It’s all an overstuffed mess, but that was true of the previous entries as well, and audiences obviously don’t seem to mind.

Closer in tone and old-school psychological fright tactics to the original film than either The Conjuring 2 or Annabelle, David F. Sandberg’s incisive approach capably resets the franchise.

Tavernier focuses on a dozen or so major and minor auteurs, showcasing their artistry in hundreds of film clips that he comments on with historical insight and aesthetic precision.

Benefiting greatly from its charismatic, likeable subjects, Night School displays a compassion and empathy that feels more necessary than ever.

The ingeniously simple scenario concocted by director Roberts and his co-screenwriter Ernest Riera (they previously collaborated on the horror film The Other Side of the Door) provides the opportunity for genuine tension abetted by a series of jump scares that are no less effective for being predictable.

The sound of the zipper on Diane’s handbag, for example, becomes extremely ominous in Mermoud’s capable hands, while two distinct musical themes, written by Christian Garcia and Gregoire Hetzel, respectively, further enhance the mood and help establish the film’s bona fides as a classy and classical psychological thriller.

The experiences and challenges of the rural poor might make it into the national conversation as an abstraction, but rarely with the specificity of this intimate portrait of a black community.

Given the tragic and highly charged events it depicts, All Eyez on Me is oddly low on emotional bite, perhaps because it never feels real. As clean and polished and blandly overlit as a TV soap opera, Boom’s film looks and feels smaller than Tupac’s cinematic life story.

A visually imaginative but narratively incoherent exercise that provides viewers the unwelcome opportunity to feel what it’s like to watch a video game being played by someone else.

It’s an if-it-ain’t-broke-then-don’t-fix-it approach that works just fine if you’re simply looking to take another ride on the rollercoaster.

The issues it addresses are of massive importance.

The extemporized feel to some of the dialogue makes their rapport seem all the more credible and consequently there is something open-hearted and friendly about the performers that keeps the film watchable, for all its faults.

The preposterousness of Gregg Hurwitz's screenplay isn't enough to throw star Naomi Watts off her game, and the actor's sincere performance may suffice to keep a segment of the family-film demographic on board, barely.

All the talented women here are stuck playing types rather than characters, in a strained frolic in which both the verbal humor and the physical gags too often fall flat.

Although the film’s overstuffed, overpopulated storyline proves only sporadically interesting, it’s notable for at least providing an alternative view of a city more commonly associated with wintry gloom, corruption and heavy drinking.

Chadha has distilled a fascinating and epic true story into a starchy, stuffy, sanitized period piece that never fully engages on an emotional or educational level.

It’s hard not to leave the film shaken.

While visually dynamic, Lightning McQueen’s newest challenge still feels out of alignment with a languid end result that lacks sufficient forward momentum.

For all its potential, the movie ultimately feels like a frustrating miscalculation; the ingredients are there — it's the recipe that's off.

Ascent sometimes lives up to its title by proving a slog, not fully earning its feature-length running time. But the film nonetheless exerts fascination with its haunting imagery.

The execution is weak, and Crowley does himself no favors by repeatedly invoking the memory of more psychologically persuasive films like Five Easy Pieces and Deliverance.

Weirdly out of place here, Cruise brings little daring and less charm to the film, though to be fair to the actor, his character's a stiff.

There's enough dark sizzle between leads Rachel Weisz and Sam Claflin to keep the audience involved through the underpowered middle stretches before the film regains its footing, delivering a disquieting shiver of a conclusion.

In the absence of a sturdier storyline and more dimensional characters, the manic, rapid-fire delivery, while yielding some well-deserved laughs, proves more exhausting than inspired.

Dorfman declares that she was never a media or critics’ darling. “I was at the bottom of the list,” she says when talking about her position in the ranks of modern photography. This film will convince you that she definitely deserves a higher position in the pantheon.

With his fine cast and his gracefully restrained screenplay, Shults makes horror recognizable.

Bringing their real-life story to the screen, director Gabriela Cowperthwaite has made a movie about soldiers that's not, strictly speaking, a war film. She's made a love story, one that's all the more heartstring-tugging for its cogent restraint.

Australian director Jonathan Teplitzky has fashioned a small-scale chamber drama from huge historical events, with a functional script and modest budget that fails to match the grand sweep of its story.

As with all comics-based extravaganzas, brevity is anathema to the Patty Jenkins-directed Wonder Woman, and it doesn’t quite transcend the traits of franchise product as it checks off the list of action-fantasy requisites.

It is clear that Serraille has made a portrait of a very specific individual but that she’s also saying something more general about her own generation.

Even if one agrees with Jarecki's progressive political position, making Elvis into a metonym for the nation's spiritual corruption starts to feel too much like a contrived rhetorical sleight of hand.

The two creators hit it off famously and collaborate with great ease on a journey driven by mutual curiosity and creative application.

There is ample material in Fortunata for a heart-rending tale of blue-collar female empowerment, but Castellitto’s noble intentions get swamped along the way in incontinent floods of histrionic excess, broad caricatures, clumsy allusions to Greek tragedy and psychodrama subplots that feel like half-baked afterthoughts.

Overall, Pio's accelerated passage from adolescence to adulthood is depicted with moving honesty and sensitivity.

There’s something admirably honest about the meta-method Amalric and co-writer Philippe Di Folco have chosen.

The film was shot chronologically and this is clear in the increasing fluidity of Gras’ camerawork, which is less and less searching the closer they get to the city.

Perpetually shifting gears between playful sci-fi pastiche, quirky rom-com and apocalyptic thriller, Before We Vanish might have worked better as a single dedicated genre, but it becomes a little scrambled trying to cover several at once.

Barbosa doesn’t seem very interested in questioning Buchmann’s intentions — the idea of cultural appropriation never comes up, for starters — with the young man depicted as sincere if clearly naive.

Ultimately, this psychedelic culture-clash comedy-romance takes what was at heart a relatively simple story by Gaiman, which channeled bold sci-fi imagination into relatable adolescent experience, and overcomplicates it beyond repair.

There are multiple levels on which to enjoy Roman Polanski’s Based on a True Story (D’Apres une histoire vraie), none of them very deep or complicated. But together they raise the resonance of a masterfully made psychological thriller in the traditional mode.

The sheer purity of the imagery is entrancing and puts it among his finest, most uplifting works.

The use of both dialogue and film language is sophisticated; sometimes Ismael’s Ghosts borders on overripe melodrama, while at other times it relies on genre tropes but then gives them an unexpected twist. [Cannes Version]

This intoxicatingly stylish work is all over the place, a hot mess at times so ravishing it sends shivers down to the toes. Unfortunately, it’s also at times just plain crass and silly.

Although the film manages some disarming insights into the man’s complex makeup and difficult behavior, a service enhanced by Louis Garrel’s very good lead performance, serious cinephiles will likely reject it as glib and disrespectful, while more mainstream viewers could be amused but not that interested.

A film with some real stunning visual highlights but a narrative throughline that feels patchy and unbalanced.

Even admitting that films like Cache (Hidden), The White Ribbon and Amour have raised the bar higher and higher, Happy End feels like it’s pulling its punches and not in their league. For one thing, it’s hard to pin down the theme of the piece.

With his devastating, finely layered new drama Loveless (Nelyubov), Russian director Andrey Zvyagintsev once again demonstrates his remarkable gift for creating perfectly formed dramatic microcosms that illustrate the bred-in-the-bone pathologies of Russian society.

The film slowly but surely works its charms, painting a rich, emotionally complex portrait of a woman who, like Denis herself, will not let herself be boxed in.

The Rider is a rare gem, a small, acutely observed portrait of a few lives on what used to be the frontier but is now a desolate backwater, the windswept badlands around Pine Ridge, South Dakota.

A minor addition to the Korean action cinema canon, The Merciless offers thin pleasures in a glossy package.

For a film meant to champion the powers of three-dimensional art, Rodin winds up being awfully flat.

Following the fizzle of his coming-of-ager Goodbye Berlin (Tschick) last year, Fatih Akin bounces back and bounces high with an edge-of-seat thriller inspired by xenophobic murders in Germany by a Neo-Nazi group.

Its tale of doubles, deception and desire allows Ozon to fool around with some of his favorite themes — the turbulent inner lives of complex women, the distance between appearance and reality, the essential unknowability of even our most intimate loved ones, the necessity of imagination in enduring everyday life.

Creature is exceptional in its depiction of the Byzantine bureaucracy that encases gulags, and how the towns adjacent to Russian prisons tend to be seedy snake pits of crime and venality.

His new film acquires considerable urgency and raw emotional power in the closing stretch. But at just under two-and-a-half talky hours it's almost maddeningly protracted, maintaining a somewhat cold intellectual approach that might have been improved by greater emphasis on the beautiful scenes of intimacy, tenderness, naked fear and helplessness that punctuate the action.

The screenplay...is very good in its many observational scenes, which here are more straightforward and less laced with irony and dark humor than in Women.

Minutely observed and framed with great precision, this finally has a few too many characters and twists to become a fully satisfying drama.

With its many story strands and flat direction, the movie lacks a pulse, its ambitious hodgepodge of concepts refusing to jell.

What’s perhaps most impressive about Ostlund’s evolving style as a filmmaker and social commentator is his compulsion to enrich every scene he creates with a multitude of tones and nuances across the serio-comic spectrum. He’s like a virtuoso chef driven to try increasingly wild combinations of spices and ingredients; often the result is terrific, once in a while it’s too much.

Only in an extended sequence late into the proceedings...do we get a sense that Pineiro has tried to move outside of his comfort zone and does the film really become affecting.

Joshua: Teenager vs. Super Power is actually a rousing documentary on a youth movement against, essentially, educational brainwashing.

This is a richly textured genre piece that packs a visceral charge in its restless widescreen visuals and adrenalizing music

Radiance remains mired in underwritten relationships that end up less emotionally engaging than they appear.

Hong, who again wrote as well as directed, hasn’t suddenly become someone interested in things such as densely plotted narratives and surprise twists, with the few events that happen only excuses to dig a little deeper into the behavior and feelings of his protagonists.

Feeling more spontaneous and improvised than ever, this tale of chance encounters at a big film festival is easy on the eye and strewn with humorous gems, as it wryly reflects on the festival business and its denizens.

Miike’s facility for the sharply sketched portrait, in between bouts of bladed mayhem, remains as shrewd as ever.

What saves the movie's sobering latter developments, giving it an emotional wallop that overrides the flaws, is partly the sadness playing across Dafoe's face as Bobby watches from the sidelines.

The rich vein of unsettling darkness and psychological unease that ripples like a treacherous underground stream beneath the absurdist humor of Yorgos Lanthimos' work becomes a brooding requiem of domestic horror in his masterfully realized fifth feature.

It’s hard to detect a strong raison d’etre behind Sofia Coppola’s slow-to-develop melodrama.

Shlomit Nechama’s screenplay makes the proceedings compelling while mining gentle humor from the foibles of the mostly endearing characters, expertly played by the large ensemble.

Baumbach’s film for Netflix is more conventionally conceived than some of his best work but benefits from sterling turns from a wonderful cast, most notably Dustin Hoffman and, no kidding, Adam Sandler.

Alive with the magic of pictures and the mysteries of silence, this is an uncommonly grownup film about children, communication, connection and memory.

The film is inspiring.

Johnson and Efron possess impressive muscles, but the performers have never done as much heavy lifting as they do here. And to their credit, they succeed to some degree.

None of it is earth-shattering, but Goodman gives it muscle and makes it work. And with their synapse-firing performances, Banderas and Rhys Meyers keep the viewer at arm’s length and guessing — through, and even past, fade-out.

The film has its sporadic pleasures, mostly provided by Bella, who effectively conveys Destiny’s enjoyment of her over-the-top murderous and sexy antics, and Michael Madsen, as Lisa’s supportive stepdad.

Calling itself a "vision" as opposed to a "film," Icaros attempts to conquer fear — of death, of blindness, of loss — by accepting the potency of a magic it knows it will never understand.

The pic ends with a sermon on self-determination, and the dialogue tends toward the on-the-nose instead of the kind that allows viewers to draw their own inferences.

As generic paranormal mysteries go, this is an awfully dull one, filled with dead air and stiff direction.

[A] comprehensive documentary adding context and a modern-day update to the tale.

Finally less a two-stories-for-the-price-of-one situation than essentially two films of about an hour each, this is nonetheless a visually impressive Hollywood calling card for Jimenez, who almost manages to overcome the material’s structural weaknesses with impressive directorial verve.

Degan's first film, the effort often suffers from hazy storytelling, but its real difficulty for many viewers will be its protagonist, who isn't the most sympathetic proxy for Americans curious about the plant extract's suitability to treat depression.

A work of deep but unsentimental optimism, Wrestling Jerusalem gives us plenty to wrestle with, but presents it at such a relentless clip, in such self-conscious fashion, that it becomes wearying rather than involving.

One of the more effective entries in what has essentially become a documentary subgenre, the film focuses on the surviving Green Berets who recall their experiences with a combination of pride and sorrow.

Rough-hewn stylistically and occasionally bordering on self-indulgence, 32 Pills: My Sister’s Suicide nonetheless packs a powerful emotional punch with its unflinching portrait of two siblings dealing with past and present demons.

The film's scabrous, sometimes arch, other times spot-on critique ultimately comes together in an effective finale that retroactively puts a better light on the entire film than might have seemed possible during some of the earlier, rougher moments.

The pic may have an unlikely story (in real-world love affairs, this kind of second chance rarely ends happily), but benefits from unusually authentic performances.

It may be a specialist’s rarified sort of work now, but Gordon and Abel really know what they’re doing. It’s gentle and admittedly closer to a divertissement than a full-course comic meal. But no one else is doing anything like this at the moment.

Scodelario, of the Maze Runner films and Andrea Arnold's Wuthering Heights, is just about the only member of the cast who seems to believe she's expected to be more than a thin generic functionary or flamboyant scene-stealer.

Frequently wearing only a halter top and skintight yoga pants, Johnston looks as great as she moves. While her dramatic chops leave something to be desired, they’re more than adequate for the rote narrative which only gets in the way of her kicking serious butt.

Like the cumbersome hybrid animal at its heart, this beast is no beauty. But it is a technically impressive and boldly original statement.

Sacred might have made for a satisfying web series of thematically related short films. But as a short feature-length movie, it's not much to see.

Jolts of humor and fantasy bring welcome texture to the romance-novel sleekness, as do the leads, who both have an uncommon, idiosyncratic allure.

There’s much that international audiences will find relatable and enjoyable in the film, which is graced with a particular empathy for human foibles and appreciation for the specific humor to be found in everyday family life.

By now Bowers, who also directed the last two Wimpy Kid movies, knows how to choreograph the inherent chaos for optimal giggles, even if many of the book’s more satirical elements have been swapped out for broader slapstick.

After 90 years and more than 50 films, Wajda has earned the right to make stagey period pieces like Afterimage, minor codas to a gloriously symphonic career.

A minor but touchingly human subplot to the financial crash, Abacus: Small Enough to Jail is both an affirmation and an indictment of the American Dream.

Katie Says Goodbye is a plaintive story of hard luck and fringe dwellers, one that might have felt clichéd in lesser hands. But first-time filmmaker Wayne Roberts conjures new, resonant chords in his taut, tender drama.