Feig goes for the spaghetti method of storytelling: Throw a whole bunch of stuff at the wall and something has got to stick. Only some does, but the good stuff — the really campy, trashy, nutty stuff — is the kind of thing popcorn cinema hasn’t so happily embraced in years.

Still, as with any great theater, the performances here are superb, with Holland telegraphing Clay’s years of insecurity into the confines of a one-night-only movie that opens a window onto a Black identity crisis, only to shut it down on us as we peer over the sill.

Gabriel never entirely compliments its eponymous subject with a story that can match his erratic mentality, but Howe's restrained approach is refreshingly unsentimental, never once creating the possibility of an easy resolution to the situation.

Eventually, Soo-hyun's relentless pursuit-and-release approach outlives the director's skill and the premise starts to feel redundant.

You’ll laugh, you’ll gasp, you’ll have, yes, a very good time. You’ll also marvel at the introduction of a newly-minted filmmaker with a crystal-clear vision of both what the world is and what it could be, at least if the women were in charge.

Watching Turner learn to accept his weakness is ultimately satisfying, even if this gentle documentary loses a lot of texture with every shuffle.

This version of Speak No Evil, despite an effectively creepy performance from James McAvoy, grinds the unsettling contours of the original into gory, “Straw Dogs”-lite, home-invasion comeuppance pulp in a last act that’s exactly the sort of dragged-out predictable material Tafdrup sought to avoid.

Wonder is as manipulative as movies get, but that isn’t necessarily a bad thing. Sometimes a story needs to steer you; sometimes a story tells you what to feel, but redeems itself by virtue of the sincerity with which it shows why you should feel that way.

Takei is a natural storyteller who lends an enjoyable flow to the movie’s uncomplicated proceedings.

Little of it will surprise the group’s long-time fans (or, as popular parlance now deems them, “stans”) and it will likely spark interested newbies to seek out further information, but Blackpink: Light Up the Sky does a stellar job of introducing Jisoo, Jennie, Rosé, and Lisa as individuals.

Much of this quiet, slow-burn character study inhabits the dreary, remote quality of Doña’s existence, but with time, the movie pieces it together to reveal the emotional solitude lurking beneath that distant gaze.

Director Michael Winterbottom hasn’t just delivered the funniest movie of the year, but also a comedy that casts its characters in a harsh new light.

With its palatial setting, Borgman shows how money can buy luxury, but it can't salvage the corruption that comes from within.

Despite a few predictable beats, What Keeps You Alive offers plenty of effective jolts, helped along by the chemistry between leads Anderson and Allen.

A docudrama that in its early scenes feels like a documentary — the co-directors have a nonfiction background, and the actors are actual carnival performers — the film plays out like a small-scale fairy tale.

The Phenom wanders through a series of half-formed ideas. When Buschel narrows his focus and has a handle on these characters’ essences, there are flashes of greatness. All he needs is a tighter grip.

The movie doesn't offer much in the way of substantial character development, but that's not a deterrent when the fun twists keep coming.

What this quaint little “Hot Fuzz” homage lacks in scale, it nearly makes up for with a stacked cast of delightful comic actors who all deliver the goods.

The 70-year-old Choy isn’t the subject of their film so much as she’s the lens through which it looks back at yesterday and the fire that kindles its hope for a brighter tomorrow, but her inextinguishable spirit can be felt burning away behind every scene.

In trying to thread the needle between a tribute and a testimony, Pelosi in the House ultimately succeeds as neither.

Whereas "The Avengers" felt like a reimagining of the paradigm for superhero movies, Age of Ultron has air of a rerun. Though impressively made and visually remarkable, it suffers from the hollowness that plagues so many blockbusters carrying the sense that we've been through this before.

An Open Secret is an incisive and utterly unflinching look at a subject too rarely scrutinized.

It’s a shame that Brian and Charles plays things safe, as Archer’s naturally irreverent debut only becomes easier to invest in during its more outlandish moments.

This is an assured debut that sketches the relationship to state power that the marginalized contend with in London and the world beyond. Too muted in emotional effect to bring home a flirted-with theme of solidarity, the world-building still brings to life in the spirit that animates even the most besieged communities.

The many logic-defying developments in “Missing” make it difficult to hold one’s attention, especially considering that the film gives viewers plenty of time to think about the countless ways it doesn’t make sense.

Unlike so many comedies, Sausage Party only gets funnier as it goes along — there are dozens of duffed jokes along the way...but the script mines its demented premise for its full potential, and the plot crescendos to an ending so good that you’re likely to forgive many of the dull moments that came before it.

If this fun but frequently exasperating new chapter in Godzilla’s never-ending story feels like a major anomaly, its eccentricities are what best allow it to channel the forward-thinking urgency of Honda’s original.

This creatively unbound tale about imaginary friends is so determined to spirit you away that it soon loses any meaningful grip on reality.

The Life Ahead is compelling enough to make the by-the-numbers narrative worth telling, if only because with such fine-tuned performances at its center, it deserves to be told.

Mike Leigh’s expansive, exhaustive, and extraordinarily thorough portrait of early 19th-century political activism is, to put it one way, deliberate in pace and tone. To put it bluntly — and in an argot more readily familiar to its cast of working-class characters — the film is bloody well dull.

Alan Partridge stays true to this small, very specific world of regional British radio and this class of local celebrity while also injecting the high-level drama needed to carry such a story to a much larger audience. It’s this balance that should win the film over for Alan Partridge fans and the general movie-going public alike.

Devotion can be stiff and hackneyed at the best of times — it’s nothing if not a war movie that has seen too many other war movies — but it lifts a few inches off the ground whenever it locks in on the loneliness that Brown must have felt as he flew towards an aircraft carrier whose landing signal officer may have wanted him to crash, or soared in formation with people who might have been happy to shoot him down.

What begins as an atypical use of two beloved actors gets more messy than complex in The Rule of Jenny Pen. And yet, the undaunted director, Ashcroft, approaches his vision with palpable conviction.

This slick and involving sequel finds Adonis continuing to work through the weight of his father’s death in the ring, follows all the familiar motions revived with Creed. But in the context of this resilient franchise, the movie hits each beat with the calculated precision of its tireless fighter.

Here, the same genre tropes that are ordinarily primed for cheap thrills and big twists are bent towards the opposite effect, as the film blurs the line between reality and delusion in order to make audiences question a trauma so disorientingly awful that it might otherwise be easy to dismiss altogether — even for the people who suffer it first-hand.

Beneath its overworked plot — and a Julia Roberts performance that toes the line between maternal desperation and movie-screen broadness — this is a tender and knowing story about the salvation that an addict can find within their family, and the toll that addiction can take on it.

Bizarre and challenging when it's not outright goofy, Wiener-Dog never feels remotely compromised. Somehow hilarious and gloomy at the same time, it represents a big middle finger to anyone who wishes Solondz would lighten up.

If The Founder comes up short of providing a satisfactory dramatization of its main storyline, at least it peels back the veil with sufficient intrigue. Yet it still leaves the sour impression that Kroc got the last laugh. Even in this less-than-flattering portrait, he remains its brightest star.

While the rules of her conundrum never quite coalesce and some of the twists feel shoehorned, The Intruder generates so much intrigue to maintain a breathless pace and unsettling atmosphere at every turn, with Rives’ layered performance fusing the strange trip together.

Charlatan becomes entangled in its conflicting mesh of traits and time periods, but the film is only able to become more than the sum of its frustrating parts because it embraces those complications in the first place.

Shaggy and unformed as Pahokee often seems, the film — like its subjects, and the town where they live — is more than the sum of its parts.

Anyone expecting a three-course meal as rich and nuanced as Ryusuke Hamaguchi’s “Wheel of Fortune and Fantasy” (or even a single dish as sumptuous as Juzo Itami’s “Tampopo”) might find themselves disappointed by a quick and dirty film that only aspires to offer the satisfaction of a light dessert, but Yoshida’s giddy fetishism makes for its own simple fun.

Capaldi doesn’t go for neat and tidy endings, so it’s a real shame that this too-glossy documentary does.

Mulan is perhaps the best example of how to marry the original with something fresh. The Ballad of Mulan has always been an epic-scale story about the power of being yourself in a world not ready to accept that, a tale that will likely always have resonance. In Niki Caro’s “Mulan,” that story elegantly and energetically moves forward, a timeless message made for right now.

The Last Showgirl is both the role of a lifetime for Anderson, one that can fully capture her incredible emotional intensity and vulnerability, and (we can only hope) the start of a brand new career for her.

It’s undeniably affirming to watch someone risk it all in order to embrace who they really are, even if that’s not who the world said they should want to be. It’s been one hell of a journey, but David Arquette has finally found the role of a lifetime.

Even the best records start skipping after a while, and once The Sound of Silence gives in to the demands of conventional narrative it begins feeling less fresh and new than it did when it was simply introducing us to Peter and his work.

Hollywood Stargirl, for all its charm, doesn’t quite hang together as a complete story. It feels like an episode, a vignette, a tiny slice of Stargirl’s remarkable life suddenly turned into a filmmaking parable she’d likely balk at.

There’s a tenderness here, not just between the Sasquatches (and even then, not always just tenderness!) but for nature itself.

“Life Comes in Flashes” doesn’t go out of its way to highlight the more salacious details of Bogart’s story, but it’s also not as bowdlerized as some viewers might expect from an estate-approved doc.

A less controlled and slapdash character piece than "In Bruge," McDonagh's new movie benefits greatly from a plethora of one-liners that toy with crime movie clichés in the unlikely context of writerly obsessions.

What Bumblebee does best is remember that this is a franchise for the young, and embrace that fact without any shame while also still delivering on the action. There’s no self-importance, no grafting of ultra-patriotism and too-dense mythology onto what should be a simple narrative.

If the first half of the film shies away from the cheap thrills of its serial killer story, the pointed banality of its final chapters proves as horrifying this genre ever gets.

Çatak fashions a film that’s both a gripping marital drama and a rallying cry against artist censorship.

A true story so pure that it almost grants its teller the permission to be sloppy, Gabriela Cowperthwaite’s Megan Leavey is a bit of a mess from the moment it starts, but it’s hard to completely dismiss any movie with a soul this strong, just as it would be hard to dismiss a disobedient puppy so long as its tail keeps wagging.

Coppola presents a smart cross-examination of the impact of media exposure on fickle young minds. While the ambitions of its young thieves often blur together and lack precise definition, The Bling Ring is the director's breeziest work, allowing the story to glide along with the ease of a heist movie.

Douglas Miller's Dinosaur 13 is both awe-inspiring and tragic. Conventionally made but featuring an undeniably compelling story at its core, Miller’s debut benefits greatly from the combination of passion and sadness embedded in its subjects’ tale.

The coolheaded patience of Burns’ approach is precisely what makes “The Report” so powerful in the end, not only as a lucid crystallization of our country’s recent political history, but also as an urgent reminder of how a world that prioritizes emotions over ethics will eat itself alive.

This could all feel schematic in lesser hands, but Neugebauer gives Lawrence and Henry the space they need to make the film’s characters feel like real people. As a result, the inevitable glimmer of hope they share at the end is as honest as the hurt that guided them to it.

It’s a shame that You Don’t Nomi, a new documentary about the failure and reevaluation of Paul Verhoeven’s 1995 pulp film “Showgirls,” doesn’t live up to its truly inspired title.

Even when accounting for its forced and uncertain finale, this is the most poignant and perceptive thing that LaFosse has ever made, and therefore also the most painful.

Offering plum roles to Catherines Frot and Catherine Deneuve, The Midwife is a minor-key crowd pleaser about friendship, forgiveness and rolling with the punches.

Angelou’s life and work was rich, significant, influential and hugely varied, and yet “And Still I Rise” is hobbled by unimaginative delivery and direction. In short, it’s limited, and Angelou’s own history proves that limitations must be fought against at every turn.

Beyond its surface pleasures, Crimson Peak also confronts the demons of modern entertainment. The movie frightens and surprises us in familiar ways, but at the same time issues a plea for restraint.

Is it good? In parts! Is it intoxicated with the same demented bravado that its namesake embodies when he sneaks behind the enemy lines of the Franco-Spanish War, but tragically lacks whenever he’s alone with his true love Roxanne (a ravishing Haley Bennett, with whom Wright himself is besotted in real life)? Absolutely. And that’s plenty to sing about.

Amini's directorial debut is a quiet and graceful achievement that suffers from a number of shortcomings but still works on its own terms.



An eager crowdpleaser from one of the world's greatest crowdpleasers, it gets the job done and nothing more.

Joe Cornish’s long-awaited and largely delightful follow-up to “Attack the Block” is a unicorn of a children’s fantasy movie: It’s imaginative, it’s heartfelt, and it never feels like it’s trying to sell you anything more than a measure of hope for the future.

Users lacks clarity, sliding along in moment-to-moment beauty with such confidence that it never seems too concerned with building a cohesive argument. But it’s never less than enthralling to get lost in this particular ether.

The story suffers from a distracting aura of self-importance. Vikander brings a remarkable tenderness to her character (who, in real life, left her husband's side much earlier) but Redmayne's sharp gaze and toothy smile make it virtually impossible to ignore the actorly feat on display.

At first, you may be inclined to reject it outright, but Game Night works so hard to win viewers over that it eventually finds its way to a winning formula.

Well made as it is, Don Jon suffers from a half-baked scenario that never manages to make its characters as intriguing as the problems that afflict its protagonist. It's a movie that shows better than it tells, even as it leaves much up to the imagination.

We simply couldn’t get invested in this film, despite our very best efforts.

It's an unflinching update to media scholar Neil Postman's prophetic claim about the deadly impact of television on cultural identity: Smartphones in hand, we face the danger of filming ourselves to death.

Zellweger inhabits the role of the jaded, soul-searching musical icon reasonably well within a dreary and unremarkable saga that finds her grappling with her past, contending with pill-popping addictions and a broken family. It’s a familiar story that Judy struggles to freshen up, at least until Zellweger takes the mic.

But it’s the shadow of despair that “Wonka” traces most clearly; the cloud of disenchantment that can hover over every inch of our waking lives when the wrong people are allowed to monopolize our dreams. This may not be Paul King’s most satisfying film, but even at a scale — or at least a budget — several times larger than that of “Paddington 2,” the purity of its imagination remains unquestionable.

Blanchett, a commanding figure who scowls her way through every argument, gives Mapes an involving screen presence that elaborates on the character's staunch resolve much better than the straightforward script.

Winocour has a talent that cannot be taught, she has a gift for filtering every development through at least one character — especially those moments that other movies would mulch into the stuff of raw spectacle.

Lear remains a keen observer of his own ability to inject leftist politics into popular culture. The chief stylistic devices used to bring his experiences to life are a different story.

Landline is a textured, silly, sweet, and deeply felt comedy that traces the distance between the most satisfied parts of ourselves and the most desperate, between the people we are and the people we think we should be, and it finds that — for better or worse — we’re all stuck somewhere in between.

The bittersweet and gently moving Wedding Doll sidesteps so many of the traps it sets for itself because writer-director Nitzan Gilady is less interested in the purity of his heroine than he is in what it reveals from within the people around her.

Perpetrator suffers from a novice lead performance and a script that tries to do too much. It’s an ambitious addition to the feminist horror genre with blood and guts to spare, but it’s no game-changer.

As Riegel builds to a conclusion that feels both predictable and satisfying, Dandelion must decide how far she’s willing to go to bet on herself. More people should bet on Riegel and Layne, and fast.

After the implosive force of those first 30 minutes, the rest of the movie can’t help but feel like a self-defeating scavenger hunt through the rubble.

In the hands of director Josephine Decker, a filmmaker uniquely suited to depicting personal expression on the big screen, the film version of The Sky Is Everywhere makes for a satisfying and special take on a particular sub-genre of YA story.

By the standards of Jordan's earlier films, "Byzantium" is unquestionably a minor achievement, but its technical specs help flesh out a thick environment that elevates the proceedings to a lyrical plane.

Combining savage archetypes with spot-on wit, Slack Bay is a fun, peculiar romp with deeper conceits lurking beneath the surface.

Baumbach is ultimately too in sync with DeLillo for “White Noise” to escape from the shadow of its monolithic source material, as movie struggles to escape the hat on a hat sensation of that match between filmmaker and novelist, and often feels like the work of a third party who’s trying to imitate them both at once. All the same, you can still hear something almost subliminally divine under that uncanniness whenever Baumbach cranks up the volume.

Roofman is more of a slog than a romp, largely because of an extended 119-minute run time that still leaves many of its juiciest elements unexplored.

It makes for a creative, clever watch, though one that seems exclusively imagined to cater to the series’ older fans and otherwise mature audiences.

Leonard and Weixler’s lived-in chemistry and quirky writing (again, largely improvised) keep their characters feeling real even in the midst of their wilder adventures.

At its core, this is an iPod-shiny parable about the pain of being left behind, and one that — like so much of the best sci-fi — poignantly literalizes some of the the anxieties that have dogged humanity since the dawn of time.

Letting the movie do the talking often works best.

The Snowtown Murders manages to become a compelling exercise that excels at making horrible acts look shockingly listless.

Clocking under two hours, The Real Charlie Chaplin is less concerned with being an exhaustive biography than trying to pinpoint what Chaplin’s life means to film history and how we might think of him today. It’s an approach that, while not entirely successful here, could help introduce newcomers to classic film rather than preach to the already converted.

Ultraman: Rising is a fun, sincere, and thoughtfully conceived piece of kids entertainment.

This energetic, enjoyable movie does not set out to break ground, but in putting centerstage those who are typically left on the sidelines, the movie emerges as a rousing success.

The film unravels towards the end, devolving into a too-neat shoot-em-up finale that stinks of studio interference, but Nicholson’s performance is a marvel throughout. It’s time it got its due.