Blockers, for all its high-velocity raunch and drug abuse, is fundamentally positive.

Chappaquiddick is somehow both cynical and deeply inquisitive about the morals of every character involved.

The movie suffers from having no obvious endgame, and it’s not as fun as the recent, less tony shut-the-hell-up horror movie Don’t Breathe. But it’s aggressively scary.

This is an conversation- and character-driven film with an occasional eye for something more ineffable, but Falco and Duplass’s complicated, nakedly searching performances are the main event.

The (elderly) Burt Reynolds vehicle The Last Movie Star strikes a note of banality in its first sequence from which it rarely deviates.

The performances could hardly be better — with the exception of O’Dowd, who’s good but maybe needed to find just one redeeming moment. (The writers could have helped.) As for Andie McDowell, I haven’t changed my thinking about her amateurish work in almost everything but "Sex, Lies, and Videotape," but I also see that with the right material her inward demeanor can be powerful.

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

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.

It’s at once familiar and unsettling, with shades of "Pan’s Labyrinth" and "Return to Oz."

As it turns out, the Ferris wheel is the other perfect parallel to Love, Simon, not the most thrilling ride in the park, a little slow, utterly predictable, perhaps even welcoming the label of “boring.” But like the chorus of a latter-day Taylor Swift song, it will lift you up, goddammit, and good luck trying to stop it.

Rush is a wonder. It takes bravery to convey closure, tunnel vision, total indifference to the camera that actors always know is there, however self-effacing they might want to be appear. Final Portrait is, like Rush’s performance, a miniature, but there’s a fullness to Tucci’s vision transcending every surface.

It’s a series of moving paintings, tableaux vivants, a goofy dog comedy, a grim totalitarian allegory. It’s sui generis. It’s the damnedest thing.

Uprising’s script isn’t great at jokes or nuance or originality, but it’s pretty good at shuttling us from one set piece to the next. And when those set pieces are good — as is the case with an early Jaeger fight in Siberia, or the gee-whiz silliness of the climactic battle in Tokyo — it’s easy enough to overlook.

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

It muddles what might have been a fascinating alternate — i.e., downbeat — take on one of Israel’s most-acclaimed military operations.

The fights and chases are well designed. You can always tell where everything is in relation to everything else and who’s hitting or shooting whom — which isn’t a given, surprisingly, when fast cutting and loudness can cover a lot of infelicities.

I’ll give Flower props — in an age when so many teen movies are grasping so desperately for message-y topicality, it does the impossible, and manages to be about nothing at all.

Death Wish is a classier version of what you can find on cable in the wee hours — it’s not worth seeing in the theater — but it’s worth pausing over its politics of guns.

A Wrinkle in Time, was strong enough to carry me through the film’s first, wobbly 15 minutes — but not a lot further.

The flatness that is meant to shock early on quickly becomes boring, and the movie never sparks, slogging on in its nearly unbroken monotone all the way to its climactic moment.

As in the most unnerving satires, the glibness adds to the horror. Even the most absurd deaths have a sting.

Gringo is a slightly above-average crime farce with a way above-average protagonist — both in terms of writing and performance, and especially given the genre. It’s a surprising high point in Oyelowo’s already distinguished career.

Mute is pretty meh but gets points for randomness.

Figuring out whether someone is a double, triple, or quadruple agent isn’t a brain-teaser, it’s a brain-irritant, especially when the script is so convoluted. The novel by Jason Matthews is cleaner, without so much jumping around between the two main characters.

Foxtrot feels unusually full for a film that seems to move in slow motion, in which the characters’ brains grind emptiness.

It won’t fix the studio comedy, but it’s a welcome, watchable outlier for now.

A culture clash defined by an incredibly strong first-time performance, it’s continually more emotionally surprising than its dry packaging lets on.

To mistake Garland’s succession of haunted-house-like spectacles as Acid: The Place would be missing out on so much emotional work that he’s doing. (Although, the squeamish should be warned those spectacles range from mildly disturbing to gory and disgusting to absolutely terrifying.)

Pellington and Perry can be accused of over-enunciating their ideas, but any film flooded with this level of emotion is worthy of our respect — and our tears.

The Party is breathlessly well shot — and, even better, in lustrous black and white. The look conveys an unspoken message: Even playing fools, these actors are pure class.

A half-baked tragic love story so desperately engineered to tear-jerk that it ceases to resemble anything human.

It’s so insistent that this isn’t your great-grandmother’s Peter Rabbit — while, again, not straying from the original character design all that much — that it feels like the animators are at war with the writers, and the loudest of the two groups tends to win out at every turn.

One word springs to mind after 15 minutes of Loveless: Getmethef**koutofhere. The chill eats into you — the cold burns and cuts. But it turns out Zvyagintsev has more on his mind than emotional cruelty to kids.

Clint Eastwood’s The 15:17 to Paris celebrates old-fashioned American heroism, and I like it — in spite of its dumbbell infelicities.

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.

Loveless is about a state of mind, a lament, an indictment of crimes against the human spirit.

Ozon is doing sexual gymnastics all over his uncanny womb-based plot, and somehow it all coheres pretty seamlessly, even at its most ridiculous.

By the end of Freed, Christian and Ana are no longer a rich man and his middle-class girlfriend, but two rich people telling the tale of how and why they got rich to each other. Doesn’t get more deviant than that.

There aren’t a lot of people to necessarily sympathize with here, but the collective swell of a thousand nagging disappointments, both identifiable and not, make Perry’s film strangely haunting despite the bourgeois mundanity of its events.

Unusually grounded for a Marvel superhero epic, and unusually gripping.

Things speed up too quickly, meaning just when the movie’s rhythms should become loopier and the action more eccentric, The Cloverfield Paradox becomes one more formulaic ticking-clock series of chases and shootings with a moral dilemma for pathos and then uplift.

Please Stand By is thoughtful in how it dramatizes the consequences of autism. The movie is a little stiff, though.

In Beirut, Hamm still doesn’t have the outsize personality we associate with major movie stars — a lot of whom are lesser actors. But he has focus. He can think onscreen. He can make you watch him closely, trying to keep up with the wheels churning in his head. I think he has fully arrived on the big screen.

It’s not particularly illuminating, but it’s far from futile.

What makes Phoenix’s performance especially exciting is that you’re watching not just a character go from chaos to self-possession but an actor, too.

The movie, based on the terrific book Horse Soldiers by Doug Stanton, is only so-so, but it moves at a fair clip and fills in a lot of details about the early successes of the Afghanistan war.

The movie is barely an hour and a half but feels dense, and exhausting, as Barker skips among three protagonists who are up against a ticking clock.

The film treads familiar territory when it’s trying to carve cinema-worthy myth from its semi-fictitious protagonist’s life, but its more impressionistic, painterly moments are what feel truly fresh.

Part of the film is a crackerjack courtroom drama. What’s dull is the trajectory. The Insult is so schematic that it shrinks to the level of a painfully scrupulous newspaper editorial. Which is fine — for a newspaper editorial.

This is the sort of action film where the bad guys often hold their fire for no discernible reason, and are terrible at dodging things, but if one suspends one’s disbelief long enough, they’re rewarded with a rollicking, highly competent popcorn movie.

What Mary lacks in the resources to visually gobsmack, it partially makes up for with its unstoppable titular ginger, whose empathy, depressive streak, and enviably fierce eyebrows place her shoulder to shoulder with any Ghibli heroine.

Dimly lit and slackly made.

This isn’t to say that the humans in The Commuter act anything like real people; the train is the most realistic performer here, but you could do a lot worse.

The film gets progressively funnier and more delightful as it goes on; King layers plenty of good-natured comedy on top of each daring escape and chase scene, stretching probability and sometimes patience near the end, but each new hitch and escape feels like an act of invention.

The arty but suspenseful drama The Strange Ones is a perfect demonstration of how the craft of storytelling is also the craft of withholding — of revealing as little as possible in carefully parceled-out amounts.

There is a real chance that one might be too busy trying to piece it all together to notice the jump scares, the film’s prime mode of horror-stirring.

The movie has amusingly broad performances; good, bloodless scares (the characters die horribly — but have multiple lives); and self-empowering life lessons too bland to be specious. You could do far worse.

Film Stars Don’t Die in Liverpool isn’t visually drab, only conceptually. As a critic who often complains about biopics diverging too radically from the facts, I’m chagrined to find myself wishing the filmmakers had taken more liberties with Turner’s brief memoir.

Thanks to chillingly spare storytelling, Kruger’s momentous performance, and a score by Josh Homme (the front man of Queens of the Stone Age) that features a sort of screechy clang that gave me shivers, In the Fade is gripping. But it’s hard to know what to take away from it.

Bright turns out to be more interested in its mythrilpunk world-building than any kind of social commentary, which is a good thing, because while it is so-so at the former (the plot holes in this thing), it is clearly out of its depth with the latter.

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.

Musicals are inherently fake — they can be ecstatically, transcendentally fake — but this is a whole other level of disingenuousness.

I appreciate that Payne is more interested in blowing out a middle-class American perspective, and its perpetual victimhood narrative. But Damon is completely forgettable here — I suspect that’s by design, but nothing about him commands you watch him the way you watch Chau or Waltz.

Ends with a sentimentality I didn’t buy — the Bellas don’t seem to particularly care about each other outside of a competitive setting, so why should we?

It has its creaky corners, but there are enough twists and shocks to keep it engaging throughout.

Hostiles is a brutal if well-intentioned film that doesn’t help its cause with its lack of development of its Native characters.

The new Star Wars, Episode VIII: The Last Jedi is shockingly good.

Thelma is both more mysterious and more accessible than his other films. The spell it casts transcends the silly plotting. It puts you in a zone all its own.

Everyone seems to be a walking embodiment of an essence, not cartoons exactly, but something more totemic. If all this makes Darkest Hour propaganda, then the shoe may fit, though it’s hard to find fault with its protagonist’s aims, at least in this small of a scope.

We’re not so much watching Woodcock the rarefied designer as Day-Lewis the rarefied actor, his immersion so uncanny that he can illuminate a soul at once titanic and stunted.

The Post is a good enough “procedural” to keep you hooked.

The Other Side of Hope — which is tragic, funny, depressing, and inspiring — shows that a truly imaginative artist has resources unavailable to journalists and nonfiction filmmakers. In Kaurismaki’s work, it’s as if the masks of comedy and tragedy don’t — as usual — face away from each other, but stare each other in the face, as if they were saying, “You and me, we’re in this together.”

It’s a gorgeous-looking, sensitively edited film to be sure, but never finds a dramatic foothold, no matter how many manic arguments and drug overdoses it throws our way.

By its close, Voyeur spouts some lines about how we all like to watch, and we are left with three documents of the Voyeur’s Motel and no closer to knowing why we should care.

The Disaster Artist is primarily a pedestal for the ultimate James Franco performance — it’s his "Lincoln." Whatever my queasiness about laughing at a head case, I couldn’t help myself from thrilling to Franco’s timing, his relish, his swan dive into an egotism that has no bottom.

An altogether warm, sharp, and unobjectionable family holiday film.

Chalamet gives the performance of the year. By any name, this is a masterpiece.

Brimstone & Glory, in a lean 67 minutes of cinematic poetry, bears that love out in dizzying extremes.

You come away from Jim & Andy wondering — not for the first time — about the cost to great artists of what they do, envious of their talent and thinking, “I’m glad that’s not me.”

Wonder has an overflowing humanism that extends to less-sympathetic characters.

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.

Mudbound could have easily turned out as a kind of dusty, respectable period drama that looks important while advancing nothing, but it exceeds expectations with every new layer.

Like most “universe” movies, this one has about five beginnings and then segues into a round-up-the-team section that ought to have been sure-fire. But the banter has a droopy, depressed air, as if the actors know they’re coming from behind.

I just wish Vega and Lelio let us in a little more to see her as an individual, aside from the hostility she encounters.

To return to why Murder on the Orient Express was remade: Beats me. Maybe it’s someone’s idea of counterprogramming when every other film in the multiplex is for kids or yahoos. Maybe it’s a tax shelter.

This is a toxic, not at all benign film.

It’s intermittently successful, but even in its more meandering moments it is a gripping, almost unbearably dark watch.

Grady and Ewing use music as scary as in any horror film. They had no interest in making an “objective documentary,” although I doubt the Hasidim would have made themselves available to two women with a camera and their own hair. In such cases, they usually say, “If you want to understand us, read the Torah.”

I confess that I had a hard time reconciling McDonagh’s madcap incongruities with the horror of the original crime and the grief of a mother struggling to cope with so primal an injury. Are the people who love the movie less rigid in their tastes? Or has McDonagh succeeded in so thoroughly psyching them out that they’re afraid to call foul?

It would be misleading to call My Friend Dahmer “entertaining,” but I got off on its fuzzy sense of dread, its poker-faced ghoulishness.

It’s a flittery movie, too, but with soul: Gerwig has a gift for skipping along the surface of her teenage alter ego’s life and then going deep — quickly, without fuss — before skipping forward again.

A Bad Moms Christmas is a film about women trapped in a bleakly infantilizing suburban hellscape with horrible lighting, whose only idea about how to subvert their situation is to scream and push people and hit each other in the crotch.

Betts has succeeded in capturing a watershed moment in the life of the Catholic Church — a push to adapt that is, in important ways, at odds with its very origins. Her irresolution makes for excellent drama.

Watching Jigsaw go about his torture business is about as interesting as watching a child burn ants — a dumb and ugly waste of energy, resources and time.

Only the Brave feels like a film that would have made sense coming from Peter Berg or Michael Bay, but Kosinski mostly pulls back on the macho cheerleading to find something more objective, and ultimately, deeply emotional.