As with much of Soderbergh's avant-garde work, his garde isn't quite as avant as he would have us believe it is. Still, Soderbergh's jazzed stylistics can be smartly entertaining. Without them, an uneven movie like Traffic might seem more of a mélange than it already is.

Apart from scenes with Leslie Mann as a mother who propagates the wisdom of The Secret (she’d be too heavy-handed for a Disney Channel sitcom), The Bling Ring is enjoyable. And it’s always easy on the eyes.

So here, in the year of our lord 2019, comes Five Feet Apart, and if it ends up being a late entry in the trend, it wouldn’t be a bad one to go out on.

Cutler’s onscreen interactions with Stewart, as well as occasional forays into the way she treats the people around her, turn the picture into something a lot slippier and the subject into someone more captivating.

By continually interrupting the sequences of the adult couple with scenes of the young pair, Eyre shatters the emotional power of Dench and Broadbent.

This could all easily get tiresome quite quickly, but the director has a light touch thanks to his poppy, direct style — colorful close-ups, broad line deliveries, simple cuts.

The cluttered story and the shifts in form might lose you from time to time, but the film conjures some genuinely powerful emotions.

It’s a time-filler, not a time-waster. It’s a film of simple pleasures — but they are pleasures.

Tomas is the film’s most captivating element as well as its limiting factor because it’s only possible to bear so much time in his company. It’s a testament to Rogowski’s performance that Tomas’s appeal remains apparent despite his behavior, that his gravitational pull is understandable even as you long for the others to escape it.

Being the hero of the story has never looked so poisoned, and that alone is thrilling enough to hope Villeneuve gets to make part two of this impressively batshit venture.

What’s on display here is a great actor at his absolute peak — damn it all.

James Franco’s adaptation of the sick little Cormac McCarthy period novel Child of God is surprisingly pretty good.

I think the movie works best if you know the original and have a taste for goofy revisionism.

So what makes The Brink so different from just another platform for this professional troll? Though Klayman sticks to a largely vérité approach of following her subject around and observing his various interactions, she also provides important context.

The film is an unshowy but slick underdog sports picture, fluidly told and elegantly mounted. It’s about rowing, for chrissakes; it doesn’t have a post-modern or irreverent bone in its body, and for that, we can be at least a little grateful.

“He’s probably the only man in history who has become famous for trying to kill himself,” says Johnny Carson as he introduces Knievel in a clip from The Tonight Show. As the film makes clear, Evel often bore out that tension in his acts, and it slowly, subtly ate away at him.

An outlandishly entertaining mixture of high silliness and high style.

Does Rocky Balboa deliver? Weirdly enough, it does: I was jumping out of my seat during Rocky's bout. If you close your eyes and try to halve your IQ--aim for something between a baboon and a lemur--you might even think it's a masterpiece.

More than anything, Aline feels like a kamikaze act of wish fulfillment, wildly indulgent but so deeply committed to what it’s doing that it can’t help but be compelling.

It feels like a fist that won’t close, its elements never intentionally coming together.

The most interesting parts of this baggy, inevitably indulgent, and often spectacular work find him grappling with the idea of putting himself onscreen versus adapting part of his life into the stuff of a movie.

The set pieces, such as an unmasked Spider-Man trying to stop a runaway subway car, are furiously scary, and compensate for all the icky mooning and moping that Peter does whenever he's questioning his gift, which is most of the time.

One of the films best visual treats are its alebrijes, the colorful fantastical creatures from Mexican folk art, rendered here as electrically colored lizards and gryphons that seem to pop off the screen even without the aid of 3-D.

Lowery — who made A Ghost Story and The Green Knight, and whose last film was a live-action Peter Pan remake that Disney shunted directly to streaming — is too compelling a stylist and has too earnest a heart for what he’s made to be easily shrugged off.

Kingsman is full of elaborately orchestrated violence and acrobatic stunt work, shot in fast, sinewy, CGI-enhanced long takes that push and pull our perspective this way and that. It’s all very silly and not really meant to be taken seriously, but as the story gets more and more brutal, something strange happens: We start to care for these cartoonish characters and this absurd scenario.

The dialogue of Alien: Covenant is often clunky and its plot repetitious. (As usual these days, there are too many climaxes.) But it’s scary and splatterful, which is all it really needs to be. It holds you.

Tends to settle for easy, homiletic insights. But it also has a collection of first-rate performances by some marvellous actresses.

The whole movie-making story line is the most fun part of A New Era and gives Fellowes, who wrote the script, and director Simon Curtis an opportunity to do what Downton Abbey has always done best: explore class distinctions and how those boundaries are constantly changing.

It’s a logical expansion, another exercise in big-league capitalism from an artist who has used pizza boxes and UPS trucks as promotional platforms. But it’s also a showcase for the pen and pain that animate Swift’s finest compositions, the fuel that keeps the pistons in her well-oiled business apparatus pumping year after year.

The movie has absorbed its actor’s vibe. It looks great, and it ambles along pleasantly, rarely veering too far into the dramatic or the emotional; moments of tension or insight are often defused with a laugh or some other odd narrative distraction. But by the end, it gets you anyway.

The picture may not fully cohere, but it has an infectious energy all its own. The Harder They Fall is a mess, but it’s a fun mess.

Borat 2 may not hit quite as many shocking comic highs as the first Borat, but it probably coheres more as a film — ironic, given that it appears to have been written, produced, and edited in record time, during a global crisis — and it also manages to walk a fine line between offense and revelation.

A test of an actor is playing someone who’s split in so many ways that he moves forward while looking backwards and vice versa, and Chalamet is already a master.

My Cousin Rachel is a fascinating hybrid. It uses clunky devices out of a 19th-century melodrama, but its subject is modern: mistakes of perception and of metaphor. It’s about the myopia of the male gaze.

Barry Levinson’s political and media satire Wag the Dog goes as fast as the wind, and that’s a relief because the idea behind the movie is thin. Very thin -- and at times offensively glib.

The hang-loose grodiness of these films has its charms, and the Ray-Banned team of Will Smith and Tommy Lee Jones, at its best, is good vaudeville.

It plays like a movie-length bout of aversion therapy aimed at our instinctive fondness for motor-mouthed strivers with Mikey’s every small victory creating more dread.

It’s sensational in the open air and subtle in smaller, enclosed spaces. It has sweep and intimacy. And, yes, we need this movie now.

For all its stridency, Dinosaur 13 isn’t looking to mobilize us or get us to think hard about these issues. It just wants to tell its wild, one-of-a-kind tale in the most engaging way possible, and it does that exceptionally well.

It starts off as a mess, yes, but eventually finds itself in a very poignant place. Even a lesser Terry Gilliam film is usually more engaging and invigorating than most of the other movies out there.

Agrelo steers clear of the straight-up hagiography that plagues so many docs framed as tributes to their subjects.

This new It has more on its mind, and gives more body and voice to King’s ideas of childhood anxieties and the corrosive power of fear.

Costner is always at his best when he’s a little ornery, and Duvall is the same way. His grizzled performance is so thoroughly in character that he even chews as if it were 1882.

Cold Mountain has some marvelous, intimate moments and a real feeling, at times, for the loss that war engenders, but it also has more than its share of hokum--which would be more entertaining if the hokum were juicier.

In the scenes between Hanks and Newman, we get glimpses of greatness.

Hoppers is a fun, modest little movie with enough zip and charm to keep kids engaged, and as such, one doesn’t want to criticize it too much. But the memory of what Pixar once was, the behemoth that redefined animation for multiple generations, may still make us wonder where all that energy and originality and artistry went.

It’s a real transformation. I’ve never heard this diction from her (Michelle Williams) before — sharp, with a hint of North Shore (i.e., old money) Long Island and perhaps a Kennedy or two. (The real Gail grew up in San Francisco but was well acquainted with the cadences of the East Coast rich.) Through the tension in her body and intensity of her voice, Williams conveys not just the terror of losing a son but the tragic absurdity of bearing the illustrious name Getty when family ties confer zero power.

It’s a messier film than Get Out, in that it never quite gets around to saying the things it’s trying to say. This is not entirely a bad thing; its messiness allows the film to spend more time working up inventive scares than conveying an all-caps complete-sentence message.

I’d liked him to have asked the judge specifically about the MySpace girl, whose case led to his comeuppance. But it’s a huge story, and Kids for Cash provides a measure of justice.

Mother and Child is suffused with grief and loss. It’s also suffused with compassion and insight.

You don’t have to be a moralist to see the tragedy of Scotty Bowers’s life. You only have to have an eye for things that don’t fit comfortably. Tyrnauer has that, as well as the compassion not to probe too deeply. What’s onscreen is enough to make you conclude that you can’t make people truly happy without fixing the world.

Mowgli: Legend of the Jungle is a more troubled beast, the surly goth teen of the Kipling remake pack, with maybe a touch of pyromania and an alarming fondness for blood. Its edges are rougher, and its animation isn’t quite as jaw-dropping. But it’s also beautiful in its own phantasmagoric way.

Elaine Stritch: Shoot Me is one of those showbiz docs that’s not exactly pleasurable but offers a penetrating glimpse — sometimes too penetrating — into what it means to eat, drink, and be contrary in the public sphere.

Tori and Lokita is a film born of rage and frustration, and as such, it’s a moving one. But it’s fair to expect more than just rage from artists — especially our greatest and most empathetic ones.

Perhaps the greatest gift of Maria by Callas that gives it an advantage over so many recent biographical music documentaries is how willing it is to let its subject just perform, uninterrupted.

Sing Sing may be an awkward chimera of a film, combining vibrant source material with synthetic attempts to serve as a star vehicle, but its insistence on the healing capacity of art is enough to soften the hardest of hearts.

While it’s broadly predictable in all the usual ways, Creed II admirably toys with our emotional allegiances just enough that we’re not always sure of how we feel about where it’s all headed.

Operation Filmmaker doesn't quite shake out as a microcosm of the American-Iraq relationship, although Davenport cheekily toys with the conceit. But the movie is endlessly resonant.

As an honest look into relationships, it's a bust. As a straight-up comedy, though, it’s hilarious.

This winning coming-of-age comedy understands that, when you’re 13 years old, the world really does feel like it could end if you’re not able to wear the dress of your dreams to your bat mitzvah, or if, God forbid, your crush expresses interest in someone other than you.

Like "Bridesmaids," it makes no more promises than an actual night out: These people will be there, and the goal is to have a good time. And while it may not quite have the undergirding pathos of the former, Girls Trip is a very good time.

iIsn't really much more than a funny, touching little squiggle, but it has a bracing honesty and pays particular heed to the betweenness in people's lives, to how much goes on when nothing seems to be going on at all.

The beauty of Obvious Child is that there’s nothing obvious about it.

The final scenes are wrenching. The final shot is happy and sad and strange and awful and very hopeful. As I said, it depends on your vantage.

To watch director Justin Lin, who returned for F9 and the two subsequent films that will close the series out, wind things back to the start is to feel blessed relief that this improbably good gearhead daddy-issues opera may very well stick its landing.

Crudup, whose features have the appropriate delicacy, plays Ned with complete conviction; it’s difficult to imagine anyone else succeeding as well.

And yes, it’s all insanely, relentlessly gory. You could say (and some will) that the gratuitousness of the violence in The Raid 2 is a problem. But it all functions as part of the surreal dance of death.

Women deserve their own gross-out movies, and, in Wetlands, the punk force is strong. If your taste runs thataway, you should see it in a theater with one eye on the audience — and hope that a few people will think they’re going to see a documentary about threatened ecosystems. Talk about all wet!

The Sonic movies have built their success on mixing light doses of Gen-X nostalgia with shiny, sparkly, speedy CGI action, and this new entry has that in spades. But for all their swiftness, the fights and chases in these pictures tend to have a predetermined quality; it can sometimes feel like watching someone else play a video game. That’s why giving the characters some shading helps.

Freaky Friday gives Curtis the chance to go all goofy and showcase her gift for splayed physical comedy.

There’s not much wrong with the movie on its own terms. But there’s nothing great about it, either. It doesn’t have the breathless exuberance, the highs, of Spielberg’s best “escapist” work, maybe because everything is so filtered, so arm’s length.

The film’s conclusion leaves a lot to be desired, which is unfortunate given how well it weaves its atmosphere and small ensemble together.

Smulders’s performance makes Unexpected more than worthwhile.

Nothing in Trophy shakes out neatly, because everyone onscreen has his or her own set of values and every value is in conflict. The movie is richer in every way for its tangled sympathies. It will leave you angry, sick, and confused — but not smug. Never smug.

Everest may disappoint those looking for a more awe-inspiring film with big vistas and jaw-dropping stunts and acts of surreal heroism. Unlike many mountain-disaster stories, this is the kind that makes you never want to look at a mountain again.

It delivers the goods, thanks to Washington’s performance and Fuqua’s zest for going graphic.

A prime piece of whirlybird filmmaking, and the technique saps what might have been a powerful experience.

A charming, funny, reactionary mating comedy.

Apostle is ultimately an absorbing, horrifying movie that’s maybe not as smart as it wants to be. But it is a lot stranger, and more disturbing, than you might expect.

In spite of the somewhat-cheesy climax, I came away admiring Unsane.

It’s intermittently very funny. But it doesn’t make the existential leap to the big screen, and it doesn’t have the density of gags or the lunatic free-association of the best episodes.

Clever novelist and screenwriter Alex Garland makes a half-dandy directorial debut with Ex Machina, a sci-fi film that — like much of his work — fakes excitingly in the direction of breaking new ground before turning formulaic so fast.

It may not always succeed, but the lovely, perplexing Winter Sleep is a very personal film from one of the world’s foremost filmmakers. It’s well worth your time.

What comes through are Vaniček’s expert orchestration of suspense, and the cast’s ability to make their characters’ fears feel genuine.

The movie's revisionist tone is startlingly enough to carry you along.

This is one of the most immediate, personal costume dramas ever made, and so it's not unseemly to consider how the writer-director and her heroine overlap.

Even though we can foretell just about everything that will happen in The Wedding Banquet — every plot twist, every screwball complication — we don’t much mind, because the comedy is so brisk and good-natured.

Playing Teddy Roosevelt in these films was nowhere near a highpoint for Williams, but it did speak to his fondness for these CGI-infused kids’ spectacles. His final farewell here is gentle, reflectively and almost unbearably moving. It lends the the film a retroactive grace.

Adams is lovely and tremulous, but Big Eyes would be even better if Waltz was in the same key.

The most powerful aspect of this strange little movie is the sense that in an instant things could go very, very bad — even if they don’t. Palo Alto puts you on edge because it’s all dangerous corners.

Ouija is confident, meat-and-potatoes horror, and that’s a lot harder to pull off than it sounds.

The Nice Guys has a nice feel: just slick enough to keep from falling apart, just brutal enough to keep from seeming inconsequential.

Now, approaching twilight, Eastwood has stripped everything down to its essentials. The picture doesn’t always work, but it works when it has to. It’s a fragile enterprise — lovely to bask in, but liable to fall apart if you stare too hard.

One of the pleasures of a film like this is the knowledge that a new fold is always coming. Seen in that light, occasional narrative implausibilities (of both the psychological and physical kind) recede into the distance. The Outfit is imperfect, but it works perfectly.

Maggie’s Plan doesn’t quite gel, but it’s very enjoyable, and it has a solid emotional core.

Undertone is creepy enough without needing to knit its haunting into its main character’s background so clunkily; ironically, its most effective moments are ones of stylistic indifference.

Disney's Lilo & Stitch, which is animated in the traditional way, with watercolor backgrounds, is lovely, and funny, too. It owes a great deal to Japanese anime, but there's also a "Looney Tunes" friskiness to it that's distinctively homegrown.

Thunderbolts* recaptures some of the magic of the early Marvel productions, when they felt like some alchemical phenomenon of corporate entertainment, and not just slop. The secret, which should have been obvious, is taking pleasure in the people these movies put on screen, rather than just treating them as marketing materials for future installments.