Any movie that can bring to mind a Joni Mitchell song as the credits roll — “Don't it always seem to go that you don't know what you've got 'till it's gone” — has earned its keep.

The plot’s central mystery suffers from “Body Double” syndrome in that the movie has so few characters that the villain’s reveal can only elicit a shrug.

The result is a slow burn of a drama with a restrained tone that may put off some viewers, but which will captivate those who responded to its low-key wavelength.

A strong cast giving their all — including Jon Hamm, Ellen Burstyn, Bruce Dern, Catherine Keener and Amber Tamblyn — can’t do much with such heavy-handed, self-serious material.

This is a beautifully conceived and executed chamber comedy/drama with tragedy at its core. Potter’s characters are committed to a better world even as they make their own modes of living completely dysfunctional.

The dialogue creates an arch and artificial mood, never sounding like real talk despite the clearly talented actors (Gugu Mbatha-Raw and Michiel Huisman) playing the roles. The film itself seems to be in denial about its own story.

What makes Early Man enjoyable is the way Park and his writers detail the heroes' good-natured oafishness and the bad guys' snooty arrogance.

The problem with Samson is that while it cannot be faulted for its sincerity, it can be faulted for its sluggish pacing, inconsistent performances and lack of cinematic style that gives the proceedings a tacky feel throughout.

One of the year's best films, and one that transcends the superhero genre to emerge as an epic of operatic proportions. The numerous battle sequences that are staples of the genre are present, but they float on the surface of a deep ocean of character development and attention to details both grandiose and minute

While Double Lover is as squeamish as most Cinemax-style wank material about a certain male organ, it’s more than charitable about its female counterpart. One can’t be faulted for expecting greatness from a film that opens with a close-up of a stretched out vagina morphing into an eye.

Using skillful, involving storytelling and beautifully executed rotoscoped photography, director Ali Soozandeh creates a world of intersecting urban miseries and challenges.

Entanglement is gleefully weird at times, but it could’ve been a whole lot weirder.

Still/Born doesn’t get as many points as one would hope for originality. But this is an inspired-enough take on a woman's horror, where the fear of losing her other baby becomes a terror itself, as expressed through an excellent performance.

The film does a good job conveying the excitement generated by that band as a live act, especially in San Francisco and Los Angeles. But though it produced some remarkable music, Cream’s success was short-lived.

It’s an amiable misfire. But Brie Larson sure can light up the screen, and she does so here — she’s a pleasant singer, too — and that’s enough to raise this from a one-and-a-half star movie to a two.

What is most unexpected about Permission is its sense of poignancy and tenderness. In its own way, it's quite heartbreaking.

Ultimately, no one could save the script by John Whittington, who relied so completely on his concept that he failed to write jokes or characters.

Both in front of and behind the camera, Whitney Cummings tries to breathe new life into the hackneyed, men-are-like-this, women-are-like-this style of romantic comedy with The Female Brain. The results are frustratingly hit-and-miss.

The atmospheric but threadbare male bonding horror flick The Ritual is so well-directed that you can't help but groan at its lightweight script's many little inadequacies.

Golden Exits made me want to get up and go do something sensible and productive, so as to not be like the characters in the film.

Clearly there is a severe case of “Paddington” envy here and a hunger for yet another animated franchise. But easy chuckles are no substitute for genuine charm.

The problem is there's not enough sex and too much ... everything else.

To call Clint Eastwood's The 15:17 to Paris a mixed bag would be generous. It packs all the wild action you came to see into a 20-minute stretch near the end, and elsewhere gives us something like a platonic buddy version of Richard Linklater's "Before" trilogy.

The Cloverfield Paradox is a bit of a scam job, promising to reconcile entries in a series that have little in common save for a shared genre. It fizzles so badly at the end that you might legitimately wonder if it ever had anything to do with the other two films in the first place, or if it was produced independently of the series and retroactively added.

A movie as dumb and bloody as a slab of meat, but with Momoa playing an emotionally vulnerable logger who you also believe would throw an ax at someone's face.

It's an unsettling, and sometimes high-concept doodle, but it's awfully hard to resist a film that marries Atomic Age paranoia and optimism with Kurosawa's signature post-modern, atmosphere-intensive style.

The end result is pretty much what you might expect—a work so desultory that you wonder how all involved managed to work up the energy and enthusiasm to make it to the set each day.

Lead actors Byrne and Deen do grounded, stalwart work, and director Mitu Misra occasionally succeeds in making the characters’ milieu’s register with force. But the storytelling is rickety.