While the film lavishes in the beautiful landscape and the vibrant, eclectic music that abounds, it never coalesces into anything greater than the sum of its parts, or become the film the subject deserves.

Ultimately pleasurable if very disposable, Homecoming offers strong teen dynamics and for once, serves up high school-sized stakes instead of placing the planet in peril.

Satirically tart throughout, The Reagan Show is still a schizoid experience. It mostly wants to dissect the Reaganites’ bread and circuses tactics, but also to present a thumbnail history of his presidency. Both are credibly delivered, but they don’t always necessarily mesh.

Brimming with emotional intelligence, the human texture Reeves delivers in Apes separates his film from the rest of the tentpole pack.

This is a terrific cast, appearing in scenes that have been beautifully framed and lit. Why weren’t they given anything memorable to do and say?

A gentle but sharply defined story, brimming with grace, compassion and performances of perfect naturalism, it is unashamedly intellectual yet deeply human.

May It Last plays more like a puff piece than a concert doc, never digging to discover the hard sacrifice to this hectic touring schedule, the dirt beneath the fingernails of such work.

The Last Knight is like a Red Bull-charged Bay yelling “I regret nothing!” as he jumps out of a plane backwards with no chute, detonating a megaton nuclear explosive while firing Uzis at his skydiving pals above him because hell, dude, that sounds like a wicked fond farewell. [

Though 47 Meters Down perfunctorily succeeds in its aims to terrify the audience, it’s not as much fun as it could be due to it’s beyond brainless script, its casual sexism and its idiot characters.

The entire thing feels forced and hollow, less an authentic expression of the human experience and more a gee-whiz exercise in cleverness, slathered in a healthy coat of multiplex-friendly weirdness.

Mixing equal parts of “The Hangover,” “Very Bad Things,” and “Bridesmaids,” Rough Night is a comedy cocktail that goes down easy. It adheres a bit too closely to the recipe established by its predecessors, but it works well enough to keep the audience laughing.

Harmonium builds to something peculiar and unusual by its close, and has a melancholic, discordant, uneasy sustain that lingers long after.

The main thing you’ll feel from Cars 3 is joy; this is Pixar at its most radiant and playful.

Never afraid to show off its bloody fangs, yet careful to cut beyond the skin before its savage, stirring final strike, It Comes At Night is a remarkable, terror-filled invasion.

The Mummy is a dated, empirically dismal, laughable excuse to kick off a franchise, and it should have remained entombed.

What begins as a well-observed, quietly modulated study of teen pregnancy and the strains of young motherhood devolves abruptly into extravagantly nutty soap operatics.

For all the strong performances and able filmmaking, My Cousin Rachel never quite coheres.

It’s missing bite, but you’ll appreciate its tender humors all the same.

Focusing on the indigenous community of the Pine Ridge reservation, Zhao reimagines the entrenched masculine persona of the cowboy. The result is an entrancing, deeply moving effort, one that is certain to steal the hearts of audiences on its wider release.

Yes, it’s the DCEU’s best film, but as we know, that’s not saying a lot. But, hey, that terrific second act that we should cling to even if it’s a distant memory by the time love defeats aggression. “Wonder Woman” might be molded by the mighty Gods, but as shaped by mere mortals her mettle and beliefs and can be only so wonderfully divine.

Dosch, though she’s been appearing more and more in French films of recent years (including Maïwenn’s “My King”), will make heads turn in the role of her career thus far. Her Paula is instantly charming, never too outrageous, hilarious and supremely sympathetic. She will steal your heart.

The collaborative energy between the two makes for an endlessly charming documentary, as “Faces Places” manages to look forwards and backwards with touching insight.

While it makes its point half-way into its running time and you start getting the anxious jitters of a film that overstays its welcome, A Ciambra serves the fundamental cinematic purpose of transporting you to another world.

Amalric puts all of the esoteric artistic tendencies that are part and parcel of the creative process into “Barbara” and comes up with an incoherent mess of a docu-drama. The entire film feels like a playful experiment that never evolves beyond a concept, like an unlit cigarette, never getting the spark it needs to fulfill its purpose.

This outer space oddity is destined for the cult-classic section of some future camp horror and sci-fi B-movie aisle.

It’s one of the director’s worst films, if not the worst.

24 Frames snaps still-life photography out of its stasis, giving its images a brief history and miniature stories, even if it’s just the movement of cows in and out of a shot.

The entire, whippet-lean film feels like an experiment in impressionist condensation, as though Ramsay is testing the limits of how little she can give us, and how weird it can be, while still delivering a recognisable revenge thriller.

It’s all fun and games and one big, great joke as we watch the cantankerous Jean-Luc dismiss his admirers and spit on contemporary cinema, but it’s hard to praise Redoubtable as a great film once its final act comes around

As visually arresting as Kornél Mundruczó’s latest film Jupiter’s Moon undoubtedly is, it remains too intellectually imprisoned within its own allegorical confines to make a truly positive impact.

As an austere and darkly comic family drama, and a scathing commentary about the kind of world our children are living in, Happy End is stunning cinema

This is the downer as an art form, a feelbad film of gargantuan reach and effect, and a brave, horrified commentary on a whole nation.

All in, the film is an unprecedented misfire for Denis.

It’s perhaps not a huge step-up to those already well-versed in recent Korean action cinema, but sturdy direction by helmer Jung Byung-gil, restrained hat-tips to genre films past and the well-paired male leads keep The Merciless from feeling like the summation of more famous films.

Sadly, the core of ‘Fade’ is essentially banal, and the narrative is too blunt and inert to make any kind of lasting impression.

The cinematic trickery on display – lurid dissolves, off-kilter juxtapositions, and bizarre dance numbers bouncing around Chloe’s brittle mindscape – compensates for the skin-deep thematics, and keep the rhythm of the film popping.

In systematic and cinematically dazzling fashion, Loznitsa’s nihilistic riff will drag you to a circle of hell that makes Dante’s “Inferno” look like a love sonnet, and you’ll walk out of the film feeling woozy, defeated and utterly destroyed, in that order.

The film delves deep into the soul of a fundamentally important cause, with a slice-of-life look at a time in history that feels incredible urgent in today’s torn-up world.

An excoriating razor-burn of a movie that deploys drollery like an instrument of torture.

A high watermark in the fusion of genre and arthouse, and an anthemic, youthful blast of generational pop art, “Good Time” is a 100 minute-long string of fire emojis, that begins and ends with a heart.

Infidelity has long been one of Hong’s central subjects, but The Day After might just be his greatest film about the ails of mixing business with pleasure.

If Hong is often a filmmaker who can be accused of making the same movie over and over again, this latent muse brings a veritable freshness to his output by offering an emotional gravity that hadn’t significantly figured into his creative sphere.

The infectious joy of a long childhood summer is brilliantly and boldly brought to life, unfolding, like Baker’s vital last film “Tangerine,” in a vivid present tense.

The Killing of a Sacred Deer is Lanthimos with the gloves off, and it makes the absurd, amazing “The Lobster” seem like a warm and cuddly experience by comparison.

The Beguiled only ever lets its freak flag fly at half mast, and until the end where some very enjoyable archness is allowed to creep in, this Southern Gothic tale of female sexual jealousy feels surprisingly dated.

The amiable and undemanding Meyerowitz evokes so many other media — television, short story, theater — that it’s a little unclear as to quite why it’s a film.

Wonderstruck lives in the glory of its filmmaking — its photography, its costuming, its set design, its brilliantly variegated Carter Burwell score.

Its insistence on trying to balance wannabe sincerity and earnest actions with laughs is a tonally misconceived idea. Ultimately more forgettable then deplorable, Baywatch isn’t so much a disastrous spill in the ocean as it is disposable garbage making a mess.

With no plot to speak of, a baggy tangent across Europe in the mid-section, and no forward momentum, War Machine soon descends into the quicksand of its own design and never recovers. From there it’s an enervating slog of two hours that invites sleep.

Everything, Everything is appealing in its own way. It’s good-hearted, if poorly conceived, but perhaps most crucially, Everything, Everything leaves you with very little worth remembering.

The film is not unlike a classic rock supergroup reuniting to play all the greatest hits, with the payday at the end as the only true motivation, rather than returning with something new to say about their work.

While Corsicato treats his subject extremely gently – there’s barely a hint of criticism of Schnabel and interviewees tout how controversial his work is without explaining why – his almost idyllic portrayal of Schnabel at work and play nevertheless makes for a largely seductive and engaging experience. But the lack of context often derails the entertaining film.

Bobbi’s failures, goodbyes, successes and reconciliations are beguiling, often heartbreaking to witness, but ultimately, it’s the artist’s thrilling dedication to her craft that offers the most sublime state of grace.

The Boy Downstairs straddles a patchy line between comedy and drama with mixed results, but when all is said and done, the auspicious film acts like a mature consideration of the scariness of vulnerability and laying your heart on the line.

This is a gorgeously realized popcorn movie of the most satisfying, comforting, restorative kind: full as its heart is, it has a lot on its mind, yet you’d also quite like to curl up on its belly and doze in the sun.

Handsome is modest and mild-mannered, the type of comedy that likes to keep things content and mostly carefree.

Armed with commanding performances, striking cinematography and exceptionally well-calibrated direction, The Wall is a haunting, engrossing death march, one that’s not entirely original but also not easy to shake.

Far from being a perfect film and wearing its shortcomings with confidence, Flames is a film very worthy of curiosity.

While the film never reaches the kind of emotional peaks of James’ best work like “Hoop Dreams” or “The Interrupters,” Abacus: Small Enough To Jail is no less compelling. And it serves a very important reminder, particularly at a time when more than ever, it seems banks are putting profit in front of people.

The film is very, very funny, consistently.

This is an exquisitely shot suburban tale of trauma, stretching the “show-don’t-tell” golden rule of filmmaking to the furthest reaches.

Ritchie’s ‘King Arthur’ is a pleasing big budget spectacle, oddly aligned to the filmmaker’s thematic interests and startlingly compatible with his signature razzle-dazzle style. In fact, the soggiest moments in the movie are the ones that adhere the closest to that ambitious multi-film strategy, lessening the fun, and emptying its impact.

Somehow, Scott manages to balance it all: meditations on being made in god’s own image, the fan service of “Alien Origins: Xenomorphs,” and feminist agency. Balance doesn’t necessarily mean execution though. There’s friction with all these ideas fighting for airtime.

Tamblyn’s at no loss of interesting things to say and show on screen, and Paint it Black has some real gems among the jumble, especially Shawkat, who ably shoulders the task at hand, and gives a raw and sensitive performance of a woman dealing with the loss of a lover far too young.

These are strong performances, committed to the truth of the scenario however grim that might be but Young’s talents extend beyond that. Having also written the script, he clearly designed this film to allow him to show off some impressive, expressive visual storytelling.

The filmmakers squander a boundlessly fascinating figure in service of yet another paint-by-numbers info-doc with all the dramatic heft of a book report.

The characters in The Lovers and the problems they face and struggle with feel entirely authentic, as does the magnetic chemistry between the leads.

A movie that forgoes solid storytelling for an atmosphere that keeps you captivated, director Jamie M. Dagg has made a film that plays with genres from neo-noir to thriller to even horror.

Ultimately, this rueful picture of Heath Ledger is a loving celebration of a passionate spirit and a tribute fittingly seen through the eyes of the artist himself.

Excepting a strangely off-key final scene, A Gray State is a compelling, highly dramatic piece of documentary filmmaking.

Bafflingly witless, The Clapper is an oblivious non-starter with myriad deficiencies. Artless and clueless at every turn, writer/director Dito Montiel’s inane movie is a one-note half-gag somehow stretched into a painful 90-minute movie.

Flower is hilarious one moment, tender the next and takes some surprising turns. And it certainly doesn’t hurt to have a dynamic lead who steadily navigates the twists with an emotional authenticity that keeps the movie on its bumpy track.

One Week And A Day is at times a genuinely funny diversion amongst the Critic’s Week selection. However, a sentimental streak and a series of precocious narrative turns diminish the impact of the film.

Brydon and Coogan are the same gifted improvisers they’ve always been, shooting the breeze until it sweeps them into some absurd playacted scenario.

A humanist narrative about family, faith, and grief, ‘Acreage’ is an intimate film with few outsized dramatic moments, but as anchored by Amy Ryan’s mannered yet commanding performance—her finest in years—this lovely little story sensitively absorbs.

The broad-spectrum approach of LA 92 resists easy answers while still holding a strong editorial viewpoint about the overlapping institutional defects that led to the riots.

The Circle is a movie that has all the appearances of working – a solid director, great cast and impressive pedigree – but constantly throws errors. It’s a frustrating viewing experience with little surprise or delight to be found.

How many times have you read that it’s really hard to duplicate the success of the first film in a sequel? Probably more than you can remember. Well, here’s a newsflash: Guardians of the Galaxy, Vol. 2 pulls that feat off with only a little strain and a belly of genuine emotion.

It goes without saying that Cranston has a lot to carry on his shoulders and he does an admirable job. It’s hard not to laugh every so often at one of Wakefield’s snide remarks and that’s effectively because of how Cranston sells it. But even this accomplished actor can’t make you feel any sympathy for a character whose actions defy convention in the most unimaginative ways.

Its multiple charms are so sly, the performances so perfectly unflashy, you’ll likely be surprised at how affecting it becomes in its final stages.

It’s straightforward when it should be subversive and only owns up to its silliness when it’s too late.

What’s interesting is watching the way that Lin has to maneuver in and out of the limitations that the franchise has established, while attempting to push it into new territory.

This newest Sandler vehicle is inspired and warm-hearted where his other recent movies are lazy and soulless. Does that make it a winning success? Hell no, but it’s good to see Sandler put his heart into his work again.

Gifted means well, but it’s nonetheless a formulaic movie, missing the wit and charm needed to make this kind of picture add up to something truly special.

Perhaps the array of characters read better on the page, but it all feels slight in execution, particularly when half of the running time is spent on Tommy’s past and what unfolded between himself and Shelley. Combine all that with a particularly lackluster sense of urgency and pacing, and you have film that offers few reasons for investment.

The Fate of the Furious is almost impossible not to like. It achieves exactly what it sets out to do, successfully lighting up the brain’s pleasure centers at each opportunity with a variety of tools in its arsenal.

The Ticket exists better as a parable than as a true-to-life drama.

Arnow sheds any trappings of fiction, presenting herself, her filmmaking, her relationships and her sex life in an at times shockingly frank manner. It’s refreshing to see a filmmaker embrace this honesty with such gusto (which, like life, is often painful or awkward to experience).

Perhaps the best that can be said of Salt and Fire is that its flaws are wholly Herzog’s. Those flaws are deep. But so is the man responsible for them.

This is, ultimately, a slow-burning story that requires commitment and focus from the viewers, but rewards them with characters that are properly constructed and reactions that are comprehensible once we learn more about each person, their relationships to one another and to the community.

Chastain is as good as ever, but it’s a shame that such a gripping, tender, and vulnerable performance is lost in a period drama as flat as this one.

Gay’s picture proves once again that one can construct a comedy out of such material, as long as one respects the subject matter and refrains from being gimmicky in order to feel edgy and cool.

By the Time It Gets Dark jumps at first into an examination of Thailand’s repressed history of political violence and dictatorial control. But that initial pencil sketch of a thesis is soon shuffled away in favor of several other less-interesting story threads which add up to much less than the sum of their parts.

Visually dazzling, but dispassionate and hollow, the film often looks impressive, with some incredible action sequences to boot, but otherwise keeps the viewer at a considerable distance.

Folk Hero & Funny Guy is an amiable road movie powered by great music. But it’s much more than just that, with deeply felt, lived in emotions capturing the ups and downs of longterm friendships, the nervous spark of a new attraction, and the power of making amends.

The Art Life is more concerned with the art rather than the life of Lynch, and this is the only true weakness of the doc. While informative to a certain degree, there’s always a sense that something is missing here. That there’s more to Lynch than the film cares to explore.

All This Panic doesn’t offer any revolutionary approaches to this type of intimate documentary, and the subject matter might be too broad for some, but it makes up for its lack of originality with heart and genuine emotion.