As a movie, Black Mass often drowns its dramatic potential in a dreary atmosphere and grisly violence used to dubious effect. Depp, however, operates on another level.

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

Caught by the Tides” is by nature an imprecise film, tethered to the buoys that Jia has collected over the years and prone to drifting through time without any clear sense of where it might take it.

Radcliffe’s performance ensures that the movie is engaging from start to finish — like Letts, the lynchpin of his portrayal is in the confidence of his voice — but Ragussis is afraid to follow his lead actor down the rabbit hole.

As a platform for Bilot’s efforts and why they deserve a national profile, the movie has a sincere sense of purpose. It’s a 20-year-old drama that extends into the present, and as environmental concerns continue to escalate, it couldn’t feel more contemporary.

Drop works best in its nimblest moments, but ultimately we should have nothing but gratitude for a movie that has almost zero bloat and tells an effective, original story in 90 minutes, even if this sleek package is made up of some shopworn tropes.

It’s biopic syndrome, this impulse to condense events to hit the high notes, to provide fans with recognizable stories, to essentially act as a greatest hits album, and it sinks the second half of an otherwise compelling, funny and extremely entertaining film with a beat all its own.

Alas, the trouble with trying to capture a mercurial artist on such a legible canvas is that the attempt — no matter how sincere and self-aware it might be — can only do justice to its subject through its failure to see them clearly.

By giving the spotlight to an archetype usually relegated to the background, writer-director Jared Moshé puts a revisionist spin on the familiar oater, but everything else about The Ballad of Lefty Brown is by the book.

It’s a challenge to conclude a documentary on an ongoing and fast-evolving conflict. The news will continue to tally up the dead bodies and destroyed cities, from which the film refuses to allow us to distance our emotions. But where “Freedom on Fire” proves valuable isn’t in the brutality of the corpses but in the reminder that these are individual people being broken, and real families being torn apart.

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.

This kind of hushed, low-key story certainly wouldn’t be the most obvious place to start an epic, but it’s a captivating chunk of mood and personality begging for future chapters. Here’s hoping Bateman finds a way to tell them.

While frequently very funny and sustained by a pair of boldly unlikable female protagonists, Fort Tilden adopts the glorious stupidity of its stars, and echoes their gratingly obnoxious temperaments.

Every scene is relaxedly suffused with the tension between the limits of perspective and the empathy of storytelling, until the act of seeing becomes as problematized as the refusal to look, and the boundaries between reality and fiction grow as blurred as those between the various genres that Gavagai swirls into an unclassifiable sludge.

Great horror movies should feel unsafe, but this one just leaves you feeling beaten down.

At its best, Prevenge feels like a hilarious distillation of every conflicted, politically incorrect thought that many pregnant women are too polite to share in public.

Part origin story of the Mystery, Inc. team (Scooby-Doo and the rest of them, for newbies), part Hanna-Barbera homage, the animated feature is a charming enough diversion that adds to the appeal of the original show.

It’s an enticing challenge for the writer-director to develop a stylish mood piece out this flimsy material, adapted from a Jonathan Ames novella as a series of textured moments. The movie is an elegant homage to a mold of scrappy detective stories that often collapses into a concise pileup of stylish possibilities.

The Last Shift is told with a light touch that allows the film to sneak up on you, and even its most painful moments are softened by heartrending solidarity.

Using the hyper-gendered spaces of college Greek life as a fertile palette, Takal and her co-writer April Wolfe skewer toxic masculinity, the white male literary canon, rape culture, patriarchy, and white male rage — all wrapped up with a bow in the stylishly entertaining package of a studio-backed holiday horror.

While the beats are familiar and even a film about animated pigeons can’t quite break out of the tropes that have long defined the spy film genre, it’s the kind of sweetly demented late-December diversion that should entertain plenty of holiday-weary families.

Kendrick’s image as an actor isn’t necessarily tied to dark, edgy material, but as a director she shows a talent for staging scenes of Hitchcockian suspense alongside her signature wit.

Though this thriller is packed with memorable characters, the diner itself might be its greatest.

The Taiwan Oyster manages to be consistently engaging despite its flaws.

Rodrigo Plá's intermittently engaging A Monster With a Thousand Heads is unique for how it captures the urgency of a system that's designed to frustrate and confuse people into helplessness.

As directed by Marjane Satrapi, this discursive biopic struggles whenever it cuts away from her drama to explore the bigger picture — with peculiar flash-forwards to a nuclear future — but Pike helps fuse it together.

Spurred on by its murky spectacle — and a third-act twist that raises the stakes in a very enjoyable way — Underwater always seems like it’s about to drown in its own narrative disinterest, and yet it somehow finds a way to keep moving forward.

Moverman’s discordant structure constantly veers from clumsy moments to fascinating exchanges. As an experiment, it never finds a complete shape, and ends on a frustratingly abrupt note.