It goes soft and nice and wants us to care about these characters who barely resemble human beings. After all, it’s Christmas. But everyone involved here should have asked Santa for a stronger script.

I’m not even going to discuss, in detail at least, the elephant in the ideological room that Passengers inhabits, which is its spectacular sexism.

The Bad Kids is interesting enough in what it shows us to spark interest in what it leaves un-shown. In its case, the information supplied by a few well-chosen talking heads could have given it additional clarity and appeal.

The directorial pyrotechnics keep Solace from “dragging” in a narrative sense; the very real boredom it nonetheless elicits is more existential.

Devon Terrell's performance as Barry is warming, always leading with empathy and a genuine smile, contemplative whenever not sharing his thoughts.

The Hollow Point is such a shameless and indifferent recycling of Nihilistic Crime In The New American West clichés that it feels like it was crafted by committee. A really lazy committee.

So clever and well-done that it makes the sins of the finale easy to forgive.

Fair warning: If a romance about beautiful, miserable people is your least favorite indie subgenre, this may not be your cup of tea.

The point of it all being that history and poetry are not possible without personified antimonies, real or imagined. Neruda does not make this point in any particularly convincing way, despite excellent performances by Luis Gnecco as the title character, a stolid Gael Garcia Bernal as his pursuer, and Mercedes Morán as Delia.

Despite being played by two charismatic and more-than-capable actors, the title characters never click in the way they need to. They're too cool and vague for the volcanic story they enact.

I don’t think I've witnessed a film this year that managed to so completely and utterly collapse into crass garbage in its last few minutes while abusing what little good will it has.

Rogue One is a letdown in other areas, and there are creative decisions so ill-conceived they take you out of the story. But somehow these aren't enough to sink the movie, which manages to succeed as both super-nerdy fan service and the first entry since the 1977 original that will satisfy people who have never seen a "Star Wars" film.

The dialogue isn’t just awkward and unbelievable — it’s as if it was written by a teenager raised on only bad horror movies.

Van Dormael’s film was pure torture from first to last, about as mirthless a comedy as I ever hope to see.

The current incarnation of Seagal is no fun at all.

The adaptation (by Josh Boone and Jill Killington) lacks any inference, mystery, or discovery: it is all text. Any complexity that there may be is all on the surface. Problems are easily solved, since there's nothing left unsaid, or if something is left unsaid that Ruthie says it for us in the voiceover. This makes for predictable viewing.

Baldwin's voice as a writer comes through powerfully anyway. It was wise to have Jackson read Baldwin's words plainly in his own voice, rather than attempt an impersonation.

The filmmakers are themselves too celebrity besotted to comment in a meaningful way on how Benson’s career balanced depictions of the rich and famous with in-the-trenches risk-taking.

Alas, Office Christmas Party serves as yet another reminder that allowing your cast to madly improvise (as evident with an unnecessary end-credits blooper reel) instead of actually providing a coherent script with a scintilla of logic often leads to a decline in sustained laughter.

With a documentary as flabby but well-meaning as Best and Most Beautiful Things, you have to savor the small stuff.

As awe-inspiring as this footage is, it’s every bit as amazing to envision how the filmmakers had to prepare for framing these moments with impeccable precision.

In a movie year in which I’ve had to see both “Clown” and “Trash Fire,” the bar for worst of year is pretty low. I suppose that Pet, for me at least, completes a trifecta of sorts.

Only really comes alive when cars are being used as battering rams and computer-generated explosions proliferate like fireworks.

It's a movie lost somewhere in the middle: too weird to be believable, not weird enough to be memorable.

With The Duelist, Rodnyansky is taking a more commercial turn, one that depends less on art-house refinements than on plush production values, action-movie tropes and a couple of stellar lead performances.

Arthouse horror flick The Eyes of My Mother actively alienates viewers by presenting episodes in a woman's life from a post-human, God-like perspective. Sometimes. Usually. Probably?

Man Down is a bad film, but it’s made even worse by the taste it will leave in your mouth regarding its silly handling of a very serious issue.

Pollard’s choice to end with a stirring a capella number by Son House still provided the uplift needed to fight another day.

In each of her films, Hansen-Løve has the patience to wait for what Henri Cartier-Bresson called “the decisive moment,” the moment where something "small," something detailed and specific, reveals the universal. Things to Come is full of such moments.

There are two movies in Jackie, Pablo Larraín's film about Jackie Kennedy (Natalie Portman) immediately before, during and after the assassination of her husband, President John F. Kennedy. One of these movies is just OK. The other is exceptional. The first one keeps undermining the second.

Incarnate is such a pointless bit of hackwork that it almost makes the recent horror dud “Shut In” seem focused by comparison.

The ending, while not inapt, also delves into a realm of cinematic overstatement that the movie had up until that time been careful to avoid. While disappointing, it doesn’t wholly mitigate the power of what has come before. This is an engrossing and unnerving film.

For its own part, Bobby Sands: 66 Days doesn't reclaim its subject's humanity.

Nothing can give shape or closure to Cave—and that's OK. Watching him continue his ongoing search for existential answers is comfort enough.

The film is not so much tone-deaf as old-fashioned, emerging from a more innocent time (say, three weeks ago) when "politics as usual" actually had some meaning.

Always Shine is an immersive nightmare of merging, over-identification, and projection. Its strangeness (and I yearned for more strangeness) is part of the fascination.

The makers of Evolution may dazzle viewers with an intoxicating visual style, but they never lose sight of Nicolas' humanity. Do not miss this film.

What the movie is very good at revealing and expanding upon is how this reluctant actor became such a masterful one.

Let’s just say if you are human, there is no way that Lion won’t move you.

Particularly in its portrayal of Thurman, who here isn’t so much misunderstood and unloved as he is dumber than a bag of rocks, this sequel actively devalues the compassion-on-the-knife-edge-of-misanthropy that distinguished the original in favor of a mainstream gross-out cartoon. The market demands nothing less, apparently.

It's a mess, but a glorious one, and it's so clearly the expression of one artist's vision, seemingly immune to studio notes, that when you find yourself wondering "Who on earth could this possibly be for?" you realize that it's a compliment. As an entertainment, Rules Don't Apply deserves an extra half-star for audacity.

Moana would have been enormously entertaining regardless of when it came out, but its arrival at this particular moment in history gives it an added sense of significance—as well as inspiration.

While it may not quite be the modern-day “Casablanca,” it is nevertheless a grandly entertaining stab at old-fashioned storytelling...buoyed by smart and stylish filmmaking, a good performance by Brad Pitt and an even better one from Marion Cotillard.

The kind of lush historical drama that Hollywood might have made in the 1930s but these days unsurprisingly owes its existence to foreign producers and, most especially, a renowned literary source.

I Am Madame Bovary plays out as a comedy, a lampoon of the incompetence and laziness of government officials.

The Take is just really lousy.

This is one of those “based on true events” movies that give you the distinct feeling that the true events deserved better.

Blood on the Mountain is wide-ranging across time, driven by talking heads and select footage, but it nails the human element at its core.

A work of exceptional, undeniable craft, but it’s also a movie that’s meant to stick to you a little bit.

It's the kind of movie you'll want to see a second time with someone who hasn't seen it yet, to remember what it was like to watch it for the first time.

If the subject interests you, don’t let my mildly negative review dissuade you from going to see it. I would like to see it again myself, but this time in the version I can share with several of my relatives whose vision is no longer present.

The problem, though, is that we never get enough sense of Paz's interior life to judge this movie as anything other than a comeback story about a nice guy who got knocked out by the cosmos and hauled himself up.

The Edge of Seventeen is a strong successor to Hughes’ legacy with its mix of biting humor and bittersweet heart.

As with most complicated narratives, it is best to simply sit back at some point and enjoy the ride.

Hunter Gatherer doesn't look or feel like many movies being made right now.

Ultimately, True Memoirs of an International Assassin isn’t entertaining enough to recommend, but it’s certainly not the torturous experience of recent James vehicles like “Paul Blart: Mall Cop 2” or “Pixels,” and parts of it actually work.

The kind of lazy genre hackwork that will inspire more yawns than screams—at least until the final reels, when the sounds of incredulous laughter will no doubt take over.

Disturbing the Peace is a courageous and uplifting film that deservedly earned a rapturous ovation when it screened at Ebertfest this year.

The movie is relentless in how it poses questions about our culture’s way of dealing with the power of female sexuality (and it wouldn’t work without Robinson, whose appearance and performance is impeccable for the job) and acknowledges that there’s not only unease in these questions and their answers but also mordant hilarity.

The movie USS Indianapolis: Men of Courage is not exactly unwatchable, but it’s also completely not worthy of watching.

Lacks sufficient inspiration and follow-through to be truly exciting.

Ang Lee is a great director whose last film, the Oscar-winning “Life of Pi,” made ingenious and very effective use of 3D technology. But that film had a much better story than Billy Lynn's Long Halftime Walk.

The reason that The Monster works is because of how much Kazan’s performance captures the truth of the moment in which Kathy struggles.

Elle is a high-wire act without a net.

Aunt May is such a delectable force that the audience waits with baited breath to see if she’ll do what we’d expect from an auntie. And she always does; her consistency is the warmest form of comfort.

The big problem throughout Uncle Kent 2 is that while it can offer some amusement, it all feels like an inside joke.

As a character, Yasuko feels a bit underdeveloped, resulting in a late-film character turn that I didn’t quite buy, but every narrative issue in Creepy is overwhelmed by the quality of the filmmaking.

Foiled by a weak imagination and clear limits to its awareness, Rainbow Time doesn’t become the strong feminist statement it ultimately wants to be.

A mixture of misplaced gallows humor, wildly over-the-top caricatures and a gimmicky use of animation combine to make My Dead Boyfriend one of the year’s more uncomfortable movie-going experiences.

The film’s message is quiet but clear: Darius McCollum is black and neurodivergent, and society treats him differently than it would if he were white and neurotypical. The justice system, in particular, seems designed to chew him up.

A very unusual and rare kind of movie: one that is good in spite of itself. Which isn’t to say that the movie’s director and co-producer Tony Stone doesn’t make some provocative, interesting choices.

Dog Eat Dog may be successfully alienating, but that doesn't mean it's entertaining, thoughtful or even successfully provocative.

The resulting feeling of outrage will spur viewers into action.

Some of it is tonally inconsistent and the end feels rushed, but strong performances, especially from the great Fionnula Flanagan, along with Bates’ unique voice keep it engaging.

Trolls is a sugar-shocked “Shrek,” an aggressively auto-tuned animated fun ride for easily distracted times.

True to form, Hacksaw Ridge draws equally on Gibson's bottomless thirst for mayhem and his sincerely held religious beliefs — or some of them, anyway. It's a movie at war with itself.

The director has said that the “classical” (her word) style of the earlier film, with its elegant, distanced compositions and paucity of camera movement, is typical of her work; the ragged, edgy, mostly handheld approach of Don’t Call Me Son (flawlessly executed by cinematographer Barbara Alvarez) is a departure.

Does it matter that the trajectory of The Eagle Huntress feels scripted at times and the actions we witness are sometimes staged or even manipulated? Somewhat.

For all of its wondrous world-building and trippy effects, Doctor Strange isn’t the evolutionary step forward for Marvel that it needs to be storytelling-wise. Underneath all of its improvements, the core narrative is something we’ve seen countless times.

Is it a real film, or a feature that uses the porn milieu to turn out a piece of softcore titillation that’s halfway between porn and actual drama? No doubt some of the film’s makers and defenders would argue for the former.

That the story is never scary is the least of its problems.

By Sidney Lumet won’t just make you want to revisit his works but reappreciate the role of a great director in cinema.

In a sense, the weirdest thing about Gimme Danger is how not weird it is.

If you go into a Herzog documentary hoping for a definitive, deep look at a certain subject, you're bound to come away disappointed. But if you go into them expecting a series of portraits of obsessed people, each painted by one of the most likable obsessives in cinema, you're likely to come away satisfied.

Most importantly, this is not a film to be “solved.” It is a mood piece made by someone constantly playing with structure, but never in a way that calls overt attention to itself.

The multiple twists, double-crosses and leaps in logic are more likely to prompt giggles than gasps, despite the impressive production values and the earnest efforts of an A-list cast.

There’s more to the Oasis story than what we see here, even if this does capture that historic moment when two brothers from Manchester fronted the biggest band in the world.

In addition to being a tender film about a man finding redemption in caring for a canine, Syeed’s pious film is refreshing, showing us a corner of America that we never see.

Won’t add much to the debased discourse of this miserable season.

A surprisingly effective new horror flick.

As laudable as the movie is, it does not quite achieve greatness. That’s the fault of both its indirectness and its obviousness.

A staggering misfire on two discrete levels. As an adaptation of the 1997 novel by Philip Roth, it is lead-footed and inept. The screenplay, by John Romano, treats the narrative in a way that strongly suggests what I hope was a willful misreading of the book. But even considered entirely separately from its source material, American Pastoral is hopelessly weak.

In a Valley of Violence, written and directed by Ti West, starts out slow, picks up speed, and finally launches itself into a screwball standoff, but always with a slapstick hilarious energy.

Ultimately, there’s nothing offensively bad here—other than a waste of talent who should be doing better work—but it’s so forgettable that you’ll have trouble remembering if you saw it or not when you scroll past it on cable in a few months.

At 103 minutes, this film has way too much dead weight. Scenes are repeated over and over, and some of the acting would not cut it in a school play. But in the rare moments when Tyler Perry’s Boo! A Madea Halloween is firing on all cylinders, it displays a cleverness which hints that, with more time and a few more iterations of the script, this might have been a good movie.

It is voluptuously beautiful, frankly sexual, occasionally perverse and horrifically violent.

This is one overstuffed horror movie recipe, with a dash of “The Exorcist” and a spritz of “Ghost” among its tasty ingredients.

A wildly inconsequential action comedy that contains a couple of genuine laughs but which otherwise feels like an extended version of its own television ads.