meaningful potboiler.

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.

As played by Fiennes, who has the aquiline face and piercing eyes of Max Van Sydow, Clavius is no pushover. You believe his disbelief, so when it wavers, yours might as well.

In its occasionally over-gentle way, the documentary testifies to the ego necessary to be a great star and to live a great life.

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

Plá’s comedy is black, but his moral position isn’t black and white.

Godzilla vs. Kong has speed, wit, and a refreshing refusal to take itself very seriously.

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.

The movie also plays as an extended reminder of why we love Goldie. It’s enormous fun seeing Hawn up to her old tricks — at 71! — even if they’re tweaked to help sell someone else’s brand of comedy.

Dark Horse falls into the formula of underprivileged kids challenging the elites at their own game. But the outcome is never certain.

Dreams Rewired is scattered by necessity and intent, and it throws off enough sparks to set your brain reeling.

There are a number of reasons “Covenant” works where “Prometheus” struggled to work. The characters are more incisively drawn this time, and their relationships inherently more dramatic.

The upshot: The movie develops a distinctively trippy identity.

But when Dark Horse leaves the feel-good realm to show news footage of a failed miners’ strike, or to have the camera linger on the impoverished surroundings where Dream Alliance’s owners still dwell, it suggests that it will take more than a few fairy tale finishes for their reality to change.

The result is entertainment whose pace and sound, while dizzyingly brisk at points, still accommodates characters and a setting that are terrifically rich — a menagerie more fully, memorably realized than “Zootopia.”

This is less a throwback to cutely misunderstood Molly Ringwald than to “My So-Called Life” — but with our high-school heroine stuck in a spiral like Claire Danes never knew.

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.

As with “American Sniper,” Sully gets a little gooey in the final scenes, opting for a simplistic celebration of American know-how, where everything up to that point has been darker and more nuanced. Whether you want to accept it or not, Eastwood remains one of the best and most quixotic filmmakers we have, torn between jingoism and doubt, exceptionalism and despair.

Directed from the center-left with an ear to parties on both sides of the West Bank separation barrier, it’s knowledgeable and unhysterical, openhearted without seeming naïve. Those on the extremes will probably hate it.

Honestly, the chilly dog days of February are crying out for a good, smart, silly stop-motion family film, the kind you can fully enjoy under the pretext of spending an afternoon at the movies with your kids.

For most of its running time, the movie works as a sharp, generous human comedy about fear of family (among other things), with Page once again reminding us that she’s one of the most deft and underutilized actors of her generation. You’re already sold on Janney, I hope.

As he gets older, Todd Solondz outgrows the cheap shocks and easy nihilism and stumbles toward a mellow misanthropy. He compares his new film Wiener-Dog to “Au Hasard Balthazar” (1966) and “Benji” (1974), though it tends more toward the latter than toward Robert Bresson’s masterpiece.

Ironically, the film itself is as gentle and unexploitative as they come. Yes, it deserves the rating, and yes, it depicts teenagers doing things the grown-ups would rather not admit they actually do, but it does so with a poetic curiosity and a sense of what it’s like to be young, poor, and rootless — both future-less and free.

The songs, written by Carney and Gary Clark, have a goofy but genuine appeal. Watch out, or you might end up downloading the soundtrack.

Polished? Not exactly. Poignant? Definitely.

Krasinski infuses The Hollars with familiar wry humor, but he also delivers a film that’s unexpectedly rich with sweetly moving moments.

It’s like a collection of short stories — most dystopian, some not — trying to pass itself off as a novel.

While Morris From America trundles along familiar tracks, Hartigan’s eye for detail and individuality yields enough dividends to keep the film moving tartly and congenially along.

Their non-specific excursion unfolds like a blithe Woody Allen movie without all the name-dropping.

A sweeping romantic period drama, heavy with themes of love and duty and fate, lifted up by cinematic craft and great performances.

It’s like an international-relations microcosm imagined by the Coen brothers, down to an occasional sense that the absurdity isn’t taking us anywhere.

Juice is a film about choices. The right ones. The tragically wrong ones. There will be comparisons to Matty Rich's brilliant "Straight Out of Brooklyn," but Dickerson's effort is more richly textured, more grounded in an ordinary kid's point of view. And Dickerson's dogged determination to film from that perspective has resulted in a film rich in the right lingo, the right clothes, the right attitudes. [17 Jan 1992, p.67]

For audiences with an extremely high tolerance for brutally fetishized shootouts and bloodletting, this continuation of Reeves’s potential-filled reluctant hit man saga is electrifying, both visually and in its cracked narrative ambitions.

This is not “Rain Man”; it’s better.

An illuminating celebration of music and the art of teaching, comes at a time when both art and teaching are held in low esteem.