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.