Often draped over each other like a pair of gorgeous statues, O’Donnell and Corrin strike palpable chemistry throughout, selling both their desire for one another and the consequent love born out of it believably.

The Circle has a sincerity and an honesty that shames far more expensive but over-polished dramas. Plenty of movies have happy endings; The Circle shows you both the happy ending and the incredibly hard work it took to get there.

Made of equal parts mourning and melancholy, mystery, and possibly madness, the striking Tom at the Farm showcases Dolan’s abundant talents at turning seemingly simple material into a taut, tough film.

They're thematically richer and more tonally cohesive than their hybrid. But because the two films are so similar to one another, they fail to deliver on the promise of their unique structure, rendering the “he said, she said” complementary design of the two films a dull, self-indulgent gimmick.

Even with a completely unrealistic premise, and a handful of trope problems, Long Shot is still charming enough to bring the laughs, the escapism, and the twitterpation that any great romantic comedy can provide.

The unspoken joke of the title is that this movie really wants to be called “Freaky Friday the 13th,” which is not a bad starting point, but the line dividing gory violence and farcical hilarity — which Landon has skillfully walked in the past — gets too blurry for the movie’s own good.

It’s just that while you can’t see any of the strings being used on the effects, you can see the story being manipulated. You may fall in love with Ochi all the same, but you can only wish you’d gone on a richer journey together.

If incoming director James Wan (“The Conjuring,” “Saw”) falls the tiniest bit short of what Justin Lin brought to the third, fifth and sixth entries, Furious 7 nonetheless ranks a very successful fourth place overall, with at least one gargantuan set piece that ranks among the series’ finest.

Even those who object to Bowers’ revelations may find themselves unexpectedly empathetic to his life story, and that’s thanks to Tyrnauer’s compassion. There’s plenty of gossip to be found here, but there’s also no shortage of humanity.

What Whannell wants most to do is torment and eventually pulverize most of the people in his narrative orbit and make you laugh while he does so.

The Freedom to Marry is a movie that discourages complex thinking or contradiction, but there are little hints here and there of something more frightening and unstable.

What sets it apart from other overpraised festival indies is its tremendously gifted lead.

There is wit and there are explosions, and while none of them represent a step above “Guardians of the Galaxy,” neither do they impugn the memory of one of the freshest and most fun of the Marvel movies.

It’s not only his best film yet, but it’s the work he’s been building up to over his entire career.

There is some humor to be found here, of course, and a bit of exploration of the sheer boredom of being trapped for days inside four white walls, and moments of real connection between Bahari and both his family and the political revolutionaries he gets to know on the street. But Stewart doesn't pursue any of these ideas enough to stick, resulting in a film that relates incidents without ever really telling much of a story.

If this is the end of the 'Mission: Impossible' movies, they ended on an adequate note.

Ultimately this intimate, affectionate biography underscores an essential truth about the fashion industry, Talley’s work, and the life that he built out of what might seem like the unlikeliest circumstances: “Fashion is fleeting. Style remains.”

There’s a great deal to enjoy here, and fans of “Black Panther” won’t necessarily leave feeling disappointed, but there’s a sense of strong elements not quite coming together.

While Chevalier is by no means terrible, it seems like such a huge missed opportunity for an important historical figure to have finally gotten his due.

Gender inequality may be a potentially complicating factor when it comes to sexual trauma (i.e., men can also be abused by women), but that provocative conceit isn’t considered with much care or intelligence.

Though the religious component is written broadly, the impact is hardly more surreal than many elements of 21st-century reality.

If The Peanuts Movie never quite reaches the melancholy of earlier films like “A Boy Named Charlie Brown” and “Snoopy Come Home,” it nonetheless respects the importance of failure and disappointment that Schulz always included in his storytelling.

Strong casting keeps the film thriving through its many winding subplots.

“Girl” might be the most inadvertently appropriate analog to life in 2017’s increasingly unstable world, by suggesting that it may very well become necessary to co-exist with ongoing terror, especially if the only other option is walking directly into the path of a flesh-eating pack.

The Way I See It is a marvelous portrait of Souza and of two administrations that not coincidentally also works as a scathing rebuke of Donald Trump. It is decidedly not a film for Trump fans, but others may well find themselves moved and saddened by the contrasts between then and now.

No Man of God may have been written by a man, but you can’t help feeling the reason this umpteenth examination of a modern devil works as well as it does is because, as a woman, Sealey knows where the exploitation traps are and avoids them by focusing on the people in her frame, their exchanges well-paced by editor Patrick Nelson Barnes.

The balance between the humanistic and academic is way off.

Barker’s fly-on-the-wall approach eschews showy grandstanding and divisive biases. So there’s a better-than-usual chance that viewers on both sides of the aisle will find themselves moved.

The scale in which Fukada works — as both writer and director — is so deliberately intimate that immense experiences feel microcosmic, while tiny moments make a huge impact.

Smile 2 is more of the same. A lot more. But it’s just as scary, and this time it’s feistier and funnier, proving that the premise has legs and also some malleability.

Lost Girls is a story that works much better if you do a Google search before watching it, not after, since it offers a lot of convenient human truths, but not enough hard facts.

Whether the love story completely works or not, ChaO is such a visual wonder that it hardly matters.

With its combination of workplace sitcom and social activism, Barbershop: The Next Cut feels more like a binge-viewing of multiple episodes of a TV series than a movie, but even on that level, it’s a show worth watching.

The Book of Life manages to be genuinely surprising and engrossing.

What truly anchors Save Yourselves! is the specificity of the two leads and the sharpness with which Mani and Reynolds perform the roles.

The Contestant wants you to be entertained and it wants you to feel bad about being entertained. It pretty much succeeds on both counts.

Ferragamo’s story is a complex intersection, touching on early-20th-century immigration, youthful ambition, the dawn of Hollywood, passionate artistic hunger, tenacity, foot fascination and wild innovation.

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

The film doesn’t take an extra step towards cinematic showiness, nor does it glamorize or sensationalize Berg’s life. It’s just a nice time talking about World War II and baseball, sharing stories and retelling old jokes. It’s a respectable ode to Berg’s unusual, remarkable life.

Mr. Holmes may not be the biggest or boldest recent updating of Sherlock, but McKellen’s performance alone is almost reason enough to see it on the big screen.

When viewed with both eyes open, Worth is a thematically confusing motion picture, no matter how good the acting is. If the film exists to sell us on how great the fund was, it blew it, because we’re left with troubling and unanswered questions. If the film exists to raise those questions, it cops out by resorting to treacly melodrama. And it cannot effectively do both.

Unlike “Spy,” which took great pains to make its cloak-and-dagger shenanigans as exciting, and thematically meaningful, as the raucous comedy around it, A Simple Favor is like two different movies, a sophisticated sisterhood lark you want more of, and a ho-hum buried-secrets murder mystery getting in the way of your good time.

It’s easy to appreciate the ambition of Gaines’ new take on Dutchman, but the original tale is fighting back, and it’s got the upper hand.

By the end, a part of the experience makes one wonder what sharper point Kravitz is trying to make beyond the obvious ones — and it’s clear she wants to say something — while another part simply wants to lean into the audacious experiment she’s crafted. One where the film’s tart bite is remarkably thrilling, even if there’s some hollowness to its center.

It’s cohesive and cathartic enough to make a fourth entry unnecessary, but at the same time, it’s entertaining and gorgeous enough to make the prospect of same something to welcome.

A film about adult problems that preys on adult fears, made for audiences with an attention span and high standards.

Giving the film credit where it’s due, Wonder never cheats in its pursuit of emotion. It’s never mawkish or manipulative, and its characters are so well-established both in the writing and in the performances that the movie ultimately does the hard work of earning those damp Kleenexes.

What Coogan and Brydon are doing in these films is an acquired taste, but if they want to continue on doing them then they’re going to need to cut down and edit their interminable actor impressions.

The Wind might not quite succeed as a frontier-set “The Witch,” but it certainly signals the arrival of a promising talent bound to find her voice in due course.

A unique take on one of the most painful and important parts of being human, the film is original and honest. Even knowing very little about the traditions of Hasidic Judaism, it was easy to relate to the very human element of finding a connection that ultimately leads to healing.

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.

Earl and Hayward developed these characters first as a live stand-up show and then in a short film, and natural chemistry and cheeky rapport make “Brian and Charles” a laugh-out-loud comedy.

It’s all great fun, even if there’s no central performance as riveting as Cho’s in “Searching.” Then again, acting in movies like this is an admittedly uphill battle, one that Reid is better at when not having to rely on the occasionally tinny dialogue. Long, Leung and de Almeida, meanwhile, fill the tapestry of intrigue efficiently and appealingly.

There’s a goofy spree of a movie buried deep within Sausage Party, but it’s missing both the spree and the goofs. This comedy needed to be a lot smarter if it wanted to succeed at being this stupid.

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

The Pass is finally nothing more than a modest stage adaptation and a vehicle for Tovey, but on that level it is focused and skillful.

The heart of the film is in the connection between a 12-year-old boy and an 86-year-old woman, and Loren and Gueye make that relationship rich and touching enough to give life to the movie that surrounds it.

Though Peterloo brims with 19th century authenticity, from its hardscrabble interiors and stately halls of power to the quiet beauty of its rural scenes, it’s no costumes-and-decor drama — Leigh’s focus is on the rhythms of talk in all the ways it influences: as rant, argument, posturing, strained politeness, open skepticism, and full-on performance.

If you can get swept up in a big old-fashioned war picture, Devotion has some of the goods. It’s an incredibly handsome production, and the central performance by Jonathan Majors, as real-life aviator Jesse L. Brown, is layered and impressive.

May very well be [Lithgow's] creepiest performance since Brian De Palma’s “Raising Cain” — and that’s saying something.

The truth is that “Rocky IV” and Creed II sharing the same cinematic universe requires supreme suspension of disbelief. But taken as descendants of the original, “Rocky IV” is the delinquent you never talk about, while Creed II at least knows how to keep the family business humming.

There’s enough good-naturedness and cultural specificity here, alongside a slight deviation from the usual immigrant narratives, to render it a dollop of sweetness and novelty that goes down easy.

In this time for movies about teens in trouble, it’s the mom in this one who packs the biggest punch.

An atheist’s inverse Balthazar, Wiener-Dog witnesses and experiences suffering but cannot transform that pain into anything substantive, nor can she redeem those around her.

The Founder never steps up to become the biting satire of American capitalism it so begs to be. The film is not here to praise Ray Kroc, but neither is it here to bury him.

If you strip away the things that make this such an unusual release in such an unusual year, you’ll find a pretty good movie and one that approaches this story with heart and with fresh eyes.

A documentary that sends up more red flags than a MAGA rally, You Cannot Kill David Arquette is nonetheless a robust (albeit bloody) piece of entertainment. And it’s also a character study of a guy who’s revealing himself to us regardless of whether what we’re seeing is reality or construction.

Chilly yet compassionate, anchored by both a characteristically deep-set portrait of off-putting intelligence from Peter Sarsgaard and a poignant turn by Rashida Jones, it’s a delicate oddity that won’t necessarily replace any of your favorite cinematic New York couplings, but it’ll remind you why we often respond to an unlikely pairing built around smarts, sadness and hope.

Sasquatch Sunset is sometimes hilarious, often unique, and otherwise forgettable.

Bumblebee is, again and easily, the best “Transformers” movie. Heck, it’s probably the only genuinely good “Transformers” movie, with nary a caveat to be found. But it’s also a lively and earnest 1980s nostalgia trip, made with affection for the era and its characters and its soundtracks and its storytelling styles and, yes, even its toys.

Bajestani is believably repellent as someone whose split lives as an obsessive loner and respected family man are disturbingly concordant. And Nadim Carlsen’s gritty camerawork pushes the film’s sense of grim social realism further still, providing a viscerally authentic horror. Abbasi doesn’t seem to realize, though, that he’s creating much of that horror himself.

It’s inarguable that some fans, somewhere, will relish every detail.

Unless you’re coming to the material with the experience of, say, Steven Spielberg, “violent war biopic” and “inspirational animal drama” are a tricky combo. So while it’s perhaps no surprise that director Gabriela Cowperthwaite struggles to weave these disparate threads together in Megan Leavey, she ultimately does her heroes — both of them — proud.

There’s no denying that Driver — with film after film cementing his status as a top-tier actor — is excellent at exasperated outrage, but it’s not enough emotion to save The Report from feeling like a handsomely mounted, expertly researched op-ed.

Neugebauer, Lawrence and Henry deliver an unhurried gem that might feel slight but always feels right.

Jeffrey McHale’s feature debut, the Showgirls appreciation documentary “You Don’t Nomi,” works awfully hard to justify both its subject and its mission. But if you instantly appreciated the cleverness of its title, you’ll enjoy commiserating with fellow travelers.

The bothersome and irritating thing about the way The Midwife is written is that we keep hearing detail after detail and story after story about the shared history between Claire and Béatrice, but we never get a solid idea of what that history was.

While the digital effects are undeniably contemporary, Crimson Peak is otherwise a period homage that mostly plays like a period film, rarely giving in to contemporary notions of pacing and payoff. When the scares do arrive, however, they’re effectively unsettling.

While it doesn’t come together seamlessly, there are wonderful moments between Dinklage and Bennett, even Harrison Jr. and Mendelsohn have their moments to shine. Perhaps it’s why this version of Cyrano felt so bittersweet, leaving the audience with a sense of what might have been.

The Kid Who Would Be King is a charming story of fantasy, pop-culture references and myth-making. It’s a movie with the playful camaraderie of “Goonies” and a few elements from ’80s sagas — like “Labyrinth,” “E.T.: The Extra-Terrestrial,” “The NeverEnding Story” and “Legend” — where young people go on character-building adventures.

Director Tom Hooper shakes things up a bit with The Danish Girl, proving that he’s capable of making a movie that’s both steeped in awards-season prestige and in possession of a pulse.

Fast and funny, filled with memorable characters, and able to balance slapstick and violence without spilling too far in either direction, this frenetic R-rated farce is that rare comic gem that lands on all the spaces without ever going to jail.

Somehow, through the alchemy of acting and makeup and lighting and costuming, all traces of Zellweger are erased, and only Judy remains.

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.

Admittedly, it’s pretty easy to consume Wonka. After all, it’s just a piece of candy. But it’s the kind of candy that would make Willy Wonka sick to his stomach. Wonka is the sort of safe and corporate product that the hero of Wonka says we shouldn’t settle for.

Blanchett, as you’d imagine, is riveting, even when she’s saddled with the movie’s on-the-nose dialogue, not to mention a handful of fairly contrived domestic scenes.

In both the writing (in collaboration with Jean-Stéphane Bron) and directing, Alice Winocour is careful and clever in how she dispenses information.

Crumbling nuclear families are a well-worn movie genre; you could even add “in Manhattan” to that description and the examples would be many. “Landline” is simply another one, not appreciably worse than the average, but not much better, either.

What The Gospel of Eureka does best is humanize this small and very specific group of people living on the fringes of the Christian and queer communities. They’re given the space to talk about their lives in their own words, praise the town they love so much, and preach empathy, particularly to those without any.

Director Ivie, one of the co-founders of Arbella Studios, focuses on faith and social justice, and “Emanuel” perhaps best embodies those two tenets without seeming like it’s proselytizing. But the movie is strongest when it just lets its subjects talk with no agenda at hand.

Pieces of a Woman is grounded and intensely personal. Much of that is due to the towering and heartbreaking performance by Kirby.

The most serious problem in The Sky Is Everywhere is that Nelson’s screenplay has Lennie getting upset with people and generally freaking out in almost every scene, and this becomes irritating and monotonous because she is the central figure in the movie.

Unhinged and witty, Slack Bay is one of those rare movies that looks like it was fun to make, and is even more fun to watch.

Baumbach’s textural/visual/sonic approach is stylish enough that even when White Noise is just churning along, there’s always a keen detail to absorb or killer observation to take in, if not an emotion to latch onto.

The tonal juggling act isn’t always seamless, but in a way, the contradictions are what give Roofman its life. It’s a sad movie, really, but it’s also a lot of fun. And if that doesn’t make sense, maybe it’s the whole point.

Ali and Harris give Swan Song a powerful emotional honesty that’s consistently undermined by the film’s poorly developed intellectual conceits, but their combined talents are almost enough to justify this film’s existence alone.

Ultraman: Rising is a contender for best animated movie of the year, one of the best superhero movies in years, and one of the all-time greatest American adaptations of a Japanese franchise.

Gillespie’s snappy direction and Kirk Baxter’s nimble editing capture the chaotic and irreverent online culture without necessarily disrupting or distracting from the main stories.