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.