This Point Break doesn’t ever connect with anything, even its own desire to celebrate the extreme.

Fitfully entertaining, and even more rarely actually funny, Daddy's Home, tellingly, only really comes alive in the very last portion of the third act.

In the end there's nothing surprising in Sisters, except for the fact that it isn't anything more than a party movie.

Mascaro’s film is an auspicious, original, and absorbing work that thrills with its look into this little-seen world and the dreamers that inhabit it.

It’s arguably Tarantino’s ugliest and most political film, but not his best by some distance.

For all the film’s politics, Arabian Nights can also be whimsical, swooningly romantic, inspiring, fascinating, or deeply sad.

It’s as successful as it is ambitious.

Crafted with exquisite care in the vein of its subject, though it occasionally feels overly precious (criticism that might be leveled at the restaurant itself by its detractors).

It’s dizzying stuff, and virtually everything that Gomes tries his hand to works: it’s a film that’s moving, sad, exciting, fiery, and funny.

Abrams makes big decisions and takes chances that command respect, especially in the very safe current tentpole film industry, but he doesn’t always quite sell them as he could. Still, as this new chapter props the franchise back up on sturdy legs, the Force seems to be in capable hands with a fresh forward direction.

Without an amusing instinct in its cowboy-hatted head, this painfully protracted, puerile effort meanders about the Old West as if it were making up its nonsense on the fly. The result is a torturous genre joke that marks a new low not only for the star, but for the art of cinematic comedy.

Body is very much an exercise, but by a couple of guys who are already showing a confident handle of coaxing solid performances out of their cast, sustaining a mood, and not reaching beyond their means.

Low on ideas and high on atmosphere, Dixieland is a promising debut, but it likely won’t find you overwhelmingly writing back home about it.

This is ninety minutes of comic actors having a genial go at middle-of-the-road material. It doesn’t have any guts, but that doesn’t mean it isn’t funny.

A bold, blunt, yet clinically intelligent film that provokes as much for its dark humor as for its righteous outrage, it's all at once a gripping thriller, an incendiary social critique and a mordant moral fable.

Lovely to look at, charmingly played throughout, and with a sense of fun that is more playful than subversive, The Brand New Testament is a bouncy treat: not so much heresy as whimsy, with a smooth matte finish and a mischievous grin.

This soulful and serio-comedic drama is far less interested in race and much more concerned with examining the state of contemporary male friendship.

The Girl in the Book is an auspicious debut for Cohn, a showcase for VanCamp’s true acting abilities, and a fascinating feminine story.

Playing like a slightly more reflective B-side to the director's greatest hits, his style in this film isn’t for the more cerebral audiences. But for the viewer who relates to family dysfunction, its maddening contradictions and its mercurial tenor, Joy can be painfully funny, engaging and full of relatable heartache.

Though it may feel threadbare for some, Iñárritu’s near exhausting movie is still unforgettably visceral and there’s so much to be dazzled and experientially shaken by.

MI-5 is no action b-movie classic, but it manages to weave a complex and compelling narrative knot, mix in some absorbing musings about the nature of doing right and following orders, and pack in some nail-biting shoot outs.

There are elements of The Boy And The Beast that undoubtedly reinforce the promise that Hosoda holds: it’s a treat to look at, is inventive in spots, and will probably be eaten up by younger viewers. But it ultimately proves both narratively unsatisfying and emotionally lacking.

Visual daring is nice, but it means little in the end when the ultimately safe and harmless story never rocks the boat.

There’s never too much at stake for the princesses or the audience, but it makes for a fine diversion from the realities of life and history.

The film's lack of terror might be more forgivable had it embraced its more humorous inclinations, but the script’s pedestrian liberals-vs.-conservatives, boors-vs.-yuppies conflicts rarely result in anything laugh-out-loud funny.

Illuminating and fiercely original, if you’re willing to go along on a silent, experimental, dance-based journey of a mother in the desert, Ma is well worth the ride.

Letting such a film slip into the melodramatic could have been very easy. But Garaño and Goenaga tactfully navigate the delicacies of death and the difficulties (and guilt) of life with a quiet poise that make for a film that is as enriching as it is disheartening.

Intimate, singular, and hallucinatory on all aesthetic levels, the film strips politics down to the bone, not always successful but never opportunistic.