Manipulative and over-engineered, starring high-profile actors doing all they can elicit deep compassion, Collateral Beauty fails to make an impression, and contains not nearly enough authentic beauty to make it worthwhile.

Rogue One is a very good “Star Wars” film, frustratingly though, it falls short of being a truly great one.

Bakker and Koevorden have made a sleek and captivating documentary, and the rhythm of Bob and Marcel’s interaction and the pain in which they continue to just go on, is shot with distinctive style and makes for an impressive film.

It starts out less not-good than it ends up, to be fair, and for the majority of its running time, it’s engaging enough. Its chief issue in these parts seems to be that the director isn’t super sure if he’s making an action thriller with apocalyptic overtones, a family drama, or a character portrait/performance showcase, so the tone is all over the place.

Lacking real zest or fun, it’s a middling effort, if one with ample heart and good intentions, that happens to star two actors who can rise to the occasion when necessary. Working together, it’s a shame that they serve both as this frustratingly mediocre comedy’s most reliable pleasure and most consistent disappointment.

What one takes away from My Life As a Courgette might be a casually simple and forward affair, but a deeper, more considered look at Barras’ moving tale reveals an emotional resonance and non-saccharine uplift that is mostly rare in today’s animation world. Consider it a diamond in the rough.

A paean to the unsung, Hidden Figures is also a romanticized tribute to everyday problem solvers who, in the movie’s eyes, are their own kind of superheroes.

The ultimate effect of the film’s hackneyed material is as debilitating as it is frustrating.

Sure, there are some generally reliable players (T.J. Miller, Jason Bateman, Kate McKinnon), which keeps things from getting deathly dull, but the newest film from directors Josh Gordon and Will Speck (“Blades of Glory”) is mostly uninspired and bland.

Mostly this is a thrillingly compassionate, deceptively simple, and wholly invested look at a capable older woman with a lively mind coping with a series of common misfortunes. Where that could be depressing, or at least overridingly melancholy, here it is strangely hopeful.

Sleight is imaginative and refreshing as it shape-shifts effortlessly through familiar narrative tropes and invents something unexpected and unique.

The film not only traps its characters, but also corners its story, with the ‘Experiment’ by Mclean and Gunn not allowing any room for variables that might bring some inventiveness to this otherwise steel-shuttered bore.

Not only is Bobby Sands: 66 Days allows us to put together a great double feature with “Hunger,” it’s also an incredibly important and profoundly inspiring historical documentary that will become more and more relevant as we prepare to once again face the kinds of oppression that Sands fought against.

If the film’s climax comes off as thematically clear — an outgrowth of the tension heretofore developed — it otherwise leaves an aftertaste of slightness.

An inspired, spellbinding, wonderfully-realized tale and a dazzling, visually/morally beautiful treat for the eyes, ears, heart and soul that richly weaves an all-inclusive journey based in culture, heritage, friendship and self-importance.

With The Tree Of Life the director has once again created a cinematic experience that is uniquely his own, often powerful and mesmerizing, at times overreaching and overbearing, but never forgettable.

Jessica Chastain is a great actress, but with Miss Sloane, she also proves that she’s a great movie star.

Waters’ comedy — like its forerunner — comes impressively close to elevating cursing to an art form, especially when wielded by Thornton and Cox, who spit and sneer vulgar invectives at each other like gutter-trash virtuosos.

There’s nothing lost in the translation of Fences, but its high fidelity means there’s little, if any, inspiration to be found within.

It’s an engaging film in many respects, but one that exemplifies a lot of the problems that have trailed Zemeckis across his career.

Uneven though it is, and downright shaggy at times, Prevenge is valuable in that it plots so unexpected an expectant-mother story — one in which pregnancy is actually ultimately minimized in terms of its impact on the story.

The fine cinematography, set design and costumes only serve as a distraction from the sparsely drawn story and uninteresting characters.

Berg’s approach is blunt and effective. With Patriots Day, he’s made an action film that grabs you by the throat and doesn’t let up.

Benyamina displays an empathetic and insightful view of young women, and the challenges of growing up, even if the screenplay doesn’t always follow through. But what Divines absolutely gets right is the deep longing and hunger young people have to better their circumstances, and the desperate lengths they’ll go to reach those goals.

As a world-building exercise, Fantastic Beasts often succeeds. It’s charming, playful and welcoming in ways these movies haven’t been since the first two installments, and the patchiness of the plot is often forgiven because these characters are likable, rather affable, and well-cast.

As a visual love-letter to the Yangtze River, Crosscurrent takes your breath away. As a narrative film, it’s all washed up.

Magnus is gifted with a tremendous opportunity and mostly squanders it, creating a profile that certainly admires Carlsen, but does little to uncover the methodology or magic behind the dazzling display he demonstrates on the board.

Steinfeld’s performance and the script from Kelly Fremon Craig have created a young woman who feels entirely familiar, while never feeling like a retread of the other teenagers who have walked the cinematic high school halls before her.

This isn’t merely “eating your cinematic vegetables,” as Kennebeck manages to present a well-paced and structured documentary that’s also culturally significant.

There is a sense of exhaustive familiarity that permeates throughout Taylor Hackford’s new dramedy The Comedian.

Biller explores female fantasy in the most diabolical of ways imaginable and gender politics are dissected with a brutal honesty that could infuriate some feminists with its observations.

It’s what we don’t see, at least not in full, that makes the film scare so effectively. Bertino holds his monster in reserve, conceding its presence through brief and mostly obscured glimpses of its shape.

If its somewhat unfocused narrative comes at the cost of a picture that could be more cohesive and concise, it still gifts viewers with characters and an era that’s entertaining to explore.

Peabody creates a briskly paced doc that cleverly uses interviews and archive footage in order to distill this complex subject into an easily digestible viewing experience.

Whatever inspired the compulsively addictive (I assume) fast-selling book series isn’t found in yet another dull, tiresome race-against-the-clock European mystery thriller with a historical twist.

In Buster’s Mal Heart, many of the intriguing thematic ideas in the first half of the picture, are left adrift in favor of trying to keep the audience on its toes.

Make no mistake; there is no disputing this is clearly one of Marvel’s better efforts. And, yes, attempting to break from the expected shackles of a lineage of other origin movies is difficult, but you still feel the formula straining at the core of Doctor Strange.

It’s simultaneously incredibly pleasurable and quite disturbing, owing to its chilling elements and commentary on larger issues.

An exceptionally well-executed and emotionally heart wrenching documentary.

Overall, Good Kids is an average, uneven, coming-of-age flick with decent performances, serving as a harmless example of the joy of having one last (or rather first) hurrah before entering the next phase of life.

Despite all the craft and care it seems just slightly deflating that Fire at Sea can elicit a relatively complacent reaction when it is such a thoughtful, deeply-felt and exquisitely observed film, set right in the eye of a raging storm.

Keeping Up with the Joneses sometimes clicks, thanks to the commitment brought by the cast, but it’s too often shackled with a tired plot to really make the most of its potential.

Moore’s goal — save the country from the worst Presidential election of all time— is sound, but his ungainly presentation and shaky arguments make for an uneven polemic that never takes fire, even when doused in gasoline.

Despite Herzog’s efforts to keep it as entertaining as possible, “Inferno” does feel like it overstays its welcome a bit. That being said the access and footage they’ve compiled coalesces into a truly cinematic experience. One that would be hard for anyone else to even fathom attempting to duplicate.

Yourself and Yours lacks the narrative intricacy of the South Korean filmmaker’s most celebrated work but nonetheless serves as a charming introductory point for unfamiliar audiences.

Apart from assured direction and strong performances, “A Stray” succeeds because even though it’s about a specific cultural group in the United States, it manages to depict universal, relatable truths about the plight of those newly arrived in the country.

Jack Reacher: Never Go Back isn’t a throwaway, and mainstream action/thriller fans should come out more than satisfied at the visceral nature of the film. But anyone hoping for more than a superficial on-the-run chase movie will probably wish Reacher had stayed home, instead of going back.

The Lost City Of Z won’t be for all viewers, but its delicate devotion to itself is something sure to inspire admiration and obsessives.

Billy Lynn has its moments, but its critical and unexpected folly is that the cutting-edge technology diminishes the picture emotionally, its ungainly look trivializes the drama and indulges it with an undesirable air of superficiality.

Trimming the film’s manipulations and inessential qualities would only improve it, but judicious editing would leave very little meat on its bones.

Even if the film isn’t entirely to my taste, it’s a provocative and powerfully made piece of work.

Hara marries biography to observational and slapstick humor, plus a healthy dose of supernatural rumblings, and in so doing produces something altogether fascinating and endlessly entertaining.

An above average, carnage-driven Korean crime drama.

Shin Godzilla ushers in a new age for Godzilla, and a welcome one at that. It’s not perfect, but it’s ready to ask big questions and also demand thoughtful answers. In that sense, it’s one of the most valuable Godzilla movies to come along in years, decades even.

Seemingly primed to deliver daffy thrills, The Accountant instead goes about its noble-killer business with all the excitement of an IRS audit.

Theo Who Lived is a cross-pollination of performance art and self-purging, a cleansing act that allows Curtis to face the demons that still torment him today from within the safety of a film production.

The bad news, for anyone over the age of eight, is that it’s at its best disposable, and at its worst really, really annoying.

Though the film doesn’t quite overwhelm as horror, the thematic implications are dense enough in this case that it ends up leaving a lingering aftertaste anyway.

The critical failure of 37 — because certainly a film is allowed to have disdain for its characters; there is no law that art must care for its subjects — is the fundamental lack of narrative, or even of tension.

Masterfully played by Annette Bening, Dorothea is a fascinating character of contradictions.

The filmmaker has a real gift for getting into the political context of her stories while never neglecting the personal, and seeing the Khamas gradually win over his people, while still battling the British establishment, is gripping, rewarding and eventually moving.

Keeping things on the right side of watchable are the performances, none of which are particularly revelatory, but all of them serving the territory their role in the story requires. Blunt and Bennett both rise above the pack, but even so, the screenplay doesn’t give them dimension until almost too late.

While ‘Life’s Journey’ might be a deeper meditation on the meaning of life and deeper questions of who we are, The IMAX Experience is a more realized version of similar ideas. Ultimately, The IMAX Experience is a tone poem that not only pays tribute to planet Earth and the life that inhabits it, but marvels at how this miracle was created.

The Greasy Strangler is utterly honest, to the point of purity. For all its idiosyncrasies and blank lack of comprehension with respect to any taboo, this film believes in its corrosively yearning inhabitants, their unrefined desires and untrained bodies.

Lehmann’s real imprint isn’t found in the visuals, but in the performances evoked from both Duplass and Paulson. While the former may have the showstopper moments, it’s the latter who stands out.

While the documentary The Dwarvenaut won’t break any new ground in terms of nonfiction narrative, it will ideally open up viewers eyes to the fact that art goes far beyond what’s painted or drawn and can be seen in the figurines of a live action role playing game.

If Atkinson’s presentation is just a hair above “competent,” it does the job of exposing the corroded heart of American policing.

Even though it’s far from perfect, “Danny Says” is recommended to fans of punk and rock history.

This adaptation of Ransom Riggs’ children’s-lit novel offers up merely serviceable studio spectacle, minus any of Burton’s former malevolent mad-genius spirit.

It’s hard to resist the joy of the film, the unbridled heart, and Ove’s tremendous, hilarious hatred for all the idiots of the world.

The overwhelming force of The 13th is such that as the movie moves into its third act it becomes more and more heartbreaking in all its countless examples of injustice and abuse.

By pointing their camera at the Red Mosque, Trivedi and Naqvi add surprisingly little to the conversation.

For all the moments of visual flair and earnest fun, it’s a film so indebted to Anderson (among obvious others) that it never manages to become something of its own.

‘Jane Doe’ never aspires beyond the ordinary, and more crucially even fails to meet that modest standard. Lifeless and lackluster, ‘Jane Doe’ never draws blood.

It’s intense as hell, and a supreme example of how the morally repugnant can be made to look weirdly beautiful.

While it’s tricky to pin down exactly what Trespass Against Us means to be, it’s easy to enjoy what it actually is.

Likable, heartfelt and sweet in all the right places, Stoller and co-director Doug Sweetland have put together a charming surprise that’s as joyful and friendly as it is funny and well-meaning.

My Blind Brother is mirthless, though Kroll and Slate have a delightfully easy charm that occasionally rises above the tedium.

If it came out in the ’90s, I.T. would have been a silly distraction. In this day and age, it’s a colossal waste of time, a 14K dial-up in the time of fiber optic.

More than anything else the film becomes a celebration of these two lives and the era of music that both created and destroyed them.

Zlotowski has turned in a beguiling film that impresses as much for its oddly specific and well-researched setting (the ragtag community of lower-grade workers at a nuclear power plant), as for the romance, and maintains impressive narrative and tonal control right up until an ending that falters just at the final hurdle.

Rather than use his trademark raw style to expose and eviscerate social injustice, here Escalante puts it in service of a kind of cautionary fable about both the healing power of sex and the harming power of sexual hypocrisy, and he uses a tentacled alien to do it.

The charming, rousing WWII romance Their Finest is a film that openly stumps for two causes: the value of women in the workplace, and the power of cinema to tell stories that people need to hear.

The Secret Scripture is a film with a lot to say, which struggles with the best way to say it.

The picture is genuinely entertaining and moving, but the fact it even exists in the first place is something you simply cannot dismiss.

Didactic yet generic, The Promise endeavors to educate about a period of recent history that is still unacknowledged by the Turkish government, but curiously manages to be anonymous in form nonetheless.

To her credit, Zlotowski’s film does capture the lulling feeling of a séance, but there’s a gossamer-thin thread between the mysterious and the mystifying and perhaps her delicately ephemeral film just doesn’t know how to recognize the difference.

Wildly bizarre and imaginatively alluring, if not occasionally slight, the animated movie, My Entire High School Sinking Into the Sea, is an engaging surrealist take on the disaster movie.

Guest isn’t fixing what isn’t broke, but after so long between movies, and with many more people tackling the style, it does leave Mascots at times feeling a bit overfamiliar.

Underneath the dark humor and holistic mise en scène, there remains the nagging suspicion that what is onscreen is — in spite of the film’s best intentions — another patriarchal interpretation of Lady Macbeth.

As aesthetically dazzling as this picture is, with hypnotic compositions carved through meticulous mise-en-scene, there are certain conventional lines which — when crossed — must warrant good reason. In this case, the activity on the screen must be immersive and interesting enough to balance out the physical endurance asked of the viewer by the creator.

What’s most disturbing is Jackson’s pedestrian direction has resulted in a film that barely recognizes how powerful this is in contemporary society.

In substance, it might be Vigalondo’s most ambitious film to date. And while there’s a sense at times of his uncertainty in fully committing to the ideas on the page, in the moments when the conceptual component of “Colossal” is fully embraced, the results are truly chilling.

This “emotionally immature braniac” character is funny and heartbreaking in equal measure. Carrie Pilby is special. “Carrie Pilby” is less so.

There seems to be a tiny gem of a character study hidden inside Walsh’s film, unfortunately, Maudie and its at-odds tones just don’t work. It’s a film that one can actively admire, but its difficult to fully embrace.

While Lion isn’t the kind of drama that demands risky storytelling, it is one that has within it a whole world of emotional topography that is disappointingly scrolled over instead of mapped out.

Jackie is what happens when two distinct sensibilities — the Goliath of the Hollywood prestige pic and the David of Pablo Larraín’s playful, idiosyncratic intelligence — throw down.

Cedar’s smart dialogue and direction lift Norman: The Moderate Rise and Tragic Fall of a New York Fixer (hereby just referred to as ‘Norman’) above expectations.