Fancifully heartfelt, Ride Your Wave doesn’t constitute his top effort, but it’s inviting enough to persuade audiences unfamiliar with him to dip their feet and then fully dive into the profundity of his imagination, where wonder awaits.

The film is a slickly-executed piece, an enjoyable but almost unbearably twisty puzzle box of narrative fun, but once everything slots together the box is unfortunately empty.

The new movie’s twists can only exist if they don’t contradict the previous films, so only a few surprises are even possible and those surprises can only happen in unsurprising ways.

Wild Diamonds is a character study both of Liane and of the culture that has spawned her, and a film that manages to be both empathetic and unforgiving. It won’t make you think she’s making smart choices, but you’ll understand why she’s making bad ones.

The Phantom of the Open tries so hard to be a winking commentary on British heartwarmers about lovable outsiders. And its efforts are, as often as not, entertaining. But after a while, it becomes clear that what it wants more than anything is to be embraced as a crowd-pleasing comedy itself.

Brice’s script boasts a few surprises, but this is essentially a highly competent film about boring people’s boring problems.

In some ways, Safdie’s approach seems casual and grounded rather than pumped up, though it’s also raw both physically and emotionally.

There are really two contending films inside Swallow that, if given the opportunity and the space to do so, could have been fascinating as separate entities.

[Cox and Hirsch] add depth and dimension to the mystery they’re trying to unravel, even and especially as they unwittingly become part of it.

Matt Shakman has done something Marvel Studios doesn’t do very well anymore. He’s made a superhero movie that embraces the 'super' part. And the 'hero' part. And the 'movie' part.

The film can’t decide if it wants to be truly bizarre, which is when it’s funniest, or simple and sweet, when it’s the most dramatically effective. These aren’t the worst problems for a movie to have.

Cannan and Adam approach the outlandish crime as a puzzlement, all but wondering aloud how two celebrities could be stolen from public life and turned into a dictator’s puppets.

The movie’s real showcase gold lies in the magnetic appeal of screwball comedy natural Erskine (Hulu’s “PEN15”); she’s a major talent who rightly runs away with the movie, conjuring in the viewer’s head a constellation of wishful star turns to come.

Please Baby Please may pay homage to queer aesthetics, but it fails to make any coherent points about gender or sexuality.

While director Reece has some 20 films to his credit in the last decade alone, it appears that he still doesn’t quite have a handle on either plot or pacing.

Miloni and Rafi’s shy romance becomes sweet because of, not despite, the languid pace of its development.

On one hand this reads like a Chaucer story, albeit a modern one that tackles topics even Chaucer would have struggled with. On the other, arch is still arch, so it may be hard for some audiences to appreciate Jackman’s wavelength.

The Rover is less an allegory than a suggestion how bad things could become. It's well made, and it's disturbing, if not overly passion inducing.

The women’s movements are routinely and depressingly ignored by the movies. But Suffragette isn’t just a dutiful corrective, a lid to cover up a gap, but a necessarily distressing exploration of how much a political vanguard will push and endure to set things right — and how fiercely and eagerly a society that’s resistant to change will punish them for it.

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.

Though the strong performances of Nélisse and Wiggins are key to convince you that they not only care for each other but are capable of thinking on their feet, it’s Paxton who must deliver sufficient menace to propel the story — and he’s terrifying.

In Álvarez’s final flourish, the film finally forges its own identity, pushing the franchise into a territory that it has yet to go in before. It might not stick the landing — and in some ways it feels altogether silly — but the twist plays so well into the gloriously indulgent mashup play that the film runs on that, by then, you’re just happy to be on the rollercoaster ride.

There’s a lot to like here, from a rich palette of autumn colors to a potentially provocative subplot that will teach children that nations need to acknowledge and atone for their historical sins, but in the final tally, this is a sequel that exists not because there was more story to be told but because there was more money to be made.

As a fantasy, Gretel & Hansel is a delectably smart concoction, thoughtfully reevaluating the original tale, adding all-new layers of the ominous, and yet also keeping the story rooted in an amorphous, fairy tale past. As a horror movie, Perkins’ movie relies more on disquietude than external threat, and demands a thoughtful audience’s mental energies instead of a rowdy audience’s popcorn-spilling flinches.

Along with an ending that some will find either enigmatic or unsatisfying, the movie could benefit from some minor re-editing. But there’s still much that works here, from the chillingly droning score to a uniformly strong cast.

Another star-making performance by Mia Goth — surely she’s a star now, right? How many star-making performances does it take? — and a trip back to the seedier side of a decade that’s been sanitized within an inch of its life by condescending corporate exploitation.

Even if you think you’ve seen this movie before, Headland’s gift for outrageous dialogue... and Sudeikis and Brie’s comic chemistry make Sleeping with Other People a treat from start to finish.

Casablanca Beats argues that the power of personal expression can turn the world on its head. And for a good spell, the film does just that.

The buoyancy and electricity of Give Me Future will no doubt win Major Lazer new converts, but the film also offers hope that political and social gaps can always be bridged. Especially when there’s a good beat, and you can dance to it.

It’s a character study, a moody atmospheric piece of contemplation with one character who, through interacting with others, unseen, on the phone comes away with a grander understanding of self. We, as the audience, come away with a grander understanding of our own interactions and how life changes without us ever knowing about it.

Captain Marvel, the first Marvel adaptation both to star a woman and to be co-directed by a woman, is an obvious, crude, and transparent film. And it’s also quite enjoyable and evocative — most of the time.

It’s easy to see what attracted Fraser to this material, since it’s almost mechanically designed to make him look good as an actor, and enchanting as a star.

An intimate and sensual and highly forking successful debut from Amrou Al-Kadhi.

An average scene in Confess, Fletch features several different kinds of humor, including callbacks, running jokes, physical comedy, and character-driven wordplay, all of which either flatter the individual actors or show off how well they work with their co-stars.

It’s overly ambitious, it has too many characters, and it tries to do too much. But there is also a lot here that feels fresh and original, particularly in the first half, which takes in a lot of new territory — both thematic and geographic — with a pleasing light touch.

When all the puzzle-like pieces come together, the movie’s characters, story, score and emotions soar. The pace of that progress may feel slow, but things never get too quiet. It’s a movie with a racing pulse, and you can feel its heart in every frame.

From the glossiness of the art direction from Cheryl Marion (“The Predator”) to the magnetic chemistry of the cast (which also includes the always reliable Michelle Buteau as Sasha’s assistant) and the mouth-watering cuisine, Always Be My Maybe is a delightful, funny, and wonderfully layered romp that’s smart enough to break traditional rom-com rules.

There’s not a lot of clarity here, but there is a terrible, strange beauty in the film’s mixture of ritual, magic, faith and the dark side of colonialism. By the end New Boy has a name, but his identity remains elusive.

The most impressive element of Wolfgang is the amount of ground it manages to cover in 78 minutes without ever seeming to rush over anything.

It’s not bad, guys. But guys, it’s not good.

Bombshell is overpacked and unwieldy and often disconnected. There’s so much going on that no character gets the time she deserves.

Belle's extraordinary intelligence is most evident in its slow but satisfying disentanglement of the jumble of privileges and disadvantages that the wealthy, aristocratic, and learned — but also female, half-black, and pitifully sheltered — Dido embodies.

So what does Guadagnino’s version convey? Boredom, mostly, with confusion and a dollop of disappointment and irritation.

If Swiss Army Man were a silent, scoreless effort, presented as otherworldly slapstick, or if it had employed Lil Jon to yell some obliquely connected, thematic exhortations and non sequiturs, it might have reached the heights of its music video predecessor. As it plays out, though, it smells a little too much like teen spirit.

Miscalculations aside, however, there’s a brutal wit and audacity to Ready or Not that makes it feel one-of-a-kind in an increasingly safe mainstream marketplace.

If “The Great Beauty” was a heady, humming party you wanted to live inside, Youth — its melancholy and splendor too often at odds — never rises above feeling like a pretty, meandering gallery show.

Silva does manage to introduce discomfort slowly, but the manner in which things go very, very wrong is dealt with superficially.

Hawke is terrific as the jazz legend, so soft-spoken that he sometimes appears a little frightened of the people around him.

There’s enough energy and flash, though, to overcome most nit-picking, and Butler throws himself into a performance that’s wildly physical but never cartoonish or disrespectful. (The movie respects Presley, who deserves it, but not Parker, who doesn’t.)

Each time you think you’re seeing the daylight of something potentially better to explore on the horizon, “Buddy” keeps dragging you back into the banal darkness. Like the kids, you deserve far better than whatever this lackluster production amounts to.

Holy Hell — despite its unprecedented access — finds itself oscillating back and forth between mediocrity and illumination.

Subject matter alone makes Pick of the Litter, if not especially memorable, a gently lovable outing.

There’s spectacle aplenty — you, go, Sir Ridley Scott — but the overall effect of this dry, unintentionally funny epic is far from spectacular.

Downsizing sees Payne and Taylor working on a larger palette than usual, but like their shrunken characters, the filmmakers’ humor and their sharp observation of the human condition have survived the change in size and scope.

All comedy is subjective, of course, and Barb & Star Go to Vista Del Mar is aggressive in being true to itself and its own vision. Those not on board will roll their eyes and wonder what the fuss is about, while fans will watch it repeatedly, quote it forever, and dress as the characters for Halloween.

Marvelous and the Black Hole proves to be a small marvel of an indie gem and an assured debut for Tsang.

What prevents this life-affirming account from turning boringly saccharine is the caliber of humanity that Hawkins lends Philippa.

This isn't disposable popcorn entertainment, or a winking “war” film like “Inglourious Basterds.” Ayer's aim here is a film that will stick, and stick with you. And he achieves it.

Noxon, a TV veteran making her directorial debut here, had suffered from an eating disorder herself, as did the film’s star, Lily Collins. It’s surprising, then, that the script offers only generalities instead of any real insight.

This cut makes a film that felt like a failure into one of Coppola’s very best pictures. This movie is a feast with all the trimmings, and then some.

That this is Bonilla’s feature directorial debut makes one only hope she keeps making comedies like this, as every escalation, cutaway, and lighting cue is perfectly executed. Doug may be a terrible director, but she proves to be a great one.

Rather than take the time to let us really get to know and understand its complicated title character, the movie instead goes for cheap, gotcha plotting that undermines the entire project.

Feeling simultaneously overstuffed and undercooked, Lorcan Finnegan’s Vivarium tries to ring a warning bell about, well, a lot of things. In the end, though, it works best as a cautionary tale about the pitfalls of filmmakers biting off more than they can chew.

Despite its missteps, Coming Through the Rye is a sweet and inviting road trip.

Come to Daddy has twists galore, not to mention a heavy dose of gore, but the further it drifts from its initial understated dynamic, the less each successive development seems to matter.

It finally matters very little that The Happy Prince is haphazardly written and awkwardly directed because Everett is an intelligent man who has a deep imaginative connection to Wilde and his wit and his cruising and his whole worldview.

There are individual pieces of the movie that work wonderfully.... Unfortunately, this is also the kind of movie where talented actors do some of their least notable work.

Suffice it to say that while Mockingjay, Part 1 might not be as consistently thrilling as “Catching Fire” — the second movie always has the luxury of being all PB&J and no crust — it's the movie equivalent of a page-turner, consistently suspenseful and filled with surprises and illuminating character moments.

American exceptionalism certainly deserves to be deconstructed, but that can most assuredly be accomplished with a lot more nuance than it is here. As an exercise in liberal self-flagellation, hey, whatever floats your boat. But as a political call-to-arms, I believe in America: We can do better.

It’s impressive to see Orley mask the shiny simplicity of Big Time Adolescence in finely-calibrated performances and observant, mostly realistic dialogue, but the disguise falls apart after a while.

Directors Roman Chimienti and Tyler Jensen have packed the film with as much social context as possible, and they view as many sides of this story as they can in a fast-paced, engaging style. There are interviews with academics and drag queens and fans of the horror genre, and this gives the movie a wide-ranging perspective that helps us better understand the moving personal story at its core.

For all the emotional resonance and action-packed blockbuster mayhem in Guardians of the Galaxy Volume 3, it’s still got a lot of impish nonsense, jarring tonal shifts, and enough morbidity and outright gore that it’s now abundantly clear that the PG-13 rating doesn’t mean anything more. This is a movie that will probably traumatize some kids and maybe a few adults.

There’s no denying that the tale of Colin Warner, a man who spent decades behind bars for a crime he didn’t commit, is a powerful one, but writer-director Matt Ruskin doesn’t give us anything here that a documentary couldn’t do better.

Us Kids is a needed reminder that issues don’t go away just because something else is getting today’s headlines.

It’s one of the best, most deeply felt and most gorgeously animated features of the year. On this or any other planet.

If you’re a diehard fan, you’ll probably glory in what the film delivers and wish there were more of it; if you’re not, you may find yourself power-chorded into submission sometime before the 2-hour and 17-minute running time comes to an end.

An incredibly direct motion picture, and sometimes the limitations of its budget put a strain on the ambitious multi-decade narrative, but it’s a film — and a cast — that demands thunderous applause anyway.

McMullin’s feel for the setting greatly enhances the story, as does evocative camerawork from Andrew Ellmaker, making his own impressive feature debut. But McMullin’s inexperience as both a writer and director does sometimes hold him back.

This is one of those cases where fictionalizing a true event, or at least fusing two or three real people into one composite character, might have resulted in tighter storytelling.

This is fan service as painstaking as any Marvel installment, and you’re expected to bring your well-studied knowledge of deep bench characters and all your reserve emotional commitment with you. As a reward for those loyal fans, Downton Abbey offers an envelopment in gorgeous and exacting period detail.

Though visually unimpressive, Myers’ film is surprisingly rich and expansive in its ideas.

It's a film that takes its characters and their crises seriously, allowing them to fully explore their situation before providing them (and the audience) a genuine roadmap for finding their way through.

There should be more Crimmins performance footage and fewer interviews that only reiterate points already made several times. Crimmins is preaching to the choir, and the film, while fascinating and inspiring, is at least a half-hour longer than it has story to tell.

One emerges from the theater thinking we may have just had a good time, but the more it sits with you, the more you realize that no matter how epic the battles were — and they certainly were epic — they didn’t have anywhere near the same impact as the original.

It’s a feel-bad film like no other where you have to squint for even the smallest sliver of hope as we, along with the characters, get put through the wringer with little potential for salvation.

Nobody is more violent lark than probing satire, but between Bob Odenkirk’s smartly underplayed performance, the surprises in the screenplay by Derek Kolstad (the “John Wick” series) and the puckishly brutal direction of Ilya Naishuller (“Hardcore Henry”), it’s a wonderfully paced and consistently clever action movie that ups the ante of a genre that’s been dominated by Liam Neeson clones.

Halston is at its most naturally energetic when highlighting career triumphs. It’s packed with archival footage remembering past glamour, and moving contemporary interviews with models like Pat Cleveland, whose own ascendance in the fashion world as one of the first African American models to make a name for herself, went hand in hand with Halston’s paradigm shift.

For most of its running time, it has a palpable B-movie energy that gives a little oomph to the umpteenth cinematic portrayal of humanity’s end.

Once Alverson has ensured that his subtext has been absorbed, he seems uncertain about where to go next.

That miscalculated manner that often transposes Dreamin’ Wild into an overtly psychological zone works against the rest of the film’s gentle demeanor.

Overall, the movie left me feeling bombarded with images, bored by the lack of an interesting story, and irritated with my own cultural past.

The Capote Tapes can feel a bit chaotic and lopsided at times, but it makes clear that Capote is a figure who continues to command the public’s attention.

Ultimately, In a Valley of Violence thrives is in its final 20 minutes. In one of the more impressive sudden upticks in quality by a film in 2016, West seems to finally figure out what kind of a movie he wanted to make: a comedy. The concluding combat sequences are occupied by physical and witty gags.

We Are X is nothing you haven’t seen before as a music documentary, but it succeeds as an examination of why we turn to escapist art, and what we do when it’s no longer there.

It’s a frustratingly superficial, judgmental, surface-level thriller that undermines all its scariest moments by getting distracted at all the wrong times.

It’s a perfectly enjoyable, perfectly forgettable nostalgi-comedy that will be taken to task for not being anything more.

The only annoying thing about Summer of 69 is that this is the exact kind of laugh out loud, emotionally satisfying, share-it-with-a-friend comedy that would probably find a sizable audience in theaters — and instead it’s a Hulu exclusive.