The Hateful Eight is basically an expensive vanity project allowing Tarantino to expound on his bizarre theories about race relations.

Mostly it’s up to Lawrence to wring all the drama and pathos she can out of a battle over patent rights that pushes Joy to the brink of bankruptcy. No surprise that her mettle cleans up all the messiness in Joy.

At some point in her 50-year career, Rampling became one of the world’s great actresses. Driven by her and Courtenay’s work, and by director Andrew Haigh’s limpid style, the film is devastating.

The film is sober, honest and serious about an important subject.

Three talking critters sing, dance and tell jokes, and I really wish they wouldn’t. Their act isn’t just dull — it’s almost as bad as One Direction’s.

Tilda Swinton narrates this oddball, meandering essay film.

A witty and occasionally wise take on sibling bonds and adulthood — even if the latter only arrives kicking and screaming.

I’ve never seen a restaurant documentary that seemed less interested in showing the joy of food.

Yet while Nemes criticized “Schindler’s List” as “conventional,” all that’s new here is the hyper-realistic technique: Saul’s quest is not very far from the girl in the red dress.

The shamelessness with which Star Wars: The Force Awakens replays the franchise’s greatest hits is startling. To put it another way, it’s a satisfying meal — but it’s $200 million worth of leftovers.

Virtually dialogue-free and animated in a cacophony of playful bright colors and ominous industrial landscapes, Boy & the World plays like a dream segueing into a nightmare.

Though its resolution is a bit pat, most of The Girl in the Book is a smart and pointed look at abuses of power and roles women too often play in the literary world.

Presenting a “true” adventure about a giant whale that supposedly inspired “Moby-Dick” raises tsunami-high expectations about In the Heart of the Sea that are crushed as thoroughly as if star Chris Hemsworth had brought down his “Thor” hammer on the entire enterprise.

At the end of it all comes McKay’s big angry harrumph about the meaning of the crisis — a sign of failed, frustrated satire. If you can make your message clear through comedy, there’s no need to say, “Here’s my moral.” A funnyman can’t afford to get caught wagging his finger.

Michael Caine and Harvey Keitel do some of the best work of their careers playing longtime friends navigating their twilight years in Paolo Sorrentino’s witty, wise and swooningly beautiful dramatic comedy Youth.

Lately, the Shakespeare plays on film tend to be either too self-consciously irreverent on the one hand or too stodgy on the other; Kurzel’s Macbeth takes a point of view without betraying the Bard.

Smith’s appeal, just, holds together a thin plot upon which Bennett, who wrote the script, and director Nicholas Hytner have loaded gimmicks.

We know Lee can channel anger into art. Now, in the maiden feature for Amazon Studios, he adds poetry, beginning with the spoken-word verse that fills the movie.

The years go fast but the minutes crawl in Wim Wenders’ new drama, filmed in murky 3-D so that, apparently, we can feel as if we’re living through a dozen dull years right along with its main character.

Frothy, forgettable comedy.

Seeing as Krampus is about the Alpine demon who punishes Christmas a-holes, this is a promising start — but alas, it’s all downhill from there, making a murky and humorless hash out of a pretty great piece of

Hard-core Hitchcock fans will not find much in the way of revelations.

One of the year’s warmest and most crowd-pleasing surprises.

The movie doesn’t rise above its music-doc formula of photo, clip, talking head. But for fans — like me — it’s a heartfelt, engrossing tribute.

Capping off the year that transgender stopped being transgressive, the story of artist Lili Elbe (Eddie Redmayne) makes for one of the year’s finest films.

By going exactly where you think it’s going, Victor Frankenstein doesn’t so much invent a fresh origins story as it essentially repeats, with a few uninteresting new details, all the same stuff we’ve seen in the other 457 Frankenstein movies.

The Good Dinosaur is no instant classic like its sublime predecessor “Inside Out,” but is modestly pleasing in its own way.

The third and weakest book in Suzanne Collins’ trilogy should never have been split into two films, but since that’s become money-grubbing standard practice for young-adult adaptations (“Twilight,” “Divergent”), here we are.