Despite all this, Independence Day: Resurgence still emerges as one of the better blockbusters of this summer, and that’s only halfway damning with faint praise. It’s a mess, but I grinned a good portion of the way through.

Free State of Jones has a story worth telling, it just doesn’t know how to effectively do so.

After a summer glutted with films pushing punishing, redundant set pieces on grand scales, we finally have a film that is patient, atmospheric, and that delights in delivering escalating thrills of a smaller but more valuable variety.

Unfortunately Nerdland doesn’t offer many surprises.

It’s a film that’s feels nearly otherworldly in its isolation.

Blending elements from body-horror, slashers, and folklore, Clown has a mean bite and cruelly sharp wit that almost balances some of the less inspired decisions from a first-time director.

Will it change my consideration of European-Islamic relations? No. Have I thought about its moral quandaries in the days since seeing this film? More than most others, at least. Does Les Cowboys create an itch to again see The Searchers? Absolutely — and that alone is a fairly strong end result.

Inventiveness, creativity, and complete disregard for mainstream sensibilities are what make the director so captivating.

It is, quite frankly, a bit dull as it plays out in a near constant melodramatic key.

Narrative risks aside, Outlaws and Angels takes the easy way out instead of allowing these moments the breathing room they need.

Had the story been more focused rather than trying to encompass all four sisters as protagonists as well as integrate a number of redundant secondary characters, it likely could have yielded more satisfying results.

Life, Animated, like Owen, is optimistic and should provide a measure of comfort for the many families affected by a complex disorder – such stories are essential to share.

A filmmaker who values the power of shock, but not necessarily thrills for thrills’ sake, Żuławski elucidates material with tools that announce themselves in their presentation — surprising camera dollies, fast pans, sudden cuts, overly prominent music cues — and raise complex questions about their relation to one another.

The grand takeaway from Puerto Ricans in Paris, which delivers what you’d expect and not much else, is that someone ought to finally give Luis Guzmán the leading role of a lifetime. The film, however, is tolerable on cable or free TV.

While it fails to deliver convincing action and its comedy feels watered down, Central Intelligence does get the “buddy” aspect correct. Doing their best with a script (also by Ike Barinholtz and David Stasser) that feels all-too-safe, Johnson and Hart manage to prove that a movie can glide by just enough on sheer charisma alone.

A stylish exercise in dread, teasing out its slow-drip horrors with precision, and building a deliriously evil presence that hovers along the fringes.

Jacquot’s Diary of a Chambermaid ultimately feels beholden to art-house dictates, especially with an ending that’s less confounding than poorly articulated.

In a Valley of Violence feigns to be a revisionist western, but it’s frustratingly stuck in a place of inevitability in the last half. It’s an excellently-made imitation, but coming from a director whose made a career of tilting the familiar, it’s a disappointing detour.

In terms of emotional complexity and character evolution, Finding Dory treads the same water as its predecessor with less success. It’s a fine technological update and not a particularly inspired storytelling upgrade.

Unhurried, mood-driven, pregnant with a transcendent reflection on life and death, The Assassin is a singular vision realized with absolute mastery of style and a lightness of touch that’s to die for.

Considering it tells such a singular and important story, one only wishes The Danish Girl could have been made with a lot more edge and not the usual Academy-friendly faux-progressiveness.

Realized with extraordinary craft and verve even if insufficiently contextualized, A Bigger Splash might not have achieved the desired impact, but the wicked spell it casts remains a bona-fide stunner.

Plotted with limited imagination and directed with atypical flatness, Mr. Six features a strong central performance and shares its humanistic concern with Hu Guan’s previous work but is nevertheless an artistic underachiever.

Cunningly ambivalent and stickily atmospheric, Neon Bull is an impressive exercise in style that further broadens the possibility of queer filmmaking. One only wishes it could have embedded such daring and verve in a more fully realized context.

Now You See Me 2 is a vapid, heartless film that wastes the time of its cast and audience alike.

While The Conjuring 2 smoothly goes through the motions of setup, building anticipation, and payoff in myriad ways, the slickness of the production interferes with any proper sense of dread.

With its vibrant colors muted for a NYC noir aesthetic and every 2D field shaded by roughly textured shadows in constant motion, the frames literally flicker off the screen to leave a lasting impression.

Sometimes thrillers of the “youthful stalker hits the sexual jackpot” variety can at least be entertaining in an ironic way, but that’s unfortunately not the case here.