The film refuses to soft-pedal Dickinson’s heartbreaking descent into bitterness and near-misanthropy, but sometimes operates with a heavy-handedness that’s certainly at odds with her poetry.

It’s a sci-fi action movie that spoofs the form to strong comic effect, and yet it profits from every good thing about the genre it’s mocking. It tries to have it both ways, and it succeeds.

It’s also a film with horrific shots of open graves. By all means see it if you have the inclination, but do be aware of the experience you’re letting yourself in for.

Chasing Trane celebrates its subject with great passion, but it often feels like walking in late into a good party.

The documentary takes Tower through his much publicized recent stint as the chef at New York’s Tavern on the Green, a rather hopeless assignment for a perfectionist.

It’s a complicated tale, and at 92 minutes, the film is a very brief summary.

For some viewers, it will be more than they want to know, but for Lynch’s many partisans, it’s required watching.

Ultimately, Collin’s film is one of forgiveness. That’s not the usual way great tragedies end.

The Circle is very much a plea for the preservation and sanctification of privacy, but it’s nicely constructed in that no one character expresses the film’s distinct point of view.

It doesn’t ascend to the sky. It’s not profound or great. But Vigalondo takes Colossal to all sorts of unexpected places and then brings it home, intact.

In Graduation, Mungiu takes a scalpel and dissects life in modern Romania. He shows what’s wrong with the government and the impact this has on people’s relationships.

Quibbling aside, Free Fire mainly works, as an indulgence in cinematic overkill for moviegoers who realize that sometimes too much is just enough.

It’s Miller, however, who gives the most affecting performance, in that we see the light fade from her eyes. What an awful thing this husband did to her — to praise her for courage and then use all her courage against her.

Ashkenazi is a terrific actor, commanding and grand-scale in his aura, but with an unmistakable warmth. And Gere, cast against type, couldn’t be better. In a career of only good performances, this is one of his best.

The Promise is hardly grotesque; and it has good things in it, but by the end, it just feels like a failed manipulation.

A charming and thoughtful movie, about people making a charming and thoughtful movie.

Unforgettable may have a generic title, and it may be a train wreck, but it’s a watchable train wreck throughout.

The film urges decentralization and bottom-up decision making as tools in remedying problems of global warming, food production and the like. The tone is more upbeat than you might expect, and there’s a certain glossiness to the movie that’s a refreshing change from some of its more dour documentary siblings.

He (Connery) hasn’t made a film for the ages, but it’s on par with other decent historical sports dramas.

The action is not just big — big is easy. It’s creative. It’s choreographed. It’s unexpected and delightful. It’s lots of fun and a stark contrast to the previous film, “Furious 7,” which was huge but flat, just commotion without inspiration.

It’s a great story, but the movie has a flatness that can’t be denied. Who’d have expected a Herzog film to invoke thoughts of “Masterpiece Theater” and Merchant-Ivory productions at their most stiff and formal? I surely did not.

One can see the influence of Hayao Miyazaki here — this is way more “Spirited Away” than “Ghost in the Shell” — but Shinkai also goes off into his own, weird direction.

Like its lead characters, Going in Style just grooves along nicely, until the credits roll and you realize it was time well spent.

Smurfs: The Lost Village has the look of a film that was rushed, and made on a tight budget. At best, it’s an adequate cinematic babysitter.

In its details, in its characters and their relationships, in the unfolding of its story, and even in the delicacy of its filming, Gifted rises above cynical expectation. Far from a canned piece of work, it feels sincere and inspired.

The Zookeeper’s Wife achieves its grandeur, not through the depiction of grand movements, but through its attentiveness to the shifts and flickers of the soul.

After the Storm has what the Japanese call mono no aware, which translates as “the pathos of things.” It is a film that is aware of the of the transient, impermanent nature of life.

It doesn’t help that there are strong similarities with Sony’s equally disorganized yet superior 2016 film “Storks.” Both films work off the same premise — that humans don’t bear live young.

Ghost in the Shell is like an amalgam of 2017 anxieties. Fear of technology. Fear of big business. Fear of being spied upon. Fear of the sacred disappearing, and of the crass, the loud and the empty crowding into every corner of existence — crowding out life itself.

We get a lot of hapless victims in an expensive endeavor that is surprisingly lifeless.

This new film is exceptional and one of Ozon’s best.

Song to Song is Terrence Malick’s first truly awful film. In it, he does all the things that Malick does, except for all the great things that Malick does.

Entertaining yet somber documentary.

No, T2 is not a great film, but its pleasures are great — and so rare and accomplished that they raise T2 to a level approximating greatness. There is something to be said for a movie this enjoyable. T2 is great enough.

It’s hard to dislike a film where almost every character, no matter how small, brings something to the screen, and because of that, Wilson World is worth inhabiting for a few hours.

As light entertainment goes, CHiPs is fairly accomplished, and Pena and Shepard make a good team. If someone wants to turn CHiPs into a franchise of some kind, worse things have happened.

Beauty and the Beast creates an air of enchantment from its first moments, one that lingers and builds and takes on qualities of warmth and generosity as it goes along.

The Little Prince is heartbreaking, beautiful and irresistible.

Far too precious and eager to please to really deserve its self-description as a fairy tale.

It is funny in an absurdist way, but it’s heartfelt, too. It creates unease, but also sympathy.

In performance and rehearsal clips, Heymann’s saturated cinematography captures the raw physicality and emotion of Naharin’s work, and the way he cajoles, demeans and seduces his dancers.

Kong: Skull Island is a smart SciFi action movie that doesn’t rely on a handful of monsters and random scenes of computerized destruction to run out the clock. It has a smart script, imaginative filmmaking and a cast of fine actors that actually get to act.

The Shack is unshakable in its religious message, and that’s admirable in a cynical world. But viewed objectively as cinema, it’s just not a very good film.

This is how bad Table 19 gets: At a certain point in the movie, there is absolutely no reason that any of the characters would remain at the wedding or anywhere near it. So the movie devises a false reason to keep them in the general vicinity.

It’s moving but not maudlin, and there’s humor in addition to compassion.

The documentary is gentle and observational, unfolding slowly and smoothly. No overarching drama here, just a slice of daily life.

If one can forgive its derivativeness and predictability, Before I Fall is well-acted and directed, and its message of acceptance and responsibility reads as heartfelt.

Logan takes its indestructible metal claws to comic book movie norms and destroys them, and it’s a wonderful thing.

It’s always fun to watch the charismatic Bernal.

It’s the kind of observational humor that instills a knowing chuckle and nod of the head, as opposed to an all-out chortle.

Get Out reveals an underlying unease. It diffuses tension, even as it points to its source. It may be somewhat rough and unrefined and even ill-considered in some of its particulars. Yet it may stand as a kind of pop culture document of this historical moment, a moment that’s not nearly as funny as this movie.

Too lackluster to be praised highly, yet too benign to be excoriated, “Rock Dog” is the perfect family film for a rainy day with no other options. It does not deserve mention in any animation history book; and yet it’s completely satisfactory in the moment.

Breezily bounces back and forth from Baja to Los Angeles, and it’s a pleasant diversion, on both sides of the border.

It’s not a bad film, just, strangely, not a good one.

The film is a plodding 2 ½ hours long, with an abundance of livestock gore, endless dental trauma and a violent sex scene.

The narrative is clumsy, and the monster scenes are ridiculous, but not ridiculous enough to be funny, just ridiculous enough to be boring.

For at least an hour of its hour and a half running time, Fist Fight is a complete failure, a sour comedy without laughs. But then something happens in the movie’s last quarter. It doesn’t exactly redeem itself, but it comes into focus and starts making sense on its own weird terms.

No, this is not good. This is just not good.

A strange good movie, bad in every way but its effect. And it’s an effective woman’s story, not exactly believable, but with another kind of truth, a truth of the heart. If that’s not enough, it’s close.

The Lego Batman Movie is less awesome than its predecessor, but it’s a clever, well-paced, self-aware and completely satisfying kind of less awesome.

It presents a compelling situation, genuinely touching moments and pockets of strong acting ... and dialogue that has people in the audience turning to each other and laughing because it’s so absurd.

It packs a lot in its 81 minutes, and does it well.

What keeps I Am Not Your Negro just short of greatness is, alas, the competition from Baldwin himself. Watching it, it’s hard not keep wanting to see more of Baldwin and hear less of Jackson.

All the movie’s finer points — of audience response, of interaction, of the dances between people — are conveyed with a specificity so expert that it seems offhand.

The documentary They Call Us Monsters tries, and mostly succeeds, at putting a human face on teenage criminals facing life in prison.

One of the charms of The Red Turtle is a chance to savor the joys of clean and simple animation suggestive of the old hand-drawn school, which is part of what makes the film, a quiet, humanistic fable, one of the best of its kind in memory.

This is a movie you might want to talk about afterward, so try to see it with other people.

The Sunshine Makers is a true San Francisco story.

There’s really nothing else to say about Gold, beyond one general point: It is illustrative of what’s particularly fun about being a critic in January. For most of the year, bad movies have the same general ailments. But in January, they have exotic diseases. They have things wrong with them that you’ve never seen before.

A Dog’s Purpose is peril porn; the animal grows old or faces tragedy and expires over and over, reincarnating into a new dog with the same brain.

The Bye Bye Man is the kind of mess that happened by committee.

It doesn’t help matters that the movie seems to end three times before it ends, and none of those ends are satisfying.

Always watchable, and occasionally great. And that’s probably more than even the most forgiving former Shyamalan fan ever thought they’d see again.

Bakery in Brooklyn is entertaining fluff more suitable for the Lifetime or Hallmark channels than theaters.

That the movie works so well is also due to the exceptional talents of leads Simonischek and Hüller, who hold nothing back — especially the former, whose Winfried is one of the oddest ducks in recent movies.

Keaton is fun to watch — fun and a little bit eerie. He plays Ray as all drive and no soul.

It’s a fantasia on a short period in the life of the esteemed Chilean poet and Nobel laureate Pablo Neruda — while based on fact, it’s made with a sense of freedom suggestive of poetry.

So the bottom line: This is an undeniably effective movie that I mostly enjoyed, even though I’m not altogether sure it should ever have been made.

This is a film that, in some ways, is too complex for the kids, yet leaves the adults feeling left out, too.

20th Century Women is not especially dramatic. At times, it eschews drama. Every time the story is on a knife edge and can drop deeper into turmoil or recede back to the normal flows and ebbs of life, Mills chooses the latter. But this time, the strategy works. It feels real.

Jarmusch has created a small miracle of a film, one that is both intellectually dazzling and emotionally provocative.

Almodóvar presents this material in a way that never splits our attention, even as he’s giving us a deluge of sensory and emotional detail. It’s as if he’s internalized the story so completely that he can’t make a gesture — can’t move the camera, can’t shape a moment — without saying something true.

Still, when you’re making a Christian epic and the best thing about it is the guy playing the inquisitor, you have a serious problem.

Bayona remains a director whose work should be anticipated, and A Monster Calls is a solid fantasy drama.

An Eye for an Eye may very well be the most unpersuasive documentary ever made.

Hardly a riveting experience. It has slow patches, but it has a cumulative effect, thanks equally to Hansen-Love and Huppert. We come away feeling enriched and expanded, without exactly knowing how or why.

Why Him? takes a comic situation and then does everything it can to undermine it. It’s more than unfunny. It’s anti-funny. It doesn’t provoke laughter or even neutral silence, but an increasingly stunned disdain. It is the movie equivalent of putting on a plaster life mask and letting it dry and lock your face into an expression of blank misery.

Washington delivers not only one of the year’s best performances, but one of the best self-directed performances in cinema history.

Sing is a tribute to struggling live theater.

A pleasant surprise. What looked to be yet another science fiction movie turns out to be one of the year’s few romantic dramas, one which just happens to be set aboard a space ship.

It is old-fashioned in a good way, classical and well-acted, and that it has no surprises keeps it from being disappointing, even as it keeps it from being great.

The writing, by Adam Mansbach, and direction, by Vikram Gandhi, are competent without being terribly sophisticated or daring. Terrell’s performance elevates the film, though.

This comic film from Belgium, in which God is shown as a cantankerous slob, is more mischievous than malevolent, likely to offend only the humor-impaired.

Theo Padnos, who was kidnapped and held for nearly two years by al Qaeda in Syria, has a compelling story to tell. Unfortunately, it is not compellingly told in the documentary Theo Who Lived.

In the end it all seems a little too glib, too easy and not quite true.

It’s a beautiful and hopeful film, coming at a time when there isn’t much beauty or hope in our movies, and it’s the type of picture — a sprawling, exuberant musical drama — that hasn’t been seen in decades.

It’s a downer. It’s morally tangled. The characters are as depressed as the scenario, and Michael Giacchino’s music can’t make it better.

A mesmerizing documentary.