Fences is a reasonably strong adaptation and further evidence that Washington has an assured hand with both actors and the camera, but it feels stuck between its reverence to the source material and its desire for a more distinctive vision.

The one thing it’s missing — and perhaps the most important quotient – is any real sense of chemistry.

Assassin’s Creed bears a jumbled narrative and self-serious approach that ends up feeling far too assaultive on the senses without any genuine pay-off.

Star Wars: The Force Awakens is not a great film, but it flirts with that designation far more often than this lapsed fan could have ever expected. If, on a creative level, what’s contained herein is ultimately the planting of seeds that will continue growing two, four, or forty years down the line, I suspect this franchise is in its best-ever state. How fortunate that it also stands alone as a good time at the movies.

Action is Rogue One’s strongest suit, and what makes all the faffing about bearable.

Its child’s viewpoint and pastel-colored animation belies a cruel melancholy at the heart of My Life as a Courgette, as all its children lust for a life that is different from their own.

I don’t entirely know what to do with this work which has the capacity to play as both a definitive film about spiritual vocation and a sometimes torpid melange of concept and execution — all, mind, said after one viewing as often confounded by expectation as it was made joyous by the discovery of what had Scorsese so bothered for decades.

Thankfully Bousman’s endgame does deliver the supernatural slaughterhouse of the title to great effect with inspired spectral victims looped in suspended animation. It’s so memorably jarring that you wonder if the whole was just sloppily reverse engineered from this massive undertaking.

By the film’s conclusion, you can’t not be in love with this man, and, of course, his pictures.

An authentic portrait with only a few false notes, Slash ought to be essential viewing for every awkward 15-year-old kid trying to figure themselves out.

What we have is ultimately a welcome satire for the modern age that’s no less funny than it is intelligent.

Besides an unnecessarily indulgent epilogue, the film’s good versus evil dynamic is successful at extricating itself from any mainstream trappings while also nicely serving its audience.

In the hands of McClean, the film’s violence feels often overwrought instead of fun.

While the viewer might appreciate Brizé’s lack of compromise, for such a stoic and rather long period piece, A Woman’s Life offers little else for the audience to cling on to.

Rehashing some of the best and most memorable moments of Terry Zwigoff’s 2003 comedy, Bad Santa 2 is dirtier but certainly not funnier and it ultimately gives us less of a reason to care.

All mood, atmosphere, and mystery with our own confusion about the action mirrored in those onscreen.

Mifune: The Last Samurai, the well-assembled documentary on the life of actor Toshirô Mifune, the long-time Akira Kurosawa collaborator, should be a worthy introduction to one of Japanese cinema’s greatest icons, if a little light on more revelatory findings.

Entertainment of the highest order, Allied, like a large portion of Robert Zemeckis’ work, feels like a grand ode to filmmaking of an era past.

The problem with its mystery setup is that, since we’re simply waiting for The Beast to show up, the revelations are less driving plot progression than they are filling time, and that “ticking clock” is arbitrary

Atmosphere is paramount as it should be, but sadly it’s created almost solely from jump scares the prologue quickly numbs us towards as soon as things get going.

Øvredal gives us B-movie thrills better than most of his peers, creating a campy, nasty, tremendously fun horror experience in which death proves not the ending we might expect.

Peck has made one of this year’s finest documentaries. At once pulsing with anger and yearning for compassion, it’s an examination of past and present America as a cycle where the backdrop has changed and particulars have remained the same.

It finds a poetically understated ending, but the drama, especially near the end, borders on being too repetitive. Still, it’s a worthwhile showcase for excellent performances, assured direction, and a twist on the sports story that prioritizes character before history.

Maybe Fenn’s treasure will one day change someone’s life in a material way. Maybe it won’t. In the meantime, though, it’s calling us to awaken and explore.

An overlong mid-section stagnates after the novelty of the premise wears off, but a couple of plot twists late in the game raise the stakes again and Xiaogang Feng, with his signature dry humor and newfound creative juices, hits too many marks on this one for it to disappoint.

This is Marvel imitation at its most tedious. It’s particularly disappointing given how, in her original Harry Potter books, screenwriter J.K. Rowling demonstrated a deft ability to put in subtle foreshadowing and use characters and elements that would later take on new significance.

This is one of the better-directed CG films in the Disney canon. But next to all the solid noisy bits, Disney still demonstrates trouble in slowing down properly.

It looks and feels less like a film and more like a feature-length pilot for a new TV series which happens to have a stacked cast.