Mixing horror movie imagery with honest, heart-wrenching human truths, Bayona has created a dark, coming-of-age masterpiece.

Under Jenkins’ direction, Moonlight is both haunting and poetic, a bittersweet elegy for what could have been. His unflinching camera, which tends to follow the film’s characters like a ghost, gives the film a startling immediacy and emotional power.

Phantasm: Ravager will disappoint the uninitiated, but those who are loyal will find enough to love.

In Andrea Arnold’s sublime film American Honey, freedom is relative, but every once in a while it can feel so damn good that the whole world disappears around it.

Shyamalan ingeniously places his leading man front and center, where McAvoy amuses and horrifies as the cliché plot points sometimes stumble.

Berg offers a visceral experience that overwhelms with startling humanity.

Though it doesn’t end with quite the punctuation it deserves, The Eyes of My Mother is a beautiful nightmare from start to finish.

The chief appeal of Gans’ Beauty and the Beast is its sumptuous, ornate production and costume design, and the flamboyant glee with which Gans’ camera captures it all.

Queen of Katwe shows that a film doesn’t have to give up on the tenets of genre, but has the potential to win big if it can enliven them in new ways.

Fuqua isn’t interested in pushing the genre forward so much as respecting and updating the model accordingly. The director focuses on establishing his gang of gunslingers sturdily enough that the action becomes easy to engage with, and even get excited about.

A United Kingdom hits all of the necessary emotional notes and political intrigue of a solid historical figure drama.

It might be a lesser addition to the Guest oeuvre, but it’s a welcome one nonetheless

Free Fire might be a trifle of a quippy, feature-length shootout, but it’s the best damned trifle of a quippy, feature-length shootout you’ll ever see.

The most surprising thing about Bridget Jones’s Baby has nothing to do with the perennial singleton’s offspring or the tropes of romantic comedies. What’s surprising is that, despite all the contrivances and stale conventions, this movie’s not half bad, and occasionally better than that.

The superficial thrills of the genre are all present and adoringly rendered, but the actual purpose of the whole exercise is much harder to discern.

Blair Witch is disappointing on multiple levels, all of which have nothing to do with the franchise.

Snowden is a film of sincere outrage, even when it strains to articulate that outrage in a less from-the-headlines manner.

Eight Days a Week will be of most value to die-hard and casual fans of the band alike, but it’s also a reasonably effective primer on them for anyone who might not yet be initiated.

Once the giddy critical pile-on and hate-watching settles down, the (justified) moral outrage that (re)Assignment tries to thwart will end up being the regrettable and forgettable film’s only lasting legacy.

[A] truly remarkable film.

Lofty ideas of class, thwarted ambition, the superficiality of L.A. life, the nature of love, and the meaning of art are all explicitly addressed – and maybe discussed in a pretentious conversation or two – and then just as easily dropped, as if the simple act of naming themes is enough to establish their continued relevance in the film.

Given that The Salesman strives to be far more than a revenge thriller, Emad’s story isn’t enough to make it an unqualified triumph, but it’s still a genuinely good film, and worth watching.

Instead of simple heroes or avatars for big ideas about equality, Loving delivers complex, imperfect human beings who are struggling to find their place in a far from perfect world.

The more affecting moments in Sully come when the film puts aside its posturing and really examines what it is to be heroic in a cynical age.

It would have been one thing to settle for vapid sentimentality, but what makes The Sea of Trees so galling, as it turns the afterlife into a game of riddles, is how manipulative it is.

The Light Between Oceans is an effective melodrama, but the lingering sensation the film leaves after its end is that it might have been much more.

XOXO is goofy and stickily sweet, like a mystery lollipop handed to you at an Avicii concert, but the film also lacks a strong take on the culture it’s documenting. It’s full of rave and fury, signifying nothing.

Morgan isn’t hard sci-fi. It isn’t trying to solve the questions that have suffused the genre since its inception. Rather, it couches those ever-more-timely concerns in scenes of high action and affecting character connection.

Johnson, being a primary voice behind some of this century’s most important documentaries, is a particularly qualified candidate to chronicle life in this way, and her greatest feat, one I can’t imagine anyone else achieving, is her ability to tell the story of her life without ever once talking about herself.

Rabe’s performance here is nothing short of stunning.

Mechanic: Resurrection plays in an uncommonly generic key, and the film only makes intermittent attempts to enliven the proceedings.

If you want to see a nuts-and-bolts look into the banality of evil, with a curiously strong Daniel Radcliffe performance at the center, Imperium fits the bill.

This Ben-Hur is closer to an ‘80s actioner about two men who once loved each other parting ways, only to reunite and settle their differences through vicious means.

A simple story told well can still be effective if the emotional resonance underneath it comes through. In Kubo, it absolutely does, thanks to the uniformly excellent voice performances.

The Hollars deals in weighty personal tragedies, and yet neither the treacly, offbeat humor nor the moments of more straightforward pathos tend to work for any real length of time.

Posthumous still manages to charm more often than it disappoints.

It’s vacuous, ugly, unfunny, and, somehow, not a satire. It might be the worst movie of the year.

Farahani is quite liberal crosscutting between the story’s varying point of views.... This manic style offers the film all of the necessary intrigue to make its story captivating, but it’s at the expense of being incredibly manipulative to its audience.

There’s nothing wrong with melodrama. But in order to break the dishes, movies have to be willing to build tension by holding something back. Mr. Church, however, is all reveal, constantly giving everything away in the most obvious fashion.

There is an unpredictability to the film that is, at times, refreshing. This unpredictability turns into meandering, however, leading to narrative incoherence at many points.

The middle school dialect takes a backseat to the ingenuity on hand. It’s quite clear that the masterminds behind Sausage Party really thought this one out, examining this world long enough to have the most fun in it.

The way Lowery observes Pete and Elliot’s relationship with nominal dialogue is beautiful. While it’s easy to deride the remake as commercially conceived, the film still feels as rare as the dragon it depicts, wholesome and heartfelt.

A rich, complex drama that’s as much about consequence and justification as it is destiny.

Wrona’s near-flawless execution serves up a terror that’s enlightening and paralyzing all the same.

Which is why Antibirth feels more like an anti-film, a piss-poor assembly of remarkable cult actors and brazen narratives that start off divorced without ever being married.

It isn’t the gritty, realistic portrayal of life on the streets that Caple might have been going for — he’s too poetic a filmmaker for that — but it lends shape and color to a truth that too many inner-city kids know too well: It doesn’t matter if you care about the future. The future doesn’t give a shit about you.

Here’s a documentary with plenty of courage in its convictions, and a teachable exercise about modern health problems.

For all of the film’s nonstop, aggressive insistence on its subversive qualities, it’s about as radical and unconventional as a teenager buying a Leftover Crack shirt with their mom’s credit card from Amazon.

If Jones can move from mortal woman to musical superhero in the space of a few moments, if she can convert the despair within her ravaged body into energy, then so can the rest of us in our times of weakness.

Parents will nap, some kids will be amused, and the nerdiest viewers will have good reason to point out flaws in the movie’s not-so-intelligent designs.

If Lucas and Moore do their six stars...a disservice with their muddy script, it’s nothing compared to the problems heaped upon the film by their direction.

There’s just not a lot of weight to this sequel, at least not enough to dissuade anyone from seeing this as anything but a limpid cash grab.

Nerve is refreshing and frustrating in equal measures, mining a genuinely inventive concept for some memorable, Mean Girls-esque pathos about the ways in which the Internet is changing and magnifying social structures for young people today.

Jump scares are all Sandberg seems to have in his bag of tricks, and each is clunkily executed and met with an agonizing, ear-piercing shriek. Watching Lights Out is like standing next to an idiot with an air horn, never quite knowing when it’s about to blow in your ear. It’s a far cry from the freaky grace of his short.

Star Trek Beyond is a vast improvement from the sloppy Into Darkness, bringing it on par with the excellent ’09 reboot in terms of sheer quality and chemistry.

Hillary’s America is repugnant, and while it exists to get people who stand against it yelled at as much as anything, it’s essential that D’Souza not simply be written off as a hack pandering to a willing and lucrative audience regardless of the moral implications, though he is. D’Souza peddles the kind of “media” that’s become cancerous to the country he unyieldingly purports to worship.

a great deal of Café Society is shaggy and unfocused, it’s at least pleasing in its shapelessness. Café Society is not quite one of Woody Allen’s best, but it’s good enough to make you hope that he never leaves old Hollywood. The era suits him.

Paul Feig’s Ghostbusters is sturdy summer entertainment, at once a freaky comedy and an unexpectedly effective action film.

This is the kind of film that follows you home, that makes you scared to enter a dark alley or go in the basement.

Brahman Naman is like a crispy Samosa with nothing at the center. The Netflix release, directed by Qaushiq Mukherjee, pays homage to American sex comedies from Porky’s and Revenge of the Nerds to There’s Something About Mary, but lacks the heart to go along with the excess of raunch.

Equals is composed of small, sensual moments which build to a climax that feels both gut-wrenching and potently universal, like an old torch song to which you already know all the words.

Furman’s film paints in various shades of gray as opposed to the blacks and whites typical to this genre, and for that he and Cranston deserve praise.

For a film that takes such pains to position itself within the feminist tradition, Belladonna of Sadness has a bad habit of lingering on the body of its protagonist, coming across as more pornographic than progressive, more exploitative than revolutionary.

It’s a warmly empathetic documentary, the kind that simply observes instead of attempting to sound one kind of rallying cry or another.

Captain Fantastic loses its intriguing premise in a muddle of ideas about the redemptive power of family and the right of all people to live as they please.

It’s a frustrating experience; a lot of the individual gags work quite well, but they never build to anything cohesive.

For a film designed to spawn ancilliary products and sequels, Pets is not entirely without its charms

Tarzan is too dull to offer consistent pulp excitement, too self-serious to let itself have fun, and too reliant on same-y CG spectacle to truly thrill.

The film’s comical bluntness could also be construed as off putting, but to criticize that is to deprive yourself the joy of such pulp. And this is pulp, from the brazenness of its violence to the dull bite of its clunky dialogue. What Election Year offers isn’t nuanced satire, but rather a kind of catharsis, a release that’s not so far off from what the Purge itself purports to provide.

Imagine all the best parts of E.T. (written, like this film, by the late Melissa Mathison) and all the worst parts of Hook, and you have a pretty solid picture of what it’s like to spend two hours with The BFG.

The film’s most poignant moment comes in an interview that took place near the end of Zappa’s life. He’s asked how he wants to be remembered, and he responds, “I don’t care.” That doesn’t mean we don’t care, or that we aren’t allowed to care, but this isn’t the film to make us do it.

A curiously loud and ugly beast of a sequel.

The film’s belief in and commitment to the simplicity of its premise takes it a lot farther than it might otherwise go.

This is a film predicated on voyeurism, and while it’s arguably another big ol’ starefest from Refn, the viewer’s patience is earned with unquestionable tension made all the more palpable by its troubled protagonist.

On top of trying to be a Big, Important Film, Jones is also meant to be a showcase for McConaughey’s post-Oscar relevance as a dramatic actor, and he turns in a solid but unmemorable lead performance.

It’s an unnecessary, monotonous, 102-minute scrapbook of better horror films that fails to muster even a spark of originality.

Central Intelligence is genuinely funny, intriguingly plotted, and quite frankly one of the biggest surprises of the year.

Given the absurdity of the premise, Cell isn’t nearly as luridly entertaining as it should be.

Tickled unfolds like a bad drug trip, starting off with giggles but quickly descending into surreal horror.

Pixar’s latest has all the sweet, ricochet-fast humor of the original, the same brilliant animation and rich color, the same winning performances (complete with a few new scene-stealers), and the same simple, staggering emotional intelligence of its predecessor.

Raiders!, as a documentary, is much like Zala and Strompolos’ film in that it’s rough around the edges at points, but so utterly sincere that it’s hard to deny after a while.

Jones slaves to make something of the material, and to his credit, or rather his profoundly large cast and crew’s credit, the craft is certainly visible in Warcraft. It feels rude not to compliment the hard work of the makeup, costume, production design, and visual effects teams.

There are some marginal but still noticeable stylistic improvements in the sequel. John M. Chu (a veteran of music videos and Justin Bieber: Never Say Never) brings a peppy energy that Louis Leterrier’s first film lacked, especially when showing off the flashy spectacle of the Horsemen’s almost-superheroic magic abilities.

At times amusing, at others analytical, De Palma is both an homage and a lecture.

What unfolds is a transparent example of why the music industry continues to spiral downward toward a fiery hell.

A lot of fandom went into this, but Popstar is relentless to the point where it eventually becomes plodding.

It’s all too calculated to really have an impact, to grant audiences an honest chance for catharsis.

It’s quiet and strange and simple. It’s also unforgettable, in ways that can be easily named and in others that can’t.

To his credit, Green makes great use of wide-angle photography so the action feels comprehensible, with surprisingly long shots and effective editing. It’s just a shame the director’s talents are wasted on this brand-stamped mess.

It’s slick and stylish to the point of distraction. This isn’t horror; this is exaggerated carnival fare.

The Do-Over isn’t Sandler at his best, but it’s also not quite as putrid as what we’ve come to expect from him lately.

Nuts! manages to create a fascinating, thrilling portrait of the weirdness of industrial-age America that’s as side-splitting as it is deeply haunting.

It’s a classic case of sequel bloat, a film that seems to exist less because of any extended story it wants or needs to tell than because it must repackage something that was once popular.

At its core, it’s a simple and triumphant tale of sisterhood, but with so much ladled on top of it it begins to feel as though it’s grasping for a grandeur it doesn’t need. Sometimes, even the most intense emotions can benefit from a light touch.

The combination of Schoenaerts’ intensely brutish, sensitive performance and Winocour’s singular dedication to tension gives Disorder plenty to offer.

Filmmaking this fresh, this vibrant, and this affecting for all ages is rare these days.

Little Men is a summer breeze, with rich melodrama and an easygoing mood, built up around two great kids and their troubled families that says more than any after-school special. It’s an episode of actual experience, presented in lovingly natural, minimalist strokes.

In the end, it’s not Weiner with whom you’re furious, but a media climate that routinely prioritizes scandal and lewdness over the intricacies of a candidate’s platform. With the circus that is our forthcoming election rapidly approaching, this message is all the more resonant.