Mixing familiar stories with fresh insights, Zimny’s film is a portrait in restlessness, a picture of a man who has been both wildly successful and thoroughly dismissed — sometimes simultaneously.

It may well be that we’ll eventually stop looking at these Marvel films as discrete, individual experiences rather than chapters in an epic binge-watch, but even by those standards, Avengers: Age of Ultron feels like a solid but overstuffed episode, one more concerned with being connective tissue than anything else.

If this is the final Indiana Jones movie, as it most likely will be, it’s nice to see that they stuck the landing.

As a kind of twisted social commentary, it doesn’t make much sense on paper, but don’t worry: It won’t make much sense on the screen, either, but Mosquito State manages to get under your skin and also to find moments of disquieting beauty.

Who knows if the creative team behind this sufficiently unique “TMNT” will be able to preserve this lean and sweet demeanor through the already announced sequel. But for now, “Mutant Mayhem” is a small win in the tiresome world of IP, one that doesn’t need to mutate into anything further in order to be accepted.

A procedural is never just about the case, even as the inquiry barrels along. To his credit, Moll ably recognizes as much, making his procedural a fine example of the form.

It is not a subtle film, and its bluntness is occasionally potent but just as often wearying.

The writing leaves some unanswered questions, which viewers may interpret either as frustrating or as a reflection of the protagonist, who finds himself rudderless when he loses his hearing. Either way, Ahmed’s performance goes a long way in holding the film together.

Although Tommy’s Honour has clearly been made by a golf obsessive who loves the links, it’s the rare sports biography that keeps its eye on the ball of character and milieu.

Whether playing off his returning company of co-stars or swapping barbs with fellow drag comic O’Carroll, Perry’s giving one of his best self-directed performances.

So tip your the greasy, dusty, battered hat to George Miller, who is pulling off some kind of ridiculous feat by turning these grungy action movies into a grand saga.

When Ask Dr. Ruth is over, you’ll believe a human being can be as special as any computer-generated effect.

Hidden Figures is feel-good history, but it works, and it works on behalf of heroes from a cinematically under-served community. These smart accomplished women had the right stuff, and so does this movie.

There’s a lot to like about director Kenneth Branagh’s gorgeously fanciful tale.

It’s one of the great horror sequels, for about an hour. Then it’s a cautionary tale about how not to make a horror sequel, for about an hour.

So many movies play it safe and predictable that you have to give it up to Dope for making consistently bold moves — even if they don’t always pay off. This vibrant film is a bit of a mess, but it’s a beautiful one.

Good Boy is doggone exceptional when it comes to the powerhouse acting abilities of Graham and Boon, both of whom take on their roles to showcase opposite ends of the rehabilitation spectrum. But even with talent at the helm both in front of and behind the camera, Kosama’s disjointed thriller is predictable throughout and never reaches the emotionality it seeks from its audience.

It’s a shame that Lessin and Pildes don’t tell us what these amazing women went on to do after the Collective ended. But they all remain, half a century later, passionate and eloquent and thoughtful and fierce.

This sequel might lack the delightful jolts of its predecessor, but it nonetheless maintains a slow boil of terror that’s consistently unnerving.

The Woman King possesses broad appeal. It’s an oft-told tale, yes, but here imparted with a fresh angle and a meaningful moral. And it has something in store for those who prefer the action genre, too.

Designed as a horror movie for the entire family, the film has its scares, but it’s just too wacky and too much fun to be disturbing.

The performances are striking and do much to keep the film on a tightrope. Overall, though, it’s a work of robust intellectual energy and raging conflict that could come across as hectoring and even bullying. While fizzing with ideas and ideologies about cultural freedom, it’s also a very physical film, with close ups of skin — knees, toes, torsos — and the dry crunch of the stony desert.

Monster manages to sink its claws into one’s conscience, thanks in large part to the movie’s young leads—like Farhadi, Kore-eda is an astute director of children, able to shepherd their performances in ways both precocious and disarmingly innocent.

Well-researched and polished, even if it’s essentially a feature-length episode of “Behind the Music.”

Hal entertainingly reminds us, his influence as a righteous, challenging, humanist chronicler of mortal foibles — and as a filmmaker on a quest for a greater understanding of our world — remains a force among today’s more conscientious directors.

The Invisibles is a powerful testament to the remarkable courage of those forced into heroism, and to the exceptional strength of those who chose it freely.

Bracketed by genre on both ends, the middle third of this 140-minute film becomes a gentle tale about a misfit finding in a platonic relationship a kind of second chance in life. In other words, it becomes a certain kind of Tom McCarthy film — and then gets back to the overarching story.

Although The Instigators can at times feel like a Coen Brothers movie without the polish, there’s enough charm and energy flowing through Doug Liman’s picture to keep the film humming.

A Different Man is a fascinating exploration of humanity with Sebastian Stan and Adam Pearson being a team I want to see reunite in other works. The climax is a tad underwhelming but overall it’s a rollicking ride worth experiencing.

Biggie: I Got a Story to Tell celebrates an influential musical legacy as well as a complicated life story, with a potent mix of sentiment and aesthetic appreciation.

Does Deadpool 2 pick up its predecessor’s baton and run off to new and exciting places? Not really. Is it as tasty as leftovers on the second day? Absolutely. Temper your expectations accordingly.

For an artist who is committed (for better or worse) to always putting out the purest and most unfiltered portrait of who he is and what he believes, the main problem with documenting this particular moment in this way is that it goes by far too quickly, when it’s the first he’s created in a long time that has the potential to truly change hearts and minds — and best of all, not even solely about Kanye West himself.

It’s a movie that both understands the basic desire to strike it rich and our deep understanding that one person’s wealth often comes at the expense of another person’s well-being. This isn’t a perfect movie, but it’s admirable for its ability to keep more than one thought in its head at a time.

Brought to life on screen, Wilson is a fractured, heartsick, funny adventure in mundane misery.

While it’s an undeniably powerful film, it also seemingly feels the need to tread carefully.

Thankfully the creators of this expansive adventure, a crime-solving saga starring a bunny who wants to be a cop, have a bit more in mind than the usual strains of aww-dorable humor and frenetic action.

This is a thoughtful and enlightening documentary about artistic censorship and free speech.

Less inventive that it gives itself credit for, Free Guy qualifies as a summer blockbuster with something mildly compelling to say; not the most articulate or substantial in its exploration of its most interesting ideas, to be sure, but enjoyable nonetheless

Life is too damn hard to get so damn mad about a sweet, mostly effective drama like Song Sung Blue.

Working from a script by Matthew Robinson, the dark comedy, like other Verbinski works, feels like it’s bursting at the seams and threatening to collapse under its big ideas. And yet the threat of combustion, along with a terrific performance from Sam Rockwell, helps provide the film with its off-kilter energy that will keep you hooked until you’re exhausted.

The movie is more successful as a thriller than as a thoughtful examination of war and its horrors; Mendes seems less interested in bigger ideas about the nightmare of battle and its effects on his characters than he is in Hitchcockian audience manipulation.

Even as Lau's intentions are to nudge us back into real life, the images flickering on screen continue to hold us rapt.

It’s a larger than life World War II thriller in the Guy Ritchie house style, and he strikes a fine, fun balance between the threat that the Nazis posed and the thrill of watching hunky heroes slaughter them at great length, then chuckle and smoke cigarettes and call each other 'old boy' about 50 million times.

Come for the city-flattening; stay for the political satire.

It lacks ambition or depth, but it’s delicious and filling, proving (as if anyone still needed proof) that Tessa Thompson and Chris Hemsworth are two of the most likable movie stars in the galaxy.

Overall, The Kingdom is a rivetingly credible and vivid portrait of organized crime in an area with a long tradition of banditry.

It escalates past the point of absurdity, but all you can do as an audience member is shake your head and laugh.

When the characters hit rock bottom, the movie quietly gets more emotional and more sure-handed.

Like any artist, Miller has the right to reinvent herself, but we don’t need one more director of winsome, Sundance-ready rom-coms. That said, as winsome, Sundance-ready rom-coms go, Maggie’s Plan is a pretty winning one.

Even with the re-enactments, this is a pretty straightforward documentary. It’s nonetheless valuable for the way that it takes a complicated story and breaks it down into understandable pieces.

The film’s real power comes from Garner, whose solid, memorable work anchors everything around her.

Crowe’s beauty-seeking, but exoticizing camera is slightly outmatched by his performance, which anchors the film with regret tinged with hope. But what continues to haunt after the credits finish rolling are the film’s explorations of the trauma of life after war: The brutally quick political shifts, the lingering shame of committing vicious and dishonorable acts, and the bitter knowledge that there’s no such thing as lasting peace.

Rather than serve as a shallowly classical body swap story that provides a moral lesson about her growing to appreciate the life she had, the aftermath of this decision is more thematically complicated and engaging. It’s also sincere, tapping into anxieties about being not just liked or even loved, but truly seen.

The film is structured so we come away with two competing, and yet complementary, impressions. First, that our political system has become infected with a rampant and deadly corruption that has spread out of control. And second, that there is a communal cure.

Thavat’s harrowing, moving film doesn’t necessarily offer justice for Bunny, but instead regards the small pieces of justice that Bunny, as misguided as she may be, ekes out for herself and her loved ones within a system that is trying to keep her down.

Things get a little overly explanatory, in general, as though the film assumes its audience is not familiar with these allegations or the bombshell nature of this story. But perhaps that is the issue that the film is addressing: that there are still huge swaths of indifference towards sexual harrassment and abuse thorughout the country.

This uneven but funny and engrossing drama is less about Victoria than about time itself: how it slows down in the bleary middle of the night, how it speeds up relationships between strangers when no one else is around, how capacious it is in containing the most unexpected of swerves and stumbles.

In a sense, Dos Estaciones creates its own gripping shot-chaser cycle of moods, the accumulative effect of landscape beauty, grim news, observed process (the machinery of making tequila), and abiding solemnity from Sánchez’s commanding turn, giving us plenty to digest when the incident-heavy final stretch occurs.

For a debut documentary filmmaker the former 'Xena: Warrior Princess' star makes tough choices and makes them boldly, and her film is more complicated and engrossing for it.

Without ever leaving the bar, Blue Moon offers a snapshot of wartime America expressed wholly through shifting public tastes (and the attending egos left shattered.)

Strays is trying to be offensive, and at some point it’ll probably hit your gag reflex (your mileage might vary on when), but it’s also very funny and, in its odd and exceptionally crude way, kinda sweet.

As with most documentaries drawn from books, it feels like you’re getting the Reader’s Digest condensed version, handy for those who have 90 minutes to spare but no substitute for the real thing.

Reynolds has this drily ironic fourth-wall business down pat, and Savage makes for an entertaining foil.

There’s an inherent push and pull to Bodies Bodies Bodies, a movie that wants to be a send-up for a certain type of young person but also doesn’t want to be “about” much of anything. The horror genre has fallen victim to Big Important Theme–ism of late, and it’s a relief that “Bodies Bodies Bodies” doesn’t descend into a lecture (in fact, it descends into many funny, insincere ones instead). But it all doesn’t amount to very much at all.

Funny and honest in equal measures, like a good stand-up routine, Standing Up, Falling Down uses a light touch to teach us there’s always more to learn.

We’re watching extremely talented artists try to accomplish something grand and potentially embarrass themselves in the process, and it works because they’re committed to taking that risk.

My Golden Days is lovely and thoughtful, yet it has elements of a thriller, too.

Black Widow reminds us of the pleasure that can be offered by an MCU movie that isn’t having to do the legwork of setting up the next five chapters.

Even as a doomy voice coming from the shadows, Orson Welles is a formidable presence, and Dennis Hopper a provocative, beguiling one. Their filmed conversation may be more of a curiosity than anything else, but it’s a challenging and occasionally intoxicating curiosity.

It’s hard to watch September 5 without feeling some serious ambivalence – but in a way, that’s one of the strengths of the film, because it embraces that ambivalence as a necessary part of the story.

It’s Diane von Fürstenberg’s life and I’m not even sure the rest of us get to live in it. We’re just allowed to peek through the window and be dazzled.

So it’s not an instant classic like The Invisible Man. I think we can all live with that. It’s still a scary and interesting movie about a wolf man, anchored by a haunting performance from Abbott, who understood the assignment and went for extra credit.

It’s a bold and stylish work that slips in and out of fantasy and isn’t afraid to use music and sound design as a weapon, but it can also get relentlessly dreary and oppressive, albeit by design.

It requires, and ultimately rewards, patience.

If we absolutely must have another “Matrix” movie, if we can’t just let it be, then let it be this weird one. Let it be a film with an existential crisis. Let it be a film that’s half a nostalgia cash-in and half a biopic about a filmmaker who’s forced to make a nostalgia cash-in.

Clay Tweel’s Gleason documents the agony and the ecstasy of its subject’s life, and is similarly exceptional in its avoidance of the cliches so common among inspiring documentaries.

This disturbing riff on 'The Country Girl' (the country ghoul?) never seems anything less than earnest and sometimes — all puns intended — a little confessional.

Benson and Moorhead direct and shoot their film smartly, but their performances are what ground it and give it shape. It’s Benson’s moping alienation and Moorhead’s desperate need to believe in something — no matter how nonsensical, even if he knows he’s making it up himself — that resonate.

Mortal Kombat II isn’t the best Mortal Kombat movie, but it’s hard to deny that it comes second. At least with the number 2 and all.

A cluttered mess with a boring storyline but the action is often amazing, and there’s a genuine sense of humor to all its weird duels to the death. That’s something that’s been absent from the self-serious John Wick movies for far too long — an acknowledgement of their own wackiness.

It helps that the voice cast is spot-on, that the animals themselves – none real, all CG – are seamlessly rendered and that Cranston underplays a character who could be much broader, funnier and less affecting.

It’s attractively filmed and, mostly, solidly performed, taking some historical liberties but otherwise getting the gist of the tale out in the open for new generations to discover and appreciate.

It feels as though [Loznitsa] has wrangled an entire uprising’s personality into bite-sized pieces.

The Forever Purge sometimes loses its focus, but at its best, it’s still a riveting, violent, disturbing projection of how far America could backslide into the nation’s worst impulses.

If, for whatever reason, 63 UP were the last, it would be a perfectly satisfying summing-up of what’s proven to be the surest motive for any of its participants to keep filling us in on their personal lives, issues of class and destiny be damned — they did it because time, love, and just enough fortune allowed it.

The Rental tries to do a lot of things and succeeds partway in most of them. But as a relationship drama it gets sidetracked and as a horror film it doesn’t go full gonzo, except perhaps in the emotional sense.

Chandor’s film isn’t malleable enough to fit into the moral grey zones into which it ventures; it’s too battle-hardened for that. But it’s an ambitious and absorbing above-average thriller with something deeper on its mind, making this sometimes somber journey worthwhile.

It should come with little surprise that Ferrari astounds when Mann’s focus narrows to pure gear-head reverie; unfortunately, in between the film’s narrative engine often sputters and stalls.

Short of dropping onto the Rainbow Road ourselves there is no experience closer to being fully immersed in one of the world’s most beloved video games. Pair that with some great comedic moments and swoon-worthy visuals and it looks like The Super Mario Bros. Movie might just make a real mark on the feature animation world.

Eva Longoria’s directorial debut about the power of identity and resilience is too much fun to miss out on in spite of whether or not the real story holds weight.

Where Bay’s movies where incoherent messes that necessitated heaps of migraine meds, Caple Jr. actually manages to pull off something articulate and rousing with “Rise of the Beasts,” thanks in large part to the ever-relatable presences of Fishback and Ramos, and a parting note that’s just witty enough in its suggestion of a bigger universe.

So what if it could be a little shorter? The length of the journey makes RZA’s destination more meaningful.

This is a film with an agenda in mind, granted, but it’s too witty and too heartfelt to be dismissed as a mere public service announcement. Audiences may get a message out of this message movie, but they’ll also get a movie.

Let Him Go is a tense genre piece that finds room to build out its characters, and their flaws, between bursts of action and suspense; it’s a tricky combination, but Bezucha manages the balance with real skill.

It’s a whole lot of pretty good and not a lot of amazing, but hey, remember how Tyriq Withers also starred in Him? No one can say they got the title wrong.

This slight-but-winning confection will have little effect on the controversial director’s galvanizing public image but, after a string of stuffy disappointments, Coup de Chance will offer comfort to the filmmaker’s many completists – especially given Allen’s intimation that this 50th film might well be his last.

Beast is a toothsome survival thriller, competently crafted and engagingly realized. There are far worse ways to spend 93 minutes in a movie theater, but audiences hankering for something with some actual substance may be left feeling hungry on mane.

Perhaps it’s a way for Hansen-Løve to show the way artists pick from their own lives, or maybe it’s a way to muddy the meta waters even more. That ambiguity does not always work to the benefit of a film that always teeters on the brink of self-indulgence, mind you.