Oakley’s care and McEwen’s intense performance make Blue Jean one of this year’s most impressive movies. It deals with so much heartbreak without as many words; its pain is communicated through its somberly beautiful palette and performances.

Because Users is so captivating from a technical perspective, it’s frustrating to discover how scattered it is narratively.

Ghosts and spirits appear, and weird things are indeed summoned, but Brooklyn 45 is really a meditation on grief and the unfinished business of war as experienced by a group who struggle with adjusting to peacetime.

As a Latina critic who has been writing about my community’s stories for as long as I’ve had a career, I want better for us and our storytellers. While I enjoy some aspects of this movie, I’m not sure the means justified the lackluster result.

Eventually, this outstanding reboot’s most generic elements appear subordinate to the title character’s deranged, boyish, and sometimes romantic subjective reality.

The cranky old-coot humor between Studi and Cox is a welcome break, and there could have been more of it.

Suki Waterhouse does her best with what she’s given. But still. The movie’s commonplaces don’t serve its singular subject—love him or hate him—all that well.

The Angry Black Girl and Her Monster is a soulful, bloodied cry for control.

It's all over the place, and if there was a way to unify all of its disparate elements, the filmmaker never quite figured it out. You just have to agree that it's all of a piece and accept it isn't going to settle into any one mode for very long.

Though millions of Jewish people were imprisoned and killed in concentration camps during this time, this misguided drama, written by Ilya Tsofin, isn’t interested in the truth of their stories. Instead, it’s a contrived triumph of the human spirit-style narrative where the Jewish character at the center is rendered a cipher for suffering while his Nazi tormentors are unconsciously humanized.

When a movie loves its characters and story as much as this one, and dedicates every aspect of filmmaking and performance to doing them justice, and consistently puts virtuosity in service of meaning, the result conjures a feeling that's close to what you experience when someone you adore has a great and richly deserved success, and you're privileged to be able to witness it and cheer them on.

The bittersweet Korean drama Aloners works best when it’s a character study about an isolated thirtysomething’s behavior instead of whatever her creators think should be done about it.

Before the heartbreak, there are outlandish and often funny stories about iconic album covers.

It’s still a movie about giant space robots talking trash and smashing into each other, but Transformers: Rise of the Beasts is better than most offerings in the franchise.

One of the most spectacular and frustrating mixed bags of the superhero blockbuster era, The Flash is simultaneously thoughtful and clueless, challenging and pandering. It features some of the best digital FX work I've seen and some of the worst.

Boyle is wise enough to know that she is crafting a piece of media herself, and never attempts to shy away from her personal connection to this crisis. Although she balances the personal story of her family with interviews with experts, there is a righteous anger to all the facts and history presented.

The way Philippe organizes the hundreds of clips provides more startling and exhilarating moments per minute than most movies about movies can muster, although I can’t say that aficionados of ostensibly realistic cinema aren't going to be too thrilled. Which is too bad, because among the many things this picture captures is how the fanciful worlds of “Oz” and Lynch illuminate the pain and splendor of the world we have to inhabit once we leave the magic realm of cinema.

There are hints of a deeper movie here, but the one on-screen sticks too closely to stories and ideas we already know.

Padre Pio is a therapy session for star Shia LaBeouf, intercut with a story of labor strife in a traumatized Italian village. If that sounds weird, it is, but never in a way that's consistently interesting.

Rise, from French filmmaker Cédric Klapisch, is not blazingly original by any stretch, and any moviegoer paying even the slightest amount can predict most of the plot's moves. And yet, something is to be said about presenting a familiar narrative in a straightforward and undeniably entertaining manner.

Thankfully, Zuleta conjures enough effervescence to make us invested in their search for a place in the universe, even if the path is well-trod.

The film explores the tender feelings of relationships at various stages, from budding playground crushes to adulthood’s alleged certainty. It’s the kind of nuanced movie that allows for self-reflection as well as entertainment, following two characters who illustrate how relationships—both fully realized and not—influence our lives.

It is a smart, thrilling piece of work that reminded me of other great part twos like “The Dark Knight” and “The Empire Strikes Back."

Perhaps fittingly for a film that would have more accurately been titled “When Fire Met Water…,” Elemental is combustible enough from minute to minute, but it evaporates from memory the second you leave the theater.

De Niro, bless his heart, is the engine that keeps this refurbished jalopy puttering along for 90 minutes.

Holofcener finds both humor and wisdom within the complexity of her cringe comedy, providing rich fodder for conversations afterward. If anything, You Hurt My Feelings might be a little too short; it’s so well-paced and engrossing it just zips by.

I’m all for a juicy, action-packed Gerard Butler movie. A Gerard Butler movie that wants to have its geopolitics taken seriously is a different matter. And honestly, it’s an even more different matter when the movie is not particularly juicy or, you know, action-packed.