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.

Despite its technical and visual grandeur, there’s a moral simplicity to Silence that can sometimes recall the work of perhaps the other greatest deeply Catholic filmmaker, the French master Robert Bresson.

I suppose you could say the film made me slightly more likely to play one of the games, but only because I’d do just about anything before I saw this movie again.

Fences functions as a faithful—sometimes doggedly faithful—record of a remarkable ensemble performance of one of the great works of American drama. Granted, it’s never exactly a great movie, but given the chance to see actors of this caliber tear into material this rich, you would be foolish to pass up the chance.

When the system is rigged, trying to do the right thing wears a man down.

For audiences expecting a two-hour charm offensive, Passengers is not the movie you think you’re going to see. It’s something considerably darker and dumber.

By breaking some of the rules, Rogue One has made itself the first movie since The Empire Strikes Back to redefine the boundaries of what a Star Wars movie can be. The Force Awakens may have reanimated the once-dormant franchise, but it’s Rogue One that will give Star Wars fans a new hope.

For all its borrowing and bricolage, La La Land never feels like a backward-looking or unoriginal work. Even when not every one of its risks pays off the way that first song does, this movie is bold, vital, funny, and alive.

Through two viewings of Jackie, I was never able to pin down whether it was Portman’s performance or Larraín’s way of framing it that left me emotionally shut out.

Lion goes again and again where you expect it to, delivering little more than the awards-season equivalent of "Homeward Bound."

Each character in this movie — down to the smallest cameo by Lonergan himself — is an individual rather than a type, prone to spontaneous changes of mood and sometimes amusing outbursts of pettiness or ill humor.

Each stop is ever so slightly better than you remembered. Not another teen movie, indeed.