At times, Wonder Woman feels like watching Splash with a shield — another babelicious naïf breaking all the rules. Yet the joke isn't on her. It's on all the men mistaking unsophistication for weakness. To be uncultured is to be mentally free; no one's put on a yoke. That's what makes Wonder Woman a knockout.

Scott still has a talent for lovely details... He's always used awe as a tool. Scott's art direction is so precise we assume he also obsessed over the script. Surely a spectacle like this has gotta mean something. Like the intelligent-design argument, his eye is too advanced to be an accident.

Lee is credited as a director for filming a live performance of Rodney King on an outdoor stage in New York. But Lee mostly seems to have loaned Smith his brand name to get the monologue attention. He doesn't leave a fingerprint on the play, and didn't care about where to put the cameras. The angles make no sense; the edits are clumsy.

Casting JonBenét, my favorite film at this year's Sundance, shows a director in full control.

Dillard's not interested in the Zing! Pow! Bam! Sleight is quiet, almost naturalistic, even when Bo is stopping bullets with his bare hand. To Dillard, none of this is cool.

Instead of a thrilling climax, he chooses to let the story evaporate into the Amazon fog. Yet this odd film left a chill in my bones that I'll be thinking about all summer.

Colossal has no patience for piety or punishment. Even when Gloria gets punched in the face, the film refuses to sob. Instead, it's oddly heroic.

Like life itself, the film is unemotional and cruel. It hides its own nihilism behind grotesqueries that force the audience's stomachs to clench. We can't help feeling things. After all, we, too, are just collections of cells, and Espinosa plays our nervous system like a flamenco guitar in concert with head-pounding drums and nauseous trombones.

Ducournau has made a beautiful film about terrible horrors.

Kong: Skull Island is an offering to the hungry mouths at the multiplex who want to cheer a movie that doesn't insult, or tax, their intelligence.

The film doesn't trust Deutch to complete the full redemption arc from sinner to saint, which is, you know, the point of the script. She's a marshmallow from minute one, and that's a shame because Deutch is capable of being a real pistol.

Logan is the rare action flick in which the quiet moments are as compelling as any of the fights.

Peele is so attuned to the tiny ways race sneaks into conversations that we hear it in every line. Our suspicions are so heightened, we start to second-guess our own senses.

The Great Wall doesn't have the lunacy that made last year's Gods of Egypt a hoot. Zhang can't kick his craving for respectability, even if he's making a movie that flips the middle finger at historicity.

What lingers is Kedi’s awareness that the city is alive.

In the first film, his rhythmic overkills felt brutal. Here, they're more like a dance, and the best bits of the movie have a lightness that made me giggle with delight.

The movies aren't so bad they're good. They're so brilliantly bad they're genius, with Foley dutifully presenting every inane plot point while gifting us excuses to laugh.

With The LEGO Batman Movie, a shiny, irresistible delight, blockbuster flicks have perfected their ideal form.

The Space Between Us has admirable ambition, even though none of it works. Sure, the romance is a bust and the script is a howl. Yet every so often, Butterfield becomes infatuated with a new earth treasure...and for a moment, the film reminds us that there are things on this planet worth risking your life for.

It’s hard to spend time with Jackie, and Hackford doesn’t make a convincing case as to why we should. Instead, the script attempts to justify his bitterness by lowering the rest of the world to his level.

It's possible to watch Silence and see a story about saints martyred by an oppressive government. It's also possible to see a told-you-so parable about imperialists who should have stayed home. I suspect Scorsese would be a little disappointed by either conclusion. But he stays quiet because he wants to challenge the audience to go deeper inside themselves, to separate our own religion (or lack of one) from the faith that guided us to it.

Split has to satisfy both audiences that believe in trigger warnings and the camp crowd that just wants to see McAvoy pull the trigger. And so, Shyamalan trickily asks us to redefine victimhood.

We’re stuck with Hancock’s vanilla saga about a soulless businessman who failed until he won big, a story that might have worked in the cynical ’90s but today has a moral obligation to say something with its two-hour running time.

[Davis's] insistence on shaking hands and showing respect — the opposite of the behavior you see on Twitter — patiently chips away at their preconceptions about race. It's like he's trying to carve the Lincoln Memorial with a scalpel.

Live by Night loses energy whenever Sienna Miller’s not around. She makes this world with its showdowns about machismo and machine guns seem fresh, instead of the same old antler clashes.

It’s candied history. The timeline is all wrong, the soundtrack is too cheery, the movie is too eager to please. Yet at the end, I found myself tearing up anyway.

Barry's questions are powerful whether asked by a future president or a future janitor. The script is great no matter who it's about — it's just that fewer curiosity-seekers would give it a watch were it about someone else.

Edwards and the screenwriters have designed Rogue One around applause breaks for cameos and callbacks. We’ve all lost the point of the franchise. Audiences once packed theaters to gawk at the future; now, it’s to soak in the past.

Pablo Larraín's Jackie is an elegy to two slandered traits: self-consciousness and superficiality.

If only the script measured up to the craft. La La Land gives us no reason to root for Mia and Seb’s romance, except for its blithe assurance that you will because you loved Stone and Gosling together in Crazy, Stupid, Love.

At Lonergan's best, he turns the sounds of Patrick's home into its own claustrophobic, percussive sympathy.

It's thrillingly, fiercely female. It takes the same neighborhood-boy-turns-hoodlum story we've seen for a century and simply flips the script.

No Iraq movie has better captured our country’s nationalistic nonsense, and the inner chaos of the men and women returning home to this noise.

Bad Santa 2 doesn't hate Christmas. It just hates women.

At a time when judgment and self-righteousness outrank forgiveness and empathy, Nadine is the heroine we need.

Adams’s clear-eyed, open-minded doctor forces us to ask how much we’re willing to communicate.

Newt lacks soul. So, too, does his movie.

Negga, an Ethiopian-born, Irish-raised Hollywood newcomer, gives an Oscar-worthy performance. She's so still and powerful, she gives the film a depth the script doesn't earn. I can't think of the film without thinking of her gaze, and I can't think of that gaze without admiring the film more than it deserves.

The Love Witch, by writer/director Anna Biller, is a feminist film about a character who thinks feminism is bad news. It's delightful.

For the first time, a Marvel movie draws that pencil line from dream to screen. Where the earlier films felt hard and shiny and steel-colored — the look of bashing action figures on a sidewalk — Strange is ink-smudged and obsessive. It's defiantly old-school — not the cozy, apple-scented nostalgia of the first Captain America film, but that cold, back-of-the-library whiff of eraser nubs and mold.

When it was all over, I found myself googling Dante for my own clue as to what I’d just suffered: “He who knows most grieves most for wasted time.”

Park Chan-wook’s The Handmaiden is a jaw-dropping, pulse-quickening mash-up.

Jenkins has made something astonishing: a film with immaculate craft that, at the same time, feels spontaneous, even tentative, as if it could panic that it’s revealed too much and close the curtains.

It’s a hero story for wonks and scientists, people who spend their days surrounded by dry-erase boards inked with numbers and grids and yet go to work in a jumpsuit, their faces smeared with muck.

The film is polite when it should be wicked — it’s melodrama that thinks it’s saving lives, like it drank too much chardonnay and convinced itself that since Gone Girl almost got an Oscar, maybe it can, too. That tonal muck prevents the film from going in any direction.

The direction is so heavy-handed that it feels like Parker is afraid audiences don’t know slavery is wrong. Or maybe that truth is all he’s comfortable using Nat Turner to say.

When no one is making believable choices, who cares who’s human? It’s all just lines of script.

Tom Hanks is so quietly compelling that he gives the film an illusion of depth.

Don’t Breathe is a small delight, like stumbling across a shiny silver dollar.

Phillips has made a copy of a copy, a brotastic toast to capitalism that steals from all the other movies that stole from Scarface and Goodfellas.

Like most coming-of-age flicks, Morris From America tries too hard to make friends. At least its scenes of unearned triumph are balanced by embarrassing bits that hit emotional bullseyes. It’s so likable I wondered if I was a sap for enjoying it, so I watched it again and liked it more.

Fegley’s heartbreaking performance is fused onto a marshmallow. Lowery overcompensates for the darkness in the script by making everything else soft and squishy.

This solid genre pic salutes its touchstones.

Sausage Party is ballsy and dumb and brilliant all in one bite.

Yes, Nine Lives is dumb. Yes, it’s for very young kids. Yes, Lil Bub has a cameo. And yes, I giggled anyway.

Instead of focusing on the squad in the title — the chemistry the audience wants to see — Ayer doubles down on the usual DC tics: dark fights, a humdrum dependence on guns and fists, a cynical everyone-sucks grasp of politics, and sudden rain showers that people ignore. It’s moody and mindless, an angry toddler screaming over his parents’ classic rock mix of The Rolling Stones, The Animals, and a 14-year-old song from Eminem.

I've rarely seen so much effort for so little thrill.

Bad Moms is a retro throwback that proves girl comedies can rage as hard — and as mindlessly — as any dumb all-dude giggler.

Though Roberts is miscast as a wallflower — seriously, the film expects us to believe a jock in her class would dismiss the mannequin-perfect beauty as “not my type” — Nerve taps into the rush of realizing strangers think you’re cool.

Freed from reality, Lin turns into a kid gifted a box of markers and glitter: Everything is manic and distracting. There’s a cool swoosh where the lens surfs behind the Enterprise as it accelerates through a tube, but mostly the tricks are garish.

It’s all a little slow and stoic and familiar.

Café Society is a light-fingered, backstabbing trifle. Despite the occasional sour zinger, the film is so retro golden that old-timey miners would run the reels through a sieve.

Spielberg can’t fix The BFG’s strange second act.

DeMonaco makes small choices I admire. For once, no woman gets threatened with rape. Instead, ladies seem to be the aggressors, and as we cruise the streets of D.C. we see wives stabbing and incinerating husbands, or dancing around a tree strung with male corpses.

As much as I enjoyed this bizarre, ambitious adventure and its careful popcorn kitsch, Tarzan’s story will always leave our ears ringing with something we hate, whether you choose Burroughs’s white-savior syndrome or Christoph Waltz’s shivery final speech: “The future belongs to me.”

The dialogue is dense and quick and brainy.

Where Dory was saccharine, Pets is anarchic. It’s the difference between Mickey Mouse and Looney Tunes or The Muppets, where crazy creatures take aim at each other with cannons. That sense of play infects the animation, which favors fun over photo-realism.

The big CG sequences are less captivating than simply watching the four ladies kick it with a pizza. Wiig and McCarthy nestle into their comfortable roles as the soft-spoken priss and the bustling madwoman, leaving room for Jones to barge in with her big punch lines. But keep your eyes on the background. That’s where Jones’s Saturday Night Live costar McKinnon lurks, quietly transforming herself into a movie star.

Frankie and Johnny as a movie isn’t a first chance love story, or a second chance or a third. This is a film about two lonely people who have spent so long trying to find someone to connect with and who have been disappointed so often that it seems like maybe connection isn’t worth the effort anymore.