As a movie about the subjective fears of a woman on her own, being hunted or haunted by male violence both commonplace and supernaturally eerie, the movie basically works: Your heart races, you’re skeeved out, you’re crawling out of your skin. As a movie about why those men are the way they are, which is an idea that occupies a substantial chunk of its runtime, well…

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.

Writer-director Richard Shepard gives Brosnan his meatiest role ever, and he digs in with relish.

Panic Room is Fincher's high-style testament to the cool things movies can do to make us jump out of our seats in the dark.

The mischief Thornton does make adds up to wild, rowdy fun.

Wheatley and screenwriter Amy Jump (his wife) have energized Ballard's parable of class warfare in the technology age with a daring approach that will touch a nerve or have you bolting for the exits.

Araki gives his hypnotic film a raw intensity heightened by a surreal landscape and a jagged score from the likes of Braindead Sound Machine, KMFDM and Coil.

Even with sex, drugs, hip-hop and a murder, these four stories are dull, dull, dull, dull.

If anything, Good Night Oppy could be nerdier, a little more in the weeds of the science that makes all of this possible. That’d prove a little less lightly entertaining, for some. But it’d also be true to what the movie is already about.

Unlike most revisits of previous box-office hits, it doesn’t rely on nostalgia for the original. It does, however, display a serious soft spot for a bygone era of moviegoing, when two photogenic stars, a simple high-concept premise and the promise of digitally rendered chaos was enough to put millions of asses in seats.

Carell shows a whole new side to his talents.

Before it goes off the rails into strained sermonizing, this sorta-sequel to 2008’s delightful "Forgetting Sarah Marshall" gets in big laughs.

The Art of Self-Defense sets itself up as the 90-pound weakling destined to live forever in the shadow of "Fight Club." The good news is that writer-director Riley Stearns gets in a few good licks at toxic masculinity before odious comparisons to David Fincher’s masterpiece blunt the film’s comic and dramatic impact.

It's all a blur, except for the music. That's workin'.

Ali is a bruiser, unwieldy in length and ambition. But Mann and Smith deliver this powerhouse with the urgency of a champ's left hook.

This remarkable movie will haunt you for a good long time.

As with Landon’s equally ludicrous Happy Death Day 2U (2019), the fun comes from seeing exactly how deftly and stylishly the director can pull these things off; it’s like watching a magician successfully perform a trick that you know isn’t a real illusion so much as an act of misdirection, extreme co-ordination and a specific set of well-honed skills.

It fails as a character study because the murky inner workings of the character are all manifest, outwardly, in turns and attitudes that you can see from a mile away and are no wiser for being able to predict.

Best of all, Jason Mewes is out of rehab to play Jay and spar with Smith as Silent Bob, his dope-dealing partner.

The movie often plays like another Stranger Things dilution, watering down the paperback thrills of literature’s reigning master of horror into an inferior throwback substitution.

Sadly, Lumet's skill at bringing out the juice in actors isn't enough to save the film from overkill.

It's not the identity of the killer that gives Seven its kick -- it's the way Fincher raises mystery to the level of moral provocation.

The overall lack of subtlety suits the age Aster is taking to task, though it also makes everything feel slightly wobbly on its feet. The viewpoint is both-sides misanthropy. Jonathan Swift has some notes.

Ultimately, The End is a cult movie that, until it eventually finds its cult, will be more admired than loved. It isn’t the last word on the pending apocalypse. It simply has the fortitude to go out singing.

Gorgeous filmmaking that brims over with funhouse thrills and ravishing romance.

It's unlikely audiences will be echoing a starving Oliver's most famous line: "Please, sir, I want some more."

There is a sense of healing — emotional, personal, psychic, definitely and defiantly sexual — that this filmmaker seems to be chasing. The ultimate goal, however, is really just casting away creative shackles and just letting it all hang out without professional worry. Yakin has assuredly done that.

Bale, in a piercing, quietly devastating performance, holds the film's center with commanding authority. It's a film whose brute force tempered with contemplative grace. It's a potent and prodigious achievement.

The satire loses its edge as the filmmakers wrongheadedly try to humanize this nest of vipers. Soapdish is more fun when it's spitting venom than when it's licking wounds.

Brice, who made an impressive thriller debut with 2014's "Creep," has a knack for getting the most out of four people talking.

Harris offers an adrenalin rush of energy and talent. Her artfully stylized, explosively funny film also manages to be deeply moving without jerking easy tears.

As Hanna confronts her past, the movie becomes like nothing you've ever seen. I'd call it a knockout.

What pulls us over the rough spots is the mind meld between del Toro the artist and the child inside him. They both want to astonish us. Geeks everywhere, salute.

Hamilton manifests her vision of what politics can do to individual thinking with subtlety and sophistication. Remember her name. She's a genuine find.

Safdie is so determined to keep his film at a low simmer that one occasionally wonders if he’s turned the stove on at all.

The battle, expertly shot by Dean Semler, captures the chaos of guerrilla warfare paralleled in "Black Hawk Down" and gives the film a scarring documentary realism.

Part I is more disappointment than disaster. It merely rolls along like something off an assembly line. Untouched by human hands.

There’s undoubtedly better adventures on the way for the Four in future endeavors, and this should truly be viewed as a first step to making them a major deal in the MCU. But to say their introduction is fantastic would be pushing it.

Down in the Valley is a wild thing that sticks with you long after it's over. You know, a real movie.

An emotional powerhouse.

The dramatized version simply floats, roils and plods forward as if being tugged dutifully along, ticking off checkpoints along the way. That IRL ending still reads as miraculous. Yet the whole thing feels still feels starved for creative oxygen.

This film is a muckraking provocation whose time has come.

Estevez keeps his touch light, with a minimum of pedantry. The Way is really a gift from this son to his father. Sheen, gradually revealing a man painfully getting reacquainted with long buried feelings, who gives the film its bruised heart.

All you really need to know is that The Rover is a modern Western that explodes the terms good and evil; that its desolation is brilliantly rendered by Michôd and cinematographer Natasha Braier; that Pearce and Pattinson are a blazing pair of opposites.

With lyrical intelligence and scrappy wit, Coppola creates a luscious world to get lost in. It's a pleasure.

Altman orchestrates Dr. T's odyssey with the precision, heart and lively wit of a virtuoso.

Writer-director Gerard Stembridge keeps the amoral laughs bubbling.

It's a gimmick, it's not a movie.

Hess and his terrific cast -- Heder is geek perfection -- make their own kind of deadpan hilarity. You'll laugh till it hurts. Sweet.

What makes Suffragette a relevant rabble-rouser, besides Mulligan's fierce, affecting performance, is the way it won't bow to the kind of Hollywood formula that tsk-tsks about how bad it was then — only to wrap everything up with a comfy banner that says, "You've come a long way, baby."

Winkler's script creaks with melodrama, especially in the scenes with Merrill and his ex-wife, Ruth (Annette Bening), though Bening gives the role spine. Director Winkler fails to modulate the performances.

Coup de Chance is a pretty slight and minor film, but for an 87-year-old American working in a second language, it can’t help but seem impressive; it’s certainly as good as anything Allen has made since 2013’s Blue Jasmine.

Stick with it for Miller’s gutsy tour de force and the kick of watching Buscemi, as actor and filmmaker, turn an experiment into a mesmerizing battle of wills.

Does it tick off the boxes of what we’ve come to expect from this series? Yes. Does it add up to more than The Chris Farley Show of Alien movies? Well … let’s just say no one may be able to hear you scream in space, but they will assuredly hear your resigned sighs in a theater.

Disney delivers an uneven but sensationally entertaining sequel to the Oscar winner that pulls out all the stops.

In Mother and Child, he (Rodrigo Garcia) creates an emotional powerhouse.

Bateman, in a rare dramatic role, is just tremendous, finding depths of emotion where they're least expected. Disconnect works they same way. Even when it trips on its ambitions, it hits home.

Goat means to shake you, and does it ever.

While there’s nothing on the level of Pearl‘s climactic monologue or credit-roll close-up, Goth still turns this revenge-of-the-final-girl parable into superior flashback pulp.

Whatever you call this one-of-a-kind bonbon spiked with wit and malice, it's classic oo-la-la.

It makes you laugh till it hurts.

Brutal, sexy, built to thrill and minus a scintilla of redeeming social value, the movie -- based on a series of comic books by Mark Millar and J.G. Jones -- explodes like summer fireworks.

Branching out in a bold new direction, Stallone is quietly devastating. James Mangold has directed Cop Land from his own ardent, audacious script, and despite some draggy, overdeliberate moments, it's the strongest piece of material to come Stallone's way since he invented himself as Rocky 21 years ago.

It’s a power house.

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.

This movie will get under your skin.

Harron needed just the right actress to play Bettie. And she lucked out big time. Gretchen Mol (The Shape of Things) is hot stuff in every sense of the term. She delivers the first performance by an actress this year that deserves serious Oscar consideration.

Williams gives a performance that is riveting in its recessiveness and, as a consequence, truly, deeply scary.

It’s a delightful throwback to an age when a comic mystery fueled by someone with a screen-friendly persona and even screen-friendlier good looks weren’t an anomaly, and a perfect vehicle for Hamm. It’s right in the breezy, funny, irreverent sweet spot in which a filmmaker poised between journeyman and auteur like Greg Mottola works best.

The actors are world-class charmers, and the magnificent Dame Maggie is the diva divine. Her wit still stings, as it does on "Downton Abbey."

The ending isn't squishy scary or deeply satisfying. Bummer. Otherwise, Prometheus – especially in its spellbinding first hour – kicks ass so hard and often that it's impossible not to be thrilled by it.

The tightly-focused origin story of Ruth, played with ferocity and feeling by Gugu Mbatha-Raw, is still one hell of a heroic odyssey.

It’s an irresistible romantic romp that turns the familiar into something sweet, sassy and laugh-out-loud funny.

Smith wins our hearts without losing his dignity, as Chris suits up for success by day and fights off despair by night. The role needs gravity, smarts, charm, humor and a soul that's not synthetic. Smith brings it. He's the real deal.

For all its bile and incoherence, In Praise of Love is filled with haunting images and insights. Godard may be a lion in winter, but the lion still roars.

An explosive piece of entertainment that also means to make a difference. Listen up.

Polarizing is too tame a word to describe reactions to Luca Guadagnino’s radical rethinking of Suspiria. Either you’ll dig in or bolt for the exit — no in between.

Heebie-jeebies are guaranteed.

A riveting and surprisingly romantic ride.

There are times when this mindbending bromance actually achieves a twisted tenderness. There are also times when you'd like to ride Manny's farts to the nearest exit. It's your call.

Menace and mirth can cancel each other out. But the combo clicked in 1985's Fright Night (banish the 1988 sequel), and it clicks again in this frisky 3D remake.

The wow factor of Ready or Not helps you jump the hurdles of any plot predictability.

Che looks dazzling, whether the camera is weaving through a battle or trying to bore into Che's haunted soul. Del Toro stands up to Soderbergh's relentless scrutiny. As for the movie, it's a reward to audiences eager to break from the play-it-safe pack. Game on.

Youth is superior cinema, ardent and artful. Sorrentino, an Oscar winner for The Great Beauty, fills every frame with ravishing images that evoke his idol, Fellini. Gloriously shot by Luca Bigazzi and scored by David Lang, the movie engulfs you like a dream.

Everything that makes Ethan Hawke an extraordinary actor — his energy, his empathy, his fearless, vanity-free eagerness to explore the deeper recesses of a character — is on view in Born to Be Blue.

Elvis is an entertaining movie about the man’s sex appeal and a pretty good movie about his life, even as it never dials things back enough for anyone to catch a breath. Luhrmann’s zigzagging, triumphantly kitschy style suits his subject.

Araki constructs the hot-blooded Kaboom as a high-wire act without a safety net. Go with it.

An uneven movie that nonetheless bristles with stinging wit and exerts a perverse fascination.

A ruthlessly clever musical, a punchy political parody and the hottest look ever at naked puppets -- the first film, porn included, in which a woody is actually made of wood.

Grand Canyon is most gripping when Kasdan shows people waking up to the world and finding that they need more than bromides.

Starting with the French revolution and ending with Monsieur Bonaparte’s no-bang-all-whimper exit from this mortal coil, the director’s sweeping, swaggering, occasionally stumbling history lesson is nothing more than an attempt to conjure up the road-show movie magic of yesteryear.

LaGravenese may be unsteady at the helm, but his film insinuates like a torch song that keeps messing with your head.

Murder is just another day at the office for corporate America, and the film hammers that theme home with diminishing returns. But the acting is aces, especially Pitt mixing it up with the superb James Gandolfini.

Downsizing brims over with the pleasures of the unexpected, a hallmark of Payne's artistry.

The purposely messy, garish and disposable comedy from Bridesmaids writers Kristen Wiig and Annie Mumolo, who also star as the fortysomething Midwesterners of the title, is so determinedly low-stakes that to quibble with its candy-colored craving to be liked is to be a terrible killjoy.

The movie is a small miracle, lifted by Ruffalo and these two remarkable young actresses. Refusing to soften the edges when Cam is off his meds, Ruffalo is a powerhouse. He and Forbes craft an indelibly intimate portrait of what makes a family when the roles of parent and child are reversed.

Now that the fanboy hype has cleared, we can see Cloverfield for what it is: borrowed inspiration, trite screenwriting and amateurish acting all in the service of a ballsy idea -- that a horror movie could maybe, just maybe, have a soul.

Like "Born To Be Blue," Miles Ahead is allergic to all things biopic, especially the cheap psychology and the effort to tie up a complex life with a neat bow.