While the film’s time-loop premise does engage with the usual themes of appreciating every moment and the preciousness of life, it also ties the concept to the scientific method in a way that feels fresh and interesting.

I’ve seen Julia Louis-Dreyfus bring more pathos to Old Navy commercials than she’s given the chance to wield as de Fontaine.

The madeline-like specificity of this memory-driven story is its greatest strength, even if it relies on a rusty structure of nested flashbacks in order to reach the past.

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

As slickly paced as a big-studio espionage movie, it nearly succeeds as a pure adrenaline-rush thriller. In the end, the problem isn't that there's too much plot, but rather a certain dramatic illogic.

It’s a breathless ending, but the juice hardly feels worth the squeeze by the dying minutes of a noble failure that trims all of the trappings off of the slasher genre until there’s nothing left but a monster, an old mask, and — in Nash — a seriously promising talent who could use a little bit more to work with next time.

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.

No matter how absorbing its individual scenes, however, The Hateful Eight is often hindered by Tarantino's confidence in the material. For every gripping sequence, there's an abrupt development or undercooked throwaway line.

The root of evil in The Blackcoat’s Daughter isn’t particularly original or deep, but the movie’s twisty plot and eerie atmosphere makes it deeply unsettling anyway.

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.

Basic yet enraging ... it shines a harsh light at one of the greatest evils of our time with all the panache of a "Dateline" special.

It’s the brilliance with which Erradi performs, especially in the musical sequences, and the touching portrait of a woman pursuing her art despite the world seemingly conspiring against her to do so, that sustain and invigorate the film.

Radwanski’s Toronto-set story isn’t quite a linear, didactic affair drama either, but rather, uses its characters as points of rumination on the present, and its fragile nature, embodied by two people with a complicated past and, most likely, no real future.

Although made up of many mesmerizing moving parts, “Harvest” ends up as feeling less than the sum of these. There are sparks of what makes an Athina Rachel Tsangari film great within this impressionistic period fable, even if — unlike the fires that bookend the film — it never fully takes the blaze.

It’s a playful movie in form and content, one that rarely takes itself too seriously, and as such, it can’t help but skate by as a pleasurable ride, whether through allowing Hoffman, Woodall and Liu space to trade quips, or through snappy editing when entering a new location.

While it might feel callous to belabor the rushed and scattershot editing of a documentary that pushed through so many difficulties to exist at all, the circumstances that compromise the film are also the same ones that conspire to make it such an affecting tribute to Nicks’ daughter, a fitting testimony to the perseverance of her entire generation, and a satisfying capstone to a project that has always stressed the need for people in a community to recognize each other’s pain.

When Lindon isn’t at the mercy of her but-I’m-a-teenager ruse, Spring Blossom and its filmmaker get a chance to show off some real creative sparks, including a trio of musical numbers that offer cinematic style and emotional flair.

Wootliff cuts away everything other than the raw nerves that are left exposed, creating a film more elemental than narrative.

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.

As a cinematic achievement, “Bikram” is fairly tame; as a mass-media call to action, it’s an essential movie of the moment.

With his unusually accomplished directorial debut Childhood of a Leader, Corbet delivers a strange and startling film that reflects the unique trajectory of his career, as well as the influence of the iconoclastic directors with whom he’s already worked.

The film’s low-key approach to a tragic media scandal feels at once timely and old-fashioned — a character study from another era designed to comment on our own.

While Poser works up to a somewhat predictable ending, the details and ideas that get us there are fascinating and unique.

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

American Animals is fiercely entertaining from start to finish, even when its characters are acting so dumb that you start to suspect they still have some more evolving to do.

Set in a single location with a cast of five, the movie offers a lesson in minimalist drama, unfolding as a sharply acted mood piece that never crescendos, but hums along with wise observations and first-rate performances.

With high points that are sharp and low points that are nonsensical, Leave the World Behind never ceases to be entertaining.

Watching “Popstar,” there’s no getting around one stubborn truth about this frequently hilarious movie: The incident that may have inspired it was also the incident that rendered it unnecessary.