This is a true story, and at times a gut-wrenching one, even if it necessarily sugarcoats some aspects of the plight of lost children.

This is Beatty’s first film in 15 years, a project he’s been working on for 40 years, and it’s immensely pleasing to see him in such fine form. Or, as his obsessive-compulsive subject would say, such fine form. Such fine form.

Moana stands head and shoulders above this year’s earlier aquatic animated hit, “Finding Dory”; it’s so transporting it will have your kids begging you to book the next flight to the islands.

Bad Santa 2 is vulgar, nasty and offensive, but it has flawed aspects also.

Allied is slow-footed and tepid, its plot twists dopey and soapy. I was rooting for things to get interesting, but I would have settled for a few surprises.

Affleck eschews all the actors’ clichés — burning intensity, soulful suffering, haunted brooding. It’s a magnificently interior performance, the sort of acting that doesn’t call attention to itself but draws us in to peer closer.

Unfortunately, the cast of characters you’ll find here is a pale imitation of her Hogwarts heroes.

I’d love to tell you Tom Ford’s Nocturnal Animals is a cinematic masterpiece, and for most of its running time, that’s what I was planning to do. You must see it. But a great movie requires a great ending, and Nocturnal Animals doesn’t have one.

Dramatically inert, satirically inept and thematically insufferable, Billy Lynn’s Long Halftime Walk is the most disappointing film of the year.

Arrival makes a moving case that we’ve only scratched the surface of what we think is possible — and what we define as intelligence.

If the makers of Trolls must keep going, I won’t be present for the next entry unless it’s “Trolls Meet Smurfs.” With chainsaws. In the Thunderdome.

War was both cruel and magnificent, as Churchill once put it. To Gibson, it still is.

With a mischievous, metaphysical flourish, Doctor Strange administers some much-needed CPR to the flagging superhero genre. It doesn’t reinvent the wheel — a power-hungry villain (Mads Mikkelsen) tries to unleash hell on Earth, blah blah blah — but it’s a heck of a lot more fun than I’ve had at a Marvel movie lately.

The film is never gripping, but at least it moves. Director Ron Howard does his best to spark excitement with cheesy horror-movie editing — brief shots of the damnation in store if the virus is unleashed — and there are a couple of twists to keep things lively. Nothing is what it seems, unless it seems ridiculous, in which case it’s exactly what it seems.

There is so much pain in Moonlight that it’s a little hard to breathe at certain moments. But there are others, of connection and redemption, that positively glow.

This flaccid comedy tries to spark your interest by undressing two of its four stars down to their underwear for significant periods of time. More outrageously, neither of those people is Jon Hamm.

Thrillers can be a valid Hollywood escape, but this one made me as uncomfortable as its hero is with small talk.

Any parent who has ever scrambled desperately to find a doll to appease a wailing child as though it were a life-and-death situation will appreciate the wit of this multilayered, dread-soaked chamber piece.

Lacking either the narrative shiftiness or the trashy thrills of “Gone Girl,” this one is the kind of flick few will watch twice: It has about as many twists and turns as an L. The third act of a movie shouldn’t make you feel as though the first two acts were a waste of time.

Both broader and deeper than the relentless and monotonous “12 Years a Slave,” it’s one of the few important movies to hit cinemas this year.

What we’ve got is a highly entertaining nautical version of “The Towering Inferno’’ (still my favorite guilty pleasure of all time).

The movie sneers at the journalists covering the trial, but for those of us who followed it at the time, the newspaper accounts were a lot more engrossing than this film.

Burton may give us a bland hero, a tepid love story and a muddled plot but, hey, at least he’s got a skeleton army doing battle with giant tentacle monsters at an amusement park.

I cracked up here and there watching this broad heist comedy, but it wasn’t laughter I felt great about. Director Jared Hess (“Napoleon Dynamite”) has always gone for geeks and oddballs, but this film mostly punches down at characters for being poor, unfashionable and stupid.

At 162 minutes, American Honey may test some viewers’ patience, but for this one, it paid off with an unflinching portrait of middle America, a love letter to the open road and a dynamic newcomer in Sasha Lane.

It’s told in a woefully pedestrian way, with talking-head footage forming the bulk of this slow-to-develop film. Still, it’s a creepily fascinating tale.

"The Titanic" is now the second-biggest disaster Kate Winslet has ever been associated with. Her new one, The Dressmaker, is like some hellborn alloy of film noir, campy melodrama, “High Plains Drifter” and the Darwin Awards for people who die in moronic accidents.

Beat by beat, it’s exactly what you’d expect, right down to the camera’s prurient interest in the dewy flesh of Stefanie Scott as the 17-year-old daughter.