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.