Riotous, if undeniably stagey.

While Kateb is a fine presence, Colmar (a co-writer of the far superior Of Gods and Men) directs with none of his protagonist’s thrilling pizazz, and his and Salatko’s script plods without any of jazz’s syncopated rhythms

You get the sense that Moverman may just have bitten off a little more than he can chew.

Timely issues of transgender rights both in Latin and North America help make A Fantastic Woman a bolder, brasher film, fiery in comparison with Gloria’s relatively tenderness, but anchored once more by a stellar central performance

It’s a generational drama anchored by three great performances, but it feels rather distinctly average — and it’s hard to make Isabelle Huppert look average.

As a consolidated character piece threaded with a popcorn-munching action picture, The Wolverine is solid.

On the Beach at Night Alone, a bittersweet tone poem from South Korean writer-director Hong Sang-soo, thinks many a thought about the universe and the future, mostly expressed through nature and the characters’ anxieties about growing old.

A rather brilliant mesh of dystopian and superhero tropes that proves to be as entertaining as it is timely.

Hope is as contemporary and vital a film as you’re likely to find in 2017, but it’s also one of the funniest and most classically (not to mention beautifully) cinematic too.

The Hollywood-infused epic fantasy plays like Warcraft meets The Last Samurai by way of Zack Snyder — but shockingly better than all that sounds.

Rush is a joy to watch, no doubt, but the unavoidable sense remains that Tucci is stretching his material a little thin, restricting the narrative to the two-weeks-plus Lord spent in Paris with nothing on either end to really fill us in.

With a remarkable fullness of understanding, it tells a deeply personal story while revealing essential human truths, all without ever feeling constructed or false.

XX plays with and pushes back against certain tropes at its very best, yet never truly breaks much new ground.

Though following this man as he wheezes, snoozes, and snacks on fatty foods, we don’t feel sympathy for him, and we don’t even get the self-satisfied feeling of laughing at him, but we do, at least to some degree, get the impression of some sort of understanding.

It’s stupid, mindless, and crude, but I laughed throughout and admittedly can’t wait to watch it again.

Boyle’s verve as a director means there’s still plenty of vibrant imagery, alongside a script that, although lacking any of the electricity of the original’s state-of-the-nation wisecracks (“Scotland is a nation colonized by wankers”), is funny and disarmingly melancholic.

The chemistry between these two men is inescapable, their relationship growing almost imperceptibly, composed expertly in a nuanced script by Lee and unfussily filmed by director of photography Joshua James Richards (Songs My Brothers Taught Me).

You quickly discover that even Soisson’s best intentions are ultimately hampered by half-baked execution throughout. So intent on providing red herrings, he never allows us to know anyone other than through two-dimensional labels like “soon-to-be-victim” and “potential killer”—sometimes simultaneously.

Through a good balance of meditative imagery and narrative stylings, Kedi is a joyous little slice of cinema that instills a life-affirming sensation in the viewer.

In porn, everything besides the sex scenes are just setups for the sex scenes. Here, everything feels like it’s only there to set up lavish parties or high-class adventures.

Whether or not John Wick: Chapter 2 is superior to its counterpart matters little when the experience is worth enjoying unto itself.

Crucially, the emotional scenes are some of the ones in which the film lets off the throttle for a bit.

Shedding little light on the circumstances of Elser’s failed attempt and even less on the broader history that surrounds it, 13 Minutes presents a redundant historical “what if” that leaves itself open to charges of relativization.

It is all of the harrowing horror of an asylum film with none of the deeper, more disconcerting subtext or mind-bending logic puzzles — a film not entirely devoid of merit, but nonetheless hobbled by poor storytelling.

Overall, this is easily the weakest of the three V/H/S anthologies thus far, particularly due to its connecting thread.

Keep Quiet is as fascinating as it is powerful.

Goodman moves mostly chronologically and procedurally through it all, using the white nationalist movement as the anchor. It all feels unbelievably relevant in the year 2017. The hate and fear lives on, and continues to burn bright.

It’s a sci-fi-teen-rom-actioner, if you will, and I mean that in the worst way possible. This is a film that doesn’t stick with any genre, but instead clumsily navigates between all three, ultimately leaving the viewer feeling shortchanged in every area.