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

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

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.

Ducournau has made a beautiful film about terrible horrors.

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.

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

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.

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.

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

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

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.

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

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

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

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.

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.

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.

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.

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

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.

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.

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.

This solid genre pic salutes its touchstones.

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.

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.

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.

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.