Volpe’s specificity with each characterization, including many of the men, humanizes what would otherwise be an issue-driven movie, and lends it an immediacy and resonance that fuels audience sympathies, not to mention understanding.

With its observational dispassion, My Friend Dahmer doesn’t quite help us understand why Jeff is so into killing, and it’s pretty much useless when it comes to clarifying how he justifies committing such atrocities to himself.

If an animated movie is going to offer children a way to process death, it’s hard to envision a more spirited, touching and breezily entertaining example than Coco.

Same Kind of Different as Me works more effectively when its talented cast is given freedom to engage on an interpersonal level and its various political subtexts are sidelined.

The inconvenient truth about Geostorm is that it’s dumber than a box of asteroid-sized hail. But to take it seriously for just a second, it misses an opportunity to turn idealism about the world coming together to solve its biggest problem and instead turns it into more of cinema’s biggest problem: empty-headed spectacle.

Imagine an improv class where students sit in clusters, waiting for something funny to be said or to transpire, and you’ll have an idea of how this haphazard mess plays out.

Leatherface is second only to Rob Zombie’s “Halloween” remake in horror’s pantheon of terrible origin stories.

It’s not hard to imagine a young audience completely losing their minds over the thrills and action of Thor: Ragnarok, and then loving it all over again when they realize how funny it is.

Allen is too self-aware and cold a creative personality to create a genuine tragedy in Wonder Wheel. Instead, he makes a gesture towards a tragic situation.

The beauty of Ai’s epic imagery feels like a perpetual challenge: Are you looking? Are you listening? Are you responding?

Baumbach’s films may reflect a prickly brand of humanism, but they’re humane all the same. In an era of untrammeled cynicism, each new release feels like an all-too-brief moment of hope.

Didion speaks very bluntly here, and sometime shockingly.

There’s still something thrilling about watching Chan, even at 63, fight people half his age. There’s a graceful fluidity to his punching and kicking. He’s poetry in motion. No film can take that away from him — not in 2017, not ever.

Professor Marston and the Wonder Women celebrates the bravery and creativity of Diana Prince’s mastermind and his muses, but with a tepidness toward the complications of their lives. The result is a gauzy, sexy ode to unconventionality that feels distinctly and disappointingly conventional.

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

The glaring inadequacies of The Snowman are the only things shocking about it. Harry Hole’s film career could not have gotten off to a more inauspicious start.

Tom of Finland is a film about a man who was famous for very dirty drawings, but it is unfortunately restricted by a dehydrated kind of good taste from ever being very dirty or very sexy.

As the story builds, these characters become richer and more complicated — and the stakes become more deadly — resulting in a movie with a delayed but no less potent dramatic punch.

Landon, who wrote four of the “Paranormal Activity” films, knows a lot about reverse engineering scary scenarios from mundane situations, but as with later installments of that series, he overcomplicates the logistics and mythology of the premise, aiming for something more raucous (and fun) in tone but lacking the intensity — or inevitability — to make its repetition feel truly chilling.

The film is vital for both its history and its currency. Above all, The Death and Life of Marsha P. Johnson works powerfully as a rallying cry for tolerance, love and understanding.

The film is meant to be a negotiation of what that long-ago relationship was, and it is that. But considered in our reality of pervasive sexual iniquity, Una also feels, whatever its creators’ intentions, an awful lot like a litany of self-serving excuses for pedophilic behavior, which may or may not be sincere.

A wonderfully humane, funny, and moving chapter in Varda’s documentary phase.

Cortlund and Halperin (“Now, Forager”) demonstrate a gift for not only creating beautiful images in unexpected moments, but also avoiding narrative shortcuts or tonal clichés to tell a story that covers familiar territory while ultimately defying easy categorization.

Yes, My Little Pony: The Movie, like its television predecessor, is all dressed up in bubbles and cupcakes and rainbows. But it’s so jam-packed with rousing girl power, it passes the Bechdel Test with (literally) flying colors.

If it’s been a while since you’ve felt the cold blast and hard crunch of midnight-movie meanness, Zahler’s shaping up to be your guy — the one selling illicit thrills out of the trunk of a well-restored, vinyl-topped LTD — and with “Brawl,” he sets himself further apart from his more schlock-minded contemporaries in cult cinem

It’s Prince, though, who lifts the movie into another realm. It’s no exaggeration to say that hers is one of the most noteworthy child performances in recent — or, for that matter, distant — memory. She is so charismatic, and so unfailingly natural, that every one of her scenes feels organic.

Delightfully unpredictable and surprisingly shocking, this is the kind of wintry wickedness that will see you through both Halloween and Christmas, especially if you like those holiday flavors together.

The captivating documentary Chavela, directed by Catherine Gund (“Born to Fly”) and Daresha Kyi, mesmerizes with its impressionistic blend of archival photos, musical performances, concert footage and candid interviews with the legendary singer herself, as well with her ardent friends like Pedro Almodóvar and former lovers.