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.

It’s an admirably well-crafted misfire, created by two of the finest filmmaking duos working together today. But perhaps that demonstrates just how singular the original remains, even to this day.

Bridget Jones’s Baby is not a game-changer, but that’s not what it sets out to be. It’s a goodnatured, accessible, persistently endearing matinee, and sometimes it’s nice to be won over by simple sincerity and commercial likeability.

Very well-made, very sweet-natured and very, very familiar: how strange that Philippe Falardeau‘s The Bleeder, a based-in-truth film about pretty much the definition of a confrontational sport —boxing— should feel cosy as a down comforter from beginning to end.

Outside of the Berg’s incredible depiction of the Deepwater’s destruction and the escape of a majority of its crew, the picture also benefits from two fantastic performances by Wahlberg and Rodriguez.

There’s something widely relatable about the way Barry tries to find somewhere to fit in, and preferably in a place where he can be himself and not somebody else’s symbol.

All of “Pastoral’s” problems could have been slightly forgiven if McGregor showed a hint of inspiration behind the camera.

The Age of Shadows has no pretensions to being a particularly deep or politically resonant piece of filmmaking. Its more that Kim Jee-woon has found in this era and this milieu the perfect inspiration for a blisteringly entertaining and exquisite genre exercise, one that may not be recognised as such only because we we have never expected genre films to be this good.

Take away Forster’s hard-working visual style, and what All I See Is You essentially presents is a standard relationship drama, with two generic, privileged people at its heart who don’t become any more striking even as the tensions between the two gradually reach a breaking point.

Walter Hill’s legacy of pushing the edges of genre conventions made the prospect of (Re)Assignment, at least on paper, potentially dangerous. But the filmmaker’s touch is completely lost here, and the only danger the film winds up posing is to the time spent by those who choose to watch it.

When the big show finally happens at the end of the picture? You can’t help but smile.

Tipping’s bold and meditative drama with its reflective moods and streetwise grime has delivered one of the best feature-length debuts of 2016 and one of the best films of the year, period.

As a piece of filmed entertainment Snowden is certainly a watchable endeavor, but Stone and screenwriter Kieran Fitzgerald’s script is often an odd mix of hero worship, conspiratorial thriller and cringe worthy dialogue.

This beautifully structured fable may be focused on the specific pain, of a specific child, during a specific moment in time, but it blows up every fragment of its premise into heart-stirring universal appeal.

Author: The JT Leroy Story, a documentary from Jeff Feuerzeig,is as truthful as it gets. Yet its content is so wildly absurd, that it plays like a work of fiction.

With “Free Fire,” Wheatley wants to push his own limits of onscreen mayhem, taking things right to the line where most directors would pull back, and pushing everything right over. And what the director winds up doing is making a big, magnificent noise, one that will certainly see more than his core fanbase sitting up and paying attention.

It would be too easy to say The Magnificent Seven isn’t magnificent. It’s definitely not, but the film has an even more egregious quality: it’s uninspired. There’s no risk, no real attempts to subvert expectations, and no desire to truly give the audience something, if not entirely new, then at least surprising.

Stone and his crew get the audience hooked on the mystery of this charismatic crank, and then take their time before they answer some of the bigger questions.

Floyd Norman: An Animated Life is as joyful as its subject, and is heartily recommended to every artist who might have lost their way and are looking for some inspiration.

It’s a ponderous work in every meaning of the term.

Poorly written and haphazardly shot, not even Sarandon is enough to convince that Ace the Case was a mystery ever worth writing, much less solving.

Too often the mechanisms of plot can be felt, the beats of the story seen, and the obvious intentions of the story heard in a line of dialogue. So, while at times it’s easy to see the great film that Tunnel could have been, that never stops it from being perfectly watchable thriller that it is.

Wannabe shock comedies toe boundaries of decorum but don’t have the stones to cross them, which in a way is more off-putting than the alternative. For Hvam, Christensen, and Klown Forever, boundaries aren’t a problem, only substance, but if you’re looking for a moral or a message, then you’re looking at the wrong film.

There is an interesting film buried in Zoom, and it’s one to seek out if you’re a fan of more daring visual choices in film. It’s just a shame that the script couldn’t have matched the direction and visuals in its intriguing approach to world building.

The very beauty of the pictures, and the exhausting knowledge of how much effort and care went into each peculiar creature, each liquidly expanding nebula, each belching mud spring, contributes to a kind of wonder fatigue, and soon it feels a little like you’ve slipped into a lukewarm bath of imagery. It’s soothing, comfortable, blood-temperature and it doesn’t quicken your pulse one iota or inspire a single thought in your mind that you haven’t had a hundred times before.

The perils of the broader-canvas follow-up to the sleek and economical indie debut are writ large: this is “Difficult Second Album: The Movie.”

This is a virtuosic piece of filmmaking art that also happens to be almost unbearably moving. Actually, there is no “almost.”

Paz’s story is obviously a feel-good one, which somewhat hamstrings a writer-director who you can feel chafing against the constraints of fidelity to sheer uplift.

Along with screenwriters Robert Schenkkan and Andrew Knight, Gibson, whose lack of directorial subtlety but skill with action both reach an apex here, is not content to tell the true story of Desmond Doss and his unshakeable, courage-giving faith. He wants to convince us that his faith was, in fact, the truth.

For a feature debut, Una is bursting with exceptional confidence and style. The aesthetic is Jonathan Glazer meets Andrea Arnold and it assures that some of the script’s more staged scenes hold your attention.

Like Brokeback Mountain a decade ago, Moonlight is a piece of art that will transform lives long after it leaves theaters.

In the end it’s really Eastwood who makes sure the film transcends the typical biopic tropes. At a spry 86 it’s unclear how much longer he’ll remain behind the director’s chair, but “Sully” proves that with the proper material and actors he can still stir emotions with the best of them.

Ford’s attempt to synthesize the two halves of his film into a coherent whole is what sells it all short.

Arrival, the shimmering apex of Villeneuve’s run of form that started back in 2010 with “Incendies,” calmly, unfussily and with superb craft, thinks its way out of the black hole that tends to open up when ideas like time travel, alien contact and the next phase of human evolution are bandied about.

La La Land is a film you simply never want to stop watching. It has wisdom and joy and sadness and such magic, from the evocative power of music to the transportative power of movies.

A lovely, but uneven moral tale of love, forgiveness and heartrending misdeeds, Derek Cianfrance’s The Light Between Oceans is conceptually sound, and at times, beautifully gut-wrenching. But the plaintive picture often becomes engrossed in conveying at all times just how precious life and love is.

[Chan] brings energy to a film that desperately needs any kind of life, but there is only so much Chan can do.

It’s sillier and more free-wheeling than you’d initially expect, but it never quite finds a sense of drive to give it purpose.

Humanity permeates Cameraperson, thanks to Johnson’s presence, so as experimental as it is, it’s also stirring and poignant, with a tangible sense of empathy intact in every frame.

Imperium, at its best, is a film about the ideological crisis of seeing the principles your worldview is built upon repurposed for hate and bigotry. But once it reaches these highs, the third act mostly squanders them.

There seems like there could have been quite the stylish biopic in Rapkin’s version of events, but the telling is underwhelming, making this film a continuous stream of possibilities that are never opened or explored.

An unsavory, underdeveloped and uninspired bore, it takes too many blows and doesn’t give nearly enough counterpunches. It doesn’t cut. It doesn’t bleed. It doesn’t even hit. Hell, it barely puts up a fight. It comes out the gate frail and disoriented, already down for the count before the picture has started.

In spite of its various imperfections, Ben-Hur always manages to entertain, proving the timelessness of epic structure and scale. And even if nothing about the movie particularly stands out on its own, when all the pieces come together, one cannot help but feel immersed in the world and ideals presented.

There’s an immense amount of promise on display in Ahn’s film, from the performances and the direction, to the more technical elements.

The People vs Fritz Bauer successfully uses the moral importance of its themes and the strength of its performances in order to build a riveting procedural that efficiently covers for its lack of visual pizzazz.

As Farah, first-timer Baya Medhaffer is a revelation, managing to combine a zest for life with teenage naiveté.

As a whole, the film is enchanting even if certain aspects of it are not.

Kubo and the Two Strings feels like a miracle, evoking joy, surprise and wonder in its audience.

While War Dogs won’t go down as one of the great films about misconduct on a national level, it’s undeniably a decent enough popcorn ride.

It’s thematically rich, and confidently directed with a clear point of view, set against a backdrop of relevant socioeconomic and cultural issues. But it’s also a deeply relatable and affecting depiction of the heedless beauty of a first love.

As underground and DIY as the kiki scene might be, it’s still highly organized, and part of what Kiki expresses is this community organization as a strategy for survival. The struggle is real, and it’s hard to imagine how they keep pushing that boulder up the hill — being fully themselves in the face of so much hardship — but they are tough, and united.

Even as a late night Netflix viewing for fashion aficionados who enjoy a scandalous bit of melodramatic trash, The Model doesn’t offer anything new, interesting, or engaging.

Alvarez’s visual flair and handle on tone can only mask his paper-thin characters and motivations for so long.

With its sensational production designs, lavish costumes and Grant providing one of his best performances in years (if not one of his best performances ever), Florence Foster Jenkins is appealing if ultimately slight.