The sincerity that Brie brings to her full-fledged embodiment of mental illness is major, and in turn helps Horse Girl overcome its tricky storytelling.

The Assistant, a very good film, is especially good on power dynamics.

Blake Lively gives it her all in The Rhythm Section, but the movie only meets her halfway.

In reality, this is the kind of low-key gem that horror fans are always looking for but so rarely find — one that is smartly conceived, visually stylish and genuinely creepy at times.

While this isn't another Garbus documentary, she’s made a film with all the power of great non-fiction storytelling, and found a way to make the emotional message of this story hit home in a way that it wouldn’t have otherwise.

I imagine even Billy Wilder would’ve gotten misty-eyed during the final, perfectly-pitched moments of this extraordinary film.

One of those quick-witted films in which if one character or plot thread doesn’t work for you, all you have to do is wait a minute for another.

I’m not sure the ending lands, and some of the tonal jumps could have been refined, but there’s so much movie here to unpack and discuss.

Wendy is a repetitive, shallow film, a children’s fable that means way more to the child who dreamed it up than it will to you.

With stunning performances from two completely genuine young leads, this is a movie people will talk about all year.

Covino’s film is an exhilarating anomaly, if not a wake-up call for the visual potential of heartfelt comedy.

These ideas are presented by a cast of well-seasoned actors who help the film survive its occasionally clunky dialogue. In fact, one of the film’s bigger pleasures is listening to these thespians plow through their numerous monologues. Their performances are the film's saving grace.

Even without access to all that it references, I Wish I Knew functions as an admirable cinematic tone poem about a place and its times.

Guy Ritchie's The Gentlemen plays like a tall tale, a yarn heard at the corner pub, filled with exaggerations and embellishments, where the storyteller expects you to pay his bar tab at the end. And maybe you won't mind doing so.

If The Turning leaves you screaming, it’ll probably be out of frustration over its abrupt, unsatisfying ending and not the actual frights that precede it.

The new French voodoo/gothic drama Zombi Child is mostly satisfying, but also a little frustrating because of its creators’ walking-on-shells sensitivity.

Lana Wilson's doc is engineered to appease her fans and promote Swift's self-awareness, and yet it leaves one feeling that there is still so much more to be discussed about what makes Taylor Swift who she is.

The addition of Cage to the already heady cinematic brew definitively puts it over the top, making it the kind of cult movie nirvana that was its apparent destiny from the moment the cameras started rolling.

I didn't see what was funny about the shallow wackiness of VHYes.

For a tale of mystery and intrigue, The Host provided neither.

A dull-as-dishwater, paint-by-numbers cinematic hiccup with no discernible reason for being.

At least, director Gille Klabin tries to amp up The Wave with aggressive visual style, but it’s still a movie that’s rotten at its core because it suffers from the same problem of all those “American Beauty” clones in that it never satisfactorily answers the question “Who cares?”

If Wes Anderson were to mesh “Bad News Bears” with a live-action “Monsters University,” the result would look and feel something like Troop Zero, a whimsical, if not generic kiddie adventure more suited for young ones than grown-ups.

While the performances are stronger and the narrative is more coherent than you’d see in a “Madea” movie, for example, Perry’s latest still features many of the auteur’s trademarks: dizzying tonal swings, awkward blocking, drab lighting, jarring edits and a mixture of the salacious and the puritanical.

Weathering With You, Shinkai’s latest animated romantic-fantasy to be released in America, has the same spark of ingenuity and consistency of vision as his earlier work.

This film tells us that the gulf between what we want to know and what we can know may never be illuminated.

A wild whirlwind of a mess, without any coherence, without even a guiding principle.

Surprisingly, Bad Boys For Life is nowhere near as bad as its opening day schedule would indicate. It is the best of the three films, offering in some odd ways a corrective to the prior installments. Unlike the original, this one finds some depth in its female characters.

Citizen K is skillfully made, with a compelling story, or really stories.

Evocatively moody atmosphere, a timely subject, and a fine performance by Josh Hartnett cannot help Inherit the Viper overcome its clunky dialogue and formulaic storyline.

While Bloch's emotions and thoughts about the Holocaust and the Israeli occupation are deeply felt, the documentary’s finer points are a little less clear.

Three Christs opts in for frustratingly broad characters that feel like half-considered caricatures and Jeff Russo’s sentimental, strings-heavy score that flattens whatever modest edge the movie might have had.

Les Misérables is a gripping experience, tense and upsetting.

Underwater absolutely bullies you into liking it. There's no time not to.

Like A Boss is a movie written and directed by men which bears very little resemblance to how women actually relate to each other.

Can you recommend a horror movie based on its impressive meanness? Meet Nicolas Pesce’s new and improved take on The Grudge, which is often as nasty as you want it to be, its cheesy jump-scares and generic packaging be damned.

This is screen acting of a very rare sort, and Clemency is a vital emotional powerhouse sorely deserving of being seen.

Literate, sober, soulful, and considered as it is, the movie is also a little overly scrupulous in its tastefulness.

Ip Man 4: The Finale is apparently going to be the last time Yen dons the familiar black cassock to play Ip Man, and Yip orchestrates a fittingly spectacular finish to the saga.

Sitting through it is like watching someone else playing a video game for two solid hours, and not an especially compelling one at that.

The ways in which the pigeons work wonders as a flock — to the point of becoming playfully weaponized in the name of good — is consistently inspired.

Little Women solidifies Gerwig’s one-of-a-kind voice on the page and behind the camera, opening up the classic in a blissful and innovative screen adaptation that feels ageless and vastly of today.

Movies like Just Mercy spoon-feed everything to the viewer in easily digestible chunks that assume you know nothing, or worse, don’t know any better.

Lush melodramas are a dying breed, especially masterful ones like Karim Aïnouz’s Invisible Life that wear Douglas Sirkian genre conventions on their sleeve proudly and abundantly.

The movie is affectionate because it has that sense of animal love that lets entire sequences rest on Togo’s charms, but is by no means letting the dog do all the work. Director Ericson Core (previously of the “Point Break” remake) clearly cares about animals, but filmmaking, too.

Sappy, slow, and mostly effective.

Cats suffers from a problem common in contemporary filmed musicals. The musical doesn't trust the audience, doesn't trust that the dancing in and of itself is exciting enough to hold our interest.

Whatever one thinks of “The Last Jedi,” if that film was trying to build a new house on familiar land, this one tears it down and goes back to an old blueprint. Some of the action is well-executed, there are strong performances throughout, and one almost has to admire the brazenness of the weaponized nostalgia for the original trilogy, but feelings like joy and wonder are smothered by a movie that so desperately wants to please a fractured fanbase that it doesn’t bother with an identity of its own.

It was perhaps a strength as a critic and a weakness as a person that she never understood how painful her words could be.

The Death & Life of John F. Donovan is rife with melodramatic moments and insufferable characters.

There are a lot of promising ideas here, but none are developed so much that this remake feels essential.

This time, there is a light touch of poignance as well that makes the message about friendship more meaningful. And like all good video games, there's a hint of yet another level at the end for those, like me, who are not yet ready to say Game Over.

Although Kristen Stewart pulls off Seberg’s short haircut, she hardly embodies any of the presence or persona of the French New Wave “It” girl. Stewart’s monotonous delivery makes her character sound uninterested and bored.

Chinese Portrait is a stunning work of photography and a simple work of empathy that asks, "How much goes into making sure we all get to just live?"

There’s been nothing quite like Alla Kovgan’s Cunningham, an exhilarating testament to documentaries as a boundless form of art.

So while not everything works in Black Christmas, the stuff that does is ultimately what matters most.

It’s one of the year’s best and most distinctive movies, though sure to be divisive, even alienating for some viewers, in the manner of nearly all Malick’s films to one degree or another.

As much as Eastwood finds to condemn in the movie’s designated villains, he does not deliver any comeuppances to them in the end. Which is merciful in the context of fiction, and kind of the mordant point in the context of fact.

6 Underground is definitely some awfully loud shit.

It’s all weighty, serious material with huge stakes — emotionally, culturally and financially. But Roach, working from a script by Charles Randolph, finds a tricky balance of portraying these events with a sprightly tone while crafting a steadily building tension. Bombshell is both light on its feet and a punch in the gut.

Delusion feeds addiction, and addiction needs a constant supply of delusion. Uncut Gems shows this electrified-fence feedback loop like no other film in recent memory. It's excruciating and exhilarating.

As loud and in-your-face as these developments are presented, they're amount to a shabby collection of Blumhouse-lite scenes that would be a parody if it weren’t so dull.

The best thing I can say about Daniel Isn’t Real is that it’s a promising early feature made by young artists who haven’t yet worked out how to express and/or synthesize what they like about their favorite artists and their work. It’s all style and very little substance.

Like the songs sung by its young cast, Knives and Skin feels like cinematic karaoke, lacking in authorship or deeper meaning. The cast, two actresses in particular, give it their all, but it is an aggressively hollow experience.

It's the kind of film where you start trying to guess which of the characters will turn out to be a figment of the narrator's imagination. The answer, of course, is all of them.

It ultimately results in a cold, unsatisfying experience.

On the whole, his (Griffin) indecisive The Wolf Hour tick-tocks its way to an underwhelming finale. And when it gets there, the most shocking realization you’ll have is how forgettable an affair it all has been.

Barrese follows his mother everywhere. She bikes to teach her classes, and there's lots of thought-provoking footage of her lectures and small conferences with students. These are some of the best sequences in the film.

It does not even work as a commercial, never showing us why these toys could be especially fun to play with.

This is one of the great contemporary films about the look and feel of a big city after dark, luxuriating in the vastness of almost-empty avenues lit by buzzing streetlamps. It's a real-life answer to fiction movies like "Taxi Driver," "Bringing Out the Dead," "Collateral," "Nightcrawler" and "The Sweet Smell of Success."

Although it’s stuffed with many cliches, The Aeronauts can feel like a rather enjoyable bit of historical fantasy.

Strickland frequently tests viewers’ patience, but his off-putting sensibility is powerful enough to make In Fabric as mesmerizing as its subject: salesmanship as a sinister, inescapable form of hypnosis.

It’s a delicate drama that flourishes through the liberating power of art, where a hopeful yet consuming love affair sparks between two young women amid patriarchal customs, and stays concealed in their hearts both because of and in spite of it.

Overall, the film is superbly acted and a lot of fun to watch, which I suppose is not enough hardcore critical substance to hang three and a half stars on, but there you go.

I didn't come out of this one feeling depressed or even particularly sad, more reflective. The sheer breadth and depth of this series creates its own sort of poetry, one that's strangely indistinguishable from journalism.

There’s a significant difference in quality between the mediocre scenario (and dialogue) and thrilling production design (and direction) in White Snake.

Queen & Slim is not interested in "neutral tints" either. Or "understatement." I appreciated the "big mood" of it all, even in those sequences that don't quite work. I responded strongly to the film's sense of scope and scale. The "rhetoric" of Queen & Slim reverberates with anger and love and mourning.

Once in a while you encounter a piece that seems like a premeditated farewell — a conscious summing-up of the life and work — whether or not it was intended that way. Varda by Agnès, a combination autobiography and career survey overseen by the filmmaker, is that kind of movie.

In the end, Shooting the Mafia is about recognizing Battaglia as a woman of immense bravery and unflappable individuality. She has seen a great deal of sadness in the world, and captured it in a way that combines art, journalism, and activism. “Shooting the Mafia” aptly conveys Battaglia's many layers, while exemplifying the power in not looking away.

Following the ordinary beats of a teen’s everyday life, writer/director Minhal Baig’s gentle and attentive sophomore feature Hala possesses something inherently extraordinary by just being about a young, female Muslim-American.

Filmed over the course of three years and clocking in just over 70 minutes (minus credits), When Lambs Become Lions is a triumph of shrewdly economical storytelling on the part of Kasbe and his co-editors Frederick Shanahan and Caitlyn Greene.

As with Morgan Neville's documentary "Won't You Be My Neighbor?", the tears may flow freely due to nostalgia or from some subjects hitting too close to home, but A Beautiful Day in the Neighborhood fits as a companion piece. Where the documentary offers a more complex view of the man in the red sweater and tennis shoes, Heller’s movie is more about the cultural impression Rogers left behind.

It’s this kind of mindful direction and editing that helps make 21 Bridges one of the most entertaining and thoughtful American policiers in recent memory.

At its most controlled and insinuating, Dark Waters is reminiscent of paranoid thrillers from the 1970s like "The Parallax View" and "Chinatown," where you know going in that you're going to see a story about how profoundly bad things are, thanks to corporate influence over government as well as the economy, but the extent of the corruption is still shocking.

Director Eva Orner makes her story both about the predator and the victims, and delivers an appropriately cut-and-dry case that Bikram more than deserves that third title. But she connects these sensibilities with an approach that too often feels like an info dump, instead of a gripping mediation on the larger themes and harrowing stories that inspired it.

Frozen II is funny, exciting, sad, romantic, and silly. It has great songs and a hilarious recap of the first movie, and then it is all of that all over again.

Though it’s still not entirely successful, I’m glad this version exists. Coppola’s restoration has turned a hot mess into a noble failure.

Is the human brain built to absorb so much of "the world"? How do we filter anything? Matt Wolf's new documentary, Recorder: The Marion Stokes Project, is an interesting meditation on these ideas, as well as a character study of a fascinating news-junkie with a mission.

Landsman’s film is enraging for all the right reasons, and more than a few wrong ones as well. It comes off as more of a puff piece than an exposé.

Warrior Queen is not the first movie about this subject to be helmed by a woman — “Manikarnika” was co-directed by star Kangana Ranaut — nor does it feature a stand-out performance like those other movies do (Ranaut is very good in “Manikarnika”). So while I suppose you could do worse than The Warrior Queen of Jhansi, I know you could do better.

The cooking scenes comprise the best moments in this episodic film.

It takes great effort to find what interested director Wash Westmoreland and company in the source material in the first place, but it feels like a project that reaffirms something I’ve long argued: just because something works in one medium doesn’t mean it will in another.

As a whole, The Good Liar is not quite good enough to deserve the comparisons to the works of Alfred Hitchcock it's clearly aiming for, though it is just good enough to suggest what Hitchcock himself might have done with it on a second pass.

It’s certainly like nothing else you’ll see this year.

The Report is also surprisingly free of tension, given the subject matter; if you’re going to experience any anxiety, it’ll probably come from a sense of worry over whether all of this is going to be on the final exam.

In watching so many films in a given week, month, or year, it’s rare to find one that sustains its thrills throughout its runtime, matches its gorgeous imagery with a compelling story, and defies easy categorization. Mati Diop’s haunting narrative feature debut Atlantics is one such movie. It’s unlike few other movies you’ll see this year or possibly this decade.

Of course, the clothes are great: racks of shimmery, sequined knockouts and rows of fierce pumps. And it wouldn’t be a “Charlie’s Angels” adventure without a variety of wild costumes for the ladies to don for their undercover assignments as well as an assortment of high-tech gadgets.

Damon is superb in the kind of role he excels at: a man of integrity who gets steered off the path and is subsequently righted. Lest all of this sound heavy, I should assure you that Ford v Ferrari is exactly as fun, maybe even more fun, than its well-put-together trailer makes it out to be.