This pooped party brings you down from all the jokes that don't land and the flop sweat pouring off good actors whose forced cheer is exhausting.

Bare and Miele do more than track a remarkable career here; they reveal the essentials of what makes Benson unique. Any paparazzo with moxie can get into the action and shoot first. But what this shutterbug's eye arranges, sometimes in a split second, is the work of a singular craftsman with a rare gift: raising the click of a camera shutter to the level of art.

What makes La La Land such a hot miracle is how the passion for cinema and its possibilities radiates from every frame.

If The Eyes of My Mother is occasionally stylistic to a fault and ends way too abruptly, it's also the mark of someone who isn't afraid to make something that leaves scars.

Best Worst Thing brims over with moments of humor and heartbreak that reflect the feeling of knowing "we're what's new." This movie is more than good, pal. It's indispensable.

It plays like an opportunity missed.

Powered by a transfixing Portman, Larrain's film – one of the year's best – is appropriately hard to pin down and impossible to forget.

It simply does not have the courage of its crass convictions. There's a going-through-the-motions vibe to the whole affair.

Sound plays as crucial a role as visuals in replicating an authentic culture to drive the storytelling.

It's clear that Beatty, who has studied Hughes for decades, has an instinctive understanding of the man, from getting stuck on phrases he repeats endlessly to making deals he can't wait to run away from. No kids. No roots. Sex, movies and aviation are the only constants. Why? Beatty hints, but never tells us. But his performance, filled with comic bite and aching confusion, teases a much deeper portrait.

Sloane is a nasty piece of work. Yet Chastain draws us in, making us see what the character keeps inside by the sheer force of her fireball performance. There are times when Miss Sloane plays like a pilot for a TV series. No knock on that. If Chastain stars, I'm in.

What a handsome empty shell of a movie Allied is.

The young star, maturing nicely past the boyish enthusiasm he showed in "Slumdog Millionaire" and "Marigold Hotel" films, enters a new phase of his career with fierce commitment. Lion is one from the heart.

If nothing else, The Edge of Seventeen should make Steinfeld a shoo-in for the teen movie young-restless-and-hilarious Hall of Fame. At the very least, the humanity she gives this young woman on the verge helps the movie teeter on the edge of being an instant classic.

Younger jacks up the action in the last third, but the air goes out of a fight movie when you can see the next jab coming.

No film this year has moved me more with its humor, heart and humanity.

Ford hits it out of the park again in Nocturnal Animals, a stunning film noir that resonates with ghostly, poetic terror.

The real stars here are the beasts, supposedly ugly, weird and dangerous, but paragons of FX creativity in service of genuine ideas.

Huppert, an fearless actress (see The Piano Teacher), gives a performance that's a riveting mix of carnal and chilly – you can't take your eyes off her.

The film's technical achievements are indisputable (a military salute to camera wiz John Toll). But Billy Lynn comes off as artificial when we most need it to be natural, organic and whisper-close. Maybe there's a future film that will use size and sharpness to express an epic and intimate truth. Not this time.

Adams, her face a reflection of conflicting emotions, is simply stellar in an Oscar-buzzed performance of amazing grit and grace. Without her, Arrival might be too cerebral to warm up to. With her, the film gets inside your head and emerges as something intimate and epic, a linguistics odyssey through space and time. It's the stuff that dreams are made of.

What Robert Downey, Jr. is to "Iron Man" and Ryan Reynolds is to "Deadpool" – that's what Benedict Cumberbatch is to Doctor Strange. By that I mean, he's everything.

The film sneaks up on you, quiet-like, until its implications accumulate. And then it crushes you.

Thanks to some of the greatest battle scenes ever filmed, Gibson once again shows his staggering gifts as a filmmaker, able to juxtapose savagery with aching tenderness.

Simon Niblett's cinematography, utilizing drones to catch impossible scenes of flight, is extraordinary, especially in the winter hunting sequences that end the film.

Hanks is one of the most likable actors on the planet. But Inferno just lays there onscreen, pancake-flat and with no animating spark to make us give a damn.

American Pastoral, Roth's magnum opus, needed a film revolutionary on the order of Paul Thomas Anderson, Alejandro González Iñárritu or the Coen brothers to re-imagine it for the screen. McGregor's timid approach does no one any favors, including Roth – and especially the audience.

Moonlight, which announces Jenkins as a major filmmaker, gets you good. It stays raw from first scene to last.