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.

First-time helmer Peter Sohn and screenwriter Meg LeFauve (“Inside Out”) have created a fantastic and frequently exhilarating feature that showcases Pixar’s greatest strengths: technical brilliance, emotional texture, crossover appeal, and an impish sense of humor that takes the utmost advantage of the animated form.

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.

A sensitive drama that marks a notably personal feature debut.

Howard’s film is a love letter to the icon, but ultimately Pavarotti is a more of a celebration of the individual behind that façade and a reminder that it’s as much his humanity as his talent that made him a star.

Writer-director Mariama Diallo’s debut feature Master doesn’t just blur the lines between the horror genre and institutionalized racism; it convincingly argues that there’s no meaningful difference.

Hill’s made an unabashed love letter to a particular decade, sure, but also to a specific moment in everyone’s life. And while he undercuts his own movie by romanticizing even the most extreme experiences of lost innocence, the purity of Stevie’s longing makes the movie’s wistful fantasy understandable.

Nothing about the interactions between Daniel and his former pen pal in the second half of the movie are even remotely believable, and so the rosy climax of Private Desert enters the dangerous realm of fantasy and wish-fulfillment, revealing that the makers of this film are as recklessly naïve and morally questionable as their protagonists.

The failure of Catfight lies not with the leads, then, but with wasted opportunity.

It’s unexpectedly touching and even lovely, a grandly sad benediction to people who don’t need no stinkin’ test to tell them who their soulmate is.

Boseman’s roiling magnetism goes a long way toward making it all work.

Although it’s extremely competent, it fails to add a new perspective to the story, or a distinctive approach to its telling.

The first hour or so of Mothering Sunday can be very enjoyable because Husson (“Girls of the Sun”) does not take what little narrative there is too seriously and instead dedicates herself to making O’Connor into the most attractive possible love object for her camera.

Shadow in the Cloud has that boisterous B-movie energy, and it’s a reminder that narrative shamelessness is permissible, even welcome, in the hands of an assured storyteller.

Their street-level stories, frequent Cannes winners since 1999’s “Rosetta,” typically hinge on a central desperation tied to simple survival, but when played out with their trademark visual restlessness and character-driven purposefulness, they’re often as nail-biting as any genre exercise or melodrama.

A disappointingly standard biopic, one whose technical flaws and paint-by-numbers clichés threaten to overshadow its subject’s compelling story.

The pacing is far from what you’d expect in a Hollywood movie with this much action, which can make the film feel longer than its 116 minutes. But that rich languor and love of words is earned, and do you really want to tell Ralph Fiennes and Juliette Binoche to hurry up? No. You. Do. Not.

Trying to overwhelm the audience with spectacle, as “Kingdom” attempts to do, is a sorry substitute for the detailed characters and thoughtful conflicts that populate prior entries in the series.

If you can separate the art from the artist — as most of us do at some point, or there’d be almost no movies or plays or novels or music or paintings left to enjoy — it’s a stone-cold gas.

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.

It’s tricky to tell a feel-good story in a time in which many people are feeling anything but good, but “Becoming” film insists on doing just that.