It doesn’t matter that the plot is predictable, because it’s merely a means for getting from one precise (and hilarious) musical parody to the next.

Though Hiddleston’s performance is evocative and compelling, he rarely betrays any emotion beyond a kind of stoned curiosity.

The conflict between Iron Man and Captain America drives a wedge through this community of heroes. And they fight, in one of the most joyous cinematic superhero battles ever filmed, the closest thing we’ve seen to an on-screen splash page.

Green Room proves to be an exquisitely crafted love letter to John Carpenter, and the rare horror ensemble that gives as much care to the villains as to the victims.

Born to Be Blue, a less ballyhooed film starring Ethan Hawke as Chet Baker, isn’t as awful as "Miles Ahead" but it’s not as interesting either — mainly because Baker’s story is kind of boring.

The remarkable feat of churning out a whole new set of clichés and setting a new level of degradation. That’s Miles Ahead, Don Cheadle’s biopic about Miles Davis.

Like Clueless or Breakfast at Tiffany’s, it’s a great American comedy, and like Boyhood and Dazed and Confused, another easygoing masterpiece from our reigning auteur of hidden depths.

Here is a movie that encourages you to give it the benefit of the doubt at every possible turn but has no interest in offering anything in return. If you liked the original, you’ll like this one less. If you loathed the original, may God be with you. Opa!

To put it delicately, this comics fan hated Batman v Superman with the fury of a thousand red-dwarf suns. Blunt, humorless, and baffling, it collides the brutish directorial stamp of its director (he of 300 and Watchmen fame) with the most shameless instincts of our latter-day superhero franchise bubble.

Midnight Special eventually sputters to a conclusion that confuses vagueness for ambiguity. The most compelling questions it leaves behind don’t have to do with its plot but with its creator: How much time should a young director have to make good on his potential?

Captivatingly confident, unsparingly wry, and agreeably cynical about how the black mirror of technology can reveal our worst qualities by reflecting our best selves, Creative Control is the rare blast of speculative fiction that has the temerity not to limit itself to rhetorical questions.

Malick has moved from self-discovery to self-affirmation; he knows exactly what he’s looking for, and Knight of Cups, for all its splendor, made me wish that he could take a swig and forget.

The heat [Chow] conjures between his leads never rises above a low boil. That’s because Chow never bothers to pretend as if the romance really matters —it’s merely an excuse for a parade of blisteringly clever comic set pieces.

Robert Eggers' uncompromising directorial debut is a bracingly new experience that boils with the primordial fever of America's original sins.

There are any number of reasons why the vast majority of comedy sequels are borderline unwatchable, but there’s ultimately only one thing that the worst of them all share in common: They give the audience what they think they want, not what they don’t yet know they want.

If the Coen brothers’ dramas are cautionary tales, their comedies are veritable how-to guides for people who can’t help but enjoy a mirthless chuckle at the humility of human existence. Yeah, the joke is on us, but that doesn’t mean it isn’t funny.

The plot is too erratic and incoherent to follow, but the constant barrage of noises and colors is more than enough to keep kids entertained.

The Hateful Eight is bold, gorgeous, verbally clever, morally repellent, and, in some way I am still struggling to put my finger on, possibly somehow evil. Any movie that inspires mixed feelings that intense can, I suppose, be said to have done its work on the viewer. But I’m not sure the work The Hateful Eight performed on me was what the filmmaker intended or that it’s an operation I would consent to again.

The action is never topsy-turvy enough for 13 Hours to be mistaken for a Paul Greengrass film, but it’s also not so operatic that it feels like Bay is turning a tragedy into Bad Boys III.

The only question worth asking about an early January horror movie is if its inevitable badness is at all interesting.

Whatever combination of practical effects and digital wizardry went into the technique that gave rise to Anomalisa’s otherworldly yet very human narrative universe, I hope it will be used to tell more stories, perhaps by this same storyteller.

45 Years is about the relationship of the present to the past and of our past loves to our present lives—a relationship that, like any good marriage, remains a total mystery.

Joy the movie never cohered, for me, into a story with forward motion. The minute the film begins to find its footing in one tonal register, it switches to another.

Like their Star Wars forebears, Boyega’s Finn and Ridley’s Rey are brave, funny, and admirable but also imperfect, uncertain, and sometimes afraid. That is to say, they’re genuine, multisided characters with believable motivations—no small victory in a movie designed with the express purpose of breaking world box-office records.

It plays the whole absurd shell game for laughs, even as it acknowledges that the last and bitterest laugh is on the rest of us.

Lee has managed to again make a movie worth debating, wrestling with, and maybe even hating, depending upon how you feel about him as a director.

In the early days of Einar's transformation, Redmayne conveys the degree to which gender is, for all of us, a skill acquired through observation and imitation.

The silliness is more than made up for with moments of stillness and quiet connection between characters learning to need each other in lovely ways. And most of all, there’s the glorious landscape.