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.