Not even the haunting images and Garfield’s haggard intensity can disguise the gaping void where the film’s soul should be. There’s no there there.

The dialogue starts at risible and descends from there.

This is where Fonte comes in. An actor who can make Marcello seem like a pitiful beta-male grotesque one second and a noble, sympathetic hero the next, he’s the thrumming motor behind this fairy tale of dogs and monsters. It’s hard to underestimate how his award-winning performance — good call, Cannes Film Festival — shapes the film and sets its humanistic tone.

The movie pulls you in through the sheer immersive force of its filmmaking. In Long Day’s Journey, the search is everything with meaning as elusive and haunting as a dream.

Still, the moments that hit hardest concern Leo’s relationship with Ahd (a very fine Eric Bernard), another male hustler who claims he’s only “gay 4 pay.”

Alternately smarmy and achingly familiar, Little squeezes "Big" for one more run through the Hollywood grinder.

Hellboy wants to remind you that this Dark Horse Comics brute with a soul still deserves a place in the superhero-movie ecosphere. It ends up simply being a franchise reboot damned to be restaged as its own bloody hell. Some things are better left dead.

Her Smell is a berserker infused a mad poetry. In her third film with Perry, following "Listen Up," "Phillip and Queen of the Earth," Moss takes a character who makes Courtney Love look like Mother Teresa and exposes the shards of humanity that once vitalized and defined her music. The effect is shattering.

You can kill the vibe of Minghella’s film with nitpicking, but Fanning rides the movie home to glory. She is simply sensational.

What you won’t be bowled over by, however, is the storytelling, which makes Missing Link the weakest link in Laika’s chain of movies to date.

The Wind does indeed blow a hell of a chill through you, though that has less to do with thing that bump in the night than in the psyche.

Estevez leans toward sacrificing dramatic power for blatant crowdpleasing. Still, his intent is refreshingly uncynical. Clearly, the quadruple threat doesn’t think audiences will sit still for his message without sugarcoating and a feelgood ending. At worst, you can dismiss him as a naïve do-gooder. At best, you can commend him for actually believing a movie might raise public consciousness and maybe even change things. Your call.

Leigh’s visceral staging, especially in the climactic moments — brilliantly shot by his longtime collaborator/cinematographer Dick Pope — brings home the significance of a 200-year-old bloodbath that still speaks urgently to the disenfranchised.

With Denis there’s always more than meets the prism of snap judgements. Let the movie mess with your head.

It’s the closest thing to witnessing a miracle — just some cameras, a crowd and a voice touched by God.

The movie honors King by raising fresh hell for a new generation. It will make you jump out of your seat, but what matters are the provocations you take home and can’t shake. That’s the stuff of nightmares.

This breezy, funny entry keeps things light with a hilarious and heartfelt package of nonstop kid-friendly kick-ass.

The Brink, Alison Klayman’s insightful and often unnerving look at one of the most divisive figures in recent memory, isn’t a particularly fun or easy watch.

Somehow, The Beach Bum is even nuttier, less logical, more visually beautiful and down-in-the-gutter uglier than the film you just imagined from that description.

What’s never in doubt, however, is the compassion the movie shows to its protagonist, partly based on the women in the filmmaker’s own family and embodied by a great actress at her intuitive, indelible best. In capturing what Jones calls “the rhythm of living” even in the face of death, he has turned this character study into a shattering portrait of resilience — and an essential work of art.

This live-action re-imagining of Disney’s 1941 animated classic may be the sweetest film Tim Burton has ever made. It’s also the safest.

That this retelling has no time for the facts, given the book’s dodgy relationship to the truth, isn’t shocking. That it feels this surprisingly fun-free and generic to a fault, frankly, kind of is. Fans deserve better. If any of them want to collectively sue for defamation of character, let me know where to sign.

If Sunset doesn’t hit with nearly the impact that "Son of Saul" does — and it doesn’t — his look back at the chaos before the storm solidly establishes Nemes as a major world-cinema voice.

Aussie director Anthony Maras, in his feature debut, brings a Hitchcockian feel for suspense and a documentarian’s eye for detail to the brutal events that transpired over three days in November 2008 when the Islamist militant group Lashkar-e-Taiba initiated an attack on the city of Mumbai.

Dragged Across Concrete is apt to send crime-film fanatics, especially ones who prefer their pulp nasty, brutish and incredibly long, into frothing fits of glee. For other folks, the title will double as an apt description experience of watching it.

There are times when the film grips us with such hallucinatory terror that you may think it’s another of Adelaide’s PTSD-induced nightmares. Maybe it is. Or maybe it’s a ghastly reflection of the way we live now.

If you can say nothing else about this free-form valentine, it’s genuinely eye-opening.

That’s not quite enough to make Captive State great science-fiction, but it ensures that the film lingers in the mind longer than it takes to run the end credits.

Headley’s book is a hard nugget crackling with urgency. This feels like soft-boiled pulp.

Nguyen can stir up all the sturm and drang he wants, but Hummingbird feels as humdrum and impersonal as a blueprint.

Clermont-Tonnerre comes from a place of defiance, and her fearless instincts surge through every frame. Each time you think you have this movie pegged, it’ll knock you for a loop.

A stuffy, soggy slog of a movie that fails to generate sparks or a lick of dramatic sense.

The best thing about The Highwaymen by a long shot is seeing Costner tap back into that Gary Cooper mode he once perfected and add older, wiser touches to it.

Hollywood retreads of foreign films are rarely a good idea (did you see Miss Bala?), but Gloria Bell is a playful, pleasure-giving exception.

Somewhere along the road of development hell, the movie settled for delivering standard-issue jolts for jocks.

The film’s low-key charm and quirky humor grow on you and create a rooting interest in what happens next. It doesn’t take the Supreme Intelligence of the universe (who we always figured would resembled Annette Bening) to know it’s wise to play the long game. Captain Marvel is not just another wonder woman. She plans to build an army.

Wherever you find yourself in the Perry equation, Medea herself deserves a final high-five. Perry hints that she may come back in a younger version, not played by him. But Medea will never be the same without her creator. In A Medea Family Funeral, she hosts a memorial service that defines the term hellzapoppin. And Perry correctly and adoringly gives her the last word in which she lets all the women have for letting any damn man abuse them. Hallelujah, sister!

Long after the dance-movie thrills are in the rearview and before the images turn themselves upside down — before the movie becomes a literal danse macabre — you find yourself impressed by the fact that he’s not out to recreate a bad acid trip. He’s trying to create his own bad trip sans the drugs. And the fucked up thing about it is: You end up wanting to go along for the ride.

It takes you right up past the stratosphere alongside these souls. Then it brings everything back down to Earth with equal agility and grace. It is a revelation.

What’s missing are the moments in between that actually make up a life and give it emotional resonance.

Jordan, working from a script he conjured up with Ray Wright, is in it for suspense tinged with laughs. But with these two dynamo actresses front and center, this nail-biter keeps you riveted.

The Hidden World is the best Dragon yet — an animated action phenom with moonstruck passion in its heart and a spirit that soars.

Part anthropological study, part rise-and-fall epic and all-out mesmerizing, this regional spin on the “family business” saga makes you rethink the notions behind why we watch crime flicks past the vicarious thrills. It’s both foreign and familiar.

Thanks to the comic tornado at its center, Isn’t It Romantic is still your best bet for a Valentine’s date at the movies. You could do worse.

The movie even plays like a wrestling match. It’s Underdog Cinema 101.

Ruben Brandt, Collector is always a feast for the eyes, but it’s the intellectual curiosity on display that raises the bar.

Now, after a deluge of comic book epics and other CGI-filled sci-fi fantasies, the movie feels like it’s way past its sell-by date. Alita: Battle Angel looks ready to rock, but time has sucked the life out of the party.

It needs a Soderbergh, who invests this tale of outrunning and outgunning organizations — be they sports leagues or studios tied to old distribution/exhibition models — with a sense of energy, verve and mischievous glee.

Henson looks ready to come out firing on all cylinders, but the comic cowardice of What Men Want leaves her shooting blanks.

Somehow, though, he made a movie that, to paraphrase an album from the director’s former musical endeavor, has seriously missed the Black Mark.

Working in Spanish for the first time, the filmmaker somehow allows the interweaving threads of his plot to get tangled into a jumble even he can’t satisfactorily unravel. It’s a damn shame.

The fans show up for this kind of movie to watch Neeson knock heads with bad guys, and Moland lets him rip. There’s no dawdling over sentiment. If you want to see a snowplow used as a weapon of mass destruction, you’ve come to the right movie.

There’s even a new song called “Catchy Song” that you can’t get out of your head no matter how hard you try. (And you will try.) Another tune, “Super Cool,” plays over the end credits simply to extol the coolness of end credits. Lego 2 never stops, which is part of the problem. Can there really be too much of a good thing? [Pause.] Nah.

Piercing is not exactly a sophomore slump for Pesce, nor is it an embarrassment for anyone else involved. But the longer you watch it, the more inadvertently ironic the title becomes.

Without the unyielding forward charge of the original, however, the far-fetched story doesn’t really work. And the movie’s attempts to explain its characters doesn’t make them any deeper; quite the contrary, it renders them simplistic.

Velvet Buzzsaw is never less than a feast for the eyes even when it reduces the plot to B-level butchery. What’s missing is the potent provocation that Gilroy seemed to be developing at the start.

What takes Arctic to the next level is Mikkelsen’s stirringly expressive face. Known for playing villains — the dead-eyed 007 nemesis Le Chiffre in "Casino Royale" and the title killer in the TV series "Hannibal" (2013-2015) — Mikkelsen invests Overgård with a bracing humanity that you root for every step of the way.

Technology has allowed Jackson to erase the barriers of time and speak to a new generation about what war does to youth. His humane and heartbreaking film is a profound achievement.

The batshit bonkers Serenity fails on every level, first as entertainment and then as a new-agey thumbsucker about a magical, mystical tour through the subconscious. Serenity finds new definitions of bad that almost make the damn thing worth watching for its magnificent flameout.

Lit with a poet’s eye by Deschanel and given dramatic heft by von Donnersmarck, Never Look Away lunges at the primitive forces that define our lives. Even when it trips up, it’s never less than exhilarating.

You leave this movie knowing exactly why it never should have happened in the first place.

Glass is not the flaming flop some folks have already suggested it is, nor is it the movie you want in terms of tying ambitious, highfalutin notions together about how we process our pulp mythos.

It’s a mediocrity no matter when you release it.

The best thing you can say about Escape Room is that for most of it, you’re not desperately searching for the exit sign.

An opportunity missed.

Kudos to Coogan and Reilly, not just for their gifts of impersonation, but for detailing the bedrock connection at work and play between the two men.

You can only swindle audiences by thinking you simply throw A-list stars in anything and people will still show up, drooling like Pavlov’s pups, for so long before the echo in empty theaters is deafening.

Call it RBG: The Early Years.

This is Kidman’s show. She neatly negotiates every twist the script throws at her, even when the plot slams into too many dead ends. This is a movie star who knows how to stay the course, no matter how twisty, tangled or down and dirty it gets. She’s dynamite.

You wouldn’t be wrong if you’re thinking this wish-fulfillment tale of a working-class woman bum-rushing the corporate world is trying to be a "Working Girl" for millennials. And while it can’t deliver the boundary-pushing kick of that seminal 1988 Melanie Griffith-vs.-the glass ceiling smash, the charms this movie does possess — its star being chief among them — will get you over the gaping plot holes and lackluster dialogue.

You never doubt the good intentions of Zemeckis and Steve Carell, who plays Hogancamp with genuine grace. Sadly, something essential went missing in the trip from Marwencol to Marwen.

The writer-director based the couple on his own parents, who bear the same names as his characters. It’s not their story, he’s said — what he’s given us instead is a love story that’s as sexy as it is savage, as tough as it is tender. It’s a spellbinder with a fever that won’t quit.

When Blunt and Miranda cut through the film’s glucose overload and take off into the wild blue of their own unique and extraordinary talents, Mary Poppins Returns shows it has the power to leave you deliriously happy.

In Vice, the writer-director is tossing grenades every which way — it’s a movie that’s ferociously funny one minute, bleakly sorrowful the next.

Aquaman is a mess of clashing tones and shameless silliness, but a relief after all the franchise’s recent superhero gloom. Any budget-busting epic that finds time to show us an octopus playing bongos gets a pass in our book.

As a distraction, it’s inoffensive. But you can tell it wants to be the juggernaut on wheels, the unstoppable giant mowing down or devouring everything in its path. It’s really the smaller thing trying desperately to outrun oblivion. It’s all scraps and nothing but.

It’s a blockbuster that, with a few whirring movements and a half dozen clicks and beeps, transforms itself into something meant to be watched by actual thinking, feeling human beings. For once, there really is more than meets the eye.

The Mule is more character study than "Dirty Harry: The Emeritus Years." It’s the detours on the road — the stops along the way that show an old man dealing with the dim possibilities of change near the end of his life — that reveal this drug-mule-in-winter drama as a deeply personal reckoning.

The sorrow inherent in this tale would be unbearable without the film’s flashes of humor and performances by a cast of nonprofessionals that are moving beyond measure. Capernaum suffers from being overly long and chaotic in structure, but there’s no mistaking its cumulative effect as an emotional powerhouse.

Jack proves he’s (von Trier) also capable of making a failed act of provocation. The fact that he ends the movie in hell seems superfluous. We’ve already been there for two and a half hours.

The haunting, hypnotic, palm-sweating score by Trent Reznor and Atticus Ross promises way more than the film delivers. By the way, the birds in the box are meant to set off alarms when the monsters approach. They see way more than we do, which is part of the problem. Why should birds have all the fun?

Not only the coolest Spider-Man epic ever, it’s one of the best movies of the year.

It’s the sort of cinema that feels steeped in the past, completely of the moment and timeless all at once.

A well-researched and richly observant documentary from Alexis Bloom about the climate of lies and systemic abuse that nurtured Ailes and allowed his behavior to flourish.

Tyrel appears to be an ensemble project, but this is Jason Mitchell’s showcase.

Ronan (Lady Bird) and Robbie (I, Tonya) were both nominated for a Best Actress Oscar last award season, and even when the pace of the film falters, these two performers hold you in thrall. That’s royalty.

Ben Is Back ends up becoming into a penetrating look at how addiction wrecks lives from both sides of the parent-child equation. It’s unflinching and unforgettable.

There’s much to gasp and fawn over here, and too much forgettable filler. But at least audiences have a chance to see it, so Serkis and his collaborators can finally turn the page on this particular book.

You should prepare to be wowed by Natalie Portman, who delivers a take-no-prisoners performance as Celeste, a swaggering rock diva who tends to burn down everything in her path, especially when she’s crossed.

Mirai casts a spell that works on children and adults alike, but in different ways. Its creator’s artistry and empathy are the connecting links. It may be the animator’s smallest film, but it stands tall. You’ll be enchanted.

What starts out as an impressive mix of various classic-Italian-cinema strains turns into something much richer, rewarding and singular. Rohrwacher isn’t interested in resurrecting the ghosts of movies past so much as channeling the spirit of the Brothers Grimm and modern-day anger.

In short, this is a genre mash-up has no agenda except providing escapist fun. Mission accomplished.

Arriving just in time to win a place among the year’s worst films, Robin Hood — bursting with an entitled sense of its own non-existent coolness — falls flat on its fat one.

It’s impossible to experience the deep-seated compassion of this film and not be moved to tears.

You know how some costume epics can be such a bloody bore? Not The Favourite. It’s a bawdy, brilliant triumph, directed by Greek auteur Yorgos Lanthimos with all the artistic reach and renegade deviltry he brought to Dogtooth (2009), The Lobster (2015) and The Killing of a Sacred Deer (2017).

It’s here that directors Phil Johnston and Rich Moore, armed with a screenplay cowritten by Johnston and Pamela Ribon, find a common ground between family-friendly entertainment and sharp social satire.

If a thing of beauty is a joy forever, as John Keats famously said, then the surpassing loveliness and bracing brilliance of Alfonso Cuarón’s Roma will never pass into nothingness.

This is not a reinvention of the wheel, just a rotation of the tires. For a story that started with a young man trying to follow in huge footsteps while blazing his own path, it might be unfair to play the compare game here. Yet Creed II does not give us anything but another, slightly superior Rocky sequel. It wins on points. Just don’t expect a knockout.