The only grace note in the generally clunky Wonder Woman is its star, the five-foot-ten-inch Israeli actress and model Gal Gadot, who is somehow the perfect blend of superbabe-in-the-woods innocence and mouthiness.

Kusijanović conveys all this through the way her actors move against and look at one another. That’s filmmaking of the highest order — intimate and gripping.

Something in the Dirt deftly bounces between the oddness of its central story, the silliness of its documentary framing, and the resentments that eventually develop between its main characters, all buried inside what is essentially a hangout movie.

The film is, finally, a brilliant tap dance over a void: There’s no real drama when the inner life of the female lead is so shrouded, even if that’s the point.

Diana, with her glamorous gowns and her taste for fast food, may be forever too much and not enough, but Spencer is just right.

If this turns out to be his final statement (he’s 87), it’s an appropriately ragged one, half-formed but gesturing toward meaning. Every edge bleeds.

Refreshingly uncategorizable: It’s somewhere between a marital-discord drama and a mystery thriller, but it also has its madcap moments.

I think The Revenant is, on the whole, pain without gain, but it’s certainly a tour ​de force — literally, a feat of strength.

It's worth seeing, though, not only for its occasional moments of breathtaking beauty and sadness but also because its very rarity demands it.

This one is a celebration of Cassandro, and like so many great sports movies before it, it’s an underdog story. But it’s one steeped in the grittiness of reality that avoids leaning too hard into easy sentimentality.

Though Gyllenhaal is making the clearest bid for the big awards performance and deserves any accolades it brings him, Maslany’s performance was the one that floored me.

Tight as a drum and almost nauseatingly suspenseful, Tim Fehlbaum’s September 5 presents an unexpected angle on a familiar event.

I’m not a fan of Schnabel’s paintings, but I think he’s a born film painter, and even if At Eternity’s Gate doesn’t reliably cross the blood-brain barrier, his frames are like no one else’s. (His cinematographer is Benoît Delhomme.)

Jodorowsky’s fondness for the surreal and grotesque is in full evidence here. What makes his films so captivating, however, isn’t their strangeness, but their refusal to divide the world into good and bad, even when it’s easy to do so.

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

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

Tim’s Vermeer starts off in a playful fashion, but as he soldiers on, our intrepid, mild-mannered technologist finds himself getting emotional. In the presence of art, something happens. By the time it’s over, don’t be surprised if you’re more in awe of the work of an artist than ever before. Maybe this is Penn and Teller’s final, subtle rug-pulling moment: An attempt to demystify the artistic process ends up posing even greater mysteries.

When King Richard works, it sings.

An interestingly woozy new film.

For all its feverish activity, Mother! feels static.

It may not quite have the explosive charm of some of the classics, but Black Souls is an elegant, unsettling addition to the gangster-movie canon. Get on its unique wavelength, and you may find it transfixing.

Clement and Waititi are intimate with the conventions of vampire movies and reality TV and must have had a crazy-great time blending the unblendable in the best SCTV tradition. But it’s the absence of camp that I keep coming back to. They scale it down and play it real. They’re undeadpan.

10 Cloverfield Lane does what it needs to do: make you sit and squirm and want very badly to know. It has the appeal of suspense radio plays from the '30s and '40s and even a touch of Orson Welles’s most infamous Mercury Theater broadcast.

That wordiness coupled with Cronenberg's classical restraint is part of the splendid Freudian joke at the movie's center.

The Kidman in Rabbit Hole is a revelation.

Getting sucked into these people’s lives means experiencing the story in all its immediacy, sans judgment. Holler is too entertaining and well-made to be overly dour, too full of suspense and throwaway bits of cinematic elegance. It marks the arrival of a major new directorial talent.

For all the sprawl, American Gangster feels secondhand. It’s like "Scarface" drained of blood, at arm’s length from the culture that spawned it.

Anderson is something of a prodigy himself, and he's riddled with talent, but he hasn't figured out how to be askew and heartfelt at the same time. When he does, he'll probably make the movie The Royal Tenenbaums was meant to be, and it'll be a sight to see.