The best surprise in A Fantastic Woman might be how lived-in Marina’s existence feels despite the tenuousness of her housing, her romantic fulfillment, and her legal rights.

A deadpan crime story with eccentric and fantastical touches, and a healthy sense of the absurd, “Have a Nice Day” makes a bold argument for Chinese animation as a fertile outlet for exploring the country’s more desperate, constricted lives, and the choices these people make.

Even if the casting choices in portraying some of iconic talents in Kenney’s orbit are occasionally questionable — a detail the film gleefully acknowledges — there’s something delightful about watching actors known for comedy now try to capture the sound or energy of the performers who inspired them.

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.

Aficionados of Nicholas Sparks movies may swoon over this film’s distressed T-shirts and kudzu-choked back roads, but lovers of love stories deserve much better.

Ultimately, Den of Thieves falls short of its goal, but it gets points for aiming high; there are worse things than trying to be the next Michael Mann when few others would dare try, especially if they lack the enthusiasm oozing out of every frame of your imitation.

The third and final film in the Maze Runner series, subtitled “The Death Cure,” gets it half right as an action movie. The stunts, the explosions and the chases are all exciting and elaborately mounted; there’s just not much of a movie to go with them.

The Chris Hemsworth vehicle is is often hammy, but also wryly funny, breath-stoppingly tense, and uncommonly intelligent. Its January dump is a disservice to a promising debut feature.

There’s a mild chuckle every so often in Early Man...but overall the movie collapses in a heap of familiarity and lackadaisicalness. Park is an animation legend, but even the greats occasionally whiff it.

Proud Mary did not screen for critics, nor should it have. It’s a copy of a copy of a mediocre original, with the drab aesthetics of a TV movie and the emotional hollowness of an infomercial.

Hamm, an extraordinarily subtle actor whose quiet craft often gets overlooked, is perfectly cast for the tone Pellington wants to strike, and he’s able to emote convincingly in the narrow elegiac range in which Nostalgia tries to operate.

It’s a quiet, eccentric comedy-drama about artistic inspiration that won’t knock your socks off, but it has its own awkward charms about how artists forge their identity while wrestling with professional boundaries.

Cardasis proves that he has some talent for both objectivity and subjectivity, but too often this movie settles for mild good intentions and “you go, girl” fantasy, and there’s little room for those things in the very tough world Cardasis is attempting to portray.

For all its brittle hilarity, Potter has shot her film in black and white. In context, it plays as an avatar of artistic seriousness. Or a warning with implications worth heeding.

Hamoud so deftly mixes both the intimate and the enormous throughout, endowing vibrantly-shot, slice-of-life storytelling with an often wrenching depth.

Hardcore horror audiences won’t find much that’s frightening in Insidious: The Last Key — there’s not even that wonderfully unsettling shriek of violins under the title this time — but as a delivery system for more great work from Lin Shaye, it more than accomplishes its mission.

Collet-Serra’s fourth team-up with Neeson, The Commuter, represents neither man’s finest work, but at its best, it suggests the snap and fun they’ve brought us before.

Grahame’s contributions to cinema are more than worthy of a reevaluation. Her complications, too, deserve more than this tepid, uncurious portrait.

Kruger is entirely commanding.

Watching Father Figures is like finding a piece of food in the back of your fridge that you barely recognize, but know right away it’s not worth eating.

There may be no more unexpected (or damning) faint praise for David Ayer’s new movie Bright than this: It made me wish I was watching “Suicide Squad” instead.

Its empty, loud breathlessness is the real bunk to behold: think trailer for a movie more than movie itself. Or more accurately, think teaser to the trailer to the movie. It’s a broken record of ersatz positivity and empowerment, practically shout-singing at you to be all you can be while it mostly just is what it is, plastic flash without any enduring oomph.

It’s too bad that Chastain’s heady, exquisitely subtle performance is dragged down by the laughably vehement male characters that seek to speak for her. You can’t keep a good woman down. But you can constantly talk over her, I guess.

Hostiles, Scott Cooper’s mournful meditation on human nature, is more than a revisionist Western; it’s a film that explores the roots of racism and the cost of redemption.

Scott whips it all into shape: the tense action involving the kidnappers, the investigation’s twists, the maddening campaign to give Getty a financial incentive in freeing his grandson, and the emotional toll it takes on everyone (Getty included).

Wilson’s comic routines here set her apart from the others in the cast, and they more than amply hint that she should be set loose in her own vehicles far, far away from the other girls and all their “Glee”-like karaoke.

If having pure fun at a “Star Wars” movie is wrong, I don’t want to be right. So for me, The Last Jedi falls right behind “The Empire Strikes Back” and maybe the original film in providing the thrills and the heartbreak, the heroism and villainy, and the romance and betrayal that makes these films such a treat even for those of us who can’t name all the planets or the alien species or even the Empire’s flunkies.

Jumanji: Welcome to The Jungle is the Christmas tentpole release that aims to please and succeeds, a funny family entertainment product that subverts more expectations than it was obligated to contractually.