It's fascinating to watch Murray act circles around his existing appeal and play into it at the same time. Melfi's likable but utterly formulaic movie never rises to a similar level of ambition, which in this case actually works in its favor. It gives Murray room to play.

While there are some riches to be found under the surface for anyone who feels like watching this with a flow chart, Zhang is so clearly seduced by the spell of his own movie magic that everything else feels like an inadvertent side effect. He’s on his side, and he’ll forge whatever strategic alliances he needs to in order to stay there.

The more bizarre The Man Who Sold His Skin becomes, the less original it gets.

If The Villainess sounds like derivative junk, that’s because it is — but rarely is derivative junk executed with such panache and personality.

If Low Tide recedes all too fast, it still leaves behind a clear sense that life doesn’t always happen on schedule, and that the hardest part of growing up is figuring out what to share with people along the way.

It lacks the same constant surprises of last year's "Gravity" or the visual poetry of "Mad Max: Fury Road," but Kormákur's movie nonetheless marks the rare fusion of effective craftsmanship with focused storytelling.

It’s a return to form, and its all-encompassing storyline plays much like a shinier, more magnificent Christmas special.

Myers brings energy to his first film the way he brought it to his early comedy – a little too much.

Once The Traitor earns its title, the movie is overwhelmed by legal intrigue and mafia infighting, and flattened into a repetitive and somewhat impenetrable courtroom drama.

That sense of a story rendered incomplete, of answers we may never fully know, is at the heart of the Kowalskis’ story, but Roosevelt’s film is unable to square that with the constraints and demands of a feature film.

Gladiator II” wouldn’t be the first sequel to become bogged down in its resemblance to its forebear, but the various superficial modifications made to characterizations and action sequences operate under faulty bigger-is-better sequel logic.

A few structural issues threaten to tip the balance from cinematic melodrama into TV soap as the bad news keeps on coming, but Izadyar’s sustained emotional conviction carries the vision onwards.

But Nobody uses its boundaries as an asset. This giddy approach to action in place of story has held appeal ever since Wiley E. Coyote chased the Road Runner off a cliff, and Nobody lingers in a ludicrous plane that works in bite-sized pieces.

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.

Even after a superbly made two-hour-long documentary, Kuti keeps many of his secrets to himself.

Things grow a bit squidgy whenever Waugh goes in for the money shots, but his eyes are seldom bigger than his wallet in a film that mines little suspense from the Garritys’ far-fetched race to safety, and a lot from their scramble to reunite whenever they get separated.

As with all of Alverson’s movies, the hypnotic storytelling takes time to settle in and encourages viewers to ponder its enigmatic pathways, not all of which lead to satisfying places. Nevertheless, this somber and lyrical achievement is the warmest and most inviting work from a director who traffics in an acquired taste.

Always interesting, seldom enjoyable, and somehow both smothered and excessive at the same time (and at all times), this nearly three-hour bonfire of Searchlight Pictures’ annual budget is a towering monument to human love that betrays almost zero interest in actually being liked.

It runs too long and drags a bunch in its final third, but make no mistake: This is Spielberg’s biggest crowdpleaser in years, a CGI ride that wields the technology with an eye for payoff.

It’s frustrating that West often scores with his few modest attempts to stamp his own imprint on the genre, as those flashes of fun hint at what this movie could have been.

This unpolished film only runs for 70 minutes, but its reluctant subject — who repeatedly asks Arakawa why any of this is worth capturing on camera — unlooses enough despair to fill the pages of an epic Russian novel.

The Lodge seems more content to hover in the disquieting mood than make anything substantial out of it. ... As it continues along an aimless trajectory, The Lodge proves that even horrible events can be a deadly bore.

Internationally savvy gay film fans with a taste for the kinky and sad will want to check out this understated but occasionally quite graphic and sexy new work.

Cafe Society works about as a well as a decent-but-not-great Allen movie can.

Nymphomaniac is indeed a major work that tries and, to a large extent, succeeds to organically synthesize the world, ideas and filmmaking savvy of von Trier in one sprawling and ambitious cinematic fable. Somewhat shockingly given the subject matter, the most stimulating material in Nymphomaniac isn't the explicit sex but how sexuality is discussed and understood.

Clipped from the start and increasingly uncertain of its purpose as it fumbles toward the Trump we know, this origin story certainly isn’t as painful to watch as the future that it portends has been to endure, but it’s every bit as banal and unnecessary.

A terse and streamlined dad movie that’s shorter than a Sunday afternoon nap and just as exciting, Greyhound bobs across the screen like a nuanced character study that’s been entombed in a 2,000-ton iron casket and set adrift over the Atlantic.

A thin, dull, and by-the-numbers biography that fails to capture its subject’s irrepressible spirit or properly contextualize his importance.