By the end of The Hateful Eight, its status as a tale of mystery and its deference to classic Westerns have all but disappeared, worn down by the grind of its sadistic vision. That is the Tarantino deal: by blowing out folks’ brains, he wants to blow our minds.

The topic is so grave, and the corralling of ancient Greek comedy so audacious, that you long for Chi-Raq to succeed. Sad to report, it’s an awkward affair, stringing out its tearful scenes of mourning, and going wildly astray with its lurches into farce.

The remarkable thing is that Son of Saul is a début: Nemes has never directed a full-length film before. As for Röhrig, he is a poet as well as an actor, born in Budapest and now living in the Bronx. If neither of them made another movie, this one would suffice.

If you want a Ron Howard movie about a man obsessed with a creature from the deep, In the Heart of the Sea, sadly, is not the place to start. Try “Splash.”

[Silver's] densely textured images have many planes of action, which he parses with pans and zooms, revealing the volatile bonds of a group on the verge of combustion as well as the howling horrors of unremitting solitude.

So expert are the performers that you wind up rooting for Burry, Baum, and the others despite yourself, knowing full well that they are fuelled by cynicism -- by an ardent faith that the system will and must fail.

With a blend of local lore and partisan fury, theatrical artifice and journalistic inquiry, Gomes single-handedly reinvents the political cinema.

The hard-won consolations of seasonal sentiment emerge in the searching performances as well as in the impressionistic handheld images.

A wider range of interview subjects might have broadened the perspective, yet before criticizing a tradition, it’s useful to define it, and Jones (a superb critic who now heads the New York Film Festival) offers deep insight into the watershed moment and the enduring forms of Hitchcock’s canonization.

The problem is not that Kurzel cuts the words, which is his absolute right, but that he destroys the conditions from which they might conceivably have sprung.

The movie is gorgeous, as you would expect from Sorrentino, but beauty this great can lead to suffocation. The plot goes round and round and nowhere, and the highlight is a couple of blistering monologues — one from Weisz, delivered while she is cloaked in mud, and another from Jane Fonda, as an aging screen goddess, encased in her own crust of powder and Botox.

Mustang is the début feature of Deniz Gamze Ergüven, and it’s quite something: a coming-of-age fable mapped onto a prison break, at once dream-hazed and sharp-edged with suspense.

The movie is rife with confusions of every type, and Hooper handles them with clarity, grace, and a surprising urgency, far more at ease in this intimate drama than he was with the super-sized galumphings of “Les Misérables.”

The movie was written and directed by Brian Helgeland, whose screenplay for “L.A. Confidential” (1997) won an Oscar — deservedly so, for the skein of plot required a steady hand. Legend, by contrast, pummels us into believing that it has a plot, where none exists.

The film is a casting coup, with Blanchett’s inherent languor —plus that low drawl of hers, a breath away from boredom — played off against the perter intelligence of Mara, whose manner, as always, is caught between the alien and the avian.

The simplifications and sanitizations of Brooklyn would be only dreary if they merely served the purpose of a streamlined and simplified story-telling mechanism. What renders them odious is the ethos that they embody, the worldview that they package.

Anyone who has tamped down that youthful yen for excitement should stay away. But the craving for grownup glamour, however foolish, demands equal satisfaction, and Spectre, in providing it, acquires a throb of mystery that cannot be explained by mere plot.

Wiseman’s very subject is the difference between neighborhood and community—between the happenstance of urban geography and the commitment of self-identification.

The drama is stuck with that ethical rigor, and we are left with a near-heretical irony: thanks to this admiring tribute, our hero gets top billing at last, but was he not more beguiling, somehow, as a legendary figure in the shadows?

One of its major virtues is what’s not there: no creepy flashbacks of prowling priests, or — as in the prelude to Clint Eastwood’s “Mystic River” — of children in the vortex of peril. Everything happens in the here and now, not least the recitation of the there and then.

This intense, furious melodrama, by the Filipino director Lino Brocka, fuses its narrative energy with documentary veracity.

At its most persuasive, it conjures live-action versions of Chinese paintings, as if Hou were more at ease with the settings and stakes than with the personalities.

You might suggest that Bridge of Spies plays everything a touch safe, and that its encomium to American decency need not be quite so persistent. But when a film is as enjoyable as this one, its timing so sweet, and its atmosphere conjured with such skill, do you really wish to register a complaint? Would it help?

The weirdness of Truth — and, I fear, its involuntary comic value — arises from a disparity between the sparse and finicky minutiae of the narrative and the somewhat bouffant style of the presentation.

An intimate movie with a metaphysical grandeur, a detailed local inquiry that displays the crushing power of societal forces as well as the passion and vitality of those who endure.

Wright’s best film so far, livelier and more disloyal to its source than “Atonement” or “Pride and Prejudice” — crams without a care. The outcome is that increasing rarity, a proper children’s film; even the tears are well earned.

The dichotomy turns out to be a false one: whether you revile him or genuflect before him, you are still implying that the guy demands and deserves our fascination. What Sorkin and Boyle have to offer is not a warts-and-all portrait but the suggestion that there is something heroic about a wart.

The mocking of oppression may be steely, but the film’s an easy ride.