A feral and staggeringly well-conceived revenge saga.

Educational content, clever and photorealistic dinosaur CGI, and John Leguizamo voicing a prehistoric bird. What else would one need for a fun movie stew?

One terrible sub-plot away from being a legitimately good movie.

It’s merely somewhat better than last year’s meandering dud — a slight improvement on a movie that should have been pretty easy to improve upon.

Ti West’s pointless new film The Sacrament, an exercise in talking loud and saying nothing, isn’t just bad, it’s infuriating.

White Reindeer concedes that much about Christmas is funny — its notions quaint, its fixtures cliched. But it proposes that beneath this sometimes lurid veneer lay something to cherish all the same.

While American Hustle succeeds when it comes to casting and characters, it’s dragged down by a murky and poorly-paced narrative.

While hardly insightful as a character study, Tracks can’t help but flourish as an Aussie travelogue, with cinematographer Mandy Walker doing justice to these vast and harsh environments.

The Punk Singer is a perfect storm. It is a love letter to Kathleen Hanna, to feminism, and to the fans, but it’s also just a damn good movie.

Out of the Furnace is no disaster, but it doesn’t achieve what it hopes to achieve, and it has no one to blame but itself.

He spent 28 years in prison and this is what he gets?

While the film certainly targets a particular audiences, those viewers who don’t fall squarely into that demographic should nevertheless find the film pleasant enough, its pastoral ambitions compensating for its lack of finesse.

The animation is beautiful, the music is catchy and the lyrics are clever.

A slumming Spike Lee is still better than most directors at the top of their game, but Oldboy isn’t just Lee’s worst movie, it’s practically his “Wicker Man”.

Only completists need check in with Homefront. The rest of us can just stay home.

A film that strives to make you think, and even tug at your heart. But the central foundation of the entire enterprise is so shaky that the walls and plaster are falling down all around you, even as you’re trying to make sense of it all.

Philomena honors its namesake by valuing potent understatement over potential hysterics.

A potent encapsulation of how fame and finance beget fear and grief.

Steady-handed action is enough to elevate this film above its predecessor.

There’s charm and delight here, to be sure, but it is occasionally obscured by attempts to make it somehow darker, deeper, and more dramatic.

The Best Man Holiday goes whole hog on the holiday cheese, and there’s something admirable about an adult feature that doesn’t balk at real feelings, especially around the holidays (sex montages notwithstanding).

Go For Sisters is something of a frustration. It’s the least interesting crime caper ever, and there are fascinating characters forced to go through the motions as if any of us could possibly care.

Teller manages a careful enough balance between painstaking technique and a larger cultural context over 80 brisk minutes to make even minor revelations feel like major moments.

An embarrassing gut-punch of unfiltered schmaltz, but its sympathy for the devil-style humanism is well-meaning.

If only all of Thor: The Dark World could capture the magic of its last act, the film wouldn’t feel like such a chink in Marvel’s otherwise solid armor.

Some Velvet Morning is a horror film with no blood, with words the only weapon for 98% of the picture.

The result is a film that grows worse with each passing minute, as the vibrant and complex Diana is reduced down to a daft, dumbstruck love addict, a biopic that tries desperately to humanize an already beloved and relatable human being and makes her look comically idiotic and empty in the process.

Might be the single most beautiful documentary of the year.