The Star Wars universe is the best toy box a fanboy could ever wish for, and Johnson makes sure that Jedi is bursting at the seams with knockout fun surprises, marvelous adventure and shocking revelations that will leave your head spinning.

In the end, what Quest gives you is not just well-earned empathy but the pleasure of the Raineys' company, and that is what genuinely makes it worth seeking out and seeing ASAP.

I, Tonya is funny as hell, but the pain is just as real. You'll laugh till it hurts.

There are valid criticisms of Wonder Wheel as a film that feels more like a stage play – its claustrophobic atmosphere can be stifling. But even covering familiar ground, Allen finds the blunt truth at its core. As Ginny is stripped of her fantasies and exposed to the harsh glare of reality, Winslet stands her ground, as if to say attention must be paid. It should be. Her performance is absolutely astounding.

As a director, Franco succeeds beautifully at bringing coherence to chaos, a word that accurately describes the making of this modern midnight-movie phenomenon. Do you need to see "The Room" to appreciate The Disaster Artist? Not really.

The result is an acting duet that will haunt your dreams and break your heart.

Coco brims over with visual pleasures, comic energy and emotional wallop.

Gary Oldman is one of the greatest actors on the planet – and he proves it again as Winston Churchill in Darkest Hour.

It's a swooning new classic and one of the very best films of the year.

Wonder is an emotional wipeout, that's for sure, but Chbosky handles it with such tenderness and delicacy, you won't hate yourself (too much) for giving in.

Washington digs so deep under the skin of this complex character that we almost breath with him. It's a great, award-caliber performance in a movie that can barely contain it.

The director and her cinematographer Rachel Morrison do wonders with the elements that batter the people of every race and social class in the Delta. But it's the storm raging inside these characters that rivets our attention and makes Mudbound a film that grabs you and won't let go.

Justice League is a decent crowdpleaser, preferable in every way to the candy-assed cynicism of Suicide Squad. But sometimes shadows need to fall to show us what to be scared of. In the end, this all-star team-up is too afraid of the dark to work its way into our dreams.

There's too much undeniably impressive filmmaking to dismiss Thelma; there's too much uncertain storytelling to actually recommend it. Trier undoubtedly has a great horror-movie character study in him. We can't wait to see it.

It's a renegade masterpiece that will get you good.

Murder on the Orient Express offers audiences a deluxe journey to the past, but this pokey train goes off the rails about the time all the characters, except for Poirot, cease to matter.

The compensation comes in watching these three marvelous actors have a go at it, which they do with piercing humor and heart.

A warped wonder of a movie that takes twisted to areas few have investigated.

Just when you think there's nothing original or exciting left to mine from a coming-of-age story, along comes the totally irresistible Lady Bird – a reminder that no genre is played out when there's a new artist around to see it with fresh eyes.

Shot through with grit and grace, Novitiate is a potent provocation. It's also something special.

Clooney is too talented and committed a filmmaker not to get in his licks. But with Suburbicon, he's made a movie that is tonally at war with itself.

The whole movie is a grab-bag of insanity so off-the-chain hilarious that you stick with it even when the convoluted plot goes haywire.

Well, it's a little confusing. And slightly incoherent in terms of how it lays out the book's narrative about a serial killer who is targeting mothers and whose calling card is a snowman. And sort of not very good overall. It's bad.

At the end, with Sean's condition scarily deteriorating, the raw and riveting BPM musters the emotional power to floor you.

The surprise MVP runner-up here is Connelly, despite her tendency to get kind of yell-y during key dramatic moments. Her lonely Amanda is a better written version of a typical long-suffering-spouse.

A film of extraordinary details that adds up to less than the sum of its parts. But, oh, it gives a lovely light.

Even the opaque hints can drive you cuckoo with frustration. Lanthimos does not coddle his audience. His M.O. is to shock, provoke and leave you talking to the voices inside your own head. The choice is yours.

Does the script by William Nicholson sometimes hit the sentiment pedal too hard? It does. But look at the tale it's telling.

Thanks to Professor Marston and his real-life Wonder Women, something close to a death blow was dealt to the demeaning, centuries-old image of the damsel in distress. It's a hell of an origin story.

Campbell keeps the action cooking and the suspense on a high burner in this compulsively watchable conspiracy thriller, while The Foreigner proves again is that Chan is the Man – now and forever.

Your only mistake would be to not see it at all, and miss out on one of the unalloyed pleasures of the fall movie season.

If their contribution to the man-vs-nature genre isn't exactly top-tier, Walking Out still hits its marks in terms of father-son melodrama with an uncanny precision.

In the case of Una, the play's the thing, with the stage production coming at you in a rush that doesn't allow the characters or the audience to take a breath. In this personal hell of Harrower's creation, there is no exit. The movie, however, keeps opening the door and letting the air in.

Sheer perfection – that's the phrase that springs to mind when describing the humanist miracle that is Faces Places, the year's best and most beguiling documentary.

Willem Dafoe should be on top of Oscar's Best Supporting Actor list for his stellar work in The Florida Project, a film that's as hilarious and heartbreaking as it is unclassifiable.

If many male stars of a certain age are destined to become late-act action heroes, we hope this is Vaughn's "Taken," and his particular set of skills will continue to involve dishing out such graceless, effective hurt.

And just when you think this movie cannot get more unendurable ... it does. And then some. You can see every twist telegraphed from miles away even in a driving blizzard. The Mountain Between Us is epic all right – an epic waste of talent and your time.

What the film, based on books by Felt and John D. O'Connor, lacks in narrative drive it strives to make up for with psychological probing.

I'm dumbfounded by the idea of remaking a movie that was no damn good in the first place. Is it the possibility of making it better? The exact opposite happens with Flatliners.

For Blade Runner junkies like myself, who've mainlined five different versions of Ridley Scott's now iconic sci-fi film noir – from the release print to the Director's Cut and the Final Cut (the last two minus that voiceover Scott and Ford hated) – every minute of this mesmerizing mindbender is a visual feast to gorge on.

No one who cares about movies and those rare actors who can elevate them into something unforgettable would dream of missing this scrappy, loving tribute to a virtuoso. Lucky may not believe in God. But what kind of fool doesn't believe in Harry Dean Stanton?

Woodshock is both gorgeous and pretentious in equal measures, and it's hard to reconcile the fact that you don't get one without the other – or that, coming in the shadow of another free-form swing for the fences, any rush to ding the movie for being an exercise in style over substance isn't even slightly tinged by gender.

It's all true – but so what? American Made may be fact-based but that doesn't stop it from feeling monumentally generic, like you've seen it all before (Blow, Sicario, The Infiltrator, War Dogs, TV's Narcos ... the list goes on).

The action and jokes pile up with exhausting repetitiveness. But Theroux and Franco make a truly hilarious team.

Lucky for us, Dench and Frears pick up the slack and turn slim pickings into a fun time at the movies. But Victoria & Abdul could have been oh so much more.

Based on the bestseller by Bauman and Bret Witter and blessed with a nuanced script by John Pollono, the film makes sure that tears, when they come, are fully earned.

Battle of the Sexes is not an overtly political movie; it's a blast about two tennis champions going over the top to make a point.

True Kingsman fans will appreciate that director Matthew Vaughn reacted to digs at "The Secret Service" for being gratuitously violent, sexually adolescent and politically reactionary by laying all of it on three times thicker.

Gorgeously shot by Enrique Chediak, American Assassin may be too slick for its own good, but O'Brien cuts deep enough to make you root for a Rapp franchise. That's saying something.

Clearly a passion project for Jolie. Her adopted son Maddox, 16, was born in Cambodia and served as executive producer on the film. If there is such a thing as a cinematic labor of love, this is it.

Thanks to Stiller's prodigious gifts at blending comedy and drama, it's hard not to see ourselves in Brad's besieged humanity. That's the thing with Stiller and White – they make you laugh till it hurts.

Shot with a surrealist's eye for madness and destruction by the great cinematographer Matthew Libatique, Mother! always seems on the verge of exploding. Your head will feel the same way. And I mean that as a compliment.

A patently bogus romcom in which every note rings false.

It works enough of the time to deliver on the promise of bad dreams.

Forget fever – this floral-scented fiasco is so lifeless you can barely feel a pulse.

Like Kathryn Bigelow's "Detroit," set half a century ago, Chon's Gook uses the past to speak to a tumultuous present. Chon has created a hardass yet hypnotically beautiful film that snarls and sparks to incite, not a fever in the blood, but an urgent conversation about what makes us human. Godspeed.

British actor Harris Dickinson gives a smashing breakthrough performance in Beach Rats.

Macdonald sells it, the predictable and the profane, as if her life depended on it.

You can accuse Lemon of a lot of things. False advertising in the title, however, is not one of them.

Whether it's the "best" documentary of 2017 is a matter of opinion. But it is assuredly the most vital.

Reynolds and Jackson make this summer lunacy go down easy with their banter and bullet-dodging skills. They're the only reason that The Hitman’s Bodyguard doesn't completely sink into the generic quicksand from whence it came.

It's a terrific, twisty, funny-as-hell crime flick about so-called hicks who decide that making America great again starts right at home.

A pitch-black comedy that dances around its central theme without ever facing it head on. But oh, the demented, delicious mischief it kicks up.

As directed by the Safdie brothers, Josh and Benny, the movie rips through 100 minutes of screen time like Wile E. Coyote with his tail on fire. It's electrifying.

Hollywood has a knack for sanitizing books that deserve better. In the case of The Glass Castle, it's a damn shame.

Even the best actors – and this coming-of-age movie boasts a handful of them – can't fight this much tin-eared dialogue.

Yes, his direction hits a few tonal bumps; he could have been tougher on his screenwriter on tightening the plot twists. No matter. Wind River packs an elemental power that knocks you for a loop.

Delicate business is being transacted in Columbus, a whisper-soft debut from Kogonada that nonetheless results in something unique and unforgettable. It's pure cinema.

This unholy mess shouldn't happen to a King, much less a paying customer.

Before the jacked-up antics get to be too much, director Tony Leondis and co-writers Erich Siegel and Mike White get in a few satiric licks at a technology we've all come to call home.

Truth to Power sprawls when it most needs to focus, diluting the power punch of the original with too much bobbing and weaving. But it's hard to argue that the crusade isn't still vital.

Theron, in the middle of her action-hero phase and at her "Mad Max: Fury Road" best here, just nails it.

It's a hardcore masterpiece that digs into our violent past to hold up a dark mirror to the systemic racism that still rages in the here and now.

Landline never finds its emotional footing. Amid all the shouting – and these folks really go at it – there's a void where a soulful core should be.

It's as gorgeous as anything the French filmmaker has made and as empty as a Trump tweet.

Dunkirk is a landmark with the resonant force of an enduring screen classic.

Even when Oldroyd loses his directorial grip, Pugh is there to make things right. Not many young actress have that sort of power to command the screen as if by divine right. She dives deep into this terrifically twisted, erotic thriller and makes it matter.

Reeves achieves visual wonders even in the stillness before all hell breaks loose. It's what makes War for the Planet of the Apes such a unique and unforgettable experience – that, and Serkis's career-high performance. Hail Caesar, indeed.

This is a poetic and profound experiment you do not want to miss.

Yes, this far-out fable is too much in every department. But it is also the work of a visual storyteller drunk on the power of movies to stir things up ... and maybe even to heal. It's a bumpy ride, for sure, but hold on. Okja is worth it.

Carell is the life of the party and the main reason this animated blast of slapstick silliness packs appeal beyond the PG crowd.

News Flash: Tom Holland is the best movie Spider-Man ever. He finds the kid inside the famous red onesie and brings out the kid in even the most hardened filmgoer.

Now this is what I call a summer movie. Baby Driver has it all: thrills, laughs, sex, nonstop action, a killer soundtrack, a star-making performance from Ansel Elgort and a director – Edgar Wright – who can knock the wind out of you.

Amirpour dips into an seemingly bottomless supply of signs and symbols to show us an imploding society all too recognizable as our own, and you'll marvel at hallucinatory brilliance of her images. Yet The Bad Batch never finds a way to fuse its scattered intentions into a cohesive whole.

Transformers: The Last Knight is all kinds of awful. It's also the worst of the series to date, which is saying something.

Coppola is a virtuoso of image and sound. but don't mistake her delicate touch for weakness. The Beguiled is a hothouse flower of startling power and intimacy. You can't shake it.

Nanjiani and his wife/co-screenwriter Emily V. Gordon carved this romantic comedy out of her personal hospital experience and their own culture-clash relationship. Their hilarious and heartfelt script has a rare authenticity that pulls you in and keeps you glued to the screen.

Was this eventual big-screen take on Shakur going to be an epic look at a complicated legend's life and times – a Gandhi of gangsta rap iconography – or merely a slightly larger Lifetime TV movie filled with hysterics and greatest-hits moments. We now have an answer. It was not the one we wanted.

The Book of Henry starts well, begins flirting with absurdity in the middle – and ends in crashing disaster. But the feeling persists that director Colin Treverrow believes every word in the shambles of a 20-year-old screenplay by crime novelist Gregg Hurwitz.

The women in Rough Night are terrific company. They never wear out their welcome. You can't say the same for the movie.

The result is inspiring, which isn't something you associate with this series.

It's not perfect, but it is a gift to Sam Elliott – and to us.

The funny, touching and vital Beatriz at Dinner probably tackles way more than it can handle, but so what? Godspeed. You won't know what hit you.

Mara is funny, fierce and altogether wonderful, even up against an irresistible costar.

You want horror that screws with your head? This is your ticket.

Credit Rachel Weisz, who's just the dynamite actress needed to play a character who could be a misunderstood innocent or a fortune-hunting seductress who could be a cold-blooded killer. How delicious to watch the star keep us guessing.

It's a monster fail.

Martin excels in the title role.