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.

Don't dig too deep into The Other Side of the Wind: It's largely surface. But what a surface. And what a chest of toys for a man who never lost his childlike delight in playing with the medium.

Shirkers is a joy, but it also feels haunted, as if Tan had the unique opportunity to unearth a perfectly preserved clone of her younger, more idealistic self.

The film doesn’t offer many huge belly laughs — Atkinson has never been one for big comic climaxes — but it does deliver a fairly steady stream of pleasant chuckles, many of them mixed with generous doses of humiliation comedy.

Hunter Killer won’t win any awards for originality, but it may win a couple for the brazenness with which it stacks clichés upon clichés. Basically, it’s "Crimson Tide" meets "Lone Survivor" meets "Under Siege" meets a Russian variation on "Olympus Has Fallen," with a bit of "Geostorm" thrown in. At least three of those movies are pretty good, so the overall math works in the film’s favor.

Suspiria is a gorgeous, hideous, uncompromising film, and while it seeks to do many things, settling our minds about the brutality of the past and human nature is not one of them.

The not-so-good news is that Mid90s never quite manages to make an impact, in part because it gives us so little to hang onto with the characters onscreen.

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.

What is on paper a small-time heist film in the vein of the Coen Brothers or "Breaking Bad" is ultimately a cover for a more observant and relatable portrait of loneliness.

The pitch-black and paper-thin Galveston not only fails to find a way to reinvent, or at least refresh, that old tired idea, it also piles a few more tired ideas on top of it.

It’s not brash enough to measure up to the very-near-future dystopia of "The Purge" franchise; it’s also not studied enough as a character ensemble to work as a dialogue-driven bottle movie. The Oath lands in an unpleasant middle ground that is too close to reality to feel like escapism, and too antic to feel equipped at anything like incisiveness.

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.

Bad Times at the El Royale isn’t an event. But I was never too bored.

It replicates the template and the atmosphere of the original, but it lacks invention and emotional investment.

Just like the families of the victims in the film who feel nauseous at the prospect of making a celebrity out of Breivik and spreading his toxic ideology, I feel a little queasy at the chilling, captivating portrayal of him by Anders Danielsen Lie. I feel uneasy being “captivated” by any of this, period.

Swift, entertaining documentary.

The how of Tillman, Mabry, and Wells’s telling distinguishes their story. The Hate U Give should be an epic, and it is: Yes, it’s a teen melodrama, but it’s also an elegantly constructed piece of world-building, a love story, a family history, a sociological spiderweb of cause and effect of the hate referenced in the Tupac-coined titled. If this is what the next wave of YA adaptation will feel like, we are in a good place.

Much of Her Smell, especially these backstage scenes, border on unintelligible, with numerous exchanges getting lost in the chaos. I found this to be incredibly, teeth-grindingly effective — this is a thoroughly subjective depiction of mental illness and substance abuse, and the accurate relay of information often takes a backseat in the throes of such a state.

Much of the picture falls flat, but the Eddie/Venom dynamic is aces and lives up to the Zombieland legacy.

Like Teddy, there’s a lot of sophomoric silliness Night School feels obligated to perform. But there’s a heap of good intentions behind it, and enough big laughs to make us want to forgive it in the end.

Monsters and Men, then, functions more as a lightly fictionalized photo essay than a narrative film — which is okay, it just means that it feeds more off timeliness than character or art, and there are obvious limitations to that.

Unfortunately, instead of coming across as a warm throwback, Nappily Ever After is a romantic comedy saddled with a reductive understanding of black womanhood without enough cast chemistry or beauty to distract us.

The cast in House is exceedingly fancy, but they never seem to connect; Blanchett and Black are about as awkward a pairing as they sound on paper, engaged in two irreconcilable ways of going about their performances.

Put up side-by-side, the redemption of killers doesn’t feel quite as urgent a narrative as the alliance of idealists, and in its final minutes The Sisters Brothers retreats back from some interesting, adventurous territory to something all too familiar.

There’s something strangely uninvolving about White Boy Rick, despite all its claims to be a sensational true story.

The movie’s central motif — rituals that dull pain and heighten unhappiness — doesn’t clobber you. It seeps into you.

With its martini-swilling leads and swingy French pop soundtrack, A Simple Favor seems to yearn for a bygone era of nail-biter, but rather than wallow in pastiche, it comes up with something truly contemporary feeling.

Jenkins and cinematographer James Laxton’s palette is rich and warm, its colors deepened by a score by Nicholas Britell that ranges from a distant, forlorn trumpet to a string quartet in which the players dig in as if they’re having their own dialogue between hope and despair. The close-ups are immense, the emotions archetypal.