The musicality of Diao’s cinema has never been more symphonic, but it comes at the expense of his ability to properly conduct this script.

You couldn’t ask for a better match between filmmaker and subject.

The scalding final sequence of Ly’s film is powerful enough to obliterate the occasionally clumsy path by which it gets there.

This sharp two-hander veers from caustic to sweet with acrobatic filmmaking to spare.

It’s a stunning showcase for Robert Pattinson and Willem Dafoe to unleash their wildest extremes, by positioning them at the center of a two-hander about a descent into madness in the middle of nowhere. It’s the best movie about bad roommates ever made.

While Goodman and Ephron’s film abides by a “peace & love 101” approach that might prove tiresome for people who already know about Wavy Gravy or the inclement weather that threatened to rain out an entire movement, this lucid and entertaining look back in time gradually twists that broadness into its greatest strength.

Razor-sharp and shatteringly romantic ... as perfect a film as any to have premiered this year.

A Hidden Life is a lucid and profoundly defiant portrait of faith in crisis.

It’s not the most polished endeavor ... However, Bloom gives Wye such a dynamic screen presence that she often transcends the boundaries of the material.

Frequently sublime ... a piece of work so feral and full of life that you’d never guess it was (at least) the 90th feature its director has made in the last 30 years.

The filmmaker’s best and most personal movie in years.

Beanpole is slow to thaw, and its emotional impact is dulled by a structure that delays the story’s full power until the final moments, but there’s a resonant beauty to how these women seize control over their themselves.

Sorry to Miss You doesn’t break new ground for the filmmaker, but it radiates a timeliness that suggests an old-fashioned Ken Loach lament matters more than ever.

At once both more forceful and more inscrutable than Filho’s previous work, Bacurau plunges deeper into midnight territory as its core ideas take hold, its ghosts become literal, and its heroes take up arms.

Rather than revealing much about the man behind the music, Rocketman seems more content to hover inside of it, exploring his unique synthesis of blues, rock, and every other relevant genre as a natural extension of his personality.

Diop’s first feature doesn’t always fit together from a narrative perspective, but it musters such an absorbing vision of an alienated seaside life that not everything needs to add up for the atmosphere to take hold.

El Chicano feels less like a cut-rate version of a comic book movie than it does an insanely over-budgeted pitch video.

Perhaps no other movie has better illustrated the golden rule of CGI: Just because you can, doesn’t mean you should.

Director Annie Silverstein doesn’t elevate these conventions to new heights, but understands their potential well enough to craft an absorbing window into marginalized lives.

It’s hard to shake the feeling that Dupieux’s outré premise would have worked better as a short, as the unusual narrative struggles to make the scenario palatable even at the bare minimum for a feature-length treatment.

While great direction isn’t the worst problem to have, the fact that the writing and acting couldn’t quite live up to their gorgeous surroundings hollows the experience of watching it.

If Jarmusch’s latest often feels as though it lacks a pulse, this star-studded parable is held together by one consistent truth: When Hell is full, the dead will walk the Earth. And when the Earth is fucked, the living will do whatever they can to sleepwalk through the nightmare.

Trial by Fire is completely reignited by the scenes between Dern and O’Connell, who form a compelling bond through a thick sheet of plexiglass. More than just an acting masterclass, the probing, delicate conversations between their characters build towards a harrowing tap dance between hope and surrender.

Giddy, exhausting, and breathtakingly violent.

When The Hustle succeeds — in fits and starts, and with occasional big laughs — it’s wholly thanks to the dedication of Hathaway and Wilson, who throw themselves into thinly written roles (the film somehow required four screenwriters) that they spice up by bringing their A-game to material that’s beneath them.

If this is the best Hollywood can offer these women, it’s not their fault for wanting to work. Instead, it’s on writers and studios to stop treating seniors like some sort of oddities to squeeze a few laughs out of before they croak.

A pleasant and perfectly watchable comedy that would have died on the vine in theaters, Wine Country is casual viewing done right.

A taut and stylish thriller that manages to draw fresh blood from some very familiar territory.

This sweet but vacuous exercise in suspending disbelief is an overstuffed and underwritten misfire.

A wrenching self-portrait of inherited abuse that joins “The Tale” and “Leaving Neverland” on a growing list of essential and unfathomably brave films about the internalization of sexual trauma. What “Rewind” sometimes lacks in elegance, it makes up for in immediacy.

A provocative and frequently brilliant thriller.

You’ve seen this story a thousand times before, but Joris-Peyrafitte’s expressive direction and Margot Robbie’s sheer force of will are enough to endow the movie’s best moments with the same hope-and-a-prayer immediacy that its heroes take with them as they speed towards the southern border.

For all these striking moments, Burning Cane can’t shake the feeling of a sketchbook loaded with ideas that could use more fleshing out.

While it still dilutes Tolkien’s memory by molding his life to the narrow dimensions of a middle-brow feature that’s too safe for the arthouse and too small for the multiplex, at least it does so in a sincere attempt to trace the etymology of Tolkien’s work, and to emphasize that where stories come from can be as meaningful as where they take us.

It seems that this particular game of Pokémon needed more time at the gym. Yes, that’s a “Pokémon Go” reference, and if you can’t follow it, don’t bother.

A maddeningly shallow look at Ronstadt’s remarkable life.

More of a snack than a fulfilling meal, Good Posture is too scattershot to make good on the full potential of its protagonist.

The UglyDolls film makes the most obvious choice at every conceivable opportunity, and is all the more tolerable for that.

The way that the film resolves — or doesn’t — leaves the distinct impression that Waltz simply ran out of interest in this story, which would be an explanation as understandable as it is frustrating.

No matter its oddball turns, Kiwi director Ant Timpson’s wild, unpredictable debut manages to deliver a gory hilarious father-son reunion saga with a surprising degree of confidence in the silly-strange nature of the material.

Not since Klaus Kinski has Herzog aimed his camera at such an uncontrollable subject, and that includes the erupting peaks of “Into the Volcano” and the radioactive crocodiles in “The Cave of Forgotten Dreams.”

The results are fascinating, weird, and often quite moving.

Body at Brighton Rock is the happy work of someone who misses when scrappy genre fare could have low stakes and still feel slightly dangerous; when filmmakers were empowered by the knowledge that a VHS of their schlock took up just as much real estate on video store shelves as a tape of the biggest Hollywood blockbuster.

As Endgame sputters to the finish line, it leaves the impression of witnessing a Marvel Movie Marathon compressed to three hours — and 58 seconds, but trust me, they’re disposable — of unbridled fan service.

Even at its most serious, Okko’s Inn is calibrated for the attention span of a five-year-old; as mature and abstract as the lessons its protagonist learns might be, there’s no use making an uncommonly honest kids movie about death if kids aren’t interested in (or able to) sit through it.

A strange, bifurcated tale of love and espionage, with Judi Dench stuck in a thankless role that does nothing to capitalize on her talents. The film is worse for it.

The wit of Robinson’s series still occasionally peeks out in Someone Great, especially when her central trio are interacting, but smushed into a 92-minute running time, little of the best bits can actually breathe.

The best thing you can say about Stockholm is that it’s good enough to prove that a much better film could be made from this story.

With Penguins, frequent Disneynature filmmaker Alastair Fothergill and franchise newbie Jeff Wilson are working in a more minor key than such essential entries as Chimpanzee and African Cats, but the artistry and relative magic of the series is still on full display.

Perhaps it’s appropriate that the 2019 version of Hellboy is busy to an exhausting degree, overloaded with apocalyptic fears, and seemingly endless in its pileup of twists. But it’s hard to read much into a movie less invested in shrewd observations than in stuffing as much lore as possible into 120 minutes.

Whenever things seem really dire, Martin saunters in with attitude to spare, and puts everything in perspective. With talent that big, the rest of the movie seems little by comparison.

There are bigger questions to ask here, but when it’s easier to roll out some simple images and wrapped-up answers, Breakthrough breaks down, happy to just explain away everything good as a divine act that no one could possibly control. Movies, however, require a bit more than just faith.

The Haunting of Sharon Tate resolves as a cheap revenge fantasy that suggests its subjects only died because they couldn’t see the writing on the wall.

Robin Bissell’s The Best of Enemies may not be some kind of game-changing corrective to all the retrograde films about race in America (we’re talking about an uplifting historical biopic directed by the executive producer of “Seabiscuit”), but this sturdy drama has the good sense to recognize that allyship is only valuable when it’s hard. When it’s a sacrifice. When it forces white people to put some of their own skin in the game.

Missing Link is a sweet, touching, and seriously fun adventure comedy about two lost souls who are struggling to reconcile yesterday with tomorrow in their bid to belong in a world that refuses to make room for them.

From its title on down, Sauvage / Wild is a film that’s torn between different translations of the same basic principle — one soft and the other hard. There’s no judgement of him whatsoever, to the point where it sometimes feels like the character is more of a construct than he is a fully dimension person of flesh and blood.

This bitter and beautiful Sundance-winning doc focuses on a single beekeeper as though our collective future hinges on her hives.

While Moriarty’s novel functioned as a compelling story about two women from different backgrounds converging during a pivotal time in American history, Engler’s film turns much of its attention to Norma’s story, jettisoning the very best part of the film along the way.

Like many (or all) of the movies Burton has made this century, Dumbo is a shallow pop spectacle that’s forced to rely on its more superficial charms; unlike many (or all) of those other movies, this one actually has superficial charms on which to rely.

This heartfelt origin story is more than the sum of its immense charm and Spielbergian attention to detail.

Rock biopics often struggle with the part after the party’s over, but The Dirt becomes unusually adrift; at times, you can’t even tell what decade you’re supposed to be watching.

You’ll have to wait a while before Tigerland introduces its eponymous stars, but like many elements of Ross Kauffman’s emotional, often harrowing new documentary, the eventual reveal will be worth it.

The movie ... sometimes sags into a lethargic pace and unwieldy tangents. ... But there’s no doubting the presence of a focused, intelligent vision guiding the small-scale material along.

Too adult for kids, too childlike for adults, and too muddled for the motley lot of misfits and dreamers who just want to think different.

The new version of “Pet Sematary” is both darkly humorous and quite chilling, modernizing some of the cheesier emotional beats of that earlier adaptation. ... It’s in the third act that Kolsch and Widmyer’s ambitions get the best of them.

The third act is crammed with twists and revelations that ultimately seem forced, and can only offer truncated reconciliations. And yet there’s something to be said for the pleasure of watching Sasha, still a bit silly and definitely in need of more life experience, succeed on her own terms and in her very own movie.

Piponnier dominates every frame, with a mesmerizing screen presence that pushes the drama well beyond its formulaic premise and visible microbudget constraints.

This gory teen comedy blends laughably outrageous carnage with a legitimately scary plot to delightful ends. Throw in a winking fetish for cinephile culture and audiences are sure to go wild for the gutsy film.

Embedded in all this is a would-be message about those who trade freedom for security, the human spirit, and so on and so forth, all of which is too muddled to register with the intended force. Captive State is many things at once — or at least it’s trying to be — and every match it lights along the way is quickly snuffed out.

There may not be much to “Pink Wall” that you haven’t seen in a dozen other indies about millennials in crisis, but Cullen’s woozy and ultra-watchable debut plunges straight into the heart of the matter, and leaves you wondering what parts of your own relationship might be just beyond your field of vision.

A film that’s dark and delightful and ripe for rediscovery.

A sugar-addled My Neighbor Totoro ripoff with a beautiful message and a hideous everything else.

Decent enough as a night out but destined to be used as a fundraising tool, the film is galvanized by its push towards a perverse kind of representation; the idea isn’t to make people with cystic fibrosis feel seen, but rather to erase them altogether. And the highest compliment one can pay to Five Feet Apart is that it has the power to play a small, valuable role in that effort.

Much like its subject, the film is beautiful, compelling, hard to watch, and spread too thin to stay with us for long.

While the pace is spotty and not every joke lands, “Good Boys” manages to be adorable and twisted at the same time.

There was more to Bonnie and Clyde than 'Bonnie and Clyde,' but The Highwaymen falls short of making the case that the good guys had the better tale.

This time, Morris has less command over the edgy material, positioning his modern-day Keystone Cops in a series of smarmy vignettes that don’t cut quite as deep. But it still delivers a scathing and often very funny indictment of homeland insecurities.

The best comedy of its kind since "Superbad," Wilde’s slick, unpredictable romp can sometimes feel like several movies at once. This riotous, candy-colored celebration of sisterhood is so dense with anarchic developments it often threatens to collapse into itself, but avoids lingering on any gag long enough to let that happen.

Stearns’ tone involves a tricky negotiation between the melancholy and the macabre. “The Art of Self-Defense” doesn’t always pull that balance off, but it has enough ambition and wacky payoff to make the zany gamble worthwhile.

Marshall-Green is just finding his way, and his debut is very much a first film. ... Modest and unfussy, “Adopt a Highway” fails to ground its fable-esque qualities in a deeper bedrock of emotional truth, but its best moments offer a tender glimpse at what people do with several decades of pent-up resentment.

Long Shot turns its endearing couple into a savvy vessel for exploring America’s fractured times. As Rogen’s shaggy humor finds its match in Theron’s domineering energy, Long Shot is overlong and rough around the edges, but its imperfections speak to an endearing knack for the messiness of modern times.

[McConaughey]’s so entertaining, in fact, that it takes nearly the entirety of “The Beach Bum” to fully absorb how little else there is to the film once the initial high of basking in Moondog’s perma-stoned glory wears off.

The movie’s lightweight plot yields a disposable comedy with a lot on its mind, but its modest ambition is just enough to let Maron push his onscreen appeal in a new direction.

A brilliant home-invasion thriller laced with cultural reference points stretching back to the late ’80s, and a smorgasbord of first-rate visceral cinematic scares. Think “Funny Games” collided with Cronenbergian body horror and Hitchockian suspense, and you’re maybe halfway there.

Hard to sit through and impossible to forget, this torpid four-hour anti-drama is suffused with the sort of hopelessness that cinema only sees every once in a long while .

A diverting Western that’s almost worth seeing for the unsaddled performances that director Vincent D’Onofrio gets from his cast, The Kid only makes a few small adjustments to the dustiest of American genres, but these errant wrinkles — a far cry from any serious revisionism — provide much of the fun.

Triple Frontier lands a handful of thrilling sequences in a sea of familiar riffs on greed, masculinity, and the lingering traumas of war.

As generic and retrograde as “Black Panther” was specific and revolutionary, Captain Marvel is a frustrating disappointment at a time when every inclusive blockbuster is fought over as though it could be the decisive battle in our never-ending culture wars.

Rather than going out with a bang, however, the final installment in the franchise hinges its loose plot around the marital infidelities of younger, humorless characters so thinly sketched that it is impossible to care about them.

Erlingsson has created a winsome knickknack of a movie that manages to reframe the 21st century’s signature crisis in a way that makes room for real heroism.

In making Water Makes Us Wet, the filmmakers have embarked upon the noble pursuit of moving people to care about climate change as if their lives — and their sex lives — depended on it.

As a spare and sexy thriller, Michael Winterbottom’s “The Wedding Guest” is far too undercooked; there’s little flavor, and even less to chew on. As an audition for its star to be the next James Bond, however, this aimless Dev Patel vehicle is virtually perfect.

A blunt, breathless, and astoundingly unsentimental morality play that’s told with the intensity of a ticking-clock thriller, Wolfgang Fischer’s Styx is every bit as ominous as its title suggests, and far less fanciful.

What The Competition considers a deliciously exciting rite of passage, viewers might interpret as a kind of cultural rot. The truth likely falls somewhere in between, as Simone’s documentary is too gripping to be dismissed, and too queasy to be accepted.

Lane has an unmatched ability to strike the right balance between anger and absurdism, and frames the Temple in a revelatory moral light.

None of the pretty imagery or impassioned lovemaking can break free of a mopey old formula that sits on every scene with the same schematic quality that makes its weary setting so familiar from the start.

The fact that Woods has already made it (and with an incarcerated mother of her own) only adds to the perfection of her casting; even without the meta elements, which underline the extent to which America’s disenfranchised look to pop culture as a pipeline to salvation, her performance is beautifully expressive and open to the world.

There are any number of movies about gay men trying to liberate themselves from the long shadow of heteronormative oppression — a regrettably, enduringly relevant premise — but few have been told with the extraordinary nuance or compassion of Jayro Bustamante’s Tremors.