The staggeringly well-crafted Isle of Dogs is nothing if not Anderson’s most imaginative film to date.

The formulaic approach to presenting each story — which ostensibly track different people Julia herself has studied, though she never interacts with them — is predictable, static, and wholly clinical.

From the start, Whittington’s script lays everything out so schematically that there’s little reason to keep watching for the story.

Shelton’s work is understated, but elevates seemingly forgettable scenarios with a wise, humane approach that makes even a lesser work like Outside In a cut above the market standard.

Eastwood remains a deeply purposeful filmmaker, and The 15:17 to Paris clearly has a plan — it builds to a riveting showdown, with a unique kind of payoff enhanced by the authenticity of its design. It’s a fascinating gamble even when it doesn’t hold together.

The film is often compelling, clever and entertaining, but oddly enough, these strongest moments are revealed in an awkward third act tonal and structural shift to be nothing more than filler.

Finally, the Fifty Shades phenomenon has yielded a disarming comedy that makes this ridiculous material fun to watch.

Black Panther is different. It’s the first one of these films that flows with a genuine sense of culture and identity, memory and musicality. It’s the first one of these films that doesn’t merely reckon with power and subjugation in the abstract, but also gives those ideas actual weight by grafting them onto specific bodies and confronting the historical ways in which they’ve shaped our universe.

It’s worth remembering that the “Cloverfield” movies were only able to successfully disrupt conventional distribution methods because they’re good. The best thing you can say about this one is that it’s free with your Netflix subscription.

Theron and Davis are dynamite together, the actresses playing off each other like two sides of the same coin.

Maybe this is exactly the biopic that Kenney would want, silly and bittersweet and laced with regret. Unfortunately, the film is just good enough to convince us that he deserved better.

Anderson does add some style to the film, doing wonders with an indie-sized budget for a film that requires a specific period setting.

The movie falls short of deep insights, but its most prominent qualities — scrappy, ephemeral, a little bit lewd — mirror the chief attributes of Callahan’s endearing work.

Fuglsig’s feature debut is ultimately less an action movie and more a procedural, one in which incremental gains and minimal casualties are as much as can be hoped for.

Save for a few clever twists and winning performances from O’Shea Jackson Jr. and 50 Cent (née Curtis Jackson), Den of Thieves is the kind of bloated crime thriller that could have been made in any decade — which is not to call it timeless so much as way past its time.

Tightly written and sensitively rendered, the devastating film is propelled by masterful performances, led by a bewitching Wood in the role she was born to play.

Mary and the Witch’s Flower may not be a great film — it occasionally struggles just to be a good one — but it’s a convincing proof-of-concept, and that might be more important in the long run.

It’s director Wes Ball who emerges as the real hero here, the former visual effects supervisor proving himself to be the rare filmmaker who can force some genuine vigor into one of these banal modern blockbusters.

As ever with Aardman, the cleverest moments are also the most fleeting.

It’s almost a blessing in disguise that Proud Mary is so light on action, as Henson and Winston generate some real chemistry during the low-key moments they share together, both of them doing a fine job of negotiating between violence and vulnerability.

Initially it seems as if Sidney Hall will just be another film about lone geniuses trapped in worlds where they’re misunderstood or undervalued, but the film then unspools into nearly two hours of baffling narrative choices, weak character development, and so many offensive cliches that it would be funny if it wasn’t so, well, offensive.

Paddington’s ability to positively impact people is so profound that it can’t help but stretch out towards the audience, too. We may know that being kind and polite doesn’t always set the world right, but damn if that little bear doesn’t make you want to try.

The witch-hunt metaphor that emerges from Abigail’s bullying is more overt than it needs to be, but Shephard clearly didn’t rely on SparkNotes in crafting her film.

With Shaye’s performance as its anchor, the movie is often a perceptive character study, at least until it’s hijacked by the same bland trickery that so often fogs up horror movies with more to offer.

This may be a forgettable movie about the forgotten man — a blue-collar morality play disguised as a very contrived hostage crisis — but at least it’s shlock with something on its mind.

From the director of “Suicide Squad” and the writer of “Victor Frankenstein” comes a fresh slice of hell that somehow represents new lows for them both — a dull and painfully derivative ordeal that that often feels like it was made just to put those earlier misfires into perspective.

Shamelessly familiar and profoundly alien in equal measure, The Greatest Showman takes a billion of the world’s oldest story beats and refashions their prefab emotions into something that feels like it’s being projected from another planet.

As an experiment in filmmaking trickery, All the Money in the World is an extraordinary viewing experience; without that, it’s a compulsively watchable rumination on the worst of the one percent.

Some of the goofier bits from Pitch Perfect 2 has been excised, and this latest entry focuses more firmly on the bonds between the ladies after its somewhat mean-tipped predecessor, though it never hits the girl-powered highs of the original. But mostly, it’s yet another unholy mashup of disparate tones that’s never as fun or frisky as the original material.

This is a beautiful film, and an ugly one, and the tension between those two sides doesn’t abate until the very last scene.

Under the fastidious guidance of writer-director Johnson, The Last Jedi turns the commercial restrictions of this behemoth into a Trojan horse for rapid-fire filmmaking trickery and narrative finesse. The result is the most satisfying entry in this bumpy franchise since “The Empire Strikes Back” in 1980.

The mildly amusing Jumanji: Welcome to the Jungle is further proof that even the stalest whiff of brand recognition has become preferable to originality. Only part of the blame for that belongs to the studios, but after cannibalizing themselves for much of the last 20 years, Hollywood has clearly eaten their way down to the crumbs.

Even as Quest toys with expectations, (there are no chart toppers to be found here), the triumphs in Quest are much harder to spot, though they are mighty; love, family, and hope in the face of adversity. Nothing could be more harmonious.

The director’s most outwardly accessible movie in ages, Phantom Thread is at once an evocative period drama and a magical fable about lonely, solipsistic people finding solace in their mutual sense of alienation.

A master chef preparing an entire feast inside a pressure cooker, Spielberg shoots The Post like every shot was delivered to the studio on a deadline, and the result is a film that combines the spartan clarity of hard journalism with the raw suspense of an Indiana Jones adventure.

Voyeur is framed as the story of one observer trying to clarify another, but Kane and Koury lose sight of their own film, which is really a story about two men so desperate to hear the sound of their own voices that they deluded themselves into thinking they had something to say. Voyeur falls right into their trap.

Cuba and the Cameraman, while essentially a greatest hits collection for Alpert’s career, never feels recycled. It also never feels Frankensteined together.

So urgent and far-reaching that it never settles into the comforts of a coming-of-age story, The Breadwinner is a small film about the biggest things. It’s engaging from start to finish, but Twomey — to her great credit — prioritizes stoicism over sentimentality.

Structured like a fireworks display, with only a handful of small reprieves throughout, Brimstone & Glory naturally builds to a marvelous grand finale.

For an artist whose work in a proud and robust tradition carried a recognizable grace, Song of Granite is a stirring, solemn tribute.

The resulting 119-minute pileup of showdowns and one-liners is an undeniably tighter, more engaging experience. It’s also a tired, conventional attempt to play by the rules, with “hold for laughs” moments shoehorned between rapid-fire action — a begrudging concession that the Marvel formula works, and a shameless attempt to replicate it.

Mr. Roosevelt is a sweet and shaggy comedy about someone who needs to renovate their idea of home. It’s a reminder that the 21st century is going to be full of coming-of-age films about 30-year-olds, and it’s compelling evidence that that might be alright.

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.

Holiday movies don’t have to be good, they just have to be comfortable, and by that regrettable standard “Daddy’s Home 2” mostly gets the job done.

Bad movies happen to good actors all the time, but Pottersville is something worse — not malevolent so much as utterly mystifying. It’s a movie that’s mere existence is infinitely more amusing than any of its jokes.

Even as the high-concept premise wears thin, Palka manages to generate an unexpected degree of sympathy for the floundering couple, and the wordless finale allows for a complete transformation that extends beyond Jill’s bizarre condition.

Fresh and stale in equal measure, Coco represents the best of what Pixar can be, and the worst of what they’ve become.

A handsomely furnished holiday movie that should have devoted more attention to its many ornaments and less to the tinsel at the top, this Murder on the Orient Express loses steam as soon as it leaves the station.

Clear enough about what happened to be ambiguous about what it means, the film makes only one clean argument: Truth isn’t always stranger than fiction, but it’s often a hell of a lot sadder.

Princess Cyd is a triumphant little film — little in the detailed moments it creates, not the content of its character. Anchored by complicated, smart, funny women, Princess Cyd is a rare delight of a film and a model for others to follow.

The cheerless, choppy nature of A Bad Moms Christmas keeps each storyline feeling oddly singular, and it’s worse for it.

The New Radical magnifies an emerging desire for major changes to the global marketplace and makes a compelling argument for how those sentiments have gained traction.

The Light of the Moon is a lucid, clinical, and wholly necessary drama about life after rape, and the while the film is far more watchable than it might sound (thanks in large part to Stephanie Beatriz’s rich and involving lead performance), viewers should know what’s in store for them.

The story ultimately frays apart by tugging at its flimsiest threads, but Onah hits on too many things with too much force for his debut to be dismissed as a result.

A well-intentioned but wearisome jolt of prefab holiday cheer.

The question with a movie like Jigsaw, which was preceded by seven “Saw” movies and did not screen for press, isn’t “Is it good?” but rather “How bad is it?” The answer, dear reader, is “quite.” Jigsaw is quite bad.

Olin, at turns daringly open and frustratingly restrained, makes Maya entirely her own, the focal point and reason for the film itself.

All I See Is You continues to be fun and involving even when things get truly ridiculous in the third act and Forster starts relying on the sheer momentum the plot in order to speed over its potholes.

Whereas “Creep” suggested that the annoying man-child is scarier than you think, Creep 2 shows just how much scarier he gets with age.

One of Us offers a rare window into a highly insular community that is often misunderstood, or tacitly sanctioned for fear of stoking anti-semitism.

The Divine Order is as milquetoast as these things get, but Volpe’s film finds real value by emphasizing process over politics, by glossing over the eventual vote in favor of knuckling down on how one act of courage can spark a blaze that’s big enough to burn the whole system to the ground.

There’s a raw honesty here that could have benefited from a surer hand, and yet it almost doesn’t matter that Hall lacks the tools to mend the rotted bridges that isolate veterans from their home country, because at least he understands the sheer depth of those gaps, and how desperately our soldiers need us to meet them half way.

Tyler Perry’s Boo 2! A Madea Halloween would be tone deaf, lacking in plot, and almost entirely humorless in any year. That is happens to arrive in theaters amid a cascade of sexual assault survivors sharing their stories about sexual assault doesn’t help its case.

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

Geostorm is terrible entertainment, but it’s a remarkably effective window into Donald Trump’s soul.

Its atmospheric sophistication holds strong throughout, channeling a wonder for the natural world reminiscent of Terrence Malick with an air of existential dread straight out of Andrei Tarkovsky.

Madness is difficult to convey on screen, and less is often more. McLean opts for most, sacrificing Radcliffe performance — so alert and responsive that you can feel the life draining out of his body once the Amazon takes hold — at the altar of some empty affectations.

Thor: Ragnarok doesn’t break fresh ground by Marvel standards, but it livens up the proceedings just enough to grease up the wheels of this franchise behemoth as it careens along.

Rather than spend more time with the band, Traavik tries to milk additional drama from North Korea’s diplomatic tensions.

Unfolding like a microbudget cross between “Salò, or the 120 Days of Sodom” and “The Squid and the Whale,” Peter Vack’s impressively disgusting Assholes is the kind of movie that you wish you could unsee, one you have to watch in your peripheral vision because straight-on viewing would be way too nauseating.

Ruspoli’s presence in the film elevates Monogamish beyond the predictable talking heads documentary.

Winslet delivers her most powerful, emotionally resonant performance in more than a decade.

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?