There are two movies here, and the actors handle that duality well. But the brooding darkness lurking inside these characters needs a drama of its own.

It’s the central performance by Oyelowo, who allows us to laugh at Harold’s naiveté and tomfoolery with some well-placed broad comedy choices while never dropping the ball on the character’s relatability, that makes Gringo a worthy watch for genre fans.

This is a standard vigilante/revenge fantasy too plodding to deliver the base genre goodies, and too simplistic to work as a character study on how a sudden life of violence can irredeemably disrupt an average citizen’s psyche, the way the original film at least half-heartedly attempted to do.

There are movies that fail because they are misguided, or because their heart isn’t in the right place. This movie wants to be special, which makes the fact it is such a lumpy, clumsy mess all the more frustrating. You root for this movie, and the movie tries to go a long way on that good will. It doesn’t make it far.

A sobering, beautiful movie that’ll haunt you for weeks after watching it.

Bateman and McAdams have some fun with the gonzo goofiness of the project, and milk a couple of comedy set-pieces—like one about a gunshot wound and a squeaky toy—but the flatness of their characters leaves no room for relatability.

Lawrence (and his star, Jennifer Lawrence) want to leave no doubt that this is the lurid, infuriating stuff of the adult-minded, drenched in sophistication and pain—much like Lawrence’s dystopic vision for The Hunger Games, only anchored in the hyperreal world of the New Cold War we may be starting to realize isn’t “new” at all.

Mohawk is exciting on its own merit. Seen as a piece of Geoghegan’s growing filmography, it’s positively thrilling, a great extension of its author’s fascinations.

Park smoothly pilots this film around and through certain narrative conventions—training-montage clichés are parodied, familiar sports-movie characters are rejiggered—and there’s a pleasing familiarity to the whole endeavor. But there’s also a ceiling to how funny or touching any of this is.

It’s a film about pettiness couched in maturity, and a brilliantly merciless take on the comedy of manners.

Anonymously directed by Mark Pellington, puzzlingly scripted by Alex Ross Perry and handsomely acted by its ensemble—though none of its participants are ever given enough space to fully feel out their characters—Nostalgia is a poor man’s version of other great movies built upon complexly interwoven narratives.

The criticism is less that Mute doesn’t know what it wants to be, and more that it seems to emphatically decide what it wants to be every few minutes, only to then change its mind once more. And every time it does so, it’s the audience that is being left behind.

This is a film that wants to make you feel as confused and terrified as the characters you’re watching. In this, it is unquestionably successful.

Dog Years’ lack of faith in its audience makes its over-explanation and hackneyed groaners unshakable weights on a story that only needed to let Reynolds do his thing.

Black Panther might be the first MCU film that could claim to most clearly be an expression of a particular director’s voice.

Even at their breeziest, Crano’s punchlines cost exorbitant amounts of discomfort.

Coming from a first-timer, Golden Exits might suggest promise. Coming from Perry, it nearly reads as self-satire, the epitome of overly dry and thoroughly hubristic indie filmmaking. Don’t let the indulgent chatter fool you. Here, Perry has nothing to say that’s worth listening to.

Before We Vanish is almost too much of a stretch for Kurosawa, veering from gory sci-fi horror to screwball comedy to marital drama to alien conspiracy potboiler without the necessary connective tissue to give his genre cocktail equilibrium.

It’s easy to see why studio execs at Paramount were unsure of how to market this movie, as it seemingly attempts to check so many boxes at once that nearly any description is going to fail to accurately convey the experience of watching it. Ultimately, it’s that unstable, unpredictable nature that is simultaneously its most entertaining and most problematic aspect.

Gorgeous and gross in equal measure, propelled by the sense that anything could happen, Like Me is a visual feast.

Overall, this is an easy film to admire—it’s exhaustively detailed and an intriguing collage of an important American institution.

Small Town Crime doesn’t give us much to hang onto apart from its casting, and from its experiential beer-stained, cigarette-tainted atmosphere.

The Clapper is just so boring and corny that all the audience can do is either feel bad for Helms or disingenuously applaud his unsuccessful efforts, mimicking his character’s chosen vocation.

Chances are that if you’re a big fan of the book series, you’ll be satisfied with this halfway competent but way overlong resolution to the saga.

[Barker's] film only tries to let us understand the constant and harsh pressures that people in such high positions of power go through daily, and that it does well enough.

We all look for magic in the world around us, and when we do the world routinely lets us down. Movies like this remind us that there’s magic, and life, in art—and perhaps especially in animation.

Insidious: The Last Key certainly doesn’t rewrite the rules of the genre, but it’s a solid entry in a franchise I thought would have run out of steam by now, and you can certainly do a lot worse when it comes to an early January release.

Maya Forbes has crafted a zippy comedy about a charismatic charlatan and the disastrous impact his fakery has on the rubes gullible enough to fall for his schtick.

None of it ever escalates past a baseline of digestible insanity, which isn’t really all that insane when the pasts of Cage and Taylor are littered with the skeletons of seedier films and more preposterous premises.

Den of Thieves is such a dumb misunderstanding of the genres in which it plays, such a loud, interminable shart of unmitigated machismo, such a heavy-handed rip-off of Heat and The Usual Suspects and even Ocean’s Eleven (and maybe even The Fast and the Furious, but for scumbags) that it feels anachronistic on arrival, the kind of melodramatic, pulpy studio action flick that doesn’t get made anymore because it shouldn’t.

The movie has its moments. But Thor wrestling with the Hulk is more realistic and, frankly, more relevant to the current facts on the ground.

The Commuter isn’t a tough puzzle to solve, and it veers closely to being obvious at times. But easy, unsubtle, unabashedly masculine action films don’t need nuance as long as they’re this much of a goofy pleasure to watch.

Paddington 2 reminds us how difficult it can be to pull off a sweetly tempered, gently moving children’s movie by doing exactly that, and doing it so well.

Half musical and half drama, it finds balance in poetic stillness and exuberant motion.

The film’s highlight is the swaggering Sorvino. More charming with age, like wine or scoundrels, he manages to enrapture without pandering, entertain without sacrifice or compromise.

Those who’ve had Knights of Badassdom on their radar all this time are likely to get some mild amusement and satisfaction out of seeing the LARPing community depicted as something other than viral video fodder. Everyone else will find it a frustrating exercise of missed opportunities, as rough around the edges as the fake Frank Frazetta painting on your cousin’s van.

An irreverent mix of genres taken completely seriously but with no small amount of fun, Devil’s Gate wears its script’s stupidity on its sleeve and allows its creature effects and committed cast to carry it throughout.

The Strange Ones is a solid movie on first watch that becomes a seriously good movie on second watch. Maybe that’s a poor framework for an endorsement, but the film is more than the shock of its climax.

Intimately, quietly, painfully, In the Fade reckons with supremacist beliefs, centering that process on Katja, and on Kruger, who breathes life and humanity into a film that intentionally lacks in both. Akin’s movie is worth seeking out on its own merits, and his subject matter is urgent, but Kruger makes them both feel essential.

Kasdan isn’t known for pulling off big budget action properties. He does his best here to create a kinetic pace, but the execution is always flat and dull.

Everything about Pitch Perfect 3’s foundation is openly half-baked. If it winked at its own indifference anymore than it already does, you might mistake its indifference for outright contempt.

Phantom Thread gets under your skin. On the surface, it is proper and refined and exquisite. But underneath, messy, angry real life keeps bubbling up, fervent and eager to escape. At last, it bursts through the seams. It always does.

Gilroy isn’t a drudge, of course, and Washington is Washington. If nothing else, the film rides on his mesmerizing performance and on Gilroy’s talent for character study. But after Nightcrawler, seeing Roman J. Israel, Esq. coast on craft rather than on transgression is nothing short of a letdown.

There’s nothing adorable or convoluted about this collision of worlds. The Other Side of Hope makes room for jokes about bad restaurants alongside stark monologues about the horrors of Syria. It operates in an atmosphere of constant conflicting emotions.

Screenwriter Steven Rogers and director David Gillespie get an “A” for effort as far as their brave attempt to meld these wildly differing tones into a cohesive narrative, but their execution, as satisfying as it might be, too obviously reaches for a pedigree it hasn’t yet earned.

It’s a beautiful thing, Wright’s film, an act of historical tension made with the grandest of ambitions tempered by the most careful of portrayals—precise in its bloat and fearless in its fantasy—a reminder today of what makes for actual leadership in a world exhausted by flummoxed white men with sound and fury, signifying nothing.

This being a Steven Spielberg joint, The Post can’t help but gradually bring heavy emotional tension to the film’s forefront, easing us moment by moment into a fairly manipulative yet exhilarating finale. None of that should come as a surprise: “Manipulative but exhilarating” might as well be the director’s calling card.

Although Downsizing is often thoughtful, funny and poignant, ultimately it really is just another movie about a middle-aged white dude pondering his insignificance—with the added demerit being that he learns valuable life lessons thanks to a marginalized woman of color.

For all the technical achievement on display, as impressive as it is that you could recast a main role in so short amount of time, All the Money in the World is disjointed and frazzled.

A movie that delights with spectacle as much as it repels with revisionism. Part of you will enjoy it. Another part of you will hate the part of you that enjoys it.

The film is intense, making for one of the sniffliest audiences in which I’ve ever been included, so viewer discretion is certainly advised. But with that kind of emotional power too comes the intellectual and statistical weight we need to enact change.

The movie is smart, stirring and deeply exciting, but more than anything, it is surprising. This is a Star Wars movie that plays with your assumptions and upends them, but it never betrays the story, characters and ethos at the series’ core. It expands the idea of what a Star Wars movie can be. It’ll knock you over.

Even Bahadur’s stupid voiceover writing becomes funnier over time as we realize the clichés and groaners only serve to show what an ultimately lame writer Bahadur was—that it was his bravery, stubbornness, hope, inquisitiveness and stupidity that made him great.

Del Toro weaves together his influences so finely, so delicately, that the product of his handiwork feels entirely new: We recognize the pieces, and we cannot mistake the author, but cast in the warm, beryl glow of Dan Laustsen’s gorgeous cinematography, we feel as if we’re seeing them afresh. That’s the magic of the movies, and, more importantly, the magic of del Toro.

Though the film acknowledges its performative nastiness at every opportunity—setting its killers and victims in windows, mind ballets, stages, and jail door slits, having them directly address the camera—acknowledgement doesn’t mean subversion, satisfaction or novelty. Even the most dedicated gorehounds should look elsewhere.

As for the cinematic The Disaster Artist, outside of its magnificent central portrayal by the elder Franco, its strongest and occasionally most problematic elements revolve around the huge ensemble cast of familiar faces.

The film represents a full embrace of a culture and its people, as well as a celebration of family, both present and past. As such, it’s difficult to imagine healthier holiday fare.

The film’s abundance of tenderness and lack of cringe laughs, save for that opening sex scene, lets it stand out from its feel-bad comedy peers.

Twomey gives The Breadwinner ballast, binding it to the real-world history that serves as its basis, and elevates it to realms of imagination at the same time. It’s a collision of truth and fantasy.

Justice League may be a more functional film that its predecessors, but it also lacks the style and go-for-broke big ideas that made Batman v Superman such a fascinating shitshow.

This is a film that’s proudly impertinent but also deeply morally serious. And even if Three Billboards doesn’t always hold together, that’s appropriate for its anxious characters who are, themselves, a little unsteady.

The third film in the arguably least-loved franchise of Kevin Feige and company’s box office-melting enterprise, it’s also the liveliest, funniest and “loosest” film of the bunch (and that includes Guardians of the Galaxy Vol. 2).

The film’s cute, zingy, candy-coated tone is seductive enough, and both Hildebrand and Shipp are compelling in their roles. You will, in short, be entertained. But if Tragedy Girls’ subject matter is odious, its tacit, but perhaps accidental, endorsement of the very thing it means to send up is jaw-dropping.

The Square’s contrast between categories of morality is peak Östlund. There’s no clearly defined gauge for goodness or badness here, just a palette of gray ethical relativism to offset the film’s superior construction.

Last Flag Flying isn’t great—a concept like greatness is too highfalutin for a film so bone-dry modest—but its scruffy integrity digs at you, won’t let you quite dismiss it.

A River Below is pure investigative journalism.

The main issue is that the story, while reasonably interesting, is not as interesting as the setup would like you to imagine, and that in such a context, Lena Olin is way too powerful for it. She not only overwhelms her young executor-suitors but the entire movie.

Suburbicon warns of the dangers of moral rot infesting our communities. No word yet on the effect that chronic smugness might have.

Mudbound’s is a large and cumbersome story not because of the complicated dynamics it presents, but because of the way they’re presented, with a lot of opportunity to explore the complexity between characters, but little of those opportunities are constructively used, perhaps because there is too much material on hand.

The real problem with The Snowman is that no one involved seems to understand how movies work. There is no setup, no character development, no suspense, no mystery, no suspects, no payoff.

The Florida Project is spattered with profound sadness, with moments of externalized, violent frustration at presumed helplessness, at practically being born into all this. To what degree you believe Baker to be condescending or patronizing or exploitive is up to you, but the film’s bursts of light, its idea of what caregiving looks like when caregiving is a privilege, is handled with sensitivity.

The Mountain Between Us is Grade-D bunkum with the good fortune to have actors working their hardest to sell it like Casablanca.

Lady Bird is nothing short of tremendous, a wise film about how two people deal with ambivalence.

Anthony’s is the rare film that thrives in its parts rather than in the sum of them, though the sum is breathlessly simple, to the extent that one wonders why no film has ever connected the lines—lined up the parallels—as Anthony has.

Robinson is so eager to please that she’s a little too on-the-nose sometimes; she’s definitely not subtle. But that’s okay, too, because she allows us to spend time with these people, and smart, flawed, lovable people, as they try to peel apart the layers of their lives and then reconstruct themselves.

Wasted is super optimistic, full of fantastic food-porn, and oftentimes hilarious. I was getting itchy myself before it was over, not because I was uncomfortable or bored but because I was excited to remember it might not be too late to plant winter crops in my small suburban backyard.

The Killing of a Sacred Deer is endlessly watchable but only intermittently arresting—you’re held captive by its craftsmanship, even if you find yourself not particularly invested in how it all plays out.

Winslet is doing an impression of Cate Blanchett doing an impression of Mia Farrow in September.

Failing to be incisive or moving, Marshall is content to be genial and unthreatening—two adjectives that have never been used to describe the long, hard, ongoing fight for equality.

Blade Runner 2049 should resonate deeply with anyone who’s ever held love for the original.

Though Chalamet and Hammer are up to the task of communicating a competition of desire with as few words as possible, they offer up a dare and a proposition that Guadagnino and his film never fully take on. Maybe they’re afraid of the consequences.

Kingsman: The Secret Service may lack the sophistication of its peers, but damned if it doesn’t know how to have a good time.

For all its supposed irreverence, the movie feels product-tested to the moon; there isn’t a single shot that isn’t trying to sell you something. The movie also has some of the creeping bro grossness of some of Vaughn’s other films.

Ninjago seems emotionally interesting during, and immediately boring afterward. There are plenty of parts to this movie that work and moved me, but they’re mired in a whole that doesn’t seem to recognize what’s really working.

In Search of Fellini isn’t a sophisticated movie. Instead, it’s a joyful movie, and the lack of refinement, whether embodied by the overuse of Fellini clips or the lack of juicy material for Bello and Rajskub to sink their teeth into, shows without stymying the movie’s intentions as a love note to its namesake.

As stimulating as it is, the animation ends up being more pictorial than expressive—an initially fancy but eventually rather monotonous way to dress up what is ultimately a mundane drag of a detective procedural.

Ultimately, Gerald’s Game is an unassuming, overachieving little thriller that is blessed by two performers capable of handling the lion’s share of the dramatic challenges it presents.

Despite its shortcomings, American Made can be deceptively nuanced, as Liman and Cruise put care into their depiction of a natural born charmer who may eventually find his luck has run out.

It’s only in Dayveon’s final act that plot contrivances begin to wander away from Abbasi’s carefully calibrated realism.

Battle of the Sexes projects a breezy confidence—the movie’s a little too smooth and polished, eschewing the grit of real life—but Stone conveys her character’s growing anxieties with such care that King emerges as an immensely empathetic, resilient figure.

The Tiger Hunter isn’t exactly the most woke comic effort you’ll see in 2017, but there’s a particular pleasure taken in watching Khan pick apart our beloved national fable through a South Asian lens, even though that lens indulges a traditional and long-expired style of racial profiling.

Woodshock is a movie which doesn’t seem to have much interest in being a movie. It revels in images and sensations...without much mind paid to story or character development or really even any context demanded by the difficult issues it raises.

Salinger’s world doesn’t feel real, but like an amusement park ride taking visitors through the major stops of an author’s legacy, each moment a checkmark before the literary splashdown. It’s almost stubbornly mediocre.

Every creative problem White gives himself receives the most boring, trite solution, each chance for artistry stifled by mediocrity.

The Limehouse Golem has costumes, and drama and an abundance of severed appendages, splattered gore and artfully dismembered bodies, and maybe that’s all any horror fan can ask for. Still: There’s nothing wrong with hoping for more.

The problem with director and writer Hallie Myers-Sheyer’s film is that it just blandly presents all of the expected cliches of the genre without anything really new or unique to say.

It’s a calculated and logical film about an altogether illogical subject.