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.

The director is barely a kid, yet this is such a ferociously accomplished, beautifully nuanced and endlessly surprising film, you'd think the guy had been directing for decades. [13 June 2010, p.Q25]

You don’t see many sci-fi action extravaganzas that are about late middle-aged disappointment, about wondering what it’s all about and whether any of it was worth it. It’s this element that gives The Last Jedi an extra something, a fascinating melancholy undercurrent.

In almost any other filmmaker’s oeuvre, this film would be considered a highlight. But for the director who made “Hannah and Her Sisters,” “Match Point” and “Blue Jasmine”? It’s right up there with “Melinda and Melinda” and “Scoop.” Good, not great.

What sticks with us in the end is something beyond the black humor and even Khaled’s sorrows — it’s the touching relationship between the two principals, and the Finnish man’s quiet commitment to doing what’s right.

Across the veil of years, we have seen tall Churchills, obese Churchills, sloppy Churchills, gross Churchills and scowling bull dog Churchills, and yet not one movie or TV Churchill has come close to giving us the man in full, both in look and spirit, until Gary Oldman in Darkest Hour.

The Shape of Water is brilliant, but sick — or maybe it’s sick, but brilliant. In any case, it’s something to see.

This is a movie that has lots of magic, in more ways than one.

On the Beach at Night Alone is really Kim’s film. Her performance won her the best actress award at this year’s Berlin Film Festival, and she is in every scene, warts and all.

This movie is seriously funny, surprisingly funny, not funny in a way that you ever decide to laugh, but funny like you couldn’t keep quiet even if you wanted to. The laughs, as they say, keep coming.

Though it would be inaccurate to reduce Thelma to an extended metaphor, it’s fair to say that Trier uses the supernatural element to illustrate, in a forceful way, the power of lust, the selfishness of love, and the world-obliterating intensity of a first romance.

The film is honest enough not to exaggerate the beneficial results of Parvana’s courageous act.

Short on complexity and depth, The Divine Order gives us a parade of heroines and villains. Instead of raising questions, it seems to want to induce in viewers a sense of smugness.

Rarely has a movie ever captured the importance of a writer’s having unbroken concentration in order to work.

Roman is bad at doing good, so when he starts showing promise in the other moral direction, it hardly seems like a tragedy. It seems like a smart career move. Plus, he gets to wear decent suits and finally starts looking like Denzel Washington.

Coco is the best-looking Pixar movie since the tonally uneven “The Good Dinosaur.” The colorful afterlife is the centerpiece, but excellence is found in unexpected places.

Nye’s focus on work has had a deleterious effect on his social life. Some of Nye’s issues are no doubt the result of lifelong fears that he may be struck by a neurological condition called Ataxia that runs in his family, but which so far has not affected him.

The worst action movies, and this is one of them, are all about stretching out the action.

For the vast majority of its 113-minute running time, Wonder stays genuine and true.

The movie represents a leap forward for writer-director Martin McDonagh. Three Billboards is as clever and imaginative as McDonagh’s “In Bruges,” in terms of how it makes characters collide in delightful and unexpected ways.

Here is more ambiguity, in a film that needs less of it.