The plight of the alienated monkey is at turns absurd and genuinely bittersweet, not to mention a whole lot better than its premise might suggest.

The problem with this hokey courtroom drama isn’t that it says the right thing in the wrong way, the problem is that it ultimately doesn’t say anything at all.

A rich, rewarding documentary that digs deep into major questions without being afraid of the answers.

The two plot strands are ostensibly linked by an act of indiscriminate violence, but they’re so clumsily threaded together that it just calls attention to the stitch-work.

Alfredson’s direction proves yawnsomely methodical, ticking off surviving plot points as though filling in some I-Spy Book of Scandinavian Crime Cliches.

The movie is so cautious about avoiding disaster movie tropes that you can practically sense the resistance to arriving at the tragic finale. The result is a tasteful, well-acted bore, but so out of sync with traditional studio filmmaking it deserves some kudos anyway.

When Landon moves away from the darker parts of the film, opting to play up the campier elements of a mostly silly story, Happy Death Day is the kind of dizzy fun as slasher horror can possibly be. Too bad then that all that goodwill has to reset every night, pushing everything back to square one just as it was getting good, murderously so.

So deeply rooted in metaphor and allegory that it might as well be called “father!,” Alex and Andrew Smith’s Walking Out is a strong coming-of-age adventure that buries its vaguely biblical underpinnings beneath the heavy snows of a Jack London epic.

If only its irony were the most painful thing about Flatliners, an artless and agonizingly boring remake of a semi-forgotten movie about the dangers of bringing things back from the dead.

Director Denis Villeneuve goes beyond the call of duty, with a lush, often mind-blowing refurbishing of the original sci-fi aesthetic that delves into its complex epistemological themes just as much as it resurrects an enduring spectacle.

Above all, Last Flag Flying illustrates a fascinating link between Ashby and Linklater, two filmmakers from different eras who both explore American society’s capacity to alienate the same people contributing to its identity. That gloomy proposition finds a fresh tone in Linklater’s hands, where angry, disillusioned people still manage to find room to laugh.

It’s fantastically unrealistic stuff from the first minute to the last (and there are far too many minutes between them), but Idris Elba and Kate Winslet generate enough heat to keep the frostbite at bay, and Mandy Walker’s stunning location cinematography ensures that the film looks considerably more authentic than it feels.

Till spins a sloppy but uproariously clever urban fable, one that doesn’t sanctify or belittle the handicapped, but rather shines new light on that invisible population by inviting them to play the most visible of movie archetypes: assassins.

Few films this year offer up such lush and beautiful formal components as Jane (Glass’ score is, to be noted, also very lovely), but Morgen has also made a film of deep emotional beauty, the kind of satisfying, stick-with-you fare that any filmmaker would love to make.

Director Chris Perkel, who also edited, hasn’t made a movie so much as a prolonged tribute reel with ample material to fuel a dozen lifetime achievement award ceremonies.

The ending may be strained, but it works its way to just the right sentiment.

Gugino and Greenwood deliver first-rate performances enriched by their characters’ ambiguous qualities.

While nothing groundbreaking, the story mines a degree of profundity out of the traditional supernatural thriller tropes at its core.

We’re left with something handsome but safe, a film that tries to bridge the gap between children’s characters and adult concerns without ever anchoring itself to either side.

Unrest works particularly well once Brea looks beyond the limitations of her own bedridden experiences to document other cases worldwide, providing a stirring collage of stories to illustrate the destructive impact of the disease and why it remains widely neglected by the medical community.

Woodshock offers a whole lot to look at, but not all that much to see.

Friend Request packs some fun scares and twists, but it’s a film best saved for a late-night Netflix binge when nothing better is on.

Every bit as irreverent, smart, and ridiculously entertaining as its predecessors, The LEGO Ninjago Movie proves that these films are now on the brink of becoming a viable brand unto themselves; it cements them as the most consistently delightful franchise in the contemporary world of corporate animation. Nothing else comes close.

It’s fun, but it’s blockbuster overkill after an already-crowded summer season.

Simran might put Ranaut front and center, the film proves once again that in Bollywood, screenplays that truly serve an actress’s talent are still woefully hard to find.

Victoria & Abdul is an otherwise benignly toothless, pleasantly glossy affair, but it does force us to confront one tricky question: When treating a subject as fraught as British imperial rule, when does a film’s benign inoffensiveness become offensive in and of itself?

No surprises here, folks; just half-hearted punchlines and unadventurous sentimentality readymade for marketplace consumption.

Here, the Norwegian’s filmmaker’s signature brand of existential dread (always coupled with and complicated by a youthful sense of becoming), is expressed through style more than action. This isn’t a movie where all that much happens, but every decision ripples with darkness.

Bolstered by sterling turns from stars Jake Gyllenhaal, Tatiana Maslany, and Miranda Richardson, the film is a showcase for what Green has always been able to do so well, and what his actors continue to excel at.

Rather than developing Roman’s conundrum, Roman J. Israel, Esq. settles for a prosaic character study laid out in painfully obvious terms, with a tacked-on twist in the third act just so that the story can find some way to end.

Evans, Hall, and Heathcote exhibit major chemistry (in every permutation) possible, but they also don’t wink at the storyline, playing a provocative story totally straight.

The subtly profound ways in which this movie distorts the recent past makes it one of the most radically entertaining things its iconoclastic scribe has ever written.

Brawl in Cell Block 99 unleashes a fascinating gamble, blending the grimy aesthetic of a one-note action movie with undercurrents of blue-collar frustration. It doesn’t quite succeed at fusing those two elements, but it’s further proof of a filmmaking sensibility willing to push beyond the presumed barriers of formula.

It’s a gorgeous, romantic drama that earns its emotional resonance without venturing beyond the most familiar beats.

In American Assassin, the violence is surprising and brutal. However, its impact is stymied by a predictable script and action sequences that feel like a watered-down version of “John Wick.”

The result is relentless and involving even when it stumbles. Jolie may not be a full-fledged auteur yet, but she unquestionably possesses a singular aesthetic that courses through her work and exists completely apart from her high-profile acting career.

Even as Brad’s Status doesn’t overextend its reach, Stiller gives the material a touching, soulful core.

These portraits don't have a hint of didacticism or preachiness, but "Ex Libris" achieves a certain emotional velocity all the same.

Not only is Three Billboards Outside of Ebbing, Missouri the director’s most accomplished film yet, it’s also his most compassionate.

Lady Bird is both snarky and sincere — a touching, markedly feminine ode to growing up that never takes its familiarity for granted. Gerwig earns the ability to make this rite-of-passage saga her own.

Despite the focus on such a fertile period, it suffers from a meandering narrative and a jarring pace, particularly as it pushes on into his later years without bothering to age star Nicholas Hoult in the slightest.

At times, the movie excels at portraying the dread of children forced to confront a world indifferent to their concerns. But no matter how many times Pennywise leaps out from unexpected places, it’s impossible to shake the feeling that we’ve been here many times before.

It’s an amenable enough ramble of a romantic comedy, and Witherspoon is as charming as ever in the genre in which she excels.

mother! begins as a slow-burn and builds towards a furious blaze. Awash in both religious and contemporary political imagery, Darren Aronofsky’s allusive film certainly opens itself to a number of allegorical readings, but it also works as a straight-ahead head rush.

An undeniably entertaining watch, Suburbicon stumbles when it tries to recycle effective old ingredients into something new.

It’s a deliciously unsubtle testament to the power of words and their infinite capacity to inspire.

This is a film that admires — even awes at — Billie Jean King, but it doesn’t share her commitment to the game. If anything, it has more in common with Riggs than it should, moving with the sluggishness of a player who underestimates their opponent.

Kill Me Please is as much a teen movie as it is a horror movie, vacillating between the genres in such a way that you’re reminded from one scene to another how similar the two really are.

Love makes people do crazy things, and as overwrought and silly as Tulip Fever is in both execution and aim, the film embodies that sentiment in an unexpectedly compelling manner. It’s unfortunate that it takes 107 minutes to get there, but a final twist offers the film’s sole play for emotional resonance.

There’s something ineffably beautiful about such a purehearted folly, even if a Herzogian drama about the making of Loving Vincent might have more to offer than the film does itself.

Human Flow is an epic portrait of mass migration that understands how a lack of empathy often stems from a failure of imagination.

Not only is The Shape of Water one of del Toro’s most stunningly successful works, it’s also a powerful vision of a creative master feeling totally, joyously free.

Downsizing is rife with witty visual touches and inspired comic premises but never quite comes together as fully successful whole.

The movie is weighed down by too many secondary characters, which only serve to dissipate their flickering charms. No one in the film, even our heroine, gets more than a hint of backstory as the single-minded plot careens toward its predictable conclusion.

Jan Hřebejk’s The Teacher is a sardonic, richly seriocomic morality play that uses a delicate touch to explore why communism never seems to work out in the long run.

Red Christmas rarely deals in gore for gore’s sake in its early going. By the end, however, it becomes such an exercise in sensibility-testing brutality that any message about the fragility of the family unit is as murky as the cinematography.

Equal parts journalistic investigation and family portrait, Ford’s delicate project transforms the source of his frustrations into an absorbing cinematic elegy.

A handsome little biopic that’s sopping wet with the same clichés that its whiny hero so adamantly disavows, Mark Gill’s England Is Mine distills the early days of one Steven Patrick Morrissey into an anonymous coming-of-age story that — if not for its keen sense of place — could really be about any mopey white boy whose talents are dulled by torpor.

The only reason to take such a uniquely Japanese story and transplant it to Seattle is to explore how its thorny moral questions might inspire different answers in an American context, so for this retread to all but reduce America to its whiteness indicates an absence of context more than anything else. It’s the most glaring symptom of a film that utterly fails to investigate its premise.

Raw and compelling from its poetic opening shot to its gut-punch finale, Gook doesn’t always find the best way to express itself, but it knows what needs to be said, and it knows that words can lose their meaning in a conversation where so many people are denied their own voice.

The film has just about enough going on around its anti-hero to sustain the interest and land its punchline, and there are signs Liman (a Cruise veteran since “Edge of Tomorrow”) is solving the enduring problem of making a Cruise film that’s not wholly about its leading man.

The plot ends in a place that feels honest and true, but it gets lost in a kind of narrative no-man’s land on its way there.

A half-assed action-comedy that lacks the courage to commit to its own premise.

A spare and unflinching documentary about the true cost of cheap textiles, Machines doesn’t tell us anything we don’t already know about the inhumane work conditions in countries like India, but it forces us to become palpably familiar with the awful facts of the matter.

Both introspective and entertaining, Betts never forgets that her young nuns are still teenage girls, and Novitiate rings as true as any other film about coming of age.

While shoving big messages inside animated offerings isn’t a new concept by any stretch of the imagination, The Nut Job 2 is uncomfortable with its most ambitious concepts, bookending them with gross-out nonsense that doesn’t seem engineered to appeal to anyone.

Annabelle: Creation does offer several shocking moments, and manages to deliver some truly eerie imagery. Even when you can spot the gimmicks from a mile away, Annabelle: Creation hits the horror notes it’s aiming for.

Sunao Katabuchi’s In this Corner of the World is scattered and emotionally disjointed from start to finish, but few films have done so much to convey the everyday heroism of getting out of bed in the morning — not just surviving in the shadow of death, but living in it as well.

Wirkola, who’s best known for his two “Dead Snow” zombie movies, struggles to tackle a more serious-minded tone this time around.

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.

Even when the the music swells and people talk through their problems to reach unremarkable conclusions, there’s an undercurrent of emotional authenticity.

Song reference or not, the title alone should be a major red flag, but there’s no way to fully prepare yourself for the navel-gazing narcissism to come during the film itself.

While Amanda Lipitz’s film doesn’t quite reinvent the narrative, Step tells a story that highlights the intertwining values of hope and education, and never loses sight of the idea that much more lies ahead.

Columbus is a feast for the eyes, but its more lasting impression is on the heart.

Creepy is both a return home and a return to form.

The Emoji Movie might have been a boring and brazenly cynical piece of corporate propaganda, but at least it had the courtesy to be offensive. Kidnap, on the other hand, doesn’t have the the courtesy to be much of anything.

King’s Dark Tower universe is rich with cultural reference points and is always totally unpredictable, but in cutting it down to consolidate its highlights, The Dark Tower can’t even shoot the most necessary bullets straight.

It’s the questions that Fenton can’t answer — maybe even the questions he doesn’t mean to ask — that make It’s Not Yet Dark such an illuminating experience.

Offers a wry snapshot of self-involved New York lesbians that’s both enjoyably smarmy and unsettling in equal doses.

The most distressing aspect about The Emoji Movie is that a spectacle this self-evidently soulless no longer feels like a new low. It doesn’t even leave a dent.

Escapes prefers to approach its star in a roundabout fashion, immediately launching into one of Fancher’s slippery and rambling monologues about his wandering days as a charmed lothario.

The film is at its best when Dieckmann slows down the action and revelations for its real charm: two ladies, on the road, talking.

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.

If Logan Lucky begs you not to take it seriously, that doesn’t mean it lacks real soul.

Detroit is extremely powerful when its wandering eye is trained on the moment at hand, when it’s performing a bracingly direct meditation on white violence and black fear. The film only runs into trouble when it clumsily attempts to contextualize the events of its horrific second act.

This is the kind of experience that might tell you more about yourself as both a viewer and a person than you’re comfortable knowing; it’s also the most alluringly strange movie of the year so far.

Few movies have so palpably conveyed the sheer isolation of fear, and the extent to which history is often made by people who are just trying to survive it — few movies have so vividly illustrated that one man can only do as much for his country as a country can do for one of its men.

Enhanced by a number of notable comedic actors entering uncharted terrain, it’s the kind of movie that makes you laugh and flinch in equal measures, and despite some messier twists, never ceases to move in surprising directions.

Throughout the film, Noxon refuses to offer up easy answers and feel-good conclusions to Ellen’s journey, even when it ratchets up into a literally overheated final discovery.

Fortunately, you don’t need to wish for better versions of the movie experience Wish Upon calls to mind; they exist, and deserve repeat viewings far more than Wish Upon deserves one.

Blind is bad for many reasons, chief among them how it contributes to the belittling notion that representation doesn’t matter for a demographic that will never be able to see themselves on screen.

Girls Trip nails laugh after laugh even amidst — and oftentimes because of — dramatic issues that wouldn’t be out of place in a Lifetime movie.

The first 25 minutes of this movie should be mounted as an installation at the Louvre and played on an infinite loop. Only then can our planet know peace.

It often feels like Heineman is (understandably) too overwhelmed by the stories he’s capturing to help shape them into something greater than the sum of their parts. But no other film has so convincingly, or so urgently, illustrated the role that media will play in our fight for the future.

Set at a prestigious drama school and frequently engrossing, the film unfolds like an experimental acting workshop that occasionally falters when the plot intrudes on the performances.

It would almost be impressive how many funny people it took to make something so unfunny — the full ensemble includes Nick Kroll, Allison Tolman, Michaela Watkins and Rob Huebel — only it’s difficult to be impressed when you’re focused on how little you’re laughing.

Pop Aye never dips into cutesiness or sentimentality, even when you might find yourself wishing it would; it’s less a big-top circus and more a low-key character study.

“Homecoming” works by allowing itself to become an actual genre film, the first of its ilk to recognize that superhero movies might be more interesting if they were also something else.