The reason that this old-fashioned movie works as well as it does is the transformative commitment of its two leads. They’re both clowns crying on the inside, who, despite years of resentment, know they’re more than partners; they’re uneasy soul mates stuck in one last “fine mess” together.

Director Paul Weitz is mostly known for lighter, more observational stories like "About a Boy" and "Mozart in the Jungle," and the strongest moments in Bel Canto are the small ones.

We never get any sense of how the brothers build their empire, or of how the various supporting characters fit into their lives. Telling this story in a more straightforward fashion would have been far more satisfying. Still, the Kemps are something to see.

The Other Side of the Wind (both the movie and the movie-within-a-movie) is a hypnotic, magical mess of a film. It’s a lot of story and not enough of one. Still, there are shots that are so haunting and beautifully composed that you want to get out of your seat and take up residence in them.

Two of the chapters stand with some of the best work the merry-prankster filmmakers have ever done, while the rest are varying degrees of… fine.

At its heart (and it’s a big corny heart, for sure), the film’s message is one of unconditional love and embracing family wherever you find it. It’s hard to argue with. Especially when it’s served up with such spiky laughter-through-tears sweetness.

Life is hard; Downton Abbey is easy.

Despite its Irish setting, Black ’47 feels more than anything like an American Western, what with its shades-of-grey morality and almost Biblical quest for payback. Like Clint Eastwood’s Bill Munny in "Unforgiven" or John Wayne’s Ethan Edwards in "The Searchers," Martin is a silent avenger pushed to do things he doesn’t want to do but also can’t ignore.

The Mule fits the 88-year-old Eastwood perfectly. Not just because there probably aren’t many roles for actors of his age out there, but also because its lack of judgment makes sense for a star who’s always been as willing to play anti-heroes as heroes.

Body Snatchers is inky and somber, with some of the creeping bad-dream naturalism of George Romero’s Living Dead films.

The strength of Tito and the Birds lies in its imaginative touches like this and overall visual aesthetic, which mixes various painting and animating styles into a beautiful fusion, but the actual storytelling leaves a little depth to be desired.

It all goes down easily if not exactly unforgettably; a wispy slice of hirsute whimsy.

What kind of Grinch would I be to berate a new cheesy holiday movie about two siblings going on a Christmas-related adventure in which, I repeat, Kurt Russell plays a hot Santa? Make some cocoa for the family, and spike yours if you have to, but remember what the holiday is about: watching mediocre, predictable movies with the people you love.

As Bird time-jumps between the claustrophobic action of the house and a desperate sort of jailbreak, director Susanne Bier (The Night Manager) keeps the mood taut and defiantly in the moment.

"Virgin" is also one of the few Reagan-era romps that could put a lump in your throat, as loser Gary (Lawrence Monoson) watches his skeevy best friend (Steve Antin) steal his dream girl. Thank-fully, the Cars keep things fizzy by shaking it up on the soundtrack.

The animals are dignified cuties and the humans are boisterous archetypes, and if you want the heart to have more darkness, you’re barking up the wrong vine.

What makes it more than a slick impersonation of sociopathy, though, is the layers he peels — Bundy’s desperation, his endless calculations and longing for connection. He also has some great interplay with John Malkovich, as the Tallahassee judge who engages in a sort of folksy, combative back-and-forth with him in court that nearly verges on buddy comedy.

The best scenes in Late Night are consistently the ones where the movie’s main stars spar and banter and intermittently connect; two unlikely satellites smashing into each other’s orbits, and maybe finding themselves in the wreckage.

Even if this handsome film runs a bit snoozy and dull at times, it’s wondefully acted and clearly made with no shortage of compassion and love.

The phrase “low-key thriller” might be an oxymoron, but it also feels like the best description of The Wedding Guest.

There may be no honor among thieves, but Triple Frontier certainly makes watching them pretty entertaining.

The new documentary Ask Dr. Ruth... seeks to give audiences an understanding of the extraordinary life that shaped this one-of-a-kind woman but falls short when it comes to digging beyond mere biography.

The script’s second half drifts, going too soft on teachable moments, but Little still finds its loopy sweet spot: Tom Hanks’ "Big" flipped and recast as pure black-girl magic.

No Footloose. But its synthy soundtrack, heated dance-offs, and Day-Glo leg warmers are guilty-pleasure pay dirt. A mouthy 14-year-old Shannen Doherty doesn’t hurt either.

Hoult brings a quiet, romantic intensity to the young Tolkien (pronounced ‘Tolkeen’, who knew?), Lily Collins does a lot with a little as his first love Edith, and the Hobbit horde will gobble up all of the easter-egg references peppered throughout the movie.

For a lot of its runtime, Velvet is fun and silly and enjoyably outrageous. It’s hard, though, to walk away with a real sense of anything more than blood on the canvas and a blank where your feelings — beyond mild bemusement, and a sudden appetite for prime Los Angeles real estate — should be.

A solidly enjoyable formula thriller.

It’s cartoonish, fast-paced, a bit cheesy, and ridiculously dumb fun.

The Highwaymen is a leisurely ride with a pair of actors who know how to do a lot by not doing too much. It won’t reinvent cinema the way that "Bonnie and Clyde" once did. But it’s a ride worth taking nonetheless.

If the script’s epiphanies don’t feel quite as shocking or profound the second time around, it’s still pleasing to watch these beautiful, troubled people move through their equally beautiful spaces: something borrowed, something blue — and with Freundlich’s careful alterations, something new.

If Big Time isn’t exactly a PSA for good adulting, it’s still an endearingly messy portrait of boyhood and manhood and all the lessons in between.

It falls on Pattinson's leather-cased Batman to be the hero we need, or deserve. With his doleful kohl-smudged eyes and trapezoidal jawline, he's more like a tragic prince from Shakespeare; a lost soul bent like a bat out of hell on saving everyone but himself.

Clemency does what few other movies about death row have, handling a thorny, infinitely complicated subject in terms that are neither moralizing nor melodramatic. And Chukwu’s clean-lined storytelling has an undeniable pull; something quietly incandescent at the center. In the end though, it’s hard not to wish that she’d let a little more light in.

No one gets off easy here, and no one quite gets answers, either; maybe that’s the point.

And even as the narrative goes through its sometimes sermonizing paces, it’s hard not to be moved by the singular passion of a woman who effectively dismantled her own life not just to salve her conscience, but to save the soul of a nation.

It’s Nyong’o who makes Monsters worth spending 90 breezy, bloody minutes on; wielding her tiny guitar like she did a fateful pair of scissors earlier this year in Jordan Peele’s "Us," she’s both a warrior queen and a fallible, believable human woman — and never not a movie star in every scene.

The script, which Davidson co-wrote, is rooted in his own childhood loss; his father, too, was a fireman, killed on 9/11. In its best moments the movie resonates with those realities, though it also comes packaged, like so many Apatow films, in a kind of incurable ramble — some two-plus hours dotted with pleasingly random cameos (Pamela Adlon, Steve Buscemi) and odd tonal shifts.

Somehow, The Final Reckoning is 170 minutes, but, like Tom Cruise running across Westminster Bridge, it zooms. Even the acres of baffling dialogue are delivered swiftly.

Coming 2 America is cute and fun, a lovingly made exercise in nostalgia that delivers several genuine laughs, even if it never achieves the comedic excellence of its predecessor.

Abominable’s themes and arc are familiar kids’ movie fare, with only one real plot twist. But its reverent attitude toward nature and wonder is a welcome addition to the cartoon canon.

Even as the story descends into full bloody camp at its crescendo, Spencer holds the more ludicrous plot threads together.

A gentle, almost willfully recessive story about love and loss and all the ways that people find to share the burden of them both, one unhurried day at a time.

The sheer awesomeness of Villeneuve's execution — there might not be another film this year, or ever, that turns one character asking another for a glass of water into a kind of walloping psychedelic performance art — often obscures the fact that the plot is mostly prologue: a sprawling origin story with no fixed beginning or end.

Violent and sexy, balanced between hope and despair, definably too-much and unapologetically mythic. The road is bumpy, but what a trip.

Director Tom Harper (War & Peace) aptly conveys the single-mindedness that a life of art requires, and the double standard applied to the women who pursue it at the cost of other, seemingly more essential things. But it’s Buckley, wild and free, who makes the movie sing.

It delivers. The Perfection is a pure hit of twisted, absurd camp catnip.

Director Jesse V. Johnson sprinkles in enough cruel twists of fate and melancholy-laced flashbacks to prevent Avengement from becoming just another disposable exercise in action sadism on a budget. The real credit, though, goes to Adkins, who one of these days will hopefully get called up to the Hollywood big leagues and wind up surprising a lot of people — and grin while he’s doing it.

The stuff of a thousand future Twitter gifs, though, is a featured appearance by Keanu Reeves. It’s better not to know too much about his role going in, other than that nearly everything about it has the winking air quotes of a movie star playing directly to his own storied Hollywood history, and that it is for the most part ridiculously fun.

Aniston and Sandler, paired before in 2011’s "Just Go With It," relax into their roles as if their only stake in Mystery is to enjoy the free trip to Italy and have fun running down cobblestones.

If the blond, marathon-lean Zellweger hardly seems like a natural doppelganger for Garland, she subsumes herself completely in the role, without ever tipping over into some kind of gestural Judy drag.

It’s not a bad setup, and Bridges would be a better movie, easily, if it had let a little more nuance creep into its script. Instead, it lays the task squarely on Boseman’s shoulders — having him fill in all those broad strokes with his own fine lines, and spraying bullets and mayhem across the rest.

To be clear, Stuber is a very silly movie: Half the action scenes look like they were shot inside a Cuisinart, the sexual politics are questionable, the violence cartoonishly extreme, and the plot has the general coherence of a wet napkin. But Stuber knows that sense and logic aren’t what its audience came for; we’re here for good dumb fun — and of course, central air.

If the buildup and catharsis of its final minutes are more than a little silly, and marred by Whannell’s urge to put too neat bow on it all, the movie still has its satisfying jolts — including possibly one of the single most shocking screen deaths so far this year.

Harris, eyes blazing, brings a humanity and an urgency that serve the story maybe more than it deserves: a performance above and beyond the call of duty.

Even if The Next Level doesn’t set a new high score, it still proves this franchise isn’t out of lives just yet.

The film lacks the atmosphere of David Lean's "Great Expectations" or the weighty iconography of any one of a number of "Christmas Carols," but a sincere affection for and understanding of the source material shines through in its wit and good nature.

The looping flashback structure and relaxed, intimate pacing has the odd effect of making the fate of the free world feel a lot less urgent than it probably should; the movie frequently comes off less like a standard MCU tentpole than a metaphysical family drama whose black sheep just happens to be Thanos.

Give Sam Raimi a multiverse, and he will take a mile. The director's take on Doctor Strange feels like many disparate and often deeply confusing things — comedy, camp horror, maternal drama, sustained fireball — but it is also not like any other Marvel movie that came before it. And 23 films into the franchise, that's a wildly refreshing thing, even as the story careens off in more directions than the Kaiju-sized octo-beast who storms into an early scene, bashing its tentacles through small people and tall buildings like an envoy from some nightmare aquarium.

Even in Valhalla or Paradise City, though, there is still love and loss; Thor dutifully delivers both, and catharsis in a climax that inevitably doubles as a setup for the next installment.

If its aim to inspire and educate inevitably leaves the movie feeling a little classroom-bound, Harriet is still an impassioned, edifying portrait of a remarkable life, and a fitting showcase for the considerable talents of its star, Tony-winning British actress Cynthia Erivo.

It’s solidly rewarding to watch the wheels of Mercy turn, though the direction ... can’t seem to help falling into certain schematics that tend to follow movies like these: the original sin; the uplift; the leering good-old-boy sheriffs; the big-moment court scenes.

If it all sometimes feels trapped in the amber of his intentions, Brooklyn still casts a quiet sort of spell: a meticulously, lovingly made mood piece, full of empathy for the ones who can’t speak — at least not always the way they want to — for themselves.

If Bening’s genteel British accent sometimes feels a little wobbly, her character is by far the most vivid force in the film.

Still, there's a sort of willful energy field between Giedroyc and Feldstein that pushes the story along; the blithe, anything-can-happen thrill that comes from being young in a world where anything is possible — including the right to wreck yourself spectacularly, rebuild, and then start it all over again.

The timeliness of the film is particularly affecting when they all say goodbye to their loved ones, then cope with loneliness by compulsively online shopping and trying not to think about horrible possibilities over which they have no control. There are better movies than this one, sure. But this is its moment. Call it military punctuality.

For all the flying intestines and skulls that split open like past-due melons, Double Tap has another squishy organ at its center: a big, goofball heart.

As an expose of the new wave of racist youth-gang violence, Romper Stomper lacks depth, psychology, a sense of social background. Yet Wright’s flagrant attempt to humanize his skinheads-to turn them into bona fide movie characters-is, in its way, dramatic and vaguely honorable.

Affleck keeps the movie anchored with his rumpled, unshowy performance: a man killing himself to live, until he can start to believe that maybe there's a better way.

With his ripe lips, flirty eyes, and pre-Calvin Klein-era androgynous appeal, the 24-year-old Warren is utterly believable as a boy who drives Natalie Wood plumb insane with sexual frustration in William Inge’s overheated melodrama.

A stricken teen trapped in a polyurethane isolation tent. That’s a potent metaphor for adolescence, which may be why this made-for-TV movie was a rite of passage for an awful lot of us.

Soho is one hell of a half of a movie: a wildly styled neon reverie whose spooky bedazzlement only crashes to earth when it succumbs to bog-standard horror in the final act.

What’s left is primarily a series of grand battleground set pieces — filmed crunchily, and well — and a series of consistently strong performances. (Has Mendelsohn every not been menacing and great in anything?).

Ferrara’s movies have the iridescence of Miami Vice (Ferrara directed some episodes), the rude energy of the B’s, and a sophisticated style that glides above their subjects. King of New York careens along loonily: A gaunt Christopher Walken, his eyes beginning to bulge like Peter Lorre’s, plays an eccentric Robin Hood gangster who coolly murders his rivals but offers millions to a hospital in the South Bronx.

A quirky bootstraps narrative of improbable small-town ambition and extremely regional accents designed not to rush its modest, affable charms.

Dispatch often feels like the filmmaker in concentrate form, both his best and worst instincts on extravagant display.

Screenwriter John Osborne and Richardson (both received Oscars as well) came up with a smart solution to the problem of adapting an 18th-century literary classic: Turn it into bawdy slapstick with generous helpings of then- daring sex and violence.

Hands On a Hard Body itself is sometimes as bumpy as a panhandle dirt road, but out of the low-budget roughness and moments of Lettermanesque ain’t-folks-nutty humor, sharp portraits emerge of contestants as well as of the families and friends who massage, feed, and revivify the flagging bodies.

Stanley Kubrick’s adaptation of Vladimir Nabokov’s wicked, witty hymn to forbidden love loses some bite in the journey from novel to the screen, but it’s got its plummy pleasures, including a wonderfully subtle James Mason as Humbert Humbert, obsessed with the delicious Sue Lyon as the 14-year-old Lolita (bumped up from 12 in the book), and a marvelously blowzy Shelley Winters, hilarious as Lolita’s sexually voracious mom.

But the truth, when it does come out, is devastating — to the point that it can feel invasive to watch such a profoundly private moment unfold on camera for our benefit.

Chicago 7 frames the past not just as entertaining prologue but a living document; one we ignore at our own peril.

If only they’d trusted it more, they might have made a marvelous kids’ film instead of a merely charming one.

People is a bizarre fairy tale that never loses its sly intelligence even when fulfilling its gross-out quota.

Though this tale of redemption and survival doesn’t feel particularly relevant or essential in today’s media landscape, it still has the capacity to entertain and move, well over a century after the story first was published. And Ford’s presence and performance inject it with a wild heart it desperately needs.

Brooks works the other side of the manic explosions of our most popular comics: His humor is reactive but no less funny. If you can reverse your expectations, this may find deserved afterlife on your TV.

It’s a proud piece of family entertainment with a good heart, an eye for inventive action, and a delightfully wacky sense of humor.

In a genre where winky self-awareness has become standard-issue, Free might have come off as manic and hollow; instead, it has fun having a heart.

As an instrument of righteousness and retribution, Let Him Go can feel both familiar and at times shockingly brutal, especially in its final climactic moments. Still, there's blunt power in the execution, most of it concentrated in Bezucha's moody big-sky atmosphere, and in the seasoned professionals he's found to tell the tale.

As an attempt to scale the craggy heights of a marriage in crisis, Downhill may be more bunny slope than black diamond — a force mineure, but still worth the trip.

John Lewis: Good Trouble is absolutely inspiring — but it stops a bit short of being illuminating.

What feels freshest, maybe, is the mere fact of two leads of color taking on all the tropes of the genre and making it feel as modern as they do.

Love’s most radical act may be the simple fact of its Blackness — that the faces at the center of the screen are ones that for so many decades we’d mostly see only in the margins of a movie like this, or not at all.

Swedish-Chilean director Daniel Espinosa (Life) gives it all a dark sheen, and shoots the pair's inevitable confrontations less like traditional comic-book clashes than something from The Matrix.

The cutting and camera work in Sign ‘O’ the Times are too intrusive, and the somewhat discordant songs worked better as a magnificent hodgepodge on the album. Still, this concert movie (which barely made it to theaters) is a feisty, engaging show.

Though the bag of tricks that Bruckner (V/H/S, The Ritual) digs through — the jump scares and shadow figures, the eerily suspended rules of gravity and physics — are familiar, he uses them to build a kind of clanging, feverish atmosphere. And British actress Hall (The Gift, Godzilla vs. Kong), tasked with carrying nearly every scene, grounds her performance in more than meat-puppet panic; her unraveling springs from genuine, furious grief.

It helps immensely that the film has an actress like Amy Ryan (Birdman, Beautiful Boy) to play Mari Gilbert, whose years-long battle to get anyone at all — the press, the police, the people of New York — to care about her daughter Shannan forms the emotional core of the story.

If the setup feels quotidian, the tension still climbs steadily, egged on by Edna's increasing confusion and cognitive decline and Kay and Sam's conflicting ideas of what should be done about it. But it's the final scene, it turns out, that James has saved her chips for: a haunting tableau both gruesome and beautiful and somehow, full of love.

Ironbark might not be a great film in the end, but it is a satisfying good one — a story that’s at its best when it colors outside the black and white (or Communist red, as it were) lines of war and hones in on the real, fallible men and women who fight it, one quiet inglorious step at a time.

In a way, the movie feels almost like Marvel antimatter, an auteur's willful response to whiz-bang emptiness and Infinity Stones. Knight is ultimately a tale of honor though, and a deeply moral one — inscrutable, but haunting too.