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.

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.

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 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.

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

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.

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

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

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.

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.

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.

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.

[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.

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.

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.

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.

This is the type of fantasy that admits its characters get sunburned and dirty and need to, er, use the bathroom. It takes a female director to allow her female star to be this un-vain. Amirpour would rather be bold than beautiful.

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.

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

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.

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

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.