Nuremberg benefits not only from a terrifying performance from Crowe in a larger-than-life role like those that defined the early part of his career, but also from the ensemble of actors.

Tucked safely away from most of the cinematic universe shenanigans, Blue Beetle is a self-contained and smartly crafted film that ranks among the DCEU’s very best. Even though, admittedly, that doesn’t say nearly as much as it ought to.

Because Munn wisely underplays, she’s able to creep across the high-wire Bateman has stretched out, in which Violet perpetually balances deadpan external calm with overwhelming internal detonation.

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.

Hokey and unconvincing, “Tetris” skims the surface of a genuinely curious “true story” thriller, which too often plays out like a Disney-ified version of “The Social Network.”

Rob Peace isn’t the story of an “Ivy League drug dealer”; it’s the story of a human being who deserved way better than what society gave him.

Inventively, Gilroy utilizes exaggerated horror tropes to take to task our cynical thoughts about artistic creation. His sharp Velvet Buzzsaw is an exquisitely diabolical exposé on the merciless materialistic ambitions that run rampant in cultural fields.

If you can block out that verbal frenzy, though, the last chapters of Antarctica: Ice & Sky are, finally, a compelling narrative (who wouldn’t be interested in the idea of “fossil air?”) and yet another scientific explanation of global warming.

Eisenberg emerges as a restrained filmmaker who has a clear idea of what he wants to communicate, and a clear, unfussy way of delivering it.

It’s an engaging slasher movie amusement park ride – but just like any amusement park ride, it’s not as exhilarating the sixth time around, it probably won’t impress you with its subtext, and you can usually see the ending coming around the bend.

True to its word, Scary Stories to Tell in the Dark delivers an entrancing thriller that explores the power of narratives with a few screams to boot.

All the human strife, all the political squabbling, comes across like an excuse to be “badass” but high-minded about it. The film’s shootouts are “cool” but lack anything resembling a meaningful perspective, so when the characters talk about the political rationales for their violence, it rings hollow. And when the bullets fly, nothing else seems like it ever mattered.

In the end, Saltburn works as a distinct and wildly entertaining probe into familiar waters of privilege, rather than the definite word on it, one that reinforces Fennell as a distinguished auteur of the big and the bold even on shaky grounds.

Shooting the Mafia is, if nothing else, a decent introduction to Battaglia’s work, even if the rest of Loginotto’s primer doesn’t tell us much about who Battaglia is, or how to appreciate what she does.

Kingsman: The Secret Service is a startlingly enjoyable and well-made action film leavened by humor and slicked along by style, made by, for, and about people who’ve seen far too many Bond films.

There’s an austerity to the film, but also a sense that this interesting couple in this interesting environment is going over the same territory with only minor changes.

The film’s various elements work in wonderful concert to keep the momentum brisk but still grounded in a stylized version of human empathy, from Jay Cassidy and Evan Schiff’s whiz-bang editing to Daniel Pemberton’s consciously grandiose score. The cast makes each moment count.

Whether he’s expounding upon his fear of wild animals or recounting how he sweated his way through his first experience trying to order something at Starbucks, Hart is a natural raconteur, alternately arrogant and self-deprecating, worldly and juvenile.

It’s good to know that John Woo still thinks the only reason motorcycles were invented was to be shot and exploded in mid-air, but most of this action is merely satisfactory, and even after years of experimentation, CGI bullet hits still look faker than an old-fashioned squib

It’s a grand, old-school saga full of sacrifice and betrayal and loss, and just when the audience is gearing up for a powerfully tragic resolution of the kind that Thomas Hardy might have written, the movie veers off into Nicholas Sparks territory instead.

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.

As a portrait of an author on the verge of a breakthrough, this is a run-of-the-mill, occasionally clumsy biopic; as for contextualizing Christmas, it never explains how it functioned before Dickens and only briefly mentions how it changed after him.

Dragged Across Concrete is not a terrible movie, but it’s not so good that Zahler shouldn’t get dragged for it.

After the quick-witted and action-packed first act, the film switches gears into full romance-novel mode. Unfortunately, The Lost City never manages to sustain or recover once Pitt’s rousing cameo is over. It’s still pleasant, though it’s unlikely to satisfy those thirsting for action and adventure.

Spectre is a frustratingly unsatisfying experience.

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.

As overflowing as it is with subplots and stylistic quirks, perhaps “Brother and Sister” should simply have concentrated on the brother and sister. That would have been more than enough.

An ordinary feature that could have been extraordinary as a series of three shorts. Instead, this is what we’ve got: a vaguely watchable animated Christmas movie that only works in fits and starts.

The getting-to-know-them is the best part of this Ghostbusters: these women are a true democratic caucus of funny. That leaves the aforementioned bloat — CGI bigness and the current vogue for drawn-out showdowns — the only nagging glitch, although it’s all slickly rendered by the visual effects team.

The follow-up to 2016’s “Doctor Strange” hits the ooh-and-aah marks we expect from a well-crafted Marvel adventure, but even with Sam Raimi at the helm, this entry goes heavy on the spectacle but light on the humanity.

It’s still sweet, it’s still funny, it’s still freaky, and it’s still Friday. Thank God.

Though it’s fun to watch Pullman and Huston sparring, it’s nearly as pleasant to watch their characters make up.

See How They Run lies as dead on the screen as the corpse of its murdered movie director.

The intent of the film, and its timeliness, are beyond reproach, but that doesn't make Kill the Messenger as stirring or inspiring of indignation as it clearly wants to be.

Precisely because of how ravishingly constructed some of the set pieces turned out, it’s more of shame to see the storytelling’s structural lack of cohesiveness and subplot saturation clutter the view.

"Scandalous” is a fast-paced documentary, packed with incident and information, as tantalizing as an old issue of the Enquirer itself.

It’s a movie about cool people looking and acting cool, for the enjoyment of the (probably uncool) people in the audience. They call it ‘star power’ because it dazzles.

The tone and the plot take some time to settle, but once they’ve hit their stride (and adults decide to surrender their senses and go along for the ride), the bird and pig unit become almost affable in their daftness.

“The Kill Team” is both a tense moral thriller and a disheartening account of our country’s actions abroad.

Roach and McNamara fall victim to the occasional phony biopic moment or straight-up moment of didacticism, but overall Trumbo is a lively history about the day-in-day-out drudgery of survival during oppressive times. Screenwriters are so rarely taken seriously by the film industry that it’s a nice switch to watch them be the heroes.

This is a very difficult personal narrative to try to digest and make sense of, but at least XY Chelsea makes for a start on this, even if it cannot approach anything definitive on her singular story.

The new characters are all one-dimensional, and we learn nothing new about the old characters from the series.

Without that emotional groundwork to establish the contours of Cathy and Jamie’s relationship, “The Last Five Years” is largely a numbing experience.

Whatever nuance existed in the original novel, whatever detail regarding the complicated emotional existence of actual human beings, is reduced here to not-quite-suspenseful-enough plot points and an impossible forbidden romance that makes almost no sense.

Ronan’s fiery Mary and Robbie’s emotionally complex Elizabeth truly reign divine on screen.

Allied is ultimately a thin love story, with creaky suspense machinery and star turns from Pitt and Cotillard that feel more like matinee idol dress-up than a meeting of the magnetic.

This new Scream is a killer. Smartly scary and scary smart, consistent with the history of this series but unafraid to piss off fans if it’s for the good of the story. This satire of requels may very well be the first requel done right. It’s a scream, baby.

Rather than play like a significant departure from the “Toy Story” films that spawned it, Lightyear instead emerges as a disappointing runner-up, capturing but a fraction of the comedy, thrills and poignancy of its predecessors.

If Overlord was a video game, it would be a great one. It just happens to be a movie, and it’s a great one of those too. It hits all old-school genre tropes so hard that they make new noises, and infuses cheesy grindhouse thrills with all the “you are there” intensity of a great interactive experience.

Say what you will about the premise, but if you think that’s all there is to 'Goat,' you’re going to bleat those words.

Good Boys is a snappy comedy that pokes fun at those painful pubescent years and, by the credits, grows up into a somewhat mature comedy about friendship.

Norton earns praise for taking on the gargantuan task of bringing this story to the screen, and pulling quadruple duty as actor-director-writer-producer, but Motherless Brooklyn seems more like a blueprint of a great film that lacks the nuance it needs to be truly impactful.

Like the hundred pounds of latex cast over Fraser’s body, the film itself requires its performers to act through an overbearing pall. But for the most part, it has room for only one voice.

The single-minded simplicity of its plotting can at times be an asset rather than a hindrance; in a summer even more bogged down by needless sequels and remakes than most, Crawl is, at the very least, a lean thriller that isn’t based on an existing property.

Sharp and warm ... It reaffirms a distinctive cinematic voice who might be going back to his greatest hits, but has brought something new to them.

A feel-good movie that earns all those good feelings, McFarland, USA might be running on a predetermined track, but the heart it shows along the journey is what makes it a winner.

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.

A bright, entertaining, intelligent film about how easy it is to get distracted by superficiality, and how important it is to look at Christmas — and by extension, Christianity — from a fresh and even critical perspective.

The Nowhere Inn . . . is a collection of comedic and musical sketches that are not funny, weird or thoughtful enough to sell its creators’ insistent, but mostly trite and undeveloped, ideas about the performative nature of self-fashioning and creative authenticity.

It’s a slow, sluggish and whimsy-deficient movie that seems designed to entertain neither children nor adults, and the film’s script opens a Pandora’s Box of a plot twist.

While the reteaming of Gal Gadot and director Patty Jenkins provides the expected thrills and excitement, this sequel shares the significant flaw of its predecessor: Both films graft an unwieldy and effects-heavy finale onto a movie that had managed to create relatable characters and situations, even when both are larger than life.

Ridley is simply extraordinary, and she and MacKay give us a younger, lustier Ophelia and Hamlet than we usually get on the big screen.

Bad Times at the El Royale is vibrant motion picture, in a way few films are nowadays. One might even call it indulgent, although “decadent” is probably more accurate.

Tomorrowland is a globe-trotting, time-traveling caper whose giddy visual whimsies and exuberant cartoon violence are undermined by a coy mystery that stretches as long as the line for “Space Mountain” on a hot summer day.

[A] charming romantic comedy.

Wittock’s film is ultimately more of a well-intended melodramatic experiment than a fully realized love story about one of the more curious corners of humanity’s sexual-psychological tapestry.

It’s great to have an animated female lead that does for science what Belle in “Beauty and the Beast” did for reading, but ultimately, Over the Moon wanes more than it waxes.

Greutert’s film brings back the core elements that made these movies work. It’s an uncomplicated, effective horror thriller, even though it’s trapped itself in the past with nowhere else to go.

Goofily self-aware and wholesomely boisterous, it’s a children’s picture whose sense of spooky fun readily diverts from its quibble-worthy messaging.

Any controversy that might erupt over Roman Polanski’s decision to implicitly equate himself with one of history’s greatest victims of injustice is dissipated by the resultant film’s tepid listlessness.

While writer-director Warren Beatty’s movie about Hughes is crafted of the finest materials, it too remains mostly earthbound, defying gravity only in fits and starts.

Between Two Worlds is highly self-aware, at some points simply playing up the odd dissonance of seeing as glamorous a figure as Juliette Binoche scrubbing toilets, and at other points making more caustic commentary on the impossible task the book and adaptation set out to accomplish.

For every interview there is with a journalist offering more of this, there is one that just meanders with a notorious influencer that should have probably been cut.

The characters, the situations, and the story are whatever they need to be in the moment to launch whatever joke the movie feels like telling at that moment. This is Wain and Showalter working in “Wet Hot American Summer” spoof mode, and if you're a fan of that movie, you may well like this one as well.

The best gag comes from rom-com world’s cloying PG-13-ness.

There’s an underlying cynicism to The Fox that gives it heft.

This is a polished, straightforward account of harrowing events, told with empathy and relative objectivity. If you’re looking for an entrée into one of the most bizarre, complex chapters of human history, look no further.

Harper’s is that rare movie that works much better when the characters are finding solutions and working together rather than falling into conflict and creating problems.

[A] sci-fi head trip ... If the film can be somewhat unsubtle in its thematic questions, it matches that with an equally loud color palette – and you know what, that’s perfectly fine.

As Jahkor resists his father and then begins to make a tentative connection, Sanders and Wright let us feel the weight of generations — and All Day and a Night, which began in a blast of gunfire, ends as a sad but touching lament.

The Sisterhood of Night is too messy to qualify as a great film, especially when it begins introducing, in passing, peripheral characters who survived rape and incest, but it certainly isn’t muddled.

You’ve got to appreciate a movie that doesn’t take itself seriously. And, man, Fast & Furious Presents: Hobbs & Shaw is definitely about as ridiculous as a movie can be, for better or worse.

Pilgrimage travels quite far on the momentum provided by a series of reveals. Each shifts the film’s stakes significantly enough that we look forward to the next divulgence as much as the succeeding battle scene. It ultimately stumbles when it reaches for depth, arriving at a hollow conclusion that mistakes cynicism for profundity.

Gifted finds a collective of competent people making a perfectly competent movie — nothing more, nothing less.

Smallfoot provides more complex food for thought than most mainstream animation, but the overall results are still disappointingly bland.

This true-crime saga of the Gucci family losing control of their own fashion empire could have been a full-blown camp classic were it not so frequently dull and tentative.

A Wikipedia entry fed into what can only be called The Sorkinator, but missing the wit module, Being the Ricardos is cultural-television-marital history flattened into a babbling stream of airless, horribly shot scenes that never come close to the glorious timing of a single comic exchange on “I Love Lucy.”

You have to forgive a lot from Bad Moms.... But the wonderfully unexpected cavalcade of hilarity — including one of the smartest and most unexpected celebrity cameos in recent memory — makes this summer sleeper a satisfying surprise.

As for the writer-director, Ol Parker, he doesn’t come up with any urgent artistic reasons for the existence of its follow-up, Mamma Mia! Here We Go Again, but he does make it surprisingly watchable, and he manages to overcome some mountainous obstacles.

Ellis and editor Richard Mettler craft an agonizing and unforgettable finale; if their sense of pacing had been as sharp throughout, “Anthropoid” might have fulfilled its potential.

In a movie whose setup that almost inevitably leads to rampant sentimentality, Pugh and Garfield are enormously charming actors who are also skilled at undercutting their own charm; they commit to the sentiment without yielding to it, making We Live in Time a truly charming and surprisingly rich film.

While neither Tommy nor the film itself was ever likely to be immortal, the closing frames prove to be a fitting sendoff for him as well as his long, sad saga. For what could very well be the last time, he and Murphy burn bright.

By the end of this captivating if unsettling movie, Foos’s unpunished criminality notwithstanding, you’ll have plenty to chew on about the nature of the relationship between journalist and subject.

It’s Merritt’s devastatingly authentic turn as a kid propelled by good intentions and naïve ambition to scuttle his own life in order to create a better one for his family that makes Demange’s follow-up to the critically-acclaimed “’71” a frequently indelible cinematic experience, charged with unique energy and impact even when its premise is overly familiar.

Though it’s nothing new — one thinks of “The Shining,” “Parents,” and “Serial Mom” — it’s still disreputably fun to watch, like a viral video of a crazy person in public, or eavesdropping on a drunken spat in a restaurant, or that feeling when channel-flipping lands you on a familiar dumb movie right at your favorite moment.