Rosefeldt’s visual panache and Blanchett’s astonishing versatility bring cinematic verve to something that could’ve easily come off as too dryly conceptual.

The Hero feels looser, more abstract, and more symbolically ambitious than the winsome “I’ll See You In My Dreams,” and at times you wish for a bit more narrative rigor. But it’s nonetheless a resonant depiction of a man fearlessly reckoning with his life, his image and, most importantly, his heart.

Only a filmmaker as talented as Alex Ross Perry could make a movie as misbegotten as Golden Exits.

While you know where “God’s Own” is going most of the way Lee finds a way to breathe new life into it (to a point).

While the surface glance of the film does feature a standard array of American indie signifiers, it’s worth emphasizing again that Abbasi’s voice is distinct, and is sure to become more sharply defined as his career evolves.

Bragança’s ambitions exceed his reach, and Don’t Swallow My Heart fails to reconcile its various story strands, conflicting tones and genre aspirations.

Hegeman’s brash picture burns brightly to the very end. If “Axolotl Overkill” ever overdoses on its dreamy, feverish style, it’s trainwreck-y, can’t-turn-away qualities ultimately rise and consumes you like a blaze of youth in revolt.

Crown Heights works best when the political and the personal merge with the insidious nature of corruption and systemic cultural, societal and economic oppression.

The doc does an admirable job of giving pretty much equal screen time to hunters, conservationists, and other experts on all sides of the argument, even though it becomes pretty clear early on where the directors stand as far as their personal feelings on the subject are concerned.

A Dog’s Purpose is an awkward, graceless, meandering and unnecessarily cruel dog movie, and therefore a fairly meaningless one.

As the story progresses it becomes less and less interesting and worst of all – gasp – cliché.

Heineman has a unique ability to condense and explain complicated information and political events without straying from the deeply personal journeys of his subjects or relying on talking heads or text.

There is an eventual reckoning, but one wishes that Tan, at least for these moments, had allowed the film a few more inches of dramatic space.

There are elements of “The Yellow Birds” that should equate to a unique cinematic experience. Unfortunately, like Bartle’s return home, you leave the theater somewhat dazed, confused and thinking of what went wrong.

This Wilson is sweet and pleasant and occasionally riotously funny. But it’s still the simplified version of a much more complicated work of art.

Sheridan pares his story and characters down to their barest essentials, making a movie that comes off sometimes as slight, but which ultimately delivers the goods for those who like smart takes on life-or-death macho adventure.

Mudbound soars thanks to the impressive performances of the ensemble cast and, notably, Rees’ intent on depicting the harsh reality of this pre-Civil Rights era, warts and all.

This isn’t the kind of genre piece that everyone will warm to. Some might find the subject matter too bleak; others might wish it were pulpier. But on the whole, Berlin Syndrome is incredibly effective, while offering a perspective that these kinds of films usually lack. It gets to know the innocent, while rendering the evil banal.

Before I Fall is a movie that will make its core audience of teenage girls melt and is a nice diversion for everyone else. It will make Hollywood studios take Russo-Young more seriously and be a calling card for Deutch, Sage and Miller. That’s not so bad, is it?

Even if The Little Hours never becomes a knee-slapper, it’s consistently entertaining…kind of like a laid-back, stretched-out Monty Python sketch.

Outside of a few short moments in Ismail Merchant and James Ivory’s “Maurice,” and Ang Lee’s “Brokeback Mountain,” the love and intimacy between two male characters has never truly felt this real or emotionally heartbreaking in a theatrical context. It’s almost revolutionary. It’s cinematic art.

The McConaissance finds no purchase here. Mining for something adventurous and coming up empty handed, ultimately the dramatically-challenged Gold digs for something fiery and collects zero treasure along the way.

Unlike “Obvious Child,” Landline plays like a series of semi-successful comic and dramatic scenes, haphazardly arranged into something resembling a story.

[Morgan's] observations about Hollywood’s image-consciousness and the transactional nature of L.A. relationships are nothing new. But there’s a specificity and a liveliness to her jokes that makes them feel almost fresh — or, at the least, relevant.

A Ghost Story has the structure and rhythm of a musical suite, with Lowry working variations on the same themes, the same characters, and the same location. The result can be lyrical and poetic, or more naturalistic and minimalist. In both cases, A Ghost Story is absolutely mesmerizing, with an anything-goes quality that’s endlessly fascinating.

The movie lives and dies, however, on Ingrid herself and, remarkably, Plaza finds a way for you to root for her even when she crosses line after line after line.

Unlike McDowell and Lader’s underrated 2014 comedic thriller “The One I Love” the most disappointing aspect of The Discovery is that it’s something of a bore. And when you find out what “The Discovery” really is you simply don’t care anymore.

There’s a certain flat indie artlessness to “The Big Sick,” but it’d be shortsighted to discount how well-written and well-acted it is. This is a very funny movie, yet always plausibly so—never throwing in jokes just for the sake of a laugh.

There’s something fresh in Detour, but it’s buried underneath a largely unremarkable movie.

One should applaud Diesel and Caruso for breathing unexpected energy into what could’ve been another lame, uninspired continuation. It’s wild, loud and totally out of control, and that’s periodically a pretty good thing.

What Blair is trying to do is quite ambitious for his first feature. He alternates moments of high comedy with serious tension and a touch of magic realism for kicks. For the most part, the tone works.

The Red Turtle is poetry made cinema, an exquisite existential allegory that says everything without having to say anything at all.

It ends up feeling like going to a festival headlining date by a reunited Britpop band. It’s great to see them back together, they look pretty good for their age, and there are transcendent moments when they play the hits. But the set goes on a bit long, and the new material’s a bit forgettable, and they’re sloppier than they used to be, and in the end, you start to wonder if it had been better if you’d been left with your memories from back in the day.

They Call Us Monsters is restrained, sensitive and quietly heartbreaking.

[Shyamalan] still knows how to manipulate an audience with an original story, and with “Split,” we don’t mind him pulling the strings again.

The Founder certainly does not reinvent the meal, but as a bite sized, consumable snack (that feels like 90 minutes though is actually much longer), its lively and entertaining spirit does often hit the spot. And surprisingly, though traditionally told, the narrative does unwrap a deceptive bite along the way.

Gould and Zwann’s film runs along perhaps too familiar formal lines to have many tricks up its sleeve.... Yet that does not rob the inevitable meeting of its simple, sweet power, and the gentle revelations, mellowed with time, that punctuate the excited chatter are truly moving.

The subtlety of [Tatiana Huezo‘s] approach interlaces ideas, resonances and emotions in ever-shifting, eternally edifying ways. And it ultimately promotes the film from human interest journalism to a grand work of socio-political critique and a quietly radical remodeling of familiar documentary formats.

There is always something of value in the sincere recreation of ordinary heroism. And Perez’ film does sincere if ordinary justice to the idea that where there is a will for it, resistance can find a way, be it so small as to be postcard-sized.

The Bye Bye Man just skirts so-bad-it’s-good territory, unintentionally making the audience laugh more than they gasp.

Ocean Waves is a deeply charming and resonant look at the tug of longing that so often comes with memory, the utter mess of youth, and the beautiful delirium of love.

It knows of its B-movie roots, its tired plot and well-worn archetypes, and beneath the burden of the sorely unoriginal, it does manage to be occasionally funny, occasionally surprising, and occasionally the bloody and bombastic genre cliche it set out to be.

Labelling Live By Night a disaster is a little uncharitable; the baggy drama is perhaps more painfully mediocre than full-blown folly, but it’s close.

It’s all window-dressing for an ending that reveals this alternately goofy and self-serious big-budget Hollywood product to be little more than a two-hour prelude to a potential future franchise.

If immaculately realized, Silence is also an increasingly monotonous, patience-testing slow-burner, with characters repeatedly voicing their fears about God’s silence (often in voiceover), debating the merits of apostatizing in service of a compassionate cause, and suffering in quiet.

The Bad Kids falters due to a lack of focus.

The movie is propulsive and, if you aren’t nauseated by the ethics, quite engaging.

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.