It occasionally reminds you of how awful it can be a kid, and It also occasionally makes you jump out of your chair. But it never figures out how to do both at the same time.

Maybe this isn’t the sophomore picture we’d hoped for, but it’s sharp and insightful regardless.

With its impeccably framed wide compositions, immersive long takes, and a cross-cutting narrative style that touches on the work of Matthew Barney—or, in a considerably more mainstream vein, Christopher Nolan—The Challenge feels like avant-garde art more than anything else.

Served Like a Girl manages to inform the audience about its important subject matter in an always engaging way while also telling an entertaining story with as many twists and turns as one might find in a fictionalized counterpart.

When the film makes its hairpin turn from comedy to drama, it doesn’t really fully commit, which has the effect of negating the power of its more serious ideas.

As was the case with Goon, Last of the Enforcers revels in a hockey culture that Baruchel knows intimately, exhibited in the crude locker room banter from some of the returning players.

The filmmakers behind Leap! seemingly can’t picture a children’s movie without a cavalcade of unnecessary action scenes and fart jokes—and not good fart jokes at that. The result is a movie allegedly about ballet with weirdly few scenes featuring actual dancing.

There isn’t an action movie out there in 2017 that’s quite like it (for better or for worse), no action movie either as crazy or as committed to its craziness.

The film isn’t strictly terrible—it is, for lack of a better neutral word, “watchable”—but it also has no real reason to exist.

The lone beacon of subtlety and warmth here is Dave Bautista, a man I would like to give a long hug. Bautista is able to extract quiet moments of genuine empathy and reflection from the shitshow droning on around him, yanking whatever depth is available from the shallow husk of a character he’s given.

Wingard’s Death Note moves like a bullet and doles out practical gore and overheated melodrama in equal measure.

One of the more frustrating experiences in appraising art is arriving at the confusing intersection of admiring an artist’s work, while simultaneously not particularly enjoying it.... Bill Watterson’s fiercely creative yet endlessly frustrating Dave Made a Maze leaves the viewer in precisely this uncomfortable position.

Against the backdrop of a coming-of-age ritual, The Wound finds its greatest insights in contrasts between tradition and modernity.

Despite these sharp moments, there’s a frustrating looseness to Lafosse’s narrative, feeling as though many of After Love’s scenes could be rearranged without changing the film’s flow. In turn, a slackness undercuts the tension the film is otherwise trying to build.

It’s a major step up for the filmmaker in both narrative and technical terms.

It’s an exquisitely challenging production, one that calls for repeat viewings over years, all the better to persuade the film to surrender its meaning.

Dickinson, in his film debut, almost makes this familiar narrative feel fresh.

It’s an endurance test where viewers pit their tolerance for naked displays of ugly masculinity against Bravo’s assured directorial chops. It’s also the best, or maybe most vital, presentation of whiteness in theaters in 2017, or for that matter the last half decade or so of pop culture.

An assembly line of ostensibly “hip” gestures and snarky attitude, The Hitman’s Bodyguard wants very badly to be a naughty, R-rated guilty pleasure. Nobody tell its makers that it’s mostly just mildly boring.

Patti Cake$ clearly loves music, but fails to translate that into a compelling narrative. It’s an album filled mostly with half-baked skits.

Soderbergh has been an indie wunderkind, an anarchic prankster, a self-sabotaging bomb thrower, even a studio hack. Logan Lucky isn’t the best movie he’s ever made, but it’s pointing him a most fascinating new direction—the auteur as compulsive entertainer. He’s well on his way.

The Glass Castle is a two-hour fight between a messy, sad, angry real-life family story and a Hollywood movie that keeps trying to soften all the edges and turn the tale into something “inspirational.”

Good Time features no shootouts or car chases—there isn’t a single explosion in the whole film. The Safdies and Pattinson don’t need any of that. Like Connie, they thrive on their wits and endless inventiveness—the thrill comes in marveling at how far it can take them.

The deeper Some Freaks wades into what becomes a series of sadistic and masochistic humiliations, the more McDonald’s film begins to feel schematic, with these characters little more than pawns in a screenwriter’s game of toying with our expectations.

Cotillard, whose face is often painted in chiaroscuro care of cinematographer Christophe Beaucarne, manages to provide a gravitas and slightly colored deviations from what is otherwise a monochrome character.

Step may stumble over its own hurried pace (cramming months of school into montage after montage), but such a method is almost forgivable once you realize that the film is speeding towards an effective finale that will have you cheering no matter what.

Ultimately, fans of the previous two films will get all they crave from The Trip to Spain, which feels like something of a rarity in franchising: These movies have yet to fizzle out and lose their appeal or run out of creative space to explore.

The Nut Job 2 actually contains some impressive animation, with photorealistic backgrounds and detailed fur dynamics on the characters, but that makes it an even bigger tragedy, since we know that untold hours were spent by artists in service of a product that even the least discerning child would find tired and useless.

The places and things Kogonada includes in his frame are important for drawing us into Columbus’s world, but it’s Richardson who gives that world its shape, supplying her director’s clean, static compositions, captured in long shots, with aching humanity molded by doubt and disappointment.

The Coens have created a film that is wholly original and highly entertaining.

Phillips simply tries to do too much.

You won’t find much of this particularly new or enlightening. It’s a little surprising, considering how much thought Leitch (no relation, by the way) has put into the action sequences, how perfunctory and even lackadaisical the rest of the film is.

The result is a sharp, moving dissection of personal identity and self-agency.

The Emoji Movie’s most insidious trait is its surface-level innocuousness.

It’s an overwhelming horror movie—maybe a little too overwhelming.

It’s so devoid of content and meaning that it’s easy to watch in spite of its terribleness.

Valerian wants to be weird and sexy but just won’t let itself.

The thrills become rather predictable.

Hers is a humane vision that refuses to cast easy judgment on her deeply flawed characters, never excusing them for their unwise decisions, but understanding the inner anguish from which they arise.

You might have heard about ISIS using spiffy, Hollywood-style propaganda videos to attract new recruits, but City of Ghosts breaks down how nefarious and well-organized this operation is, as the members of RBSS point out the ways in which ISIS took clear production lessons from Hollywood to make their videos as attractive to impressionable youth as possible.

A Ghost Story rewards viewers who are willing to engage with it, to accept its evolving premise and experience the expressionless specter’s afterlife as it reveals itself.

It’s probably a tautology to say that the patchwork surrealism of Kuso doesn’t hang together as a coherent experience.

Brigsby Bear is so committed to its brand of self-congratulatory uplift that the filmmakers refuse to contemplate any of their material’s darker aspects.

While Person to Person has an appealing less-is-more stance, sometimes less is just less.

Isabelle Huppert walks on screen in Luc Bondy’s False Confessions intent, it seems, on reminding audiences that she can do anything, including turn a modern adaptation of outdated theater tropes into near-vital product.

It’s a rapturous, gorgeous movie about the sad joy of living, the product of a filmmaker who has spent his life wrestling with the human desire to shed banality and elude our mortality, but for all its intellectual ambitions and philosophical gravity, Endless Poetry never reads as stuffy or self-serious.

It’s a really well-made genre movie, the product of a smart, obviously skilled filmmaker with a good sense of economy.

It takes everything Nolan does well and everything he doesn’t, everything he fights against and everything he embraces, everything great and terrible about him, and streamlines it, focuses it, until it’s pure Nolan, straight into your veins. It’s the most Christopher Nolan film imaginable. It also might just be his best one.

Wish Upon’s plotting is all too arbitrary to be earnestly enjoyable.

Their Finest is a joy to watch, if not for Scherfig’s direction than for Arterton’s leading performance, a mixture of affronted gumption, feminine stoicism and vulnerability that adds up to towering portraiture.

Oldroyd...maintains such a rigorous distance from Katherine that she gradually seems less like a human being than like a mere carnival attraction.

As much as I love to harp on Despicable Me 3’s lazy and cynical execution, this is a fairly inoffensive, zippy and colorful time-waster for the little ones.

What we’re left with in War for the Planet of the Apes is an absorbing, intelligent finale. The film builds to an ending that, although not particularly surprising, feels appropriate—even inevitable—considering all that’s come before.

Throughout its near two-hour runtime, the film broaches many weighty subjects.... And to its credit, Genocidal Organ manages to juggle all of these hefty concepts rather capably.

Inside Out may be the best Pixar has released in a while, especially after a string of disappointing and underwhelming efforts, but what’s most cheering about the film—and most like Pixar’s celebrated classics—is that it’s so emotionally astute.

Sadly, A Touch of Sin isn’t a movie that will have any trouble translating to other cultures. If anything, it’s upsetting how much Jia’s dark tale of murder, retribution and suicide echoes similar issues within America’s contentious class system.

The film is a black hole that sucks comedy into its vortex, never to be seen again.

Though the connective tissue keeping the film’s story together often requires its thin characters to improvise or otherwise overstretch themselves from sketch to sketch—emphasizing their relative shallowness as short story subjects—the medieval absurdity at the heart of the comedy always lands.

Despite the intriguing subject matter, this documentary can’t stay in the air.

Tramps is a minor effort loaded with small pleasures, but tallied together, those small pleasures add up to one great movie.

The discussion of what the film isn’t is a discussion worth having, just not at the expense of what the film is: Delicious, sensual, made with sterling craft and an unassumingly sharp edge.

Briskly paced and charming to a fault, it’s a Spider-Man movie that fully embraces both its source material and the perils of 21st century teenage life.

The Scribbler is overwrought, absurd, occasionally exploitative, completely lacking in subplot, takes a good 20-25 minutes to really get going and has acting that varies from excellent to, well, less-than-excellent. It’s also hugely fun!

While none of Viral’s segments manage to equal any of the better sequences from either previous V/H/S installments, what’s left is a solid group of vignettes that—while not reinventing the wheel—will surely put a smile on the right (albeit, twisted) viewers’ faces.

This movie is all about sensation, about grooving on the very specific but unquestionably catchy hook Wright has laid down for you.

It would be inaccurate to say The B-Side only scratches the surface of Dorfman, but this lovely portrait takes pains to adopt her mindset, finding the beauty that pervades an artist’s life. As a result, Morris is offering his own kind B-side—not better than the main work, but a delightful alternative take.

There are times during João Pedro Rodrigues’s newest film, The Ornithologist, wherein you can’t tell if it’s all a big sexy joke or if it’s an earnest, religious and intellectual inquiry into the boundaries of spiritual and physical adventure. There’s enough evidence in the film...to argue that it’s both.

The movie is funny/sad without ever necessarily being revelatory or incisive. For better or worse, it’s very much like its protagonists: deeply, reliably nice. In fact, what’s most radical about The Big Sick is its optimistic insistence that a little niceness can make all the difference.

All the signature Bay Movements are here, the slow-motion hero shots, the scale so vast that even planets look small and modest, the aggressively dorky jokes, but they all have a perfunctory feel, like even Bay couldn’t muster up much enthusiasm this time.

The movie is cluttered, disorganized, choppy, obvious and, at the end of the day, not even energetic enough to work up much frustration about.

The Book of Henry means well, but it doesn’t do well. It does incoherent pastiche and self-congratulatory pap instead.

Granted, the film might not have turned out much better had Smit stuck with one perspective or the other, but at least it would have had constancy. Instead, it reads strictly as a video game, sans the requisite interactive gratification.

Hawkins’ performance in Maudie is as indelible a feat of psychological imagination as it is of physical dedication.

A well-acted, well-reasoned two-hander that struggles to swerve around the contrivances of the genre.

All Eyez on Me risks little, and as a result it’s not worthy of his complicated legacy.

For the first time in its storied history, a Pixar movie feels like a straight-to-DVD entry: undemanding, mildly amusing, utterly disposable.

Cohn’s film is ultimately a genuinely inspiring one, noteworthy in the way it achieves its uplift honestly and without sentimentality.

If The Hero works at all, it’s because Elliott brings a measure of emotional truth to even the most sentimental of plot developments, and because Haley exudes such warm patience for his lead actor’s rhythms and cadences.

White and Arteta have a solid foundation but seemingly no idea of where it could go.

Raising Bertie is a moving chronicle, and a potent treatise on institutional failings that knows to demonstrate said problems instead of merely preaching them.

I Love You Both perhaps would have been best imagined as a short, but it makes for a breezy watch.

Shults’s film is many things—heart-wrenching, paced to perfection, a masterclass in visual storytelling and genuinely terrifying.

As impressively exhaustive as it is as a work of history, Dawson City: Frozen Time plays even more affectingly as Morrison’s most direct love letter to cinema: as a tool not only for recording history, but also for capturing between-the-lines truths that history books can only graze.

The film never quite achieves the level of fevered hurry for which it aims—sometimes due to its often trite, on-the-nose dialogue and sometimes to the stilted delivery of said dialogue.

Captain Underpants’ plethora of animation styles (including a wonderful sock puppet sequence) separates the film into imaginative sublayers, keeping it from feeling like the one-joke wonder that it often edges towards.

As a commentary on the modern blockbuster, the movie’s fascinating. But as an actual movie, it’s fairly disheartening.

If your tastes run to the rude, crude and pleasantly bizarre—the laughs are there, doing the heavy lifting for a story that barely is.

Healy’s good; Schilling’s superb. Together, they make a hell of a team, he the wide-eyed schlemiel, she the hysterical but thoroughly capable victim who would naturally rather not be a victim in the first place.

All the components for bite are here, from unflattering character portraits to hideous amorality, but The Commune never clamps down quite as hard as you’d like it to. Your time won’t be wasted with the movie, but it won’t send you out of the theater scarred, either.

Packing far more emotional weight than your standard buddy comedy, Jeff Grace’s Folk Hero & Funny Guy sets up something akin to The Odd Couple on the road and then proceeds to turn most—or all—of your assumptions on their heads with charm, wit and not a small amount of melancholy.

It’s clear, in any case, that Mindhorn is a labor of love for the cast and crew, and while it’s not as memorable as the comedies it recalls, its attention to more serious underlying themes is commendable.

Wakefield is… well, let’s just say, its insights into human nature are limited, at best.

The first third of Alien: Covenant is suitably gripping. The final third is wreathed in tension reminiscent of the film’s 1979 progenitor, Alien. The second third sandwiched in between these bookends is equally interminable and dumb, a garbage-level studio-prompted exercise in origin narrative, built to demystify intellectual property where mystification is a key factor in its success.

Baywatch is a tonal mess of epic proportions.

The problem with War Machine is its difficulty keeping its tone consistent in the service of a compelling story or dramatic rendering of ideas.

It’s difficult to think of a biopic that so thoroughly embarrasses its subject in the process of attempting to honor them the way Churchill does.

Band Aid never quite adds up to more than the sum of its fleeting charms.

Wonder Woman won’t reinvent the superhero franchise, or the origin story. But it does show how compelling they can still be, when someone is allowed to do them right.