Daguerrotype is frustratingly easy to rationalize. It’s also about an hour too long; by the time it reaches the end credits, even the spell cast by his eerie direction and handsome widescreen compositions has worn off.

So many movies are all sizzle and no steak; it’s kind of refreshing, in a way, to be frustrated by all steak and no sizzle.

Thor: Ragnarok, with its jabs of reportedly improvised banter, isn’t really an action movie. It’s a round-robin buddy comedy, mismatching Hemsworth’s amiable lug to characters old and new.

Jigsaw isn’t a series low point. It’s less aggressively unpleasant than some of the others.

This is a movie with a lot on its mind, from art to altruism to the so-called bystander effect, and it could function as a Rorschach test for its audience, reflecting viewers’ anxieties and insecurities right back at them. It’s also just really, really funny, at least for those who can find humor in humiliation.

For fans of the original who don’t mind the loss of scares, Creep 2 improves on the first film in nearly every way, from tone to dialogue to plot.

Betts appears to have started out with a rather mundane idea and then stumbled, over the course of her research, onto something much more fruitful. The result is as intriguing and frustrating as that suggests.

The script is just as lazy as the acting, leaning on a fitfully applied, Scream-esque meta subplot to justify why the hell we’re all here in the first place.

The film’s tonal range is formidable enough to suggest that this director may be a major talent who’s now emerging from relative obscurity, thanks to the Berlin prize and subsequent attention at festivals in Toronto and New York. It’s always exciting to discover someone who’s eager to toss the manuals aside.

Beyond its best little moments, the movie is addressing a serious issue, and it feels awfully churlish to complain that its earnest depictions of soldiers in psychological pain isn’t novel enough, or that Koale’s performance is a little shakier than Teller’s, or that the movie doesn’t have much to say about the Iraq War in particular, or that it eventually tries to pass off a lack of resolution as an abbreviated happy ending. But these stumbling blocks do stack up, standing in the way of Hall’s best intentions.

Lively has become an expert at creating the impression that at some point, the movie behind her will come together. All I See Is You comes closer than "Adaline," but its adult intentions don’t go far enough.

To turn Leatherface into a tragic figure, twisted by traumatic upbringing into a monster, is to forget that he’s scariest as a force of nature, which tend to be tough to diagnose. Remember, no one cares what the shark from Jaws was like as a tortured guppy.

A sequel so wholly anodyne that it doesn’t even deserve its exclamation point.

Butler sleepwalks through his thinly written role, and the ostensible tension between the two brothers, flaring up whenever the energy starts to sag, never feels like anything but a bald contrivance.

It’s a gripping portrait of boots-on-the-ground activism, at least so long as it keeps the focus squarely trained on the actual activism.

The film does little to explain the history behind the dynamic between their men and women, which is based, it seems, at least partly on a blinding fear of lust.

The Killing Of A Sacred Deer doesn’t have as sharp an allegorical edge as his best work — it’s no Dogtooth in that respect — but it does find the director honing his command of unnerving atmosphere to a razor point, enhanced by a camera that glides menacingly down hospital corridors and gazes from above with the severity of a merciless god.

The film, a slow-motion car crash of a cinematic mishap featuring terrible performances from normally good actors and a bafflingly half-baked script, delivers tenfold on the poster’s promise.

Jane boasts one thing that its predecessors did not: a treasure trove of truly stunning 16mm footage shot in the early 1960s by famed nature photographer Hugo Van Lawick (who would become Goodall’s first husband).

So squarely old-fashioned that it’s a little jarring to notice that many of the characters have smartphones.

For all of the time-warp elegance, it’s hard to shake the feeling that Haynes has authored more of an exercise than a movie: a lovingly assembled flashback pastiche whose emotional core remains oddly theoretical.

The fundamental intensity of Ghinsberg’s story is hard to totally squander. When it doesn’t give in to the desire to be a more traditional crowd-pleaser, Jungle provides a graphic and unvarnished account of a genuinely incredible story.

This breezy approach has its limits; Marshall isn’t so different from a well-made TV movie. But it plays well on the big screen anyway, and there’s some relevance in the way it depicts competing forms of bigotry—racism alongside anti-Semitism and expectations about female sexuality.

The Foreigner is a good, lean cut of meat—in other words, a typical Martin Campbell movie, expeditious and cold-blooded in its cross-cut, cloak-and-dagger plotting and violence.

78/52 is at its best in cinema studies mode, examining specific compositional and editing choices made by Hitchcock and his collaborators.

It’s a reasonably clever spin, but not much more than that; once the novelty of the genre swap wears off, you’re just watching another inferior variation.

Director Simon Curtis, the purveyor of such middlebrow fluff as Woman In Gold and My Week With Marilyn, lays the sentimental hues and sunbeams on thick, hoping that someone will give a sh-t.

The Meyerowitz Stories (New And Selected), is a fresh addition to Noah Baumbach’s ever-expanding gallery of neurotic, narcissistic New Yorkers.

Ai’s approach occasionally tips too far toward aestheticizing a dire situation.

The story is absolutely fascinating, even if the filmmaking isn’t.

Una demonstrates that when it comes to the staginess of stage adaptations, the cure can be worse than the disease.

Breathe seems to want nothing more than to be "The Theory Of Everything" for a slightly newer generation.

There’s great integrity to showing life as it is really is, warts and all. But sometimes showing it as it should be has value, too.

My Little Pony: The Movie tries to get meta on the sickly sweetness of its subject matter.

Still, even if The Death And Life Of Marsha P. Johnson doesn’t wholly deliver on its premise, France does a remarkable job of finding the continuity between New York in the ’70s, ’90s, and now.

Equally remarkable and counterintuitive is Vaughn’s performance. He pulls a Bruce Willis here, shaving his head and substituting intimidating stillness for his trademark motormouthed hyperactivity. The transformation suits him surprisingly well.

Remove the nonsensical characterizations and The Mountain Between Us becomes a cornball paean to rock formations and (mostly male) beauty.

The film will continue to defy your expectations.

The plot’s mechanics in tying the families together are often clumsy and contorted, in ways that are strange without being particularly interesting.

This hefty, gleaming franchise object owes much of its resonance to the relationship its audience might have to a three-decade-old classic. CGI ghosts, audio samples, and callbacks (“more human than human,” equestrian keepsakes, a boiling pot as a suspense device) haunt the film’s vast, cavernous hallways.

Flatliners 2017 is the same dumb movie as Flatliners 1990, minus most of the surface charisma.

American Made has such style and energy that its hasty patchwork of a narrative becomes a kind of charm unto itself, even when it means losing track of talented actors.

Did the super dark times need to arrive at all? If the scenes of shit-kicking naturalism feel authentic, the thriller that replaces them — a kind of junior "A Simple Plan" — relies too heavily on unconvincing psychology.

Unfortunately, Felt’s actions, while historically important, don’t exactly make for riveting drama, especially compared to a classic about two dogged reporters. Nor does the film succeed in making Felt himself particularly interesting, except perhaps as a proxy—purely by coincidence, one assumes, given any movie’s lengthy gestation period—for another, recently terminated FBI honcho.

It’s a remarkable gift to fans and cinephiles that Lucky serves as a first-rate showcase for its star as well as an ideal swan song. The man couldn’t have gone out any better.

Perhaps because he’s had a couple of decades to think about it, Flanagan’s vision for the film is assured, full of intimate closeups that allow Gugino’s multi-layered performance to shine.

There’s nothing remotely clever about this web-based fright flick, visually or conceptually. It’s flimsy genre junk of the most generic variety, just with a really groan-worthy Facebook spin.

Viewers who thought nothing much happened in "It Comes At Night" are advised to steer clear.

Dumber and less stylish than its predecessor, Kingsman: The Secret Service, the cartoonish secret-agent pastiche Kingsman: The Golden Circle is also even more of an incoherent right-wing text, an exaggeration of the James Bond movies’ violence, fashion sense, and sex that keeps trying to pass off its ham-fisted conservative attitudes as smirking nihilism.

The Lego Ninjago movie isn’t any worse than any number of professionally made but unexciting cartoons aimed at kids, and sometimes a gag will pop through with the same high-energy surprise that powered so much of The Lego Movie.

To his credit, director Peter Nicks (The Waiting Room) accepts the dispiriting trajectory that this initially hopeful film ultimately takes—there’s no dissembling here. Trouble is, most of the ugly stuff happens off-camera, necessitating a secondhand second half that amounts to an embarrassed “Oops.”

Five Foot Two does a nice job getting way behind the scenes of a non-stop, sometimes grotesquely glamorous life.

Burdge holds the picture together, playing a character who walks a fine line between being sympathetically damaged and terrifyingly loony.

It’s just another piece of well-decorated regal real estate.

Trier’s first foray into the fantastic—his college Carrie—gets stuck in an odd middle ground: It’s at once too metaphorically muddled and too dramatically straightforward.

It’s nice to report that Green, Gyllenhaal, and Orphan Black’s Tatiana Maslany hit some grace notes—and plant the germ of some interesting ideas—en route to the expected lifting of spirits.

There aren’t thrilling dramatic insights to be found here, but Wright’s showboating is unflaggingly watchable.

Franco has a fan’s affection for Wiseau’s mannerisms, but if his objective was to lionize him as an outsider auteur à la Ed Wood, then he’s failed. The idea that The Room’s strange and bitter qualities are very personal and rooted in some deep pain is obvious to anyone who’s seen the film—except, it seems, to the star and director of this movie.

With Brad’s Status, Mike White (best known for writing School Of Rock and creating Enlightened) has chosen an alternate route: Make the movie you want to, but sheepishly apologize for its existence — not via interviews or post-screening Q&As, but within the context of the film itself.

The most remarkable thing about First They Killed My Father is how quiet it is.

It’s paper-thin, predictable, and goofy as hell, but if you can get past the whole “pro-military propaganda” thing, it’s pretty fun in the moment.

The Current War employs actors capable of their own eccentric stylizations, and gives them very little leeway to make the material their own. Gomez-Rejon keeps snatching it back with every offbeat composition idea he can muster.

The actual animating force of this lushly told bedtime story is Del Toro’s swooning cinephilia, splashed across every available screen-within-the-screen, and expressed through black-and-white musical fantasy sequences, lavish throwback period detail, and the accordion whine of Alexandre Desplat’s wistful cornball score.

The effect is stark, expressionistic, and powerful. It creates the sense that what’s being said is important.

It’s almost unbelievable that something this narratively arty is being released as a mainstream horror movie, but the filmmaking ranks as some of Aronofsky’s most skillful.

Though told in broad strokes, its version of the story deserves credit for never buying into the hype and surreal pageantry of the Astrodome showdown. But its lack of interest in tennis as a sport leaves the narrative—plastered with hot-button issues and character crises—with an empty center.

By displacing some familiar gang-movie dynamics into an environment less often glimpsed on film, Abbasi stays true to the offbeat heart of his influences. The strength of his work here indicates an even more distinct voice might yet emerge.

Landing closer to Coens country, Three Billboards is more of a slow-roasting tragicomedy about grief and culpability, with higher stakes, a lower gag count, and emphasis on the tragic. But McDonagh still lives for detours and digressions, for the opportunity to stall the plot and humorously slow play a conversation.

Maybe a little longer and more scattered than it needs to be, with one too many scenes that just plant the camera in front of a gabbing speaker. His early movies were more urgent, in part because they kept their focus narrower

Lady Bird is something truly special: a coming-of-age comedy so funny, perceptive, and truthful that it makes most other films about adolescence look like little more than lessons in cliché.

The results play like some Robert Zemeckis splicing experiment gone wrong, as though Clooney had somehow digitally inserted an earnest social-issues drama into a zany mishap noir.

It’s the film equivalent of a guy loudly demanding the attention of everyone in a subway car, then refusing to even issue a compellingly strange rant.

Alexander Payne’s science-fiction comedy Downsizing is less a fully formed satire than a clever idea stuck in first draft and stretched uncomfortably to feature length.

The younger Meyers has a lot to learn about creating believable character motivations and relationships to anchor the aspirational fantasy.

It’s also slightly unfortunate — though admittedly no fault of director Shaul Schwarz (assisted by Christina Clusiau) — that Trophy covers a lot of the same ground as did recent Netflix documentary "The Ivory Game."

The Unknown Girl isn’t just their first bona fide thriller. It’s also the first Dardenne film in more than 20 years that could reasonably be described as less than exceptional, even a little clumsy.

Boris Without Béatrice never feels like the work of an artist who actually believes in everything he’s doing.

Heading a troupe of excellent actors bringing their A games to this decidedly B-movie material, Dinklage and his fellow performers are a pleasure to watch selling the hell out of this sci-fi-tinged whodunit.

Maybe it won’t exist in Ireland much longer either, so it’s a good thing that School Life manages to capture its weird, wonderful world.

While Pennywise is legitimately terrifying, overall, It is more intense than it is chilling.

Most great-author biopics are just faintly dull and unnecessary. Rebel In The Rye, true to its ridiculous title, is proudly, even aggressively hackneyed.

Although Spettacolo is thoughtful and charming throughout, it’s mildly disappointing that the film doesn’t further engage with the self-reflexivity of the annual event itself.

The filmmakers might claim the sexy superficiality as their whole point; if so, it’s a thin one. Chadwick and Stoppard seem to be making a movie about the impulsivity of desire, but they never dig into those feelings beyond depicting them.

The outline of a snappy relationship comedy is here, and Bell is talented enough to make one. Maybe next time she’ll commit to it.

Unlocked starts off sturdily and then wobbles more and more as the plot twists multiply.

A film that’s a lot like the last one, just not quite as funny or endearing. If you loved Goon, you’re gonna kind of like Goon: Last Of The Enforcers.

The aura of cheap-o emptiness is overwhelming: Scenes tend to be visually featureless, composed against strangely empty walls or Vancouver street corners. Even the occasionally decent fight choreography looks unappealing.

The result is perversely watchable, which puts it a cut above the average inane wannabe franchise-starter. With no likable characters or internal suspense to keep it in check, Wingard’s direction sputters out into a cloud of slickness and pastiche.

The Villainess delivers all the overstuffed thrills we’ve come to expect from Korean action cinema. But it also strains under the weight of those expectations.

Rather than inspiring some kind of connection between disparate eras, Leap! uses pop music as a quick fix for kids who might be bored by ballet or orphans.

Hittman (It Felt Like Love) turns out to be a conventional storyteller; despite her evocative styling and Dickinson’s surprisingly assured lead performance, her sophomore feature remains confined in monotonous, psychologically shallow coming-of-age-drama indiedom.

Bushwick imagines nothing less than the collapse of the United States Of America, with half the country in armed revolt. At a time when that possibility can feel all too frighteningly real, it’s dispiriting to see it employed as little more than an excuse to engineer a live-action Grand Theft Auto.