It’s a dazzling showcase of fantasy-based filmmaking in the 21st century that also manages a feeble attempt at injecting feminist politics into an antiquated narrative. Yet its eventual climax strains from the obviousness of these efforts.

Too heavy-handed and clumsy to land with a real knockout punch, Annie J. Howell and Lisa Robinson’s second feature benefits immensely from the quietly moving work of its lead, Besty Brandt.

It’s a star part, and Grillo commands it. Most importantly, he gets you to invest in Roy enough that, even without a controller in your hands, you never feel like you’re simply watching someone else play a videogame. With no pixels in sight, Grillo gives “Boss Level” the thing most videogame movie riffs lack: a pulse.

By the time Boys from County Hell works its way to its final face-offs, the film’s good humor and care for its characters is just as appealing as the gore. Vampire hounds might balk, but Boys from County Hell has it right: This is a story about people, not monsters.

The Pale Blue Eye begins to double as a stiff but fanciful origin story for both Edgar Allen Poe and also the detective genre he would later help shape. The best stretches of Cooper’s thin and unhurried script find the film checking those two boxes at the same time, as its occult fascination enriches its all-too-human crimes (and vice-versa) until the border that separates this world from the next becomes as blurry as that which runs between reason and madness.

It’s a wild romp with all the campy noir you might expect in a film by the father of queercore.

Its ending might cop out of the novel’s most ghoulishly prescient detail, but that isn’t enough to completely neuter the rare Hollywood product that dares to stoke our anger rather than mollify it — that reminds us that our rage is a valuable resource worth a lot more than money, and one that we can’t afford to waste on each other.

Mr. K succeeds as both an homage to Kafka’s fascination with the absurdity of life, and especially with the socio-bureaucratic systems we humans have wrought upon ourselves, and as a sumptuous and surreal feast for the eyes. It poses many questions, leaving them for the audience to ponder for themselves after the screen fades to black.

Butt Boy dares you to give it a shot, and operates on the assumption that most people will write it off from the start. It’s hard to believe this movie even exists, but equally worth recognizing that it’s not entirely full of shit.

A cute, simple, and very colorful fable of a film that will almost exclusively appeal to the youngest of kids.

A sunny ode to capitalism, the movie is a coy advertisement of its own. In that context, it's a whole lot better than one might expect, and loaded with talent unabashedly hawking their wares.

While much of what Swale has crafted here is familiar, the film’s loving tone and Arterton’s compelling performance recommend it, and the result is a warm drama never afraid of a little magic.

There’s just enough history about lucha libre to make you curious to learn more.

The result is a messy but mesmerizing summation of his unusual career ambition, a dreamlike chronicle of human suffering for which Jodorowsky offers a wild solution on par with his craziest filmmaking conceits.

The Secret Disco Revolution is the doc that disco deserves – rigorous, critical and entertaining.

[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.

For all its vibrant, flamboyant aspects, “Dom Hemingway” is a resoundingly empty star vehicle. It gives Law a character too thinly crafted to justify his eccentricities. He acts his heart out for a role that has no heart.

Renck’s film leaves [Sandler] quite literally lost in space with nowhere to go, and rather than leave us with new perspectives on space travel or marital discord or an awe-eyed curiosity about either, we leave with a shrug.

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.

This Bob Ross doc isn’t just messy, it one that paints a mixed portrait that’s hard to decipher.

A gleefully over-the-top celebration of silliness too in love with its outrageous characters and premise to make them gel. Scene after scene features a self-satisfied kookiness akin to spending time with a terrible comic unwilling to give up the mic.

Portman's screenplay shortchanges the dramatic potential of the material in favor of a by-the-numbers period piece.

The film that exists may fill in some temporary vacuum in a season without capacity-level crowds on Saturday nights and evenings. But those who want something more may have to wait a little longer.

Extraterrestrial can be forgiven the tangents into melodrama due to Vigalondo's seamless ability to navigate those soapy waters.

While certainly the most dazzling Superman movie to hit the big screen, the 143-minute Man of Steel is also the longest, and it only justifies that heft because it leaves room to keep the effects coming.

Some movies suffer because of bad timing. Shell wouldn’t be a very good movie under any circumstances, but it fares especially poorly against Coralie Fargeat’s The Substance, a better and more outrageous film that deals in very similar subject matter.

An energetic yet hopelessly convoluted espionage thriller that doesn’t tell a story so much as it chronically bumps into one. ... Lee’s debut is little more than a chattering Pez dispenser full of plot twists.

The making-of story is well worth hunting down and can make this broadly underwhelming movie almost worth the watch.

Clocking in at over two hours, there’s no lack of dazzling design and insane ideas to keep every minute of Fennell’s feature thrilling to watch. As with all of Fennell’s films, boredom is never on offer. And yet, that doesn’t entirely dissipate the feeling that something is still missing here.

As much as I’d love to see these characters in another film, I’d also love to have seen more of them in this one. Oh, and a quick general note to action directors everywhere: Silencers are great for stealth kills, but they really suck the fun out of a full-blown siege.

It’s not a sequel; it’s a replica. And while that might bring some comfort and joy during the holiday season, wouldn’t you rather savor the real thing?

Even as Almost Christmas follows a series of predictable twists, that doesn’t negate its charm.

There is no reason to care about anyone in Antonio Campos’ The Devil All the Time, a sweaty, bloated mess of a movie that flushes a knockout ensemble down the drain.

Tom Hanks' appearances come across like scene changes between unfunny sketches on 'Saturday Night Live.'

Hitchcock largely succeeds at pulling back the veil on his off-camera personality. To a larger degree, it reveals the level of influence of his devoted wife and screenwriter Alma (Helen Mirren) on both his personal life and career.

Ultimately, while the visuals — along with Majidi’s sincere intentions — keep the film afloat, it never quite finds its footing. Heartrending one minute and heavy-handed the next, “Beyond the Clouds” is in equal parts beautiful and frustrating.

Certain twists will remain unspoiled, but “Never Let Go” should resonate with both horror junkies seeking fall escapism and parents looking to see their struggles visualized.

While Kelly’s faithful dramatization doesn’t offer a lot of fresh insights, and fizzles by the end, it remains an involving snapshot of two women grappling with their private and public personas until they collide.

As a whole, I Love You, Daddy belongs to C.K.’s own peculiar aesthetic, in that it’s brilliantly calibrated to captivate viewers and make them recoil at the same time.

The actor's pathos and deadpan skills are buried in the material, which also suffers from a continuous lack of inspiration. It's high-minded entertainment with low ambition.

If there is a valuable movie to be made in the wake of America’s most recent wave of mass shootings, Beast Beast offers only tantalizing hints of what it might look like. And yet Madden’s eye is nevertheless sharp enough to draw some blood; the kids are alright, they’ve just had the bad luck of being raised in a country that can’t seem to give a shit why so many of them don’t survive to become adults.

By the time “Old” is over, the strongest feeling it leaves us with is that it just got 108 minutes shorter.

It’s easy to get caught up in the lives and loves of the Supremes, and the warm-hearted spirit of the entire endeavor is contagious. We just wish there was a bit more time to savor it all.

If Arcand’s worldview hasn’t changed, his angle continues to grow more acute. Where The Decline of the American Empire focused on social ills, and “The Barbarian Invasions” was preoccupied with ideology, The Fall of the American Empire finds the 77-year-old Canadian legend turning his attention to the greatest moral catastrophe of our time: money.

Foster's suspenseful treatment of the material is fun to watch but not the dramatic statement its blaring tone would suggest.

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

Bay’s latest reeks of falsehood veiled as righteousness.

In theory, Election Year offers a form of catharsis from contemporary anxieties by turning them into entertainment. Instead, this latest entry in a ridiculous franchise has become a victim of its own sick joke.

There’s nothing scarier than things that go bump in the night, but the terror is easily dispelled once we turn on the light and see what’s really there. That’s the lesson of King’s story, but Savage’s adaptation fails to understand that there’s nothing more frightening than the unknown.

The whole Brit falls for an American trope has been done to death, and Love at First Sight doesn’t bring anything new to the genre. While Richardson turns in the best performance of the film, even that’s not enough to push Love at First Sight to higher rom-com heights.

Wendy doesn’t take the appeal of “Beasts” in a new direction, but it clarifies its strongest qualities. Zeitlin’s roving narrative techniques may have their limitations, but this spellbinding followup proves they still have juice. Everyone grows up, but the “Beasts” formula has yet to grow old.

Close to You is rife with real emotion, but the gap between vulnerability and meaning keeps everyone at arm’s length.

Hot Milk dribbles when it should feel crisper, less torpid, but that’s perhaps to match the inner decay of everyone onscreen, and the metastasis of the most interminable vacation ever known.

There’s no denying that Bill Melendez and his artists were the perfect marriage with Schulz’s delicate vision. The feature also tosses out little “they-didn’t-have-to-do-it-but-they-did-it-anyway” touches throughout.

And “Megalopolis” — in its most dazzling and audacious moment — breaks through the screen to bridge the gap between life and thought, art and reality.

In a better world, Aquaman would excel at delivering an ecological message to the masses. But all the fish in the sea can’t salvage a movie that refuses to go more than surface deep.

If you can vibe with that whiplash-inducing comedic opening — gallons of vomit mixed with some magical holiday sweetness — you just might be in the right frame of mind to receive what’s to come in this hyper-violent, occasionally funny, and often oddly charming holiday trifle.

For all the hundreds of thousands of dollars being thrown around, The Gambler is much closer to a friendly game of poker with some loquacious, quick-witted friends than a glimpse at the gambling world’s dark underbelly. Neither is it a preachy moral tale.

A downcast and thoroughly dreadful supernatural drama that somehow fails to mine even a moment of fun out of a cautionary tale premised on the idea that your smartphone might literally be a portal to hell.

For a film that explores how the way that we’re looked at can inform how we see — a film capable of knotting the beautiful and toxic aspects of that process together in a way that makes room for them both — Clementine is too prone to navel-gazing to leave a strong impression.

In its best moments, The Flash touches on something new and exciting, but too often, its the past that tugs on, keeping it from speeding ahead.

Lynskey’s performance insists that every scene — no matter how warped or incestuous — ultimately returns to the notion that relationships are a balancing act between change and acceptance.

It’s refreshing to see two stars who could have easily phoned it in for the rest of their careers push themselves to try new things. Even more thrilling, they really can sing!

Beloved never really earns its sprawling timeline, eventually getting bogged down with too many developments and overstaying its welcome. For a movie where people intermittently burst into song, the plot is oddly one-note.

Despite the good vibes and amiable callbacks to the previous film, “Zombieland: Double Tap” is only ever amusing when it’s breaking new ground. That just doesn’t happen nearly enough.

Promised Land can't help but preach its cause in obvious ways that continually hold back an otherwise well-acted, swiftly paced drama.

A nice enough time that never really aspires to be anything more, “Military Wives” isn’t just the kind of movie that ends with Sister Sledge’s “We Are Family,” it’s the kind of movie that ends with the entire cast singing along.

Trolls is a spectacularly empty fantasia of bad songs, bright lights, and militant happiness. But there’s no denying how well the film bludgeons you into submission when it gets into its groove.

While The Tobacconist is always watchable, its inability to find meaning in a mess of uncooked symbolism prevents the movie from being worthy of Freud, and from doing justice to his parting words.

It’s a decent Cliff’s Notes version of the narrative with glimmers of something far more fascinating. It just feels like Broomfield missed the point on saying anything ground-breaking.

There’s no question there is much to admire about both Vieira de Mello and Moura’s soaring portrayal of him, but it’s all buried under the weight of a biopic too afraid to really show the truth about a flawed world, and a flawed man who loved it.

Here and there, Minamata tells a bracing story of corporate malfeasance and bracing advocacy for the underclass, but even the occasional poignant observation can’t salvage a movie trying this hard to tug every heartstring at its disposal.

Loaded to the gills with thrill-inducing mayhem, Hobo with a Shotgun feels almost tribal in its commitment to violence.

There’s some fun to be had in the Brando-like flickers of Cage’s performance, but Polsky’s film is too practical and logic-driven to indulge them.

While this film definitely does not gain points for female empowerment, it can still be fun for kids with toy soldiers coming to life, a shrinking machine and a multitude of Mother Goose characters, including Little Bo-Peep and Willie Winkie.

It’s always been hard not to admire Hausner’s audacity, but this time around the boldness of her storytelling finally spills into trollish provocation.

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.

Wildcat is too tame in its portrayal of suffering to let its Catholic undertones sing or take powerful cinematic form, resulting in a work where paradoxes are half-baked dilemmas that seem too conveniently solved, and life itself is something that happens far off-screen.

Clouds keeps its focus squarely on the ground from start to finish, and it soars that much higher for it.

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.

While the understated approach Zhu brings to her debut feature is authentic, it also underplays even big, dramatic developments in Rebecca’s life. The result is a tiny thing you can hold in the palm of your hand, soft and delicate and mild.

While Redford frames the drama with a tense atmosphere, it doesn't shake the sense that we're watching a tame made-for-TV affair.

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.

With a star-studded cast, dazzling design, and thrilling dance numbers, The Prom is the best of what Murphy can offer Hollywood — a taste of the past with its eyes on the future.

It’s the work of a studio that’s gobbled up the rest of the film industry and is still hungry for more. The Lion King feels less like a remake than a snuff film, and a boring one at that.

The sequel remains charming, beautifully animated, and often incredibly funny, but there’s a sense that writer Brian Lynch realized Max’s story needed a lot more padding this time around.

It drifts by with all the force of a mild summer breeze, and — as is typical of Sachs’ jewel-like work — it leaves you feeling like you could have spent another 90 minutes with these characters. For better or worse, this one also leaves you feeling like Sachs could have spent another 90 minutes with these characters, too.

Despite its ludicrous turns, the movie benefits from the far-fetched events for its sheer willingness to go there, not unlike Smith's goofy, self-deprecating public persona.

As delightful as Levi and Rodriguez prove to be together, “Armageddon” thoroughly belongs to fresh faces Esterson and Carganilla, taking over for Daryl Sabara and Alexa PenaVega. The kids’ respective performances feel relatable, authentic, and above all, fun.

Light and inoffensive, it trades the intellectual rigor of Godard’s work for fluffy sentiments, but never gets crass. Above all else, it succeeds at transforming cinephile trivia into a genuine crowdpleaser.

Pleasant and preposterous in almost precisely equal measure, the film never offers anything less than two all-time British actors having the time of their lives, which makes it hard to get frustrated that it seldom offers anything more.

Despite a few stylistic inconsistencies, the conceit mostly works, but it helps that this time Nelson has rounded up a talented group of actors to play his troubled ensemble of characters.

There’s plenty of intrigue to the dissonance of a hard-rock lifestyle and Malick’s gentle touch, but much of the movie’s potential is overshadowed by the impulses of a director unwilling to get there.

Consequences thrums with a vibrant current — propelled by a dizzying churn of cigarettes, cocaine, fistfights, and shirtless young men — until arriving at its predictably explosive conclusion. The film’s perspective may be austere, but its heart is defiantly exuberant.

It’s a testament to Stone’s sensibilities — and to Barden’s performance — that you want to see these characters stretched out over the course of a 10-episode season, but it’s to the movie’s detriment that they feel so condensed here, various scenes just sloshing into each other without a clear sense of flow.

Fans of “The Raid” franchise will feel right at home, even if Mayhem! never approaches the operatic scale that made the fight scenes in those movies feel larger than life.

For better or worse, we’re on Tammy Faye’s side, but the film often embraces the worst bits of a complicated story in order to make Tammy Faye look better. Why not make her look more real, makeup and all? Chastain is always able to find that humanity, but The Eyes of Tammy Faye too often turns its attention to the wrong places.

With “Bardo,” Iñárritu delivers a cartoonishly indulgent film about the fact that he makes cartoonishly indulgent films — a rootless epic about a rootless man who’s been unmoored by his own self-doubt.