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.