These portraits don't have a hint of didacticism or preachiness, but "Ex Libris" achieves a certain emotional velocity all the same.

Not only is Three Billboards Outside of Ebbing, Missouri the director’s most accomplished film yet, it’s also his most compassionate.

Lady Bird is both snarky and sincere — a touching, markedly feminine ode to growing up that never takes its familiarity for granted. Gerwig earns the ability to make this rite-of-passage saga her own.

Despite the focus on such a fertile period, it suffers from a meandering narrative and a jarring pace, particularly as it pushes on into his later years without bothering to age star Nicholas Hoult in the slightest.

At times, the movie excels at portraying the dread of children forced to confront a world indifferent to their concerns. But no matter how many times Pennywise leaps out from unexpected places, it’s impossible to shake the feeling that we’ve been here many times before.

It’s an amenable enough ramble of a romantic comedy, and Witherspoon is as charming as ever in the genre in which she excels.

mother! begins as a slow-burn and builds towards a furious blaze. Awash in both religious and contemporary political imagery, Darren Aronofsky’s allusive film certainly opens itself to a number of allegorical readings, but it also works as a straight-ahead head rush.

An undeniably entertaining watch, Suburbicon stumbles when it tries to recycle effective old ingredients into something new.

It’s a deliciously unsubtle testament to the power of words and their infinite capacity to inspire.

This is a film that admires — even awes at — Billie Jean King, but it doesn’t share her commitment to the game. If anything, it has more in common with Riggs than it should, moving with the sluggishness of a player who underestimates their opponent.

Kill Me Please is as much a teen movie as it is a horror movie, vacillating between the genres in such a way that you’re reminded from one scene to another how similar the two really are.

Love makes people do crazy things, and as overwrought and silly as Tulip Fever is in both execution and aim, the film embodies that sentiment in an unexpectedly compelling manner. It’s unfortunate that it takes 107 minutes to get there, but a final twist offers the film’s sole play for emotional resonance.

There’s something ineffably beautiful about such a purehearted folly, even if a Herzogian drama about the making of Loving Vincent might have more to offer than the film does itself.

Human Flow is an epic portrait of mass migration that understands how a lack of empathy often stems from a failure of imagination.

Not only is The Shape of Water one of del Toro’s most stunningly successful works, it’s also a powerful vision of a creative master feeling totally, joyously free.

Downsizing is rife with witty visual touches and inspired comic premises but never quite comes together as fully successful whole.

The movie is weighed down by too many secondary characters, which only serve to dissipate their flickering charms. No one in the film, even our heroine, gets more than a hint of backstory as the single-minded plot careens toward its predictable conclusion.

Jan Hřebejk’s The Teacher is a sardonic, richly seriocomic morality play that uses a delicate touch to explore why communism never seems to work out in the long run.

Red Christmas rarely deals in gore for gore’s sake in its early going. By the end, however, it becomes such an exercise in sensibility-testing brutality that any message about the fragility of the family unit is as murky as the cinematography.

Equal parts journalistic investigation and family portrait, Ford’s delicate project transforms the source of his frustrations into an absorbing cinematic elegy.

A handsome little biopic that’s sopping wet with the same clichés that its whiny hero so adamantly disavows, Mark Gill’s England Is Mine distills the early days of one Steven Patrick Morrissey into an anonymous coming-of-age story that — if not for its keen sense of place — could really be about any mopey white boy whose talents are dulled by torpor.

The only reason to take such a uniquely Japanese story and transplant it to Seattle is to explore how its thorny moral questions might inspire different answers in an American context, so for this retread to all but reduce America to its whiteness indicates an absence of context more than anything else. It’s the most glaring symptom of a film that utterly fails to investigate its premise.

Raw and compelling from its poetic opening shot to its gut-punch finale, Gook doesn’t always find the best way to express itself, but it knows what needs to be said, and it knows that words can lose their meaning in a conversation where so many people are denied their own voice.

The film has just about enough going on around its anti-hero to sustain the interest and land its punchline, and there are signs Liman (a Cruise veteran since “Edge of Tomorrow”) is solving the enduring problem of making a Cruise film that’s not wholly about its leading man.

The plot ends in a place that feels honest and true, but it gets lost in a kind of narrative no-man’s land on its way there.

A half-assed action-comedy that lacks the courage to commit to its own premise.

A spare and unflinching documentary about the true cost of cheap textiles, Machines doesn’t tell us anything we don’t already know about the inhumane work conditions in countries like India, but it forces us to become palpably familiar with the awful facts of the matter.

Both introspective and entertaining, Betts never forgets that her young nuns are still teenage girls, and Novitiate rings as true as any other film about coming of age.