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.

It’s a pity that Jack Reacher: Never Go Back fails to support Cruise and his co-stars, all of whom are acting as if their lives depended on it. There’s a great movie buried somewhere in here—a strange but beguiling family comedy and a meditation on nature vs. nurture, with a bit of shooting and punching thrown in—but the filmmakers never figure out how to excavate it.