While it hits some of the usual sci-fi tropes, Creative Control's center of gravity isn't tech itself, but the relationships of those who use it.

Resonant and surprisingly affecting.

A running joke about hipster clichés is tiresome, and the movie's plot threads are uneven. But watching Field work her magic is so delightful.

Director Robert Schwentke and his writing team do their best to move things along. Actually, who knows if it's their best? Maybe they're suffering from Divergent fatigue along with the rest of us.

The Bronze, for all its crudeness and lewdness (Melissa Raunch, anyone?) and wonky comedy, is actually a good old-fashioned tale of redemption.

Well-intentioned if cloying, Miracles from Heaven has an appealing cast and an accessible take on spirituality.

Wickedly clever nightmare entertainment.

Whiskey Tango Foxtrot isn't a great movie, but it is something rare and important: a woman's story of self-discovery - having nothing to do with her finding a husband - that has gotten room on the big screen.

A thrilling, gorgeous actioner about a massive tsunami that wipes a tourist town off the map.

Apart from its anthropomorphic, allegorical angle, Zootopia is also a tale of female empowerment and a classic noir, too.

An impossibly enjoyable live-action cartoon that plays on our real-life anxieties about vengeful cadres of foreign radicals blowing up people - and places.

The relationship between the young American and the old Frenchman is as rich as one of Perrier's sauces: the pupil and the teacher, the son and the father, the keen protégé and the stubborn classicist.

Emotionally engaging and unhampered by dialogue, Boy & the World will appeal to children with its deceptively simple story and its visual splendor.

A triumphant, feel-good, laugh-out-loud, sports biopic.

Most parties concerned maintain their grim countenances, their characters struggling to find the sweet spot between honor and greed, between doing the right thing and doing the absolute worst.

It's transformative.

Lindholm's mastery of film form is matched by his willingness to engage with some of the most intractable moral quandaries that haunt contemporary life.

While it descends too often into the melodramatic, it's a solid, smart picture and a welcome addition to the genre.

We can't but enjoy the movie and its oddball characters - which makes us somehow complicit in their crimes.

The Witch is a stressful movie to watch, and that's meant as the highest praise.

Tumbledown comes up light in the categories that matter most, miring a capable cast in a forced cable-knit folksiness familiar to anyone who has ever watched anything set in New England.

The film delivers what it promises - an education and a thrill.

Deadpool is, on the whole, a big bowl of fun filled with great stunts, gory fight scenes, and sexy poses.

It's not a critique but a rather graceful, witty, and stylish film that offers possible solutions to the problems Moore believes plague the United States.

For every laugh that Zoolander 2 elicits, there's a pang that all this was funnier the first time around.

The execution may not be there, but at least it has good intentions. Then again, you know what they say about the road to hell.

If you're looking for a reason to watch pretty people and cry, then, by all means, head to the theater. But it pales in comparison to other Sparks works, especially when it gets into medical-ethics territory.

A goofy conflation of Coenian elements: the numbskull huggermugger of "The Big Lebowski", the La La Land surrealness of "Barton Fink", the Old Testament overlay of "A Serious Man."

The irony of Anesthesia is that, while it uses interconnectivity as a storytelling mechanism, the characters do not really connect.

Try not to let the film's overbearingly jaunty score get in the way. The Lady in the Van is quite a feat.

It's easy to mistake the simplicity of plot and theme here for simple-mindedness - this isn't Pynchon or Proust. Kung Fu Panda 3 has the economy of a Zen koan, not to mention its inner harmony and wisdom.

Despite its formulaic structure, The Abandoned has a lot going for it. It eschews cheap scares, bloodletting, and gore. Instead, it works the audience with good, old-fashioned suspense. And it has heart.

Partridge portrays David with immaculate timing and meticulous attention to detail. We feel for the character's pain, but never quite trust him.

It would better to call it Two Actors in Search of a Story.

Characters are introduced as archetypes to serve as jokes and little more.

For all its grand promises, Ip Man 3 teeters uneasily among B-movie clichés.

Offers a crushing view of humanity at its most desperate, and a view of one man's fevered efforts to find grace and dignity amid the horror.

45 Years is a study in economy, in the beautiful symmetry of word and image and music.

13 Hours, by its very subject matter, can't help but tap into the confluent veins of politics and patriotism.

Ergüven's film, beautifully shot and beautifully performed, cuts its storybook tone with starker, more brutal truths. Anger - aimed at a conservative social order and those complicit in maintaining it - courses through this sad, striking tale.

One of those what-were-they-thinking projects in which good talent is on very bad display.

The Revenant is exhilarating cinema.

Joy's entry into the world of entrepreneurship has the crazy trajectory of a rocket gone haywire, and Russell's movie is kind of haywire, too.

An epic work of self-indulgence and smug riffing, stringing together tropes from TV and screen westerns and closed-room whodunits, The Hateful Eight announces itself with all the pomp and circumstance of a mid-century cinema spectacle.

Mara and Blanchett are each extraordinary, working in the most organic and soul-stirring ways.

Symphonic and cinematic, full of melancholy and hushed magic.

It's grown-up, deadly serious, and free of the ham-handed romantic subplots that mire so many films from the region in ick stew.

It's a sweet, funny comedy starring two of the best and brightest in the game.

The Force Awakens is half reboot, half remake, and all fun.

If Macbeth comes off at times like a Classics Illustrated comic-book adaptation (there is one, from 1955), it can also be quite moving, quite troubling, haunting, even.

It looks lovely in an art-directed way, and Eddie Redmayne, who won his Oscar earlier in the year for his portrayal of Stephen Hawking in The Theory of Everything, looks lovely, too.

In-your-face polemic, with nowhere to go once the point has been made. Repeatedly.

Richly informative and fascinating.

An accomplished and compelling film by writer/director Josh Mond, James White is also pretty much a bummer.

It's a period piece full of colorful characters, natty costumes, jaunty music.

A kind of mad coming-of-age yarn embellished with lightning bolts and monsters made of cadaverous flesh.

Creed is corny like the old Rocky films, but riveting like the old Rocky films, too.

If Mockingjay - Part 1 is quieter and less flashy than its predecessors, that doesn't make it less satisfying.

A small, intimate micro-budget effort, Altered Minds boasts terrific production values, pitch-perfect performances, and an eerie soundscape of found noises that evoke the feel of a surreal nightmare.

It's refreshing to see an actor tell his own story with some real honesty. Overall, however, Tab Hunter Confidential is too much like every other Hollywood True Story out there.

Brooklyn is that rare period drama that doesn't lose itself in its dogged re-creation of another time.

Secret in Their Eyes is notable for its top-tier cast - Julia Roberts, Nicole Kidman, and Chiwetel Ejiofor are the leads - and for its utter lack of credulity and good sense.

If Mockingjay - Part 1 was walkier and talkier than its forerunners, Part 2 is pretty much all action - and lesser for it.

Amid all the horror and the black ooze, there emerges a deeply touching story about the power of love.

What Our Fathers Did is a movie about historical and filial responsibility, about repudiation, about acceptance, about the pain we inherit, and the pain that continues to be doled out.

Despite its terrific performances and its great use of locations, Shelter doesn't have enough substance to hold your attention or linger in the mind for long.

Watching people be miserable with each other for the movie's run-time does not always make for a pleasant experience.

Inspiring stuff, the stuff of Hollywood all the way back to Frank Capra and before: a story of scrappy underdogs, determined to get to the truth, and toppling the mighty in the process.

Ghosts haunt Heart of a Dog - but so, too, does love.

Barrymore and Collette bring life and charm to a screenplay that needs all the life and charm it can get.

Jafar Panahi's Taxi looks onto a world where the social order and the spiritual order are at odds, in flux, where the conversations are sometimes cutting, sometimes comic, sometimes troubled, sometimes profound.

It's business as usual, even if that business is pulled off with brilliant precision, ingeniously choreographed action, and an itinerary boasting some of the most photogenic spots on Earth.

If we now take a woman's right to vote and to hold public office for granted, Suffragette reminds us that it wasn't that long ago when things were different.

Amazingly - and this movie is amazing - Room is a story of hope, of possibility. Sure, your stomach will be in knots, your fingers clenched, your heart racing. But it will also fill that heart with a sense of the goodness, the courage, the enduring love that is out there to be discovered - and to be held onto with the fierceness of life itself.

The Assassin is not "Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon", and it is certainly not "Kill Bill". But Hou - a linchpin of Taiwan's New Wave movement, the director of "A City of Sadness" and "The Puppetmaster" - evokes the magic, the majesty, the artistry of the martial-arts movie tradition, and brings a Zen-like sense of observation to the proceedings

Singular and stunning.

Some projects are just too misguided for the star to mug and shrug his way out of. Consider Rock the Kasbah at the top, or the bottom, of that list.

Is Steve Jobs a great film? I don't think so. It's an achievement, certainly, full of Sorkin flourishes, breathtaking and brilliant one-liners that reveal a lot about the characters who deliver them.

Despite its visual beauty and Rahim's extraordinary, and silent, performance, the film never quite manages to connect on an emotional level.

Goosebumps fulfills its purpose, and that's what matters.

The country goes unnamed, the warring factions aren't always clear, but the nightmarish exploitation of children is made specific in the most vivid, visceral ways.

Using a screenplay polished and honed by the Coen Brothers, Spielberg dips into John le Carré territory (you can't help but think of The Spy Who Came in From the Cold when Donovan looks onto the newly erected Berlin Wall, in the searchlights, in the snow).

What makes Drunk Stoned Brilliant Dead feel particularly vibrant is how the Lampoon's specific art direction is put to use.

While its message is a little simplistic, Knock Knock is shot through with a brilliant, gleefully anarchic dark humor that's equally fun and disturbing.

A polished piece of advocacy filmmaking, He Named Me Malala begins - and is intercut with - beautiful animated sequences featuring Malala's 19th-century namesake, Malalai of Maiwand, an Afghani Pashtun poet who inspired her countrymen to rally against an onslaught of British troops.

The plot itself has little momentum, and what should feel dramatic instead feels inert.

The movie is a snapshot collage of flyover America, but also, perhaps, an homage to the soon-to-be-lost world of brick-and-mortar gambling.

In an extraordinarily inward and moving performance, Gere sheds every vestige of his silver-screen persona.

I'm not sure if leavening is the right word, but Brolin, as an enigmatic U.S. agent with a world-weary cynicism and a black-ops vibe, provides at least a dose of (very) dark humor to the proceedings.

The Keeping Room looks at the brutality of humanity.

As a celebration of agility, ability, and outlandish human behavior, The Walk is a winning thing. It may not get inside the head of its pole-balancing protagonist - it doesn't really even try - but Zemeckis' movie takes you skyward.

The Martian is never less than engaging, and often much more than that.

Velásquez is a remarkable individual, and her message should not go unheeded.

Overall, the effect is closer to a Monty Python skit or a Village People music vid than a serious film about civil rights.

There'd be a lot less strife and starvation, disease and dread, if Nancy Meyers ruled the world.

What could have been an amusing and entertaining zombie flick is, instead, a slog.

Exceptionally graceful and accomplished, Ozon's film challenges our received notions of normalcy, intimacy, and love.

Black Mass, a down and dirty crime drama based on the exploits of Boston gangster James "Whitey" Bulger, is thrilling for a number of reasons.