In Gutierrez’s vivid and moving film, Kahlo is in no less than full, glorious view.

Does great justice to an extraordinary astronaut and reluctant icon, but also repeats the error made so often by media of Ride's era, in centering other people’s perspectives over her own.

The performances are impeccable, and the film’s structural elements are deftly handled across the board.

Whitney is at its most powerful when it focuses on reminding us what we all lost, because the more you think about how outstanding her gift was, the more tragic her absence feels.

While there are fun moments and a continuation of the franchise's main idea — Professor X's peace, love and understanding vs. Magneto's fight the power — Days of Future Past ends up feeling more exhausting than exuberant.

Land of Mine is a powerful epic, superbly acted, tense and unsettling, but also poignant and occasionally tender.

Manzoor demonstratively disregards the cliches that often define Muslim families in cinema (an act this Muslim critic is grateful for) and on the whole, gives us a lavishly costumed and fully realized cinematic outing whose agile camerawork and charismatic leads demand the biggest screen you can find. What an absolute treat!

If you don’t mind your movies nasty, brutish, and slight, you couldn’t ask for a more delectable chocolate-covered razor blade.

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.

Bring Her Back, like many great horror movies, hardly needs to dip into the supernatural to shred our nerve-endings.

The Lego Batman Movie, for the most part, very skillfully keeps the wackiness from overwhelming the plot and vice versa. And while the various Bat-vehicles take us through vertiginous zooms on land or through the air, McKay keeps the action rousing but never jumbled.

The result is artistically uneven in structure but emotionally powerful throughout.

The chief virtue of “Monica” is its restraint and its patience.

It sidesteps saccharine wistfulness to flow without pretense, consistently putting its finely-drawn characters before other concerns.

While her debut as a screenwriter and leading lady doesn’t quite reach the outrageous heights of her TV work, Trainwreck remains hilarious and provocative, heralding what we can only hope will be a pot-stirring new voice on the big screen.

The writer-director is aided immeasurably by lead actor Emma Mackey (“Death on the Nile”), whose wide eyes and expressive features convey a torment and vivacity being held in constant check by a repressive society.

It’s unlikely that any documentary could make us feel half as bad for the poachers as we do for their prey, which might not even be Kasbe’s aim. He succeeds in bringing shades of grey to a situation usually thought of in black-and-white terms — not enough to change many minds, perhaps, but at least enough to open some.

Origin is so rich, expansive and wildly varied that one could easily see how DuVernay could have turned it into a mini-series. How great that she instead chose a compact and coherent feature, with articulate editing, buttery cinematography (by Matthew J. Lloyd) across various visual palettes of different time periods, and opulent costume and production design.

It’s a life — and now a film about a life — built from disparate strands of experience, but one that makes sense exactly because she is Grace Jones, and being Grace Jones means synthesizing Grace Jones from all available material.

The film has its twists, turns and resets, simultaneously giving the audience more information while also keeping it off balance. It can be riveting and at times repetitive, but it does what it sets out to do: It drops you in the middle of a crisis and it keeps you there.

Seo excavates universal truths that transcend all generational and cultural divides. The many geographical, social and emotional pains these young people are grappling with are ones everyone faces down. As they find ways to fight this, coming to realize all the many ways they may not be so easily able to, there is something both genuinely heartfelt yet quietly haunting about it.

Ducournau’s follow-up to “Raw” is more than comfortable in its genre trappings, offering grab bag nods to past masters and positively delighting in sex, violence and grisly prosthetics as it chants “Long live the new flesh” from the film world’s toniest perch, inviting all gathered to join along.

Mission: Impossible - Rogue Nation never pretends to be anything but a solidly entertaining collection of fighting, chasing, driving, falling and going-to-the-place-and-getting-the-thing. But at that level, it delivers completely. Choose to accept it.

It is subversive, stomach-churning and visionary, a body-horror film that doubles as a fable of femininity gone wrong.

Viswanathan’s resounding, yet quiet performance allows the audience to see Hala for who she is — a smart, funny, intelligent, angsty, confused, and completely normal teenage girl.

This picture feels fated to be remembered as the “giant fluffy puppy soccer movie,” and both the giant fluffy puppies and Cotta provide enough laughs to make it worthwhile.

There is a terrible majesty to the landscape and to the story, and Kurzel gives it room to breathe.

For Dupieux, there seems to be no moral here at all, other than perhaps that life is a trajectory of mishaps and easiest for people who don’t linger over the fallout of their actions. This isn’t necessarily surprising for a filmmaker who once wrote and directed a movie about a sentient tire that commits serial murder.