It can be hard to disagree with the heart and events of this true tale, except for when the movie reveals itself to be mighty self-congratulatory.

Unfortunately, for this viewer, the formal constraint foisted upon him by writer/director Jeremy Rush in Wheelman went right up his nose and stayed there, resulting in a little less than 90 minutes of annoyance.

Leatherface tries to show us what made the man we know the legend he is now. Sadly, the makers of Leatherface didn't put enough thought into a sleepy story that could easily be titled "I Was a Teenage Leatherface."

The visuals here are interesting because Adela is a circus clown and we get see a lot of the colorful life around her performances.

Jungle succeeds in communicating the young Israeli kid’s horrible situation, as well as the camaraderie between him and his new friends, but falls short when trying to visually explicate his mental state.

A movie that veers off the track of slow burn into turgid pacing a few too many times to be entirely effective.

One of the best documentaries of the year so far.

The movie makes canny use of non-linear editing, moving backwards and forwards with engaging fluidity, and it keeps this up throughout.

You’re going to Madea’s house to laugh, forget your troubles and perhaps get a good Christian message. To Perry’s credit, he does a far better job of folding that message into the film than usual.

One of Us is so strong as-is that its more harrowing sections — particularly Ari's account of his childhood suffering and the details of Rachel's fight for freedom — are so already hard to watch that you might want to turn away.

Despite what the title suggests, Wonderstruck represents a rare disappointment from master filmmaker Todd Haynes.

Despite its early unevenness, Only the Brave tells its story in a sincere and relatively non-exploitative manner that isn’t overly dominated by visual effects, and the cast does some very good work as well.

To top off all of the ineffective weirdness, the movie ends on a tone-deaf “got a sequel if you want it” note.

There is a fascinating impulsiveness to the production of this story, especially as it essentially drops viewers into the world of Daje, and then has us follow her for months.

Some interesting things start to happen in Thy Father's Chair as the cleaners make headway, room by room.

Its lively finale is heartening, given the patience that Laaksonen was obliged to exercise before he could live his life out in the open. But the insights of the movie are too scant for much of a real impression to take hold of the viewer.

For an hour, Lucky McKee’s Blood Money is aggressively annoying, the kind of film with no likable or believable characters, and one of those cheap VOD flicks in which it feels like everyone was there purely for the paycheck.

Though Donald Trump is never mentioned by name in all 140 minutes of Ai Weiwei’s new documentary, Human Flow, the picture is, quite simply, the most monumental cinematic middle finger aimed at his scandal-laden administration to date.

The word “genius” is heard more than once, and the more the film shows us, the less even hardened skeptics will be likely to demur.

What could have been a salute to the power of imagination to heal damaged souls and broken relationships instead opts to focus on tragic events.

The turgid revenge thriller The Foreigner is an all-around lousy movie.

Professor Marston and the Wonder Women aims to shake you up, make you think and maybe even squirm a little. Make that a lot. This movie is sexy as hell, featuring several scenes of steamy three-ways and kinky S&M games.

The Meyerowitz Stories shockingly belongs to Sandler, who is absolutely fantastic.

Worst of all, it wastes the meta-idea that a lot of horror films are basically like “Groundhog Day” to an extent, as we watch relatively indistinguishable counselors at Camp Crystal Lake, for example, get killed again and again.

It pays attention to issues of racial, religious and gender discrimination without wavering from its main objective: giving us an entertaining film about a couple of guys who are in way over their heads.

The Christmas-themed home-invasion movie Better Watch Out starts out as one kind of unpleasant, then switches gears to a higher level of unearned nastiness.

Great actors Ben Mendelsohn and Rooney Mara do their best to elevate the frustrating Una, but their director doesn’t seem to understand what he has in these two performers, constantly pulling back from their raw emotion and complex characters.

Appears at first to take a more macro perspective on gay rights. But it tells a big story indeed.

Even though other characters appear from time to time, Barracuda is a two-hander, with one extraordinary scene after another (the script was written by Cortlund).

The movie would fit nicely in a film festival comprised of works with a similar theme, including "Legends of the Fall" and "The Revenant" and older wilderness dramas like "Jeremiah Johnson" and "Bend of the River."

If you are willing to suspend your disbelief for 132 minutes, you may find yourself head-over-heels for this film's brand of gross, thoughtful pulp fiction.

The film doesn't feel or look like a documentary. It's a character-based piece, but the structure is carefully considered with a clear narrative thrust and an unusual style.

Agnes Varda is almost 90 years old and she is still making fantastic films. Searching, compassionate, provocative, funny, sad ones. This is one of them. You should see it, and then go dancing in the streets.

Imagine eating a giant bag of Skittles, then throwing it all up in a fit of sugar-induced nausea and you’ll have some idea of what it feels like to sit through My Little Pony: The Movie.

The film is too ordinary to feel like it does her legacy complete artistic justice.

A high-altitude soap opera, woozy with overly telegraphed peril and determined to make the audience root for a couple who clearly aren’t meant for each other and played by actors who deserve a generous C-minus in chemistry.

It’s one of the most stunningly shot films of not just this year, but the last several. I can’t wait to just see it again, just to bask in its visuals without trying to follow its plot. And the sound design is so remarkable that it’s almost overwhelming—this is a film you don’t passively watch, you experience it.

The whole thing is too much of a tease, and once you figure that out, there's no actual suspense to speak of, just momentary manipulations.

I want to recommend Don't Sleep because it is, intellectually, more compelling than many of the indie horror films I tend to watch. But I can't recommend this movie, mostly because it's not smart enough to deserve that praise.

It’s painful to watch. Not because no one cares about Adam’s heartache. But because the movie is boring, trite, sexist tripe that wants to make the viewer empathize with a guy who’s actually pretty aggressive in his pursuit of loserdom.

This film encourages us to explore who and what he was most loyal to.

The movie is inescapably lifelessness, unintentionally dumbing itself down while desperately hoping to be profound.

So, no, this is not a frivolous film. There are a few surfing sequences that provide a rush of “whoa!” adrenaline, and some breathtaking Hawaiian landscapes on display. But the movie is a character study more than anything else.

Super Dark Times has a deeply unnerving mood, more unnerving than "what happens."

Any diehard King fan will tell you that the author’s biggest problem is endings. For years, it was almost a joke that King didn’t know how to wrap up even his best books. His ending for Gerald’s Game is atrocious, and you’d be better off turning this off about ten minutes before the credits and just imagining what happens.

The hormonal surges in Our Souls at Night aren’t quite the rollercoaster ride they are in those adolescent affairs. But this steady-as-it-goes approach to a senior snuggling has its ups and downs, too.

It’s the humblest deep movie of recent years, a work in the same vein as American marginalia like “Stranger Than Paradise” and “Trees Lounge,” but with its own rhythm and color, its own emotional temperature, its own reasons for revealing and concealing things.

American Made may be superficially a condemnation of the hypocritical American impulse to take drug suppliers' money with one hand and chastise users with the other. But it's mostly a sensational, sub-"Wolf of Wall Street"-style true crime story that attempts to seduce you, then abandon you.

I Am Another You is finally so absorbing because it plays like a lyrical road odyssey that’s also a detective story. The more Wang pursues her subject, the more depth and complexity she finds in it, and we share her sense of discovery.

If you are hungry for dazzling eye candy and don’t mind a less-than-meaty narrative, this might please your palate.

It doesn't know what it wants to be, or what story it wants to tell.

What is unusual about the film is that it is a frankly admiring portrait of a monarch. The king here is the tale’s hero, and the choice he makes regarding the Nazi invasion undergird a drama that is proudly and unequivocally patriotic.

This is a strong film that tackles a charged subject in a fair and even-handed manner. The Force will give viewers of all social and political persuasions much to think about afterwards.

A documentary that serves a vital function. Ricky Gervais notwithstanding, this disease is no joke, and it’s not going to be addressed as the scourge that it is until a larger portion of the population gets that. This movie should help.

The dream — or the drug-induced hallucination, or whatever this is — can only last for so long.

The end result is a film that may not rise to the level of “Don’t Look Back” or “Truth or Dare” but still manages to create a sense of intimacy and revelation, even as we sense that there is really no such thing as an unguarded moment for Lady Gaga.

This sturdy regal period piece provides a perfect opportunity to properly adore the 82-year-old legend as she revisits the role of Queen Victoria two decades after first playing the indomitable monarch in “Mrs. Brown.”

When she least expects it, the face of the cat transforms into a monstrous one, with sharp, pointy teeth and a roar. Yes, this is going to be one of those horror movies.

While the script has a problem sharing why it was excited to place conjoined twins in such a predicament, the Fontana sisters boast a special emotional eloquence.

It’s violence for cowardly voyeurs who want to make the people who annoy them just shut up in a way that’s silent, sterile, and thoroughly humiliating to the victim.

The pieces are all there, but they never really snap into place.

It’s a portrait of obsession that doesn’t caricaturize nor ridicule, an empathetic account of desire and its inherent limitations, as well as an opaque psychological study that falls in line with life’s myriad mysteries.

One of those paint-by-numbers romcoms that feels like you might have seen it a dozen times before.

Perhaps die-hard fashionistas would find this reasonably diverting, but to everyone else, it is guaranteed to grow tiresome very quickly.

An action film, a spy thriller, a meditation on revenge, and a story about mentors and pupils, but mostly it's a movie that loves to maim and kill people and is very good at it.

Rat Film is an odd and captivating experience, and its fluid style is its most distinguishing characteristic.

A terribly uneven narrative that doesn’t especially work as drama or noir and which manages to waste a pretty good cast in the bargain.

It is that very lack of objectivity that makes Strong Island the experience that it is. It is a very tough film to shake.

Angelina Jolie's First They Killed My Father is far and away her best work as a director: a rare film about a national tragedy told through the eyes and mind of a child, and as fine a war movie as has ever been made.

Brad’s Status might be the most Ben Stillerish movie Ben Stiller has ever made, and that’s actually a good thing.

It’s that honesty that makes The Florida Project so powerful. This is a remarkable film, one of the best of the year.

Some of it is too broad, and I wish the film dug a little deeper at times, but this is one of those rare inspirational films that earns its inspiration.

The result is a mesmerizing thriller, a movie that asks questions with no good answers and traps us within its terrifying and bizarre situation with little hope for a happy ending. With uniformly great performances throughout the cast and Lanthimos’ stunning eye for detail and composition, this is one of the most unforgettable films of the year.

The performances and the inherent power of the true story keep it from being a complete disaster, but one hopes Serkis moves on to more challenging material with his follow-up.

It’s not a “bad” film, but Billie Jean King’s story could have been so much deeper. It’s a movie that doesn’t hit nearly as hard as she did.

The film’s boundless enthusiasm for the idea of the library wins the day.

Anger is an energy in Martin McDonagh’s brilliant Three Billboards Outside Ebbing, Missouri, one of the best films of the year.

Dayveon stands out with its vision, regional flavor and overall personality.

The dull Suburbicon lacks in witty dialogue, interesting characters, or even visual flourishes. It is as flat as the well-manicured lawns in the idyllic neighborhood that gives it a name.

mother! is at times horrifying, at times riveting, at times baffling, and at times like nothing you’ve ever seen before.

Gun Shy is an action-comedy starring Antonio Banderas that is lacking only action, comedy and a performance by Antonio Banderas that is anything other than a complete embarrassment.

The limitations of Palansky and co-writer Mike Vukadinovich's shared vision are, realistically, the biggest problem with Rememory.

The execution is riddled with problems, not the least of which is the absence of Salinger’s actual work.

Fallen fuses its one good idea with countless bad ones generated not from life experience but from recycled formulas.

The Limehouse Golem only reflects its creators' lack of imagination. Medina and Goldman invest so much time in (poorly) misleading audiences that they say nothing memorable about the past, or why it matters to today's audience.

Aan odd fusion of an earnest socially conscious drama and a B-movie mystery programmer that never quite comes together despite a strong performance from Adele Haenel at its center.

It is a celebration of these two eccentric and devoted teachers (and, by extension, teachers everywhere). We see them at work, we see them at rest, we see them kneeling by an open window smoking, wondering what they would ever do with themselves if they weren't doing this?

Trophy strives to be kind and fair. But it is unmerciful in its exploration of the hunting business. Like a ruthless lawyer, it loves poking holes in arguments that appear rock-solid.

Yes, the casual-chic interior designs shine as much as her mom’s ever did. But I never really felt at home with Home Again.

What Bill Skarsgard does with the role works well precisely because he doesn’t appear to be laboring so hard to frighten us. He doesn’t vamp it up. He’s coy — he toys with these kids — making his sudden bursts of insane clown hostility that much more shocking.

It is a touching document of seemingly regular people who yearn to keep an artistic tradition alive.

There’s a horror and truth that comes from staring into the abyss, and Son of a Gun could stand to learn a little more from Michael Mann about how to convey those cinematically. It’s a little heavy on incident, and a little light on soul

The film is routinely gorgeous, but by turning its "real" people into Malick-style characters, it erodes their humanity in an uncomfortable way.

Tulip Fever reveals itself to be so nutty because it explicitly believes it’s not crazy, rambling through its odd events and obsessions without an ounce of 17th century kitsch.

This is the horror movie equivalent of canned Spam: you could have it so much better if you tried harder (or at all).

Jackals put me in a foul mood. Maybe that’s the intention of this lean, mean slab of B-horror trash: to set you on edge and keep you there long after it’s over.

Maybe the heart of the problem is that Kate and Meg's behavior doesn't track with the practical realities of lifelong, functioning friendship between (most) women as experienced by...well, any functioning adult who lives in the world.

It’s baffling, more than anything, as to how all of this talent could create something so uncharacteristic to their collective abilities to make us laugh, or feel something.