A highly effective, psychological horror thriller.

The movie is a rendering of the internal landscape of a contemporary cowboy, with the complexities and ambiguities left intact. It’s a kind of parable, delivered in a manner that has nothing to do with preaching.

This whole concept is a rich vein for gags, especially with a comic as at-home with herself as Schumer. But there’s something sweet and wise about it, too.

A particularly strong element is the story of Carlotta’s father, played with arresting intensity by Laszlo Szabo.

Much of the success of Little Pink House comes from the casting and the performance of Catherine Keener, an actress that has, simultaneously, an aura of glumness and an atmosphere of fun about her.

Torok juggles plenty of characters and themes — guilt, greed, Russian meddling, the Holocaust, justice — but he always remains firmly in control of his story. Every frame is meticulously crafted.

The game’s repetition quickly gets tiresome.

What makes Rampage especially enjoyable is the way it sneaks up on the audience. Before casting off every shred of dignity and abandoning itself to good-humored excess, the movie passes itself off as a reasonably serious science-fiction movie.

This isn’t the first film to try to deal with the horrors of the Holocaust from a child’s perspective, but it’s tricky material, and this one succeeds because it is direct and forthright.

The result is like any other Lynne Ramsay movie, whether it’s “We Need to Talk About Kevin” or “Ratcatcher” — slow, soporific and, here and there, wonderful.

Buscemi is characteristically likable here, when Del, mercenary in his treatment of human and beast, should not be so likable. Such is the curse of Buscemi, the delightful killer from “Fargo.”

A cute and scruffy movie. Helena Bonham Carter, lending a female presence to the otherwise all-male story, charmingly narrates as Robert’s sister, who pieces together the Stubby legend from letters sent home.

The movie’s stylistic idea gets in the way of its story, and the story is too slim to sustain a full-length feature. And as the political ideas become as self-conscious as the style, Where Is Kyra? starts to feel a little like poverty porn.

This is a good movie for Hamm, and also for Pike who, in her recent films, has too often been either a madwoman or a victim of circumstance (and sometimes both). Here she gets to be active and think on her feet, and it makes a big difference.

A Quiet Place is the closest thing to a silent movie since “The Artist.”

There’s authenticity in the coach’s belted khaki shorts and in the anguish Hunt brings to a moment where the coach no longer can bear being at her star player’s wake. This moment is the film’s most moving until images of the real coach, and real Caroline Found, accompany the credits.

This much is certain: The cover-up was grotesque.

If you want to know what a culture thinks it thinks, watch drama. But if you want to know how it really thinks, watch comedy. Watch, for example, Blockers, which is exuberant in its crudeness and coarseness. It’s where comedy is now, and it’s very funny.

This tale of a young rape victim further brutalized by officialdom never lives up to its potential.

The film never quite overcomes a slightly stodgy quality.

It is such a soul-killing exercise in narcissism — and not a very smart thriller, either — that yeah, you can buy into the notion that Tinseltown is a total drag.

A brisk, entertaining documentary that shows how the world of investment works.

To the extent Final Portrait succeeds, and it does intermittently, it’s a rather deadpan comedy about two men trying to understand each other against a cultural and generational gulf.

It’s good to see Spielberg, at 71, still finding new forms of cinematic language with which to express his humanism. It also should be said that though Ready Player One wears a cheerful face, there are none of the usual heartwarming, classic Spielberg moments. That’s because, second to “Munich,” this is his most pessimistic film.

At its best, the movie expresses an affection for dogs and is very much attuned to what is wonderful about dogs and what’s funny about them — their sincerity, their credulousness, their odd tendency to get nervous over nothing and yet to occasionally remain oblivious to real threats.

Once the believability drops, the seams start to show, whether it’s some extras who seem aware of the camera, bad edits, comic-timing misfires or songs written for Thorne that aren’t quite as good as everyone onscreen says they are.

A film so rich and pleasurable you’d be forgiven if you thought about it each time you have a glass of red.

Unfortunately, as Pacific Rim Uprising wears on, the monsters and the machines take over — not the world, but the movie.

When the movie starts, its main characters seem outside the norm, unusual, “wierdos,” in the description of David himself. By its end, you see nothing at all of that; they’re just people.

Doesn’t have a dull frame in it, thanks mainly to the star-making performance of Zoey Deutch, who dazzles the screen as Erica with her mix of humor, sensuality, volatility and vulnerability.

Unsane is Soderbergh in his best mode. As in “Haywire” and “Side Effects,” he takes what easily might have been a lowbrow genre entry and realizes it so completely that he turns it into something extraordinary.

Movies go bad in all kinds of ways, but in 7 Days in Entebbe the filmmakers found a brand-new way for their movie to commit suicide.

Story problems tank the new Tomb Raider — small, essential things like lack of motivation, lack of reasons for people to do the things they do, and lack of any reason for the audience to keep watching.

It’s a testament to the skill of first-time feature director Atsuko Hirayanagi that these wild mood swings can co-exist without blowing the movie apart.

Foxtrot troubles and fascinates as it shifts from a portrait of grief to one of pathology, and captivates after it shifts again, into a visually driven, borderline absurd look at military life.

Greg Berlanti’s movie about a teenager’s coming out is nothing if not sincere. More to the point, it’s not very much except sincere.

Still, I’m not sure Kiarostami really intended this film to be a movie. It seems more like an art installation. Of note is the terrific sound design; the sound is credited to Ensieh Maleki, who captures full, rich, peaceful sounds of nature.

A unique and hilarious British comedy.

Mostly it serves as a comprehensive manual of bad places to hide from a masked killer.

The pleasures of Gringo are the pleasures of genre: It’s a fun type of movie, but it’s not a good version of the type.

Credit Freyne for ambition — he’s trying to make a zombie movie with a certain amount of discretion, and evoke sympathy for at least some of those who’ve perpetrated unspeakable actions. But he’s juggling too many themes here, and manages to lose us somewhere along the way.

Submission is not a bad film — it just feels like an early draft.

Leaning Into the Wind asks us to appreciate art for art’s sake, and that’s not a tough ask at all.

The unconventional Joseph Beuys, one of the pillars of the modern art movement, gets an unconventional tribute in Beuys, a zigzagging documentary that is both illuminating and opaque.

"Bombshell” tells the story of a triumphant and consequential life. And there’s more: Everybody interviewed on camera about her apparently really liked her, especially her children. That’s no small achievement.

There’s beauty here — Virzi is too humane to make a movie without beautiful moments. But a scattered eight or 10 minutes of splendor just isn’t worth an almost two-hour investment of time.

That story proves paper thin, and requires believing Amanda is devoid of empathy yet devoted to Lily — concepts too at odds to be plausible together.

It’s conscientious. It’s watchable, and it’s never less than competent. But it seems to strive so hard to be inspirational, rather than letting the inspiration come through the story, that it becomes preachy and self-conscious.

Death Wish is easily the second best “Death Wish” movie ever made, and not a distant second.

Red Sparrow is a thoroughly entertaining movie that stays fresh and interesting for all of its two-hours-plus running time. But what kicks it into a higher level is that it’s a terrific vehicle for Jennifer Lawrence, one of the few movie stars who deserves one, who is a film star in the classic sense.

Thinking people also like a little drama with their science fiction. On that score, Annihilation comes up short.

It’s not a movie that will make you tired, but lack of ambition can sometimes be a strength. This is a comedy-thriller made simply to please in the moment, and it does, for almost every minute of its 100-minute running time.

The performances are heavy-handed, except for that of Jon Hamm, who benefits not only from playing something of a wise guy (a sports memorabilia salesman), but also from his own unsentimental instincts.

A bleak, at times fascinating but strangely inert Chinese animated film.

Shot in a glossy, appealing black-and-white and filmed in a single location, The Party generates a pressure-cooker atmosphere.

This is a film that’s likely to stick with you because of its exceptional intensity. You may find yourself wondering, long after the credits roll, what on Earth is in store for Boris’ unborn child?

The pace is quick, very quick by American standards. The script blasts through reams of plot with lightning dialogue, and even if you have a fast eye for subtitles you may come to the end of the movie with no clear idea what happened.

An engaging, revelatory slice of life.

It’s amusing to see what Ozon is up to, but the central character and her problems remain simply matters of curiosity mixed with indifference.

The film is charming throughout, literally from the beginning of time to the final goal.

Chadwick Boseman commands every moment of this film, radiating probity and purpose, and it’s only later on that you realize that, with another actor, this wouldn’t have been a sure thing. The Black Panther is a superhero with lots of uncertainty.

Fifty Shades Freed has something extra going for it, in that it depicts something that movies and pop songs and pop culture in general tend to avoid, which is the romance of familiarity.

With The 15:17 to Paris, director Clint Eastwood overwhelms the extraordinary with the mundane, turning the true story of three Americans who helped subdue a gunman aboard a European train into a tedious film.

The film would only be very good were it not for Vega’s performance, which ranks right up there with the five women nominated for best actress this year and, in some cases, surpasses them.

Yes, the two-minute trailers were an atrocious affront. But it turns out the other 91 minutes include thoughtful characters and some clever humor in between the pratfalls.

Although it isn’t a top-flight horror movie — too slow for thrill-chasers, too ridiculously fictionalized for historians — the film serves as a proper 99-minute commercial for that San Jose tourist spot.

The visuals themselves are inconsistent, but never boring. The sidekicks seem considerably less painstakingly rendered than the leads. A few of the merchants have the unnatural look and jerky movements of Pirates of the Caribbean animatronics.

Savagely lyrical, Vazante offers a harsh, impressionistic take on slavery in 19th century Brazil. And though the storytelling leans toward the opaque, the film has a sense of authenticity and power that keep it interesting.

The writing is subtle and refreshingly without sentimentality — sentimentality being a common flaw in Middle Eastern cinema.

The movie’s one and only idea renders itself boring, with still half the movie left for the audience to endure.

This is the world of Maze Runner: The Death Cure, the third installment in the “Maze Runner” trilogy, a kind of destitute man’s impoverished cousin’s answer to the “Divergent” series.

Clocking in at two hours and 20 minutes, it seems intended to have been a crime epic in the vein of Michael Mann’s “Heat,” about two men of talent and spirit who happen to be on opposite sides of the law. And it’s sort of like that, if you can imagine a Michael Mann picture that has been set on fire and dropped from an airplane.

It’s a poorly made film, with rough edits, distracting staging and plot contrivances that can be predicted to the moment.

It is, for what it’s worth, a good documentary, though I imagine its true worth and true nature can only be revealed in time. At the starting gate of 2018, we can have no idea how this film will be perceived in 10 years, and maybe we don’t want to know. Then again, maybe we do.

Buoyed by an appealing lead performance by John Hawkes, Small Town Crime is a smart, sharply written detective story that, though not without humor, plays it straight and tough.

Kalashnikov is also smart enough to keep The Road Movie down to 67 minutes, which is all he needs to create this particular vision of hell. (And, by the way, he does so without showing bloody or mangled bodies.)

It might be enough that 12 Strong makes you feel good that the United States still produces guys like this. Too bad we didn’t get to know about the real guys and their actual story.

Here and there, particularly in flashback, Bening gets a scene or a moment to invest in and shine, but for truly a surprising length of time, Bening plays a woman who is asleep, literally.

Although the director’s multipronged approach may dilute the impact of Intent to Destroy, there’s no denying the film’s value as an introduction to a major piece of history that continues to inspire debate of the most intense kind.

It weds all the winning aspects of the Neeson formula to a ticking-clock plot, full of tense moments and gripping sequences.

The only clear message to emerge here is that Kruger is a world-class talent.

Paul Thomas Anderson is getting there. He is a great director of scenes, not of movies, but in Phantom Thread he has devised a film that hangs in from start to finish, his first since “Boogie Nights.”

Hawkins, Bonneville and voice actor Ben Whishaw — who makes Paddington sound like the Geico gecko minus the attitude — give the film a strong base of kindness.

In the end, it’s left to Shaye to carry the film, and she does so with aplomb. The “Insidious” franchise may be running out of places to go, but Shaye appears to be just getting started.

The Post is on safe ground when it focuses on Streep as Graham — tentative, slightly affected, but growing by the day — and with Graham’s relationship with her gruff, hotshot editor, Ben Bradlee, played by Tom Hanks, against type but winningly. The movie’s challenge is the journalism story, which is not as clear-cut as Watergate and is therefore harder to dramatize.

A moving, quite amazing documentary.

Happy End is the latest from Michael Haneke, an uncompromising filmmaker whose work is sometimes brilliant and sometimes hard to watch, and sometimes both, but not this time. Happy End is just hard to watch.

This makes Hostiles something of a slog, but a movie-literate slog containing some impressive scenes.

At a certain point, everyone watching Molly’s Game will form the question, “Why should I care about any of this?” It’s a question Sorkin should have anticipated. He has no good answer.

It’s as realized a thriller as you are likely to find, not only in the precision of its performances, but in its evocative use of location (Rome, London), its period detail (especially Williams’ clothing) and the tension of the younger Getty’s months-long captivity.

Wilson and Helms favor Bradshaw in likability. But they are not two hours’ worth of likable, in a film this flawed.

By the end, Downsizing is one of those great ideas that should have just stayed an idea.

And then there’s the real problem with Pitch Perfect 3: The best thing about the first movie — the singing — feels like an afterthought.

There’s idiotic, and there’s magnificent, but The Greatest Showman is that special thing that happens sometimes. It’s magnificently idiotic. It’s an awful mess, but it’s flashy. The temptation is to cover your face and watch it through your fingers, because it’s so earnest and embarrassing and misguided — and yet it’s well-made.

It’s buoyant. It’s bright. It has lots of pop music on the sound track, none of it from 1991 or 1994, and almost all of it from the late 1970s, mostly 1977 and 1978. The movie’s mix of music and era doesn’t quite make sense, strictly speaking, but like everything in this loose, inspired and yet tonally precise film, it feels right.

The film’s best moments show the characters bonding as teens, “Breakfast Club”-style, within their new bodies.

There’s real artistry to Ferdinand.

Armie Hammer’s performance is a brilliant exercise in subtlety, suggesting a genial yet inappropriate space-taking, the carelessness of the beautiful.