It’s a solid first step into the magical world of the familiar. Escapist entertainment for crowds that prefer to know their destination in advance.

The Love Witch has an air of geeky satire. The presentational acting style is so self-aware you almost expect the cast to occasionally underline a joke by turning toward the camera and winking at the audience (no one does, though).

The atmosphere of Loving, the feeling it evokes, is the film’s most distinct quality. The mood is somber and restrained, and the characters — not just the principals, but the people they know — seem beaten down.

Arrival works as mainstream entertainment, but includes hallmarks of the “2001: A Space Odyssey”/“Silent Running” era of artist-driven science fiction. It has Hollywood stars, but makes great effort to strip them of any false glamour. The film is tightly calibrated, but leaves things open to interpretation, for discussion on the ride home and beyond.

Almost Christmas would have been less clunky if it had focused more on the family’s loss of its matriarch, and allowed the comic elements to naturally arise as the characters struggle with the new family dynamic. Instead, we get too many slapstick set pieces and extraneous subplots that bog down the proceedings.

Keith Maitland’s powerful and emotional documentary Tower — easily one of the best films of the year — takes a novel approach for a nonfiction film: Animation.

Hacksaw Ridge is one of the best films of 2016. And the victory is all the more sweet for Gibson in that he succeeds on his own weird terms.

Timberlake is the secret weapon, making the crankiest troll also the most appealing.

Cumberbatch fleshes out a portrait of uncompromised and resolute selfhood. In that way, he carries us and the movie over some long stretches of blue-screen emptiness.

The result is a beautiful void, a structureless emptiness buoyed by some good scenes and performances.

Aquarius has a lot of things on its mind, and sometimes the plot machinations in the last third seem a tad heavy-handed, almost as if they’re being piled upon a delicate character sketch.

It’s an intricate thriller about a con game, but so loaded with wicked humor and sensual appeal — ravishing cinematography, high-temperature eroticism — that for long stretches viewers might forget there’s any plot at all.

Every year, we get only a few of these, movies that come out of nowhere, that are different, unexpected and wonderfully right. Moonlight is that kind of movie, one of the gems of 2016.

It is a satisfying but thoroughly idiotic film, in which relationships make no sense, character motivations change on a dime, and Tom Hanks has weird hair. But brainless as it is, it’s artful. It is a well-made bit of silliness, a piece of construction optimally designed to maintain audience interest while garnering absolutely no one’s respect.

Do Not Resist amounts to little more than a grab bag. Viewers looking for depth will have to find it elsewhere.

The final frames, which hark back to an iconic TV show, are audacious, yet like everything else in this movie, they are skillfully unadorned.

We end up with a movie in which it becomes very possible to respect the intent and yet be frustrated by the result.

An earnest film, a well-acted film and, despite the presence of a star director, a generous film. As a director, McGregor is good to his co-stars and highlights them throughout. But the energy drops out of the last third of the picture, and takes with it much of its aura of importance.

Neither funny nor exciting. It’s at best incongruous, the kind of incongruity that seems delightful on the page but not in practice.

There’s nothing unique about the setup. But Flanagan and Howard’s script has charming touches, wringing humor out of characters rather than gags. Even the retro opening title card foretells its self-aware sense of humor.

This is a superior and assured action movie, a quality product that makes the case for a franchise.

The Idol, a feel-good film about a Palestinian boy’s improbable ascent to pop stardom, takes place mostly in Gaza, a place not associated with feeling good. But out of the war rubble emerges one of the most irresistible movies of the year.

It’s a character study of a character who isn’t worth studying. It’s a revenge movie, but when the revenge comes, the only person you feel like getting even with is the screenwriter.

As a child, I worried about nuclear war. It never occurred to me that I should have been worried about a nuclear accident.

Though our put-upon hero’s gradual realization that he has much to live for is obvious from the get-go, it still is a pleasant journey from pawn to king — spiritually speaking, of course.

A victory lap of a comedy film taken by a star whose talent continues to propel his career, but doesn’t seem particularly hungry.

Much of it is enjoyable and has the aura of a superior action film, but it collapses into a laughable wreck and ultimately reveals itself as a mild waste of two hours.

It’s a satisfying drama that inverts the usual way of building interest and suspense. Instead of wondering what’s going to happen, we sit with the knowledge and wait for every character to react to what we already know.