There are some moments where the film clings a bit too heavily to genre tropes, but thankfully, its main focus is on coping with loss and the complexity of grief.

Caught between exalting the glory of his titanic accomplishments and their indelible mark on Black American culture, and figuring him out with only the available pieces of his intimate puzzle, Ailey does succeed at painting him as a complex figure.

Much of what makes Horns so impressive, and such fun to watch, is the film's ability to juggle a variety of genres.

A tidy 73-minute romp through Lewis’ career that manages to fit in about a dozen staggering performances of “Whole Lotta Shakin’ Goin’ On” but still leaves you wishing there was room for a couple more.

There are few surprises here.... But that’s okay, because we’re in it for the ride, the company, and the pure pleasure of watching these women, and the actresses playing them, embrace an independence Hollywood doles out too grudgingly.

Surely Ginsburg is far more interesting than her devotees, her enemies, or this film make her out to be.

It’s particularly sad that viewers can’t spend more time in Casey’s world, since newcomer Cobb is this film’s greatest asset.

“Extremely Wicked” winds up a thought-provoking piece of cinema that avoids the easy temptation of shock value in favor of a more philosophical take on a diabolical murderer.

You can think of The Quarry as a subtle thriller, but it’s more of a meditation on guilt, forgiveness and redemption in the West.

Not Going Quietly credibly highlights the “moral stakes” of Barkan’s cause, as one of his colleague says, with a welcome mix of candor and artful consideration.

This light pick-me-up of a flick is as eager to please as Lawrence is to show off her luminous physical comedy skills, elevated by the star’s fiery comic timing and effortless drollness.

The Disneynature movies shouldn't be mistaken for traditional documentary, but if they act as a gateway drug for young children to learn more about the animal kingdom — and to open themselves up to more informative non-fiction cinema — then the films are serving a real purpose.

It’s far from perfect and is at its brutal best in the final stretch, though it manages to get there in mostly one piece — even when its characters do not.

While The Big Sick isn’t always a complete success — it’s another film bearing the name of Judd Apatow (he produced with Barry Mendel) that could stand to lose 15 or 20 minutes — it’s the kind of sweetly funny love story that’s so bizarre that it has to be real.

What Men Want” obviously doesn’t reinvent the wheel, and its biggest laughs are in the trailers, but it is a fun romp that manages to also confront a real-world issue.

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.

Despite some grim ecological statistics and a conservationist message, the movie is so inspirational it feels like the sort of old-fashioned family film that can now be excavated on Disney+.

Unrepentant, uneven and unique, Da Sweet Blood of Jesus proves that Lee can still make a film worthy of the arguments it will most certainly start.

Fantastic Beasts and Where to Find Them has all the makings of a huge family blockbuster, but all the bloated traps of those, too. It hasn’t quite got the balance right.

The movie is front-loaded with exposition, but once the action gets going and the narrative pieces fall into place, “Bad Hair” is a creepy movie with thoughtful political twists and thrilling supernatural turns.

The Biggest Little Farm is a decent personal narrative film — even inspiring at times — but it could have provided a much-needed educational view and a deeper look at the importance of California’s essential agricultural life.

It does have an intimacy that is rare for Swift, from the opening scene of her playing piano while one of her cats walks across the keyboard to several revealing glimpses of her writing songs in the studio.

Every moment indicates deep compassion for Orna, and anyone else who might be driven to see a multi-layered message movie for the #MeToo era.

While Netflix’s The Christmas Chronicles 2 hits pretty much every note you’d expect, it throws in enough surprises, and deep dives into Yuletide lore, to keep it from being mere tinsel.

Although Kajillionaire fails to fully engage in the same manner as July’s previous dramedies, it’s not entirely unsuccessful as it still compels us to see the people in front of us — not with rushed judgment, but with curiosity for the burdens or joys that have made them who they are. And it makes us chuckle while at it.

Lots of little lessons are interspersed throughout Smurfs: The Lost Village, but the film itself is an example that even the big, powerful, well-paid grown-ups who run movie studios can learn a thing or two.

As eye-opening and propulsive as the movie is, Amer and Noujaim don’t always keep the thread of their multi-faceted narrative, which was going to be a daunting task for any well-meaning filmmaker trying to give you arresting personalities while parsing complex aspects of the digital world.

It is a wholly uncompromising experience that dances with mirth and melancholy. Proving to be evocative in one moment and unrelentingly exhausting in the next, it’s as gorgeous to behold visually as it is hard to completely embrace thematically. And yet, if you abandon yourself to it by the end as one character says, you can catch glimpses of something spectacularly sublime in the vast journey that it takes on.

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.

If the end result is less a comprehensive biography than a long overdue and entirely deserved tribute, it is, nevertheless, truly terrific.

The wistfulness on display is touching and funny, often both at the same time.

The star’s transformation from nebbishy office kid to a frankly imposing skinhead street soldier is unsettling and impressive.

Lieberman’s script really meets kids at their level of understanding, and yes, at times the gags were clichéd and perhaps over some kids’ heads (like Cousin It’s license plate “C U Z”), but the humor isn’t forced, managing to get some chuckles out of the grown-ups too.

Writer-director Hirayanagi runs into a few minor pacing miscalculations, but Oh Lucy!, based on her 2014 short of the same name, is a tense, observant, and heartfelt accomplishment.

The filmmakers have managed to make a bracing, scattered and somewhat revelatory look at a period that’ll go down as a misstep in which the Smart Beatle was fumbling to figure out what to do and intermittently coming up with a satisfactory answer.

You don’t have to be a Deadhead, or even a casual listener, to find in Long Strange Trip a compelling tale of what happens when iconoclasts become icons.

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

Lister-Jones is clearly focused on character, and less so on genre conventions, so “The Craft: Legacy” could turn off some of the first movie’s fan base while simultaneously bringing new fans into the fold. As far as franchise revivals go, this one’s got the right elements.

Gerbase shows talent here, but viewing The Pink Cloud requires nerves of steel that might not be available to even the strongest among us at this particular point in time.

Saccharine is not a film that goes down easy, but you may just find yourself hungering to return for a second course to get a better sense of what James is serving up.

Full-hearted, albeit conventional ... That long first act feels, at times, punishing. ... The drama that plays out in the film’s second half is much more engaging, the script gaining momentum alongside Leslie.

As summer movies go, Logan Lucky is especially tasty bar food, slung by a master.

Minahan has made a film about embracing life when you’re not legally allowed to, and he refuses to make watching it a misery, no matter how rough it gets.

Jason Statham knows how to Jason Statham, and as usual, he Jason Stathams Jason Stathamly.

While not as anarchic or outrageously hilarious as “Teen Titans GO! to the Movies,” this latest all-ages animated adventure from DC Comics and Warner Bros. nonetheless has — and offers — lots of fun with the four-legged counterparts of a Justice League that’s more “Super Friends” than Snyder Cut.

Schwarz piles on more than enough damning interview footage to support his and Katz’s case, making Tantura a better-than-average work of docu-agitprop.

Writer-director Chris Mason Johnson's important, assured drama best succeeds as a snapshot of a moment in time when every gay man is forced to decide how AIDS will change his life.

Maybe the best thing I can say about Hotel Mumbai is that I kept waiting for it to become “Die Hard,” and it thankfully never did.

Smart, entrancing, and filed firmly under interesting, Spaceman is a conversation-starting meditation on the human condition made as a piece of art for audiences to experience rather than being a film made with an audience in mind.

Reset becomes incrementally less interesting as the performance pulls together; although it’s a visual feast to watch dancers in slow-motion executing seemingly impossible moves, the directors can only go to that well so many times before it gets a bit dull.

A Still Small Voice is both universally relevant and as niche as a film can be; only those willing to descend into the depths of grief will seek it out, though it holds wisdom enough to apply to us all.

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.

It’s a sweeping, sweet and unique romance that works across different mediums to deliver something thoughtful that isn’t afraid to wear its heart on its sleeve.

The news is, sadly, all too consumed still with crime story post-mortems about “good kids” who screw up, but at least American Animals wants to leave you wondering about how we tell stories, and whose we tell, rather than simply satisfied you saw one told well.

Bertino and Fanning are deeply committed to going to dark places, and they take us along for their freaky little ride. Whether it makes sense or not. (Probably not.)

If the documentary starts to feel like a blur, that’s exactly how a member of Lil Peep’s entourage describes the experience of living beside someone who rose and fell so quickly.

Indecipherable to a fault but in the end surprisingly hopeful, Zeros and Ones feels like diving into a murky river to search for a missing object, fully aware one might never find it but still willing to get wet in its slush for the sake of trying.

Cretton has made and will make subtler movies, but probably none that will prompt as many mid-screening rounds of applause.

Beauty is in the eye of the beholder, and Chained for Life will have you rubbing your eyes to make sense of what you’ve just seen.

Kudos to everyone here for doing their jobs, and for doing them reasonably well, but the end result of all the effort is a film which, when people talk about How to Train Your Dragon, will eventually be referred to as 'no, not that one.

These Greenland films may not always have a coherent point, but when they focus on the nuts and bolts of survival and the toll that surviving takes on these characters, they’re efficient, effectively crafted genre pictures.

Some movies are movies. Other movies are cocoa. A Merry Little Ex-Mas is the latter.

My Dead Friend Zoe' is a noble film, seemingly honest and open. It’s not a terribly exciting one, and it struggles to justify its modest length, but plot isn’t everything.

It’s that rare action movie that succeeds because it’s challenging and intriguing, which is a nice way of saying that maybe it could have kicked slightly more ass.

Brothers takes a tediously familiar comedy story structure and hangs some genuinely interesting characters and performances on it. It’s like a Frankenstein monster made out of Raising Arizona and Dumb and Dumber To.

It’s not that 'Scream 7' is a bad 'Scream' movie. There are no bad 'Scream' movies (yet). Even the worst one is kind of alright, and this is the worst one.

“First Kill” takes the best part of its predecessor — its camp value — and dials things up to 11, delivering a movie that demands to be seen at rowdy theaters and sleepovers worldwide.

If logic had anything to do with it, that would mean 'Thrash' was a bad movie. But logic has no place in these soggy halls. 'Thrash' may be arbitrary but it’s too energetic to be bad.

How are the action sequences? They’re fun until they feel familiar, and even then they’re still a trip because the long takes demand admiration for the sheer brute exertion at work.

While it’s hard to watch Arkansas and not see its debt to the Coen brothers, Duke finds a voice of his own in quiet, deadpan absurdities and southern-fried eccentricities.

Time and again, Stewart clams up or shuts down when she’d prodded on sensitive subjects; you get the feeling she’s humoring her filmographer with only slightly more restraint than she might show to a kitchen helper who uses the wrong knife to cut an orange.

It’s only in assuming that we care more about Boogie’s athletic journey than his interpersonal relationships that the film falls short.

While it may have started as a spellbinding evening of theater, what Raim’s unfussy, handsomely mounted documentary reinforces is that film is its own spiritually transporting medium, with its own risks and rewards, and its own ability to turn the enjoyment of art into — what else? — tradition!

The right people have been hired, and everyone is where they’re supposed to be. That level of planning makes the heist in Ocean’s 8 run fairly smoothly. As for the film itself, similarly curated with care, it gets the job done without ever being one for the record books.

Never Goin’ Back, which Frizzell has admitted is in ways an honest, personal reckoning with incidents in her own fumbling adolescence, has something many comedies simply fail to care about: a spark-filled joie de vivre about the stupidity of youth that lifts it above many more cynically crass (and typically male) examples of the genre.

At his most memorable, Cronenberg creates viscerally unforgettable images that horrify, yes, but they also provoke with big, shocking ideas about our very selves – the monstrousness of disease, the perhaps inevitable hybrid of the corporeal and the mechanical, the determination of the self. With Crimes of the Future, we’re left with a remove from the material, where no matter what happens, it’s all just performance art.

This new “Jem” might be pure cubic zirconium, but that doesn’t mean it can’t be part of a fun night out.

If the three main draws are too confirmed in respective talents to deliver a subpar performance or a slipshod composition, their shared billing can never quite deliver this film from listlessness.

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.

There are big, loud entertainments like “Mad Max: Fury Road” that I find myself enjoying even with my critical-thinking cap on, and then there are movies like San Andreas that somehow go straight to my lizard brain; this movie’s dumb, and its portrayal of urban devastation borders on the pornographic, but I’d be lying if I said I wasn’t entertained.

Genuinely frightening in stretches and with the creep-o-meter jacked up to 1,000 all the way through, “Bones and All” is somehow more and less than a simple horror flick, and not quite a rambling romance.

Does it all work? Not quite, but you can’t fault a film for its ambition, least of all one that does manage to bring it all together for a deeply moving home stretch.

On the one hand, the story goes pretty much exactly where you think it will, but at the same time, Danny Collins generates its funniest and most dramatic moments precisely when the characters behave more like human beings and less like moving parts of what’s clearly intended to be a feel-good hit.

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.

Writer-director Rian Johnson assembles the makings of a great whodunnit for Knives Out and winds up making a good one. It’s a perfectly entertaining film, but its attributes and apparent ambitions make the results just a bit disappointing.

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.

Set on a remote farm in the Icelandic tundra that could center either a horror film or a children’s fable, Valdimar Jóhannsson’s debut feature — which is sorta both — is in certain ways unexplainable, and in other ways as straightforward as a family portrait.

Viewed under the right conditions — that is to say, late at night, in a certain headspace and surrounded by an audience of fellow travelers ready to take the ride – “Cuckoo” will offer an awful lot of big-screen fun. Only those external factors are nearly necessary to meet an overeager film with only one note to play.

There are some good nuggets here — the leads, the look, the always-scene-stealing Dasha Nekrasova. When Englert goes behind the camera again hopefully she can coalesce her many enthusiasms into one walloping whole.

It’s a story ripped from at least a few years of headlines, and a subject about which there has been much debate. It may or may not come as a surprise, then, that a single two-hour film fails to sufficiently capture its complexities, even working from a compelling premise with a gifted cast.

It’s a film that hits some narrative bumps along the way without diminishing its tougher observations about race, the police, and the treatment of veterans.

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.

Even as a welcome offering to audiences from a broad variety of ethnic and economic backgrounds, Overboard ultimately feels like one of the dinners that Kate assigns Leo to cook for his newfound family — a good effort with a few new surprises to spice up a familiar dish, but nothing special enough to truly transform it into more than a routine meal.

It’s a tricky balance to build a world where characters are both absurd and believable — and on top of that, exist in a world where musical numbers can break out at any time (even the Wonder Wharf carnies get a song) — but Bouchard pulls it off.

Christina Milian and Devale Ellis are adorable. That’s the whole movie in a nutshell. Nothing else has to work in order to get what we need out of it. Pentatonix can’t even play themselves convincingly, at all, and it still doesn’t hurt this thing.

[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.

For all of his self-imposed restraints, Ozon remains a terrific actors’ director, with both Marceau and especially Dussollier giving lively performances that afford the film its limited spark.

At once a darkly comic social satire, a pitch-black moral thriller and an earnest plea to recognize mental illness, The Dinner is a seven-layer dip overflowing with compelling individual ingredients that, when mixed together, make the finished dish awfully difficult to digest.