A harrowing spectacle that makes one forget to breathe.

It’s disarmingly spirited, especially when its teen star, Markees Christmas, is sharing the screen with Craig Robinson.

The acting in all roles is first rate, but in this one De Niro regains the title of undisputed champion.

It’s a sweet-natured, gentle film that might remind more than a few watchers of a special date in their own life, long ago.

The full title, Lo and Behold, Reveries of the Connected World, is pure, over-the-top Herzog: simultaneously an embrace of fresh internet technology and an attempt to suggest a mythical dimension.

It quickly becomes apparent that the narrative content of “Kingsglaive” is a barely coherent muddle.

Ira Sachs’ lovely, heartfelt drama "Love Is Strange" had at its center a New York City real-estate problem — as does his new film, the equally splendid Little Men.

As Kubo warns, early on, don’t blink — you might miss something. Something that — and what a treat this is — you’ve never seen before.

Cheap and cheesy at every level, this Ben-Hur barely qualifies as an epic. It’s a wholly unnecessary addition to the venerable franchise.

For me, a grown-up spoiled by Pixar, Pete’s Dragon seemed sweet but slow and a little bland. My guests, entranced by the friendly dragon and the film’s 3D depictions of flight, thought otherwise.

The whole may be less than its parts, but the parts are pretty impressive.

Miike misses an opportunity to add even more resonance by telling us a little extra about each of the samurai fighting the good fight. But he's also busy shooting nearly an hour's worth of complicated fight choreography. Enthralling as that is, Miike's greatest achievement here is in giving us reason to deeply care.

It’s a movie that, by its serene final scene, changes its viewer. You leave happier, honored to have been, for two hours, part of this family.

With impeccable performances — particularly an electric, extended scene between Marcus and the college dean (Tracy Letts), and Gadon, whose wistful character has a face full of secrets — Indignation is an elegant debut for longtime producer Schamus; a visit to the past, with both sunshine and darkness.

Director John H. Lee keeps the action taut and often deeply felt when it comes to sacrifices and losses. But the script is often bogged down by deifying MacArthur.

Filmed in sepia tones to give it period flavor, infused with a sense of unrelieved tension and paranoia, and climaxing with a furious gunbattle, Anthropoid is a gripping picture.

The film belongs to Streep, who makes Florence a sweetly feathery dreamer — singing like an angel, in a voice that only she can hear.

In this bleak West Texas landscape where everyone seems to be struggling, you find yourself rooting, inexplicably, for all of them against a clear villain: the faceless, predatory bank.

The imagination in Sausage Party runs rampant, making for moments of the weirdest hilarity.

In the end, it’s all about that little girl and how she responds to the lavish song-and-dance epic designed to praise Korea’s leader, the late Kim Jong-II. Under the Sun may seem slow and hollow at times, but her emotions appear to be quite spontaneous.

Ultimately, her run and Roseanne for President! meet the same fate: not quite entertaining enough to qualify as comedy, nor quite thoughtful enough to take seriously.

A smart, wistful and very funny movie.

It’s Harley Quinn’s movie and everybody else in Suicide Squad is just a supporting character. No surprise there. That’s the way it is in the comic books, too. It’s all about personality, and Harley has that by the freight carload.

Shot in artful, quiet light (many of the frames look like elegant paintings), The Innocents is beautifully performed by its nearly all-female cast; each nun, even those unnamed, is given her own personality and story.

The laughs are sometimes bigger than expected, and so are the emotions stirred by the bittersweet finale.

A unique and satisfying new documentary.

There are moments in Gleason where it’s very hard — whether you know ALS or are new to it — to look at the screen; moments so devastating you wonder how this couple, and those who love them, can bear it. But there’s also, in this remarkable film, evidence of astonishing courage and miraculous love.

The message of Bad Moms is that being a mother today is impossible... But it’s a hammer brought down with a light, goofy touch (maybe too light; the male characters could use some punching-up), with a gleefully charming central trio that I enjoyed hanging out with.

The movie gets lost in its focus on flash and speed, and forgets about the man — and the fine, quiet actor — at its center.

Unfortunately, the filmmakers — busily splashing the film in crayon-colored light, vaguely sinister pop music and jittery camerawork — forgot to give Vee and Handsome Stranger (his name’s Ian) much personality.

The first-time director, Cesar Augusto Acevida, composes his frames carefully, using closing doorways to suggest alienation, as John Ford did in “The Searchers.” The harvesting and crop fire scenes recall Terrence Malick’s “Days of Heaven.”

It’s a small film that touches on large issues: the world of work, and how it defines us. You leave it feeling you’ve met someone, and wishing him well.

One is left with a director’s reverence for an artist’s point of view — not a terrible thing, to be sure.

A confused mishmash of plot elements featuring overwrought extraneous characters. Kids likely will love it. Their parents will just have to grin and bear it.

D’Souza manipulates viewers’ passions while telling them who to blame for their bile. As for Hillary, D’Souza asserts she wants to nationalize all our industries and steal all our money. His lack of evidence undercuts his message.

Like so many small-screen-to-big-screen efforts, Absolutely Fabulous: The Movie isn’t really a movie, just a stretched-out TV episode with a parade of cameos and boatloads of Champagne.

Lights Out is an effective, tidy little chiller; basically the same sneak-up-in-the-dark scare over and over. But hey, as we’ve learned through decades of horror movies, that stuff works.

Action scenes are so chaotically edited it’s often difficult to figure out who’s bashing and crashing into whom.

Though The Infiltrator breaks no new ground in its storytelling, it is nonetheless a riveting piece of work.

What’s crucial here, as in the original film, is the chemistry between the cast members. And though McKinnon’s the standout, the four women click together like Legos.

[A] warmly revealing documentary.

The picture is essentially a brief for Wise’s case. And as such, it’s as dry and uncinematic as a dusty legal document.

It’s a detective story. It’s a spy thriller. It’s a cautionary tale. And it’s true.

You’ve seen this cheery, slapdash blend of raunch, cocktails and summer dresses before.

There’s a funny, offbeat movie lurking in the details here.

Sometimes hilarious, ultimately poignant, Swiss Army Man is a picture like no other.

Engaging and constantly surprising.

If you’re partial to the Northwest outdoors, co-writer and director Alex Simmons (best known for documentaries) makes the long trip a visual treat, too. Indeed it is time for fresh air.

The casting was spot-on in “Dollhouse”; here it seems haphazard.

The biggest, baddest, berserkest Purge so far.

Much of The BFG, perhaps a little too much, is devoted to watching Sophie madly scurry away from the giants; it’s a beautifully rendered chase but still just a chase. When the movie slows down to allow Rylance and Barnhill to converse, it finds its magic.

Its theme of white man as savior of black Africans is, to say the least, highly anachronistic in these days and times.

It’s pretty. It’s empty. It’s pretty empty.

By the end, you look at the musician’s faces — particularly Ma’s beaming smile — and find a truth: through music, we can always find our way home.

A virgin, defiled. A pact with the devil, consummated. Erotomania, running wild. It’s Belladonna of Sadness, and in it there will be blood. And watercolors.

Despite promising elements of mixed-genre thrills, the film is finally the underwhelming sum of too many plot devices.

Unfortunately, it’s so ambitious that it’s constantly straining to find a focus.

It’s cheesy, but director Jaume Collet-Serra knows his genre thrills and builds layers of suspense and dread, along with some hypnotically beautiful aerial ocean shots.

You wish Perkins would have shown up with his red pencil during the screenwriting stage, when he might have done some good.

It’s Honeyglue, a romantic drama, which fittingly, given that title, is sticky with sentimentality.

Gaup deftly keeps track of the major betrayals without making them seem too obvious.

For all the witty voices and great escapes (maybe one too many of the latter), Finding Dory is ultimately a character story, and DeGeneres’ lovable, brave Dory swims right into our hearts.

The blend of Johnson’s laid-back hero-dudeness and Hart’s whippet-fast comic timing should have been good fun. But somebody, alas, had an idea, though not a good one: Make Johnson the comedian and Hart the straight man.

Time to Choose tells us all is not lost — yet. But the hour is late.

Alpha-male sparring is the name of the game in Chevalier, the new deadpan comedy by Greek filmmaker Athina Rachel Tsangari. And it has rarely looked this deliciously goofy.

It’s a sweet, faintly screwball, faintly Shakespearean look at love, families and what happens when a well-made plan goes just a bit awry.

Should you decide to watch all of Blackway, a decision I cannot endorse, you’ll get to know Lillian (Julia Stiles), a determined if rather personality-free woman who’s moved back to the small Oregon logging town where she grew up.

Paula Patton, playing a half-orc, half-human female warrior, is the most sympathetic character and actually gives something approaching a fully fledged performance, but for the rest of it … ugliness as far as the eye can see.

Try to remember this movie, a few days after seeing it, and you’ll find that — like magic — it’s disappeared.

You loved “The Conjuring” in 2013. Now here’s “2,” with more, more, more of what you adored the first time around.

T-Rex is ultimately about a remarkable (and likable) young person finding her personal power despite pressure from all sides.

Eventually, the film muddles its way into a self-indulgent, overlong mess, complete with a flowerlike beating heart, a miraculous new life and a lot of soccer. Long before anyone in Ma Ma expires, the movie does.

The British documentary Dark Horse is a delightful story well told — and, like so many good stories, it begins with a dream.

His name might be a punchline, but his story — and the human toll that it took — isn’t.

The film’s action scenes are masterpieces of stately choreography, with elements of humor incorporated.

This is a production from producer Michael Bay, master of the cinema of CG run amok. And all we helpless mortals can do is cower and duck as those 3D fists fly.

Overall, the film is sweet but often loses impact in its most serious moments by blasting a happy pop soundtrack.

There’s a problem with Popstar: Never Stop Never Stopping. It’s attempting to mock something that is beyond mockery.

A traditional documentary with solemn voice-over, career timeline and critical assessments this is not. But while a few more facts along those lines would have been welcome...this visual love letter nevertheless conveys Kirk’s spirit and music well.

Love & Friendship is pure pleasure, from the lavishly precise sets and costumes to the pitch-perfect tone. It’s self-consciously mannered and merrily playful; a mixture that Austen herself might find just right.

Inspiration, old-fashioned style, is the main course being served in Pelé: Birth of a Legend. In essence commissioned by the soccer icon, who is credited as one of the picture’s executive producers, “Pelé” is hagiography. But appealing hagiography.

Alice Through the Looking Glass isn’t without pleasures, but this empowerment-meets-fantasy mixture could have used a few more sprinklings of quirk.

The action, aside from the cloudy 3D, looks impressive (particularly the destruction of the Sydney Opera House), and X-Men: Apocalypse moves along tidily, but you watch thinking that all this used to be a lot more fun.

These characters don’t seem like types chosen from a screenwriting manual but like people we might know, with quirks and feelings and flaws and hearts.

It’s predictable — throughout the film, I kept thinking that I’d seen it before — and a bit sentimental, yet thoroughly pleasant.

Combining rowdy concert footage and revealing offstage interactions of the band members, Mad Tiger is a well-executed portrait of a band coming apart at the seams.

Unfortunately as festivities in the building turn violent and/or orgiastic, Wheatley keeps resorting to high-speed montages rather than slyly crafted scenes.

Luca Guadagnino’s moody drama A Bigger Splash is, unexpectedly, a study in charisma, with two wildly different performances at its center.

We can see everything that Manhattan Night has in store from a mile off. Every step of the way it’s predictable. And that predictability makes it tedious.

Writer-director Jo Sung-hee subtly evokes American Westerns and “X-Files”-like weirdness while dreaming up such pulse-quickening set pieces as a shootout in a fog-filled room.

Mark this one down as a sequel that should never have been made.

It should have worked, and it almost does, but Black buries his characters in a sputtering, chaotic story, seeming to realize only sporadically that we aren’t watching this film for the plot and the stunts...but for the byplay between the two main characters. And — who knew? — Crowe and Gosling have comic chemistry to burn.

The Angry Birds Movie is unnecessary but cute, like a bonnet on a cat — and there are certainly worse recommendations than that.

All of this is sporadically funny and cheerfully tasteless in its low-budget way, but it’s also unevenly acted, a bit overlong and never quite as daring as it seems to want to be.

Slick and raunchy when it might have been grindingly realistic, Viva is finally all heart.

Unfortunately, Money Monster, though perfectly competent, is one of those movies that promises more than it delivers.

In his third outing as the Captain, Evans seems totally comfortable in the role. He manages to convey his character’s goodness without making him seem like a self-righteous stiff. There’s an ease in his performance, and a sense of humor that makes him very appealing.

With its opening line, “Imagine you’re dead,” The Family Fang instantly invites its soon-to-be-captive audience on an absorbing, provocative, slightly fantastic path that’s like few others.