As tedious as much of this sounds, an odd thing happened around “Allegiant’s” midway point. The fairly packed audience started vocally reacting “Rocky Horror”-style to some of the more overtly melodramatic turns with “oohs," “ahhs” and even laughter.

Midnight Special respects your intelligence, letting you come to its themes emotionally instead of narratively. It is a breathtaking display of visual storytelling, confidently rendered by someone who understands the power of cinema.

Bring tissues. Because whether you’re the faithful target audience for Miracles From Heaven, a non-believer or someone in the mass agnostic middle ground, you may find it hard to hold back the tears during various points in this real-life tale. And they’ll be earned.

As [Farhadi] does to such masterful effect in “A Separation,” here he constructs a story that keeps revealing new thematic and psychological layers, ones that often come to light through the shifting of perspective from one character to another, a technique that deepens our sympathy for the people we’re watching to the point of our realizing that, as in Renoir, “everyone has their reasons.”

Me Him Her might look cool on the outside, but it's a vapid mess.

If you came looking for the psychological sexing, or even just regular, good old fashioned erotic screwing, you’ll find it only if you’ve brought it to the theater yourself.

Hello, My Name is Doris is like a beacon of beckoning human warmth just waiting to be cherished.

The best part of Frot's performance, and the key to why Marguerite works when it does work, is how totally Marguerite believes in her nonexistent gift.

For fans of the genial, garrulous Gold, of Los Angeles culture or of films about food, City of Gold will easily merit four stars and its 90-minute length. For those less enamored of those subjects, its claim on any stars will be qualified by some serious questions about its cinematic worth.

As a techie, I expected more from Creative Control.

That’s one dismayingly archaic trend throughout The Young Messiah: the fiendish characters are also wildly effeminate.

This sometimes rewarding but also bothersomely uneven comedy is Julie Delpy’s sixth feature film as a director; she also co-wrote.

While Hood’s film says very little about American policy in this area, it does suggest that its terrible subject is likely to be with us for a long time to come.

As a full movie experience this did not drop my jaw in a consistently enjoyable way. And the movie’s Trump joke is pretty ineffectual. Sad!

Some of it is so predictable you could set your watch by it, but there is a welcome (and surprising) layer of complexity running through the film that makes it a little bit more than your standard fare. The likable and funny ensemble helps too.

A tight, tense thriller carried by excellent performances from John Goodman and Mary Elizabeth Winstead.

To her credit, Callies has an accessible presence and tries to provide more pathos and humanity than were supplied on the page, even as her character makes increasingly idiotic decisions in the name of parental love.

If Zootopia were a bit vaguer, or perhaps dumber and less pleased with itself, it might have been a classic, albeit of a very different, less reputable sort. As-is, it's a goodhearted, handsomely executed film that doesn't add up in the way it wants to.

By preferring to keep viewers in suspense until the film's finale, Pastoll makes it harder to recommend a movie that has many good ideas, but no clue what to do with them.

Unabashedly pro-choice, Trapped is not a debate itself, but it has no need to be.

A tidy and nasty and often effective thriller that doesn’t quite blossom into full horror.

What’s interesting about The Wave is stepping back and considering just how well-constructed the whole thing is. The slow-burn build-up is just long enough, the disaster itself is just harrowing enough and the final act is just intense enough to keep us engaged.

A visually impressive mix of hand-drawn and CGI animation with basic action-adventure elements that are always viscerally satisfying thanks to Hosoda's apparent warts-and-all love for humanity.

The fantastical and surreal are presented with unshowy practicality. It's magical realism mixed with kitchen-sink drama, seasoned by a haunting sense of history as a sentient entity.

The film seems to be fighting a losing battle to make sense of itself, to coalesce into a statement, to not fade away. This feels right. Knight of Cups is not a young man's movie. It's an old man's movie. A philosophically engaged, beatific, starchild-as-old-man's movie. The end is coming.

Is Whiskey Tango Foxtrot a horrible movie about a white outsider plopped in the middle of Afghanistan? No, that would be last year’s “Rock the Kasbah.” But neither does Whiskey Tango Foxtrot fulfill its assigned duty to provide evidence of Fey’s versatility.

A horrible and wildly unnecessary follow-up that might actually be worse than its predecessor.

The story’s ending, complete with lyrical voice-over, conveys the beauty and emotional attraction of the place and its traditions, virtues also relayed by Joshua James Richard’s sumptuous, sometimes breathtaking cinematography.