While it’s a decent table-setter and a welcome return to a magical world that many of us love dearly, it’s no Force Awakens, bogged down as it is by exposition, dull characters, and sludgy pacing.

Watching it, I was excited that such a strange piece of science fiction got made—and disappointed to realize that it is strange in just about all the ways that Interstellar is. But while even Nolan’s detractors couldn’t deny his skill at manufacturing awe, the primary emotion that Arrival evokes is puzzlement.

One thing that Loving gets right in a way that few civil rights dramas do: It insists on racial discrimination as a systemic problem, not merely an interpersonal one.

Ultimately, though, it’s Doctor Strange’s return to its protagonist’s long lost psychotherapeutic roots that works best.

It just looks and feels too different from every other movie we’ve seen in the multiplex.

Both actresses deliver vivid, tender performances; they generate all the movie’s fire, but they’re obliged to do it inside a chilly, ritualized framework, the aesthetic equivalent of a softcore mausoleum.

Moonlight is one of those movies that showers its audience with blessings: raw yet accomplished performances from a uniformly fine cast, casually lyrical camerawork, and a frankly romantic soundtrack that runs the gamut from ’70s Jamaican pop to a Mexican folk song crooned by the Brazilian Caetano Veloso. But the film’s greatest gift may be that flood of cleansing tears—which, by the time this spare but affecting film was over, I was also shedding in copious volume.

Sometimes the film’s frenetic pace works, as in a brutally efficient half-second fight in an airplane bathroom. But more often, it feels like cinematographer Oliver Wood and editor Billy Weber are feuding.

Her (Reichardt's) juxtaposition of imponderably vast landscapes and regular-scale individual lives is what gives Certain Women its mood at once of delicate restraint and of moral gravity.

It’s offbeat and refreshing nonetheless.

The movie isn’t perfect. I’m not even sure if it’s good. For one thing, it can feel reductively boilerplate in its treatment of it-girl Megan.

The performances, whether from novices like the sensational Lane or professionals like LaBeouf, Keough, and Patton, are at once naturalistic and emotionally precise.

I left the film moved to tears, and still feeling like something huge was missing.

At 93 minutes, Chronic felt unbearable to sit through, at once intimate and difficult, boring and acute. Its tone aspires to the numbness of a limb pinned for too long under a heavy weight.

Magnificent Seven has one and only true goal: It’s a new Hollywood crack at good, old-timey entertainment.

Still, the movie’s mores can feel cluelessly retro as the ever-dithering Bridget lurches between one man and another.

Sully can feel like a dutiful, hagiographic slog, even though its actual running time barely tops 90 minutes and both Hanks and Eckhart give warm, understated, funny performances in the only two roles developed enough to qualify as real characters.

Cianfrance’s gift for allowing his actors to create relationships — with one another, with the camera, and with the stark landscape that surrounds them — makes The Light Between Oceans an unusually captivating romantic drama, at least until that last-act slide into self-sabotaging bathos.

Sumpter nails the first lady’s air of warm but reserved composure and the slow, careful way she enunciates her words, as if putting an extra measure of thought into choosing each phrase.

I wish there were more films every year like Morris From America, the kind that surprise you by revealing a hidden side of something—an actor, a genre, a situation—you thought you had figured out.

Pete's Dragon is a gentle, understated family adventure, one that feels notably unlike the simplistically sentimental product the Disney imprimatur might lead you to expect.

Streep, who has long enjoyed playing women endowed with more than the average supply of gusto, makes the character’s delusional faith in her own talent so infectious that we ache at the thought of Florence’s impending humiliation even as we prepare ourselves to laugh at it.

Suicide Squad’s only triumph may be that it manages to make Batman v Superman look better by comparison. Bloated and baffling as that film was, it at least had a coherent aesthetic—a morose aesthetic, to be sure, but an aesthetic all the same. Suicide Squad, by contrast, is little more than a drab patchwork, its stitching the only thing uglier than the cloth.

The dad minds behind Bad Moms don’t seem to understand, or be terribly curious about, the minds of mothers.

Star Trek Beyond may not go where no Trek has gone before, but it’s that very fidelity to the show’s original values that will keep fans trekking to the box office.

The real reason to see it — as was the case with the original, and with the past two Feig/McCarthy collaborations, "Bridesmaids" and "Spy" —has to do with the universally excellent cast who establish an easy tone of camaraderie and loopy banter.

In short, The BFG seems perfectly self-sufficient in its bookness, in no need of the lavishly cinematic bear hug Steven Spielberg bestows upon it here.

The disaster sequences themselves — of which there are many, placed at regular intervals but disconnected from the story, like operatic arias — have a dreamlike and weirdly exhilarating quality that’s quite different from the plodding wham-bam destruction of the average action blockbuster.