While often a bit of a slog, the film is not without a sense of humor, and the director still knows how to execute a sharp surrealist flourish from time to time.

It’s a film that not only goes back to the basics, but seems to deliberately steal much of what made the original such a horrific treat.

Many will place blame on Ewan McGregor simply because he may have been ill-prepared to handle such a dense work as his directorial debut. Fault should lie with him as captain, but besides an artificial, mannered feel throughout, my main issue concerns John Romano’s script being so intent on solving the central mystery of Mary’s (Dakota Fanning in adulthood) vanishing.

How Kim and his formidable technical team compose, frame and edit what could have been the most ordinary of shootouts to instantly, violently communicate peril shows not just unmistakable filmmaking prowess but a delightful, connoisseuristic appreciation of the game.

(Re)Assignment is ultimately canny in genre-play and unique in its time, factors that don’t necessarily make it great, but, beyond old-man-auteurism apologia, still hold somewhat of a flame in the modern age.

Stone doesn’t care about Snowden as much as he does the ramifications of what his employers accomplished. He’s focused on the future, fearful the next person over-stepping boundaries is Donald Trump. This doesn’t make the film a resounding success, but it does make it fascinating.

A surefire cult classic in the making, its unhinged carnage proves a memorable delight. It may not be original, but it’s an adrenaline shot I sorely craved.

This film thankfully isn’t a dramatic piece gunning for awards glory, but rather a heartwarming adventure through the emotional landscape of a child unsure how to live. It is very sentimental, but that’s kind of the point.

As much as I admire Nocturama (answer: an awful lot), locating exact points of admiration proves difficult when its pleasures are so purposefully alienating and bitter.

The marketing may try to dress it up like a prestige picture, but Magnificent Seven is a summer season thrill ride.

It basks in the rightness of those who work hard to get a proper result, simultaneously disinterested in reinventing the wheel and still finding some new ways to spin it.

A patriotic war drama for its domestic audience, Operation Chromite looks and feels like a blockbuster, offering an occasionally compelling look at the tactics employed and their effect.

Demon becomes a siren to never forget the past or the many bodies left on battlefields of horrific wars. No matter how civilized or at peace we are now, history will always haunt us.

This is not exactly landmark stuff. Many viewers may feel they’ve seen familiar things in the work of David Attenborough, or even in films such as Koyaanisqatsi or Samsara. However, Malick might be singular in his earnest search for the sublime.

There is a great deal to savor here and yet it’s hard to shake the sense that The Bad Batch is a film stuck in neutral. We await that kick into a higher gear but it’s just too cool to be bothered.

The most remarkable thing about Dominik’s film is that we are not only humble witnesses to such personal grief, but that we are seeing it actively articulated by such a fascinating mind.

While derivative and endlessly cheesy, it’s a characteristically visceral return for Gibson, and one that confirms that little has changed in the man’s singular artistic psyche.

With everything going on, Nocturnal Animals is the sort of narrative and tonal minefield that a lesser director could easily have gotten lost in. Ford allows us to consider and cherish each unique thread and wonder just how it could all possibly come together.

The Bleeder isn’t attempting to reinvent any wheels, but it is consistently gripping — slick as a skip rope and just one hell of a story.

Unfortunately the truth of The 9th Life of Louis Drax quickly becomes evident because there aren’t many suspects. Once irrefutable facts come to light, common sense dictates what’s going on.

Denis Villeneuve ponders the ramifications and possibilities of a potential first-contact between human beings and an advanced alien race and comes up with a sporadically incoherent film, but also some interesting ideas.

It’s a twinkling surface examination of how humans try to coordinate their dreams with their reality (a very Hollywood conundrum), but also a celebration of just how wonderful old filmmaking techniques and emotions look and feel on modern L.A. streets.

Fatima inevitably falls into a catch-22: every time it presents an insightful new cultural situation, it starts to feel less like a film, and more like a series of richly detailed sketches.

This subject matter can be tough to traverse, but Lewis embraces the challenge and makes us wonder why he stopped acting in the first place.

As a morality play that will surely leave the audience contemplating what they might have done in the situation, The Light Between Oceans mostly works. As a layered drama with indelible characters and an intricate narrative, it falls short, giving credence to the more contrived climactic moments while losing specificity.

Morgan struggles to make even a single fight between two people not look like it was edited with a shredder.

[A] paint-by-the-numbers product, which ought to have been released directly to VOD.

The connective tissue between the different shots is sometimes thin, and some images are of course far less interesting than the others. But those hiccups can’t degrade the unique, involving effect of the documentary as a whole.