The biggest lesson to take away from I, Daniel Blake is how a movie doesn’t have to be psychologically complex or cinematically dazzling to dig beyond its surface. It’s rudimentary in terms of technique, but how the film generates its power is through the themes of humanity and kindness at its center.

An intensely pleasurable, lavishly shot dessert tray of utter hokum, The Handmaiden is a prime example of why we should be glad that there’s someone out there still invested in the overwrought Gothic melodrama, and that that person is Park Chan-wook.

It’s timely, it’s entertaining, it’s a blast of energy, but Weiner also drills down into the unique nature of American politics in the media saturated, smartphone-enhanced, Twitter hot-takes age.

Even if you don’t agree with Jarmusch’s introductory claim that The Stooges are the greatest rock and roll band ever, there’s still a lot of pleasure to be gleaned from Gimme Danger; most of it coming from Iggy’s love of the band, the music, and inability to be anyone but his incomparable and uncompromising self.

Your time would be better spent staring at a postcard for two hours. No, not even the presence of the usually magnetic Marion Cotillard will stave off the boredom of Garcia and Jacques Fieschi‘s screenplay.

Having recruited as fine a cast of French-speaking thesps as has ever been assembled, and marshalled a strong behind-the-camera team, Dolan’s usually exuberant egotism is here taken so seriously that what we’re left with is a shrieking bore, without a single character worth rooting for, least of all the puddle of maudlin self-pity at its center.

Hell or High Water might walk over familiar ground with second-hand boots in terms of character development and structural beats, but it does so with great personality and zero pretension of wanting to be anything more.

Personal Shopper is a mess — not an uninteresting one, and better that than a staid, unadventurous bore, but a mess nonetheless.

It is indulgent in its length and relative plotlessness, though there’s no point at which the bravado of Arnold’s filmmaking, Lane’s riveting performance or Ryan’s stunning Polaroid-shaped lensing ever flag.

As polished a film in terms of craft and performance as Nichols has ever made, the director’s trademark considered intelligence shows itself in how subtly it reworks and refreshes the tired conceits of the historical biopic, while still remaining a conventionally appealing and, yes, Oscar-y example of the genre.

Spectacular, gross and delicious (so unsavory it’s almost sweet), the film is more proof of Refn’s mastery of his trash aesthetic and more fun than anything this indulgent and empty-headed has any right to be.

The somewhat drab aesthetic and almost vanishingly understated performance style dull the potential pleasures of a good old-fashioned whodunnit to roughly the luminosity of an above-average feature-length episode of a TV procedural.

Every family is its own country with culture and customs and embarrassments that seem alien beyond its borders, but the genius of Maren Ade‘s brilliantly funny and slyly crushing Toni Erdmann is that it makes the utterly foreign nation of its central father/daughter relationship feel so much like home.

If the resulting film, Julieta feels neither wholly Munro nor typically Almodovar in final execution, there is still a very compelling energy given out by the collision.

Not wondrous enough to be likened to a ghost, "Journey to the Shore" is the corpse of a film: lifeless, bloodless, insensate.

Falls flat on its face thanks to a severe lack of self-awareness and an air of dramatic self-importance.

The Nice Guys, which the screenwriter also directed, is the best of Black’s films. It is eccentrically, sometimes broadly funny, with top-notch performances from Crowe and Gosling and a pitch-perfect sense of timing to help smooth over some of the script’s fault lines and blind spots.

The BFG exceeds expectations thanks to Rylance’s performance, and joyously expounds the essence of a cherished children’s tale in all of its imaginative glory.

Extremely entertaining and well-crafted, Crush The Skull promises a bright future in genre films for Nguyen.

Given how good the cast often are elsewhere, it doesn’t seem unfair to put this at Armstrong’s door, and the film has a very first-time-director feel to it.

The film is never as savage as the first-act anarchy suggests it might be, and its best ideas are subsumed into familiar thriller concepts. Good craftsmanship elevates the result above workaday thriller territory, but ultimately Money Monster never rages in the “mad as hell” mode that’s always kept just out of reach

Director Anne Fontaine’s film is based on actual events and grapples with thorny questions that plague even the most zealous during times of crisis. It’s a pity, then, that this picture finds Fontaine compelled to find a resolution in a situation that seldom yields easy answers.

What little shock of the new the film can provide us with comes from the honeyed cinematography by Vittorio Storaro which uses silhouettes, graphic compositions and glowing closeups in an often genuinely breathtaking manner. But it also comes from the performances.

Apocalypse feels like a cog in Fox’s perpetual-motion blockbuster machine, paying lip service to the story’s allegorical potential as it grinds our interest to dust.

At its best, the film becomes something winningly subversive.

A sinister dread pulses through Bridgend, one that is engrossing and terrifying.

Dark Horse is crowd-pleasing and rousing, but its biggest problem is that no successive part of the documentary can sustain the power of its opening prologue.

Mother’s Day is the cinematic equivalent of spilling boiling hot coffee on your mother when you bring her burnt toast for breakfast in bed.