Ramsay’s fourth feature operates on the viewer in much the same way. With a minimum of resources, she creates a primal atmosphere of dread, then assaults the viewer’s consciousness in a single, sharp blow.

Blockers is about as funny and heartfelt as studio comedies get (which isn’t meant as a backhanded compliment), while smart and insightful enough to double as a guide to raising teenage girls.

Ready Player One has no obligation to be a rigorous intellectual exercise, even if it amounts to a wasted opportunity to explore who else might steer tech, and society, toward greater equity. But it doesn’t have to be so facile, either. Maybe next time the screenwriters shouldn’t set the difficulty mode to “easy.”

In a film of more prepossessing style, the glaring leaps of logic might be easier to overlook, or at least there’d be more incentive to do so, but the cellphone is Soderbergh’s enemy as well.

It’s hard to resist Isle of Dogs’ energy and wit, the filmmakers’ evident joy in exploring the miniature world they’ve imagined.

An obligatory setup for a sequel slows down the final moments, but until then, Tomb Raider feels like a perfectly paced trio of espresso shots, with a shot of adrenaline to the heart as a chaser.

The best thing you can say about The Strangers: Prey at Night, the sequel to writer-director Bryan Bertino’s 2008 home-invasion creeper, is that it reminds you the original exists.

For all of Wrinkle’s unevenness, DuVernay still manages to draw out some glimpses of more intimate beauty, the kind that one expects from the filmmaker.

The back and forth between McAdams and Bateman is what makes Game Night sing.

Feminist cinephilia has always been a complicated proposition, but it should surely demand better than this blunder.

Duncan Jones must have believed there was an incredible movie in his head. If there was, it’s still in there.

Whatever the working balance is between mystery and revelation, Annihilation, the new sci-fi–horror drama from Ex Machina writer-director Alex Garland, never quite pulls it off.

There is something special about seeing a bawdy spectacle of feigned sex and quivering emotion test the boundaries of Hollywood’s rigid traditionalism, and their goofy thrall over audiences make for especially fun experiences in a theater. These movies are derivative, often ridiculous, and, in the case of Fifty Shades Freed, unquestionably hilarious, but they’re also the overheated comfort food I crave.

While the film is deliberately crude in some respects — Park once described his aesthetic as making sure that, no matter how carefully sculpted his clay figures were, he always left the thumbprints showing — it’s fastidiously detailed in others, dancing between broad humor and subtle, almost subliminal gags as it plays out the conflict between Neanderthals and their evolutionary successors.

Black Panther could have been just another Marvel romp—a fun but ultimately disposable entry in the studio’s catalogue. But Ryan Coogler and company had the power, and perhaps the responsibility, to do much more. And they did.

Eastwood and Blyskal can’t seem to decide whether they want Stone et al. to be ordinary people thrust into an extraordinary situation or whether they were destined for greatness, so they waffle between foreshadowing and simply biding their time.

Great(ish) ideas and terrible ones sit cheek by jowl, original notions and blatant thievery corralled together with no discernible logic. It’s a horror movie one moment, a comedy the next, as if Netflix were streaming several different titles at once.

The ironic distancing makes it hard to get emotionally caught up in the sad story of Kenney’s self-destruction when the film enters "Leaving Las Vegas" territory.

Focusing the camera on Vega, an openly trans actress (apparently Chile’s first), allows A Fantastic Woman to tell a different, richer kind of story and allows us to process the subtleties of her performance without always having to evaluate the success of the underlying transformation.

It’s a relief to see an autistic woman played as more than simply a bundle of symptoms.

The world is not so full of beauty that one can wave away Mary’s visual majesty, especially now that its hand-drawn style is nearly a thing of the past. But the flaws in its writing are harder to overlook.

After a year of Trump, it’s hard not to feel nostalgic for a president seen backstage working on his Greek pronunciation.

The Commuter has nothing so heady as the plight of the forgotten man on its mind. The movie, whose screenplay is credited to Byron Willinger, Philip de Blasi, and Ryan Engle, is flagrantly, even willfully silly, juiced with such corny audacity it frequently made me laugh out loud.

Like Barnum himself, it’s an elegant fraud, nice enough to look at as long as you don’t look too close.

This devilishly funny and luxuriantly sensuous film is so successful as entertainment that it’s hard to stop and notice the extreme degree of craft that went into its construction.

Like many before it, The Last Jedi has already been hailed as the best Star Wars movie since The Empire Strikes Back, and while that’s true, it’s too faint a compliment. It’s a film of genuine beauty, one where you come away as eager to talk about the set design and the choreography as you do the fate of the galaxy or what might happen next.

The tone is tongue-in-cheek, with teeth gritted so hard you can taste just a hint of blood.

Despite its few flaws, The Post is an enthralling film: brisk, funny, suspenseful, inspiring.

The case could be made that The Disaster Artist is a little too sunny for a movie about a clearly damaged man whose lifelong drive to create something beautiful only led to his becoming a symbol of grand-scale failure. But in addition to making me laugh, hard, at a time when cathartic laughter is all but a medical necessity, this portrait of the artist as a not-so-young weirdo struck me as peculiarly moving.

Even if you’re not transported by every minute of the film’s story, though, del Toro creates such a sumptuous visual world that it’s impossible to take your eyes off the screen.

An engaging but safe journey towards a predetermined destination that engages the mind but not the heart. The movie doesn’t quite extract blood, sweat, or tears, even if it does toil.

This is the kind of movie you live in as much as watch. Some of its images—Hammer’s Oliver dancing with unselfconscious abandon, Chalamet’s face in extended close-up in the stunning final shot—stay with you afterward like memories of your own half-remembered romance.

The movie slips into a familiar rut and the scenery fades into the background.

I realize I am allowing this film to slide under a very low bar. As the better Marvel films have shown, you need a lot more than zippy repartee to make a superhero film feel heartfelt and thematically resonant. And this one, despite its Whedon-y patches, is mostly a senses-assaulting mess, an offense to good taste as well as basic narrative cohesion.

Branagh is more preoccupied with the challenges of keeping a movie set in a series of steel tubes visually interesting than he is in engaging its story.

Though Mildred makes many choices that are reprehensible or downright dangerous, McDormand never fails to convince us of the fundamental decency of this woman, a tragic heroine struggling to find even the tiniest scrap of meaning in a comically awful world.

The movie gets right so many of the little nuances about combat and Army life.

It’s not clear how autobiographical Lady Bird is — Gerwig is from Sacramento and graduated from high school around the time the film is set — but the little slice of universe she shows us feels deeply and lovingly observed.

Thor: Ragnarok is a much goofier film than its 2011 and 2013 predecessors, and also a better one.

Wonderstruck strikes a curious emotional tone, alternating between suspense and quiet wistfulness, with sudden surges of operatic intensity as the two timelines begin to connect. Still, all the moods hang together like the movements of a piece of classical music expressing different tempos: allegro, adagio, andante.

The whole movie starts to feel like a dare or elaborate game, the characters shuffling obediently about the board with no rules to guide them. Myths grow out of a need to understand the world, and to pass on an understanding of how to make our way through it, but Lanthimos just teaches you to be more cautious about his next film.

Because of its deliberate slow-building structure, BPM sneaks up on you, inundating with detail and method until it all piles up and topples you over. Yet even in despair, the movie is emotionally transformative.

It’s easy to make The Meyerowitz Stories sound tortured, and less so to convey the immense but not blinding affection with which Baumbach treats his characters.

The film’s structure at first seems loose and episodic, but each scene serves a purpose.

This new Blade Runner dazzles the audience with plenty of staggering sights but never quite matches the original’s mysterious ability to suggest something even more incredible lying just beyond our ken.

This movie’s strength lies in its gentleness just as its wisdom lies in its willingness to get extravagantly silly. Richard Linklater is one of the best directors going, and Last Flag Flying shows his talents in the full flower of their maturity.

Barry is the closest thing Tom Cruise has played to a regular Joe in more than a decade, and the part isn’t a snug fit.

Vaughn hasn’t only run out of things to say but people to hate, and without that underlying aggression, the movie feels like it’s just going through the motions. Better luck next time, bruv.

Battle of the Sexes breaks little new ground as either a sports film or a lesbian romance, but it’s lively, funny, and, if you’re unlucky enough to be a feminist in 2017, vicariously wish-fulfilling.

This is the kind of movie that often racks up more than a few walkouts but also makes for passionate postscreening conversations.

Nearly every scene builds to some kind of climactic jump scare.

Rumble: The Indians Who Rocked the World, directed by Catherine Bainbridge and Alfonso Maiorana, tackles a long, illustrious, and sorely undertold story, and as such offers some much-needed shading to a history that’s still too often framed in stark polarities of black and white.

Though Logan Lucky’s funny and committed cast (also including Dwight Yoakam, an underused Katherine Waterston, and a barely there Hilary Swank) provides a steady supply of good-sized laughs, this film struck me as underachieving on several fronts.

Having already admired Pattinson’s post-vampire work in David Cronenberg’s "Cosmopolis" and elsewhere, I wasn’t surprised to see him kill it in this role as a shambling antihero in the "Dog Day Afternoon" mode. With this movie, both Pattinson and the Safdie brothers have broken new ground in their careers.

Though not a direct adaptation of "The Talented Mr. Ripley," the movie plays like a 2017 version of the psychological thriller, and not since "Clueless" took on Emma has a film so cleverly updated a pre-existing plot for the mores of the present day.

The particular kind of “fun” to be found in a slick and shallow spy fantasy like Atomic Blonde feels peculiarly arid in a moment as desperate for substance and meaning as our own.

A uniformly excellent cast and some genuinely moving moments make Landline easy to fall for.

Valerian and the City of a Thousand Planets is a luxurious, appealingly daffy spectacle, a true vision unchecked by the standards of good taste, and that in and of itself is a quality worth savoring. But its design is pixel-deep, without the underlying thought that makes great science fiction worth revisiting.

Girls Trip more than delivers what its audience is looking for.

The swift-moving, pulse-pounding Dunkirk reveals its filmmaker at his most nimble, supple, and simple.

War for the Planet of the Apes is a formidable achievement: not just the rare last chapter in a trilogy that maintains the high quality of the first two, but a visually lush, heart-pounding summer action movie that dares to ask hard questions about the struggle between good and evil—both on the larger social scale and within each individual—and the fate of life on Earth.

In its brief sojourn on the screen, A Ghost Story moves through centuries of geologic time and into the deepest recesses of the human heart.

At its headiest, it’s like Singin’ in the Rain with a souped-up engine, but even if Baby is the Gene Kelly of the getaway car, watching Baby Driver always feels like watching someone else do the driving rather than being behind the wheel yourself.

This wouldn’t work if not for Holland, whose Peter Parker is the kind of self-conscious, quietly exceptional outer-borough teen without whom the entire concept of Spider-Man would sputter.

If you see Okja, and I hope you do, stay for the final credits. It’s not often that a stinger scene pops up at the end of a movie, not to pre-sell the inevitable sequel, but to leave you with something to think, wonder, and worry about.

From an aesthetic and technical perspective, her achievement is laudable, but there’s something underfurnished about this movie, a lack of historical, intellectual, and thematic richness. For all its elaborate design and carefully calibrated mood, it comes down to the tale of a randy fox in an impeccably preserved Greek Revival henhouse.

This movie keeps a lot of balls in the air: generational and cultural conflict, hospital drama, screwball banter — and only rarely lets one drop.

Cars 3 is still lower-tier Pixar.

Though its themes are so dark they seem to call for the invention of a new color, It Comes at Night does offer a few glimpses of levity and affection amid the unremitting bleakness.

Cruise seems weariest of all, flogging outdated merchandise he can’t even pretend to believe in. It’s not Cruise that feels ancient; it’s The Mummy.

This is a movie about battling evil that pauses to ask what evil is and whether it’s necessary to understand its nature in order to defeat it.

War Machine is unexpectedly flat and disjointed, and it’s hard to know whether to blame this on Michôd (an Australian director best known for his excellent 2010 crime melodrama, Animal Kingdom) or the general bad vibes around the project.

Baywatch is surprisingly without sexism or condescension: It’s equal-opportunity stupid.

I found Dead Men Tell No Tales to be passably fun and certainly no harder to watch than any of the better-pedigreed blockbusters this year.

King Arthur wants desperately to please, and it mostly succeeds.

The relationship between these two Fassbenders is at the heart of Alien: Covenant, and it’s one of the few things that really entertain on a level beyond the technical.

Surprisingly, though, while you’re waiting for Snatched to appall you, it turns out to be a pretty darn enjoyable movie, one that’s winning, sweet at times, and consistently very funny.

Its unthwartable tempo of quips, gags, cameos (Sly Stallone!), and loud noises rarely feels grating if only because of how loving it feels toward its characters and soundtrack, and how respectful it is toward the limits of its audience’s appetite for superheroic universe-building.

This isn’t the churning of ambiguities; it’s a muddle, a mess.

Ponsoldt—who also directed The Spectacular Now and The End of the Tour—has a great feel for intimate conversation, but he’s all thumbs when it comes to The Circle’s attempt at stylized allegory.

The film’s scruffy, smartass band of brothers, along with Gunn’s light directorial touch, make for an invigorating breather after too many summer weekends of hammer-wielding superheroic solemnity.

Justin Lin, who's now directed three movies in the Fast series, knows how to choreograph and edit an action sequence so that it's more than an onslaught of chopped-up images and grating noise.

With The Fate of the Furious, it feels like the movies have gotten as big as they can get, and the gleeful absurdity that drove them is losing ground to the specter of obligation.

Given Fawcett’s trailblazing achievements — and Gray’s choice to film in difficult circumstances deep in the Colombian jungle — the film is oddly restrained.

The 39-year-old Spanish director has made a bait-and-switch movie that won’t stop switching, a high-wire act he pulls off through sheer creative onslaught.

Even at his most indulgent, Malick brings something to the movies that no one else ever has, a way of looking at the world that is easily imitated but has never been equaled. It’s worth sifting through the sometimes half-baked philosophizing and breathy poeticism to see through his eyes.

A delicious plot twist is ginned up to serve as the film’s clever climax, but I was more interested in the relationship drama. For those of us who have survived our own rollercoaster friendships, T2’s trip is far more intense than Trainspotting’s youthful highs.

The most delicious part of Raw is its rich metaphorical life. Rather than playing like a gross-out sideshow, the movie has viscera-streaked things to say about the terrors of young womanhood, sisterly initiation, French racism, the gruesome traditions of veterinary science, and the uneasy bond between women and gay men.

Where Hiddleston seems perfectly at home in the digital trenches, gamely swinging at fiendish foes to be added in postproduction, Larson looks like she’s staring into thin air. That leaves us with the monsters, who are, to be fair, mightily impressive.

While much of the original script remains the same, screenwriters Steven Chbosky and Evan Spiliotopoulos, as well as long-time Disney composer Alan Menken (who also wrote for the original, along with the late Howard Ashman), sprinkle in just enough new material and character development to help it feel fresh.

It is not a superhero flick as we have come to know the genre but a road movie and a Western, one that plays with the myth of the aging cowboy.

This is the essence of Get Out, which only grows more darkly relevant as the main story gets going, masterfully unfurling all of the real-life anxieties of Existing While Black while simultaneously mining that situation for all its twisted absurdity.

Fifty Shades Darker is very faithful to its predecessor’s vision. That is to say, it is another terrible movie with just the slightest whiff of self-awareness about how terrible it is.

The greatest disappointment is how much of the script seems to have been assembled from a kit by someone afraid to deviate from the instructions. In a sequel to "The Lego Movie," that’s not just a letdown, it’s a betrayal.

Most of all, Kolstad and Stahelski get a lot of mileage from the intricate details of the secret society of assassins Wick belongs to.

The two storylines interweave seamlessly and subtly, the couple's real-life problems not so much repeating as refracting the experiences of their fictional counterparts.

Like Ghibli’s classic films, especially Hayao Miyazaki’s, it lavishes as much attention on the natural world as the creatures who inhabit it. But though it has the shape of a fairy tale, The Red Turtle’s perspective is distinctly adult, and its vision of nature is harsher than Miyazaki’s.

Wahlberg may have succeeded in singlehandedly cracking the case and bringing the perpetrators to justice but — like the film itself—he fails to find meaning in the wreckage.