The film’s attempt to portray the Queen as more politically enlightened than her courtiers is kindly but unconvincing, and many of the actors bark and behave as if participating in a spoof.

Above all, there is Tom Cruise, whose career was in the ascendant, with “Risky Business” (1983) and “Legend” (1985), in the frantic years covered by the second half of American Made. Because he has changed so little in the interim, and mounted so uncanny a resistance to the onslaught of time, we feel, with a jolt, that we are gazing up at a star as he both was and still is. Astronomers may flee the cinema in confusion.

The late Harry Dean Stanton, in one of his last roles, infuses the slightest gesture and inflection with the weight of grave experience, but this maudlin drama mainly renders his grit and wisdom wholesome and cute.

Haroun journeys through the country and films his travels to meet with the regime’s victims. He brings a profound compassion and a controlled rage to accounts of moral obscenities, while also recording accounts of deep solidarity among the victims, even under terrifying circumstances.

The showdown in Houston, for instance, comes across as tacky rather than triumphant, its sexual politics smothered in salesmanship, and redeemed only by the ferocity of Stone’s demeanor as she puts away yet another smash.

Yet the movie’s grasp of experience feels tenuous, trippy, and, dare one say, adolescent; if you gave an extremely bright fifteen-year-old a bag of unfamiliar herbs to smoke, and forty million dollars or so to play with, Mother! would be the result.

Graceful and all-embracing.

It feels at once crammed and sketchy, riddled with flashbacks and framing devices, and woefully light on frights.

You think afresh of the film’s title and wonder, Who is more unknown here, the nameless victim or the inscrutable doctor?

[Anthony] turns a concluding sequence of civic pride and good cheer into a brilliantly light-hearted fantasy of grave import, a radical political utopia conjured with a deft artistic flourish. It’s one of the most extraordinary, visionary inspirations in the recent cinema.

Ford is more than a witness—he is a crucial participant in the events of the film, and its elements of pain and guilt are reflected in his grief-stricken, self-interrogating aesthetic.

In Logan Lucky, Soderbergh, for all his felicitous exertions, falls back on a certain artistic facility. This doesn’t mean that the film was easy to make; it means that Soderbergh relies on what he knows rather than wandering off into what he doesn’t. He knows a lot, and it shows; his pleasure in sharing it is substantial.

Near the end, we get to hear John Barry’s “The Persuaders” — not only one of the catchiest TV themes ever composed, redolent of moneyed innocence, but a key to the tactics of this movie. It is at once damnable and debonair. It seduces as it repels.

It is not that Pattinson has ceased to make our hearts throb but that he has learned to claw at our nerves, too, and even to turn our stomachs, all without sinking his teeth into a single neck. The vampire is laid to rest.

Jasper hits every note of sentimental manipulation in a tale that’s as fleetingly affecting as it is insubstantial and mechanical.

Burdge infuses her rigidly and scantly defined role with tremulous vulnerability, and Silver, aided by the splashy palette of Sean Price Williams’s cinematography, evokes derangement with a sardonic wink.

Richardson in particular vaults to the forefront of her generation’s actors with this performance, which virtually sings with emotional and intellectual acuity.... Few performances—and few films—glow as brightly with the gemlike fire of precocious genius.

The movie’s most potent closeup is of a black policewoman, in a line confronting protesters; if you can film her, why not learn what she has to say? Folayan and Davis, however, hold no brief for even-handedness, and, for those who dominate the screen, any sign of temperance, even in a President, is treated with contempt.

The problem for Detroit is that, when contrivance is required, it tends to jut out... Where the movie scores, by contrast, is in those casual deeds that reveal the shape into which lives have been bent.

Spunky yet maudlin, grim yet heartwarming, the movie—written by Mooney and Kevin Costello—is mainly a batch of hollow gestures.

The film strains to achieve a breathless panache and a lurid swagger for which David Leitch’s direction is too heavy-footed and literal.

Although Dunkirk is not as labyrinthine as Nolan’s “Memento” (2000) or “Inception” (2010), its strike rate upon our senses is rarely in doubt, and there is a beautiful justice in watching it end, as it has to, in flames. Land, sea, air, and, finally, fire: the elements are complete, honor is salvaged, and the men who were lost scrape home.

The movie dramatizes the destruction of a society from within that society. Watching “Hell on Earth” is not an easy experience; I can’t recall another documentary with so many corpses. It’s a grief-struck history of cruelty, haplessness, and irresponsibility—a moral history as well as a history of events.

There’s neither pity nor sentimentality in Gomes’s populism; the highest strain of modern humanism faces up to the first person.

Few movies this year will be more likely to molest your sleep.

The main problem with War for the Planet of the Apes is that, although it rouses and overwhelms, it ain’t much fun.

The film locates extraordinary political and cultural tributaries, marked by archival footage, that arise from the history of Dawson City and the gold rush.

Okja is a fairy tale of sorts, though too foulmouthed for children; it nips from pastoral bliss to a terrorist pig-napping by the Animal Liberation Front; and it takes the eco-menace from Bong’s sublime “The Host” (2006) and replays the fright as farce, with a spirited turn from Tilda Swinton, as the company boss, and, I’m afraid, a barely watchable one from Jake Gyllenhaal, as a drunk TV presenter.

The ghost, on the other hand, grows ever more imposing, and the movie’s most touching spectacle — it’s also the funniest — is that of C standing at the window and waving to another ghost, in the adjacent house.

Travel-folder footage of Rio mixed with father-daughter incest (in a disguised form)...Most of the movie is an attempt to squirm out from under its messy erotic-parental subject.

The writer and director, Ana Lily Amirpour, delivers this imaginative tale as a simplistic allegory of the haves and the have-nots; she ruefully delights in the wasteland’s postindustrial wreckage while leaving characters’ thoughts and motives blank.

The absolute tastelessness of Bay’s images, their stultifying service to platitudes and to merchandise, doesn’t at all diminish their wildly imaginative power.

It would be a shame if the film were to be seen only by those already interested in French cinema. Anyone with an eye for grace, industry, resilience, rich shadows, and strong cigarettes should go along. Like the kid on that terrace in Lyon, you see the light.

The good news is that, although Baby Driver is not much of a movie, it is an excellent music video — a club sandwich for the senses, lavishly layered with more than thirty songs.

Although The Big Sick breaks new ground as it delves into cultural conflicts, there are patches of the drama that give you pause.

There is barely a graceless frame in the whole affair.

Like Ken Loach, Arteta is clearly confident of preaching to the converted, and of whipping up indignation at those who mean us harm. Thanks to his leading players, however, the movie grows limber, ambiguous, and twice as interesting, and the sermon goes astray.

The emotional wallop grows more zealous with almost every sequence, and Loach’s refusal to go easy on us is as stubborn as it was when he made “Cathy Come Home.”

Thank heaven for Dwayne Johnson, whose foot-wide smile will not be switched off, and who saves the life of the movie. Whether it deserves to be saved is another matter.

Filming cityscapes and intimate gestures with avid attention, adorning the dialogue with deep confessions and witty asides, Piñeiro conjures a cogently realistic yet gloriously imaginative vision of youthful ardor in love and art alike.

This film is at once sumptuous with thrills and surplus to requirements. Let sleeping aliens lie.

The hallucinatory power of ayahuasca and the incantatory lure of rituals fuse with existential dread in this darkly hypnotic drama.

Schreiber moves with bearish stolidity, even when boxing, and nothing is more poignantly delayed than Chuck’s realization that most of his wounds were self-inflicted.

Gunn decides to treat the quest for meaning seriously — a lethal move that not only leads to the noisy palaver of the climax but also undermines Chris Pratt, who likes to hold these movies at arm’s length, as it were, and to probe them for pomposity.

The film, directed and co-written by James Gunn, is joyfully irreverent. Gunn lends his underachiever superheroes a geeky, comic camaraderie, and he brings a spry touch to the wacky intergalactic adventure.

The range of tones and moods, like the range of situations, characters, and actors, is so wide, so recklessly self-contradicting, that it turns a tautly crafted local story into a comprehensive vision.

To be fair, A Quiet Passion is wittier, in its early stretches, than anyone might have foreseen, but it’s when the door closes, and the Dickinsons are alone with their trepidations, that the movie draws near to its rightful severity.

The director, James Wan, sends cars repeatedly airborne and seems himself to marvel at the results; the movie’s real subject is the stunt work, but its stars’ authentic chemistry lends melody to its relentless beat.

Cedar plays Norman’s story for tragedy but never develops his inner identity, his history, or his ideals; the protagonist and his drama remain anecdotal and superficial.

A dully conventional film about a brilliantly unconventional musician.

The first third of Aftermath is stripped to emotional basics (one man seized up with grief, another with guilt), and it delivers quite a jolt. Sadly, as the characters converge, the rest of the movie loses force; it slackens and then rushes, and the time frames feel out of joint.

Gray is hampered, to an extent, by treading in the tracks of Werner Herzog, who went to South America with Klaus Kinski, his leading man (or, as Herzog calls him, “my best fiend”), and returned with the extraordinary “Aguirre, Wrath of God” (1972) and “Fitzcarraldo” (1982).

With a teeming cast of vibrantly unglamorous Chicago characters who hold Eddie in a tight social web, Swanberg—aided greatly by Johnson’s vigorous performance—makes the gambler’s panic-stricken silence all the more agonizing, balancing the warm veneer of intimate normalcy with the inner chill of secrets and lies.

Despite some memorably painful moments and underlying artistic urgency, the film’s implications remain unprocessed and unquestioned.

Graduation, written and directed by Cristian Mungiu, is a mirthless farce. All that can go wrong does go wrong, and the process is both compelling and close to unwatchable.

It is this rage for authenticity, more than the leading lady, that transforms Ghost in the Shell into an American product. Here’s an irony: if anything preserves the unnerving quiddity and strangeness of the Japanese movie, it is Johansson.

The backbone of Collin’s film is the sole audio interview with Helen Morgan, made in 1996, shortly before her death. The story that she tells combines with the story that Collin builds around it to provide a revelatory and moving portrait of a great musician.

Beauty and the Beast is delectably done; when it’s over, though, and when the spell is snapped, it melts away, like cotton candy on the tongue.

T2 cannot hope to break the mold, as “Trainspotting” did, but Boyle and his cast rifle eagerly through the shards: a motley of plot scraps, crazed camera angles, flashbacks, trips, sight gags, and musical yelps.

As Adrien, Pierre Niney is extraordinary to behold: pale, tapered, and flickering, like a candle made flesh.

The over-all effect is as taut with tangible evidence as a detective story.

With bold and canny camera work that yields an uproarious parody of Ingmar Bergman’s “The Seventh Seal,” White dynamites the formalist restraint of art films and the bonds of narrative logic to unleash the primal ecstasy of the cinema.

The thing that breaks the back of this movie, and makes the second half so much less prodigious than the first, is a simple matter of geography. Once the combatants are split up and scattered around the island (Packard here, Chapman there, Conrad and Marlow stuck in their own heart of darkness), the story loses focus and even starts to drag.

The curious thing is that, as with many big-budget horror flicks, this small French-Belgian movie feels too pleased with its own outrage; the grosser it grows, the less interesting it becomes. When the carnage was over, I went out and had a steak.

When Logan and Laura unleash their furious scythes nothing feels settled or satisfied. The world grinds on, fruitlessly weary and wild.

Peele’s perfectly tuned cast and deft camera work unleash his uproarious humor along with his political fury; with his first film, he’s already an American Buñuel

On the whole, Asante’s movie, though crammed with the white man’s treachery, has a dulled and inoffensive sheen, and cannot match the visual rigor that Ava DuVernay brought to “Selma.”

Again and again, its stark and suspenseful compositions strike the eye — figures in dark clothing, prone on a pale beach, with lines of wire, black warning flags, and the chill gray waves beyond.

Under its compelling influence, we are lured into feeling that these various lives, marked by vacuity and frustration, are in some way destined to end at the point of a gun — that the murderer and his victims coexist on a continuum of despair. Try telling that to the people of Aurora.

The film that results is at once panicky and abstruse, and we are left with little more than the delirious shine of McConaughey’s eyes and the preacherly rapture in his voice.

Malik Vitthal’s first feature gives rich dramatic life to a piercingly analytical view of the American way of incarceration.

In short, we are watching an old-fashioned exploitation flick — part of a depleted and degrading genre that not even M. Night Shyamalan, the writer and director of Split, can redeem.

What follows, in the final half hour of the movie, is an astounding chamber piece, worthy of Strindberg, with the husband, the wife, and her aggressor stuck in a dance of doubt and death. With every shot, our sympathies flicker and tilt.

This arch, bold, and tender transposition of elements of the Nativity to the cramped secular life of a high-school student in current-day Paris is as much of an emotional wonder as a conceptual one.

Dave’s dread of his brother hooks The Ardennes onto a long chain of fraternal crime dramas, from “The Public Enemy” (1931) and “On the Waterfront” (1954) to “We Own the Night” (2007). Pront can hardly be blamed if his actors lack the sinew of Cagney or Brando.

Layer by layer, this dumbfounding movie devises its magical recipe, and dares us to resist it: ketchup, mustard, two slices of pickle, and hold the irony. Delicious.

Where “Paterson” is tranquil to the point of inertia, Neruda, with its jumpy shifts of scene, its doses of casual surrealism, and its mashing of high politics against low farce, struck me as more of a poem. It reminds us that movies, by their very nature, owe far more to poetry than they ever will to the novel. The story is only the start.

This movie has almost no bite but plenty of moseying charm, and what it does get right is the idea of poets as perpetual magpies.

A crucial episode of the nineteen-sixties, centered on both the space race and the civil-rights struggle, comes to light in this energetic and impassioned drama.

The director of Rogue One, Gareth Edwards, has stepped into a mythopoetic stew so half-baked and overcooked, a morass of pre-instantly overanalyzed implications of such shuddering impact to the series’ fundamentalists, that he lumbers through, seemingly stunned or constrained or cautious to the vanishing point of passivity, and lets neither the characters nor the formidable cast of actors nor even the special effects, of which he has previously proved himself to be a master, come anywhere close to life.

Almodóvar - whose penchant for narrative complexity grows ever deeper - latches on to the idea of personal history as a puzzle that refuses to be solved.

The movie belongs wholeheartedly to Bening, and to the age, come and gone, that she enshrines.

Happy Hour, a work of distinctly modern cinema, reaches deep into the classic traditions of melodrama—along with its coincidences and its violent contrasts—to revive a latent power for grand-scale observation through painfully close contact with the agonizing intimacies of contemporary life.

Catch the film on the largest screen you can find, with a sound system to match, even if that means journeying all day. Have a drink beforehand. And, whatever you do, don’t wait for a DVD or a download.

Allied is written by Steven Knight and directed by Robert Zemeckis, who seems uncertain whether to treat the tale as a wrenching saga of split loyalties or as a glamorous jaunt. Having gathered all the ingredients for derring-do, he forgets to turn up the heat, and the derring never does.

I happen to find the result intrusive, presumptuous, and often absurd, but, for anyone who thinks that all formality is a front, and that the only point of a façade is that it should crack, Jackie delivers a gratifying thrill.

As is proved by documentary footage at the end, Garth Davis’s film is based on a true story; though wrenching, there is barely enough of it to fill the dramatic space, and the second half is a slow and muted affair after the Dickensian punch of the first.

Beatty packs the movie with labored period references and unsubtle allusions to Donald Trump. He delights in Hughes’s high-handed wisdom, his high-stakes gamesmanship, and his petty idiosyncrasies, while looking ruefully at his paranoid reclusiveness.

In all, the movie is a cunning and peppy surprise, dulled only by the news that no less than four sequels await. Will the spell not wear off before then?

Even if you love the film, as I do, all the lurching, stop-and-go exchanges of these unquiet souls may leave you with a craving for “The Philadelphia Story,” or something equally streamlined.

Only Hailee Steinfeld’s committed performance as Nadine, a troubled high-school junior in Oregon, and Woody Harrelson’s deft turn, as a teacher who helps her, make this thin and cliché-riddled comic drama worth watching.

Locy infuses the film with empathy and wit, and his grandly bittersweet imagination pulls the story toward tragedy, but he also plays loosely with stereotypes better left behind.

That stance of hers will outrage many viewers, as Verhoeven intends it to, but the question of whether Elle is pernicious nonsense or an excruciating black comedy is brushed aside in Huppert’s demonstration of sangfroid. This, she shows us, is how to stand up for yourself in style. She’s the best.

I felt sorry for Gyllenhaal, berated in both his personae for being weak, and for Adams, strapped and laced into a role that scarcely lets her breathe.

Within the carnivalesque atmosphere and high-spirited revelry of Moore’s show, there’s a master of political rhetoric at work, and he devotes that mastery to a high patriotic calling. At its best, Michael Moore in TrumpLand is a moving act of devotion, a motivating turn of rhetoric of potentially historic import.

It may be weaker in the resolution than in the setup, but that is an inbuilt hazard of science fiction, and what lingers, days after you leave the cinema, is neither the wizardry nor the climax but the zephyr of emotional intensity that blows through the film.

The quiet joke of the film is that you could scarcely meet two less revolutionary souls.

The result, though corny at times, treads close to madness and majesty alike, and nobody but Gibson could have made it.