While it’s an undeniably powerful film, it also seemingly feels the need to tread carefully.

Grace and poise are certainly embedded in Yousafzai’s DNA, but there’s frustratingly little of her vulnerability or interiority in the film.

The laughs are mild, but at least some exist.

Perhaps most importantly, not only does the film stress the importance of using math and physics and botany and chemistry to solve problems, but it also makes a plot based on scientific inquiry and audacity just as exciting and even more unpredictable as the movies’ usual brand of problem-solving, the kind that involves punching everyone and then blowing everything up.

Mississippi Grind winds up being that rare beast: the buddy comedy where you’re not tired of the buddies well before the credits roll.

The Walk is that rare movie that might please practically everyone, from viewers just looking for a thrill to those who might enjoy a story that sounds like a tall tale but winds up being discreetly poignant.

At best, The Green Inferno is a reliable shock and disgust-delivery system. At worst — and it certainly veers toward the worst — it’s a racially reprehensible work that exploits one of the world’s most powerless peoples. And no number of movie-geek references to “Cannibal Holocaust” is going to change that.

Brand: A Second Coming is messy, muddled and occasionally maddening; it’s also a strong and stirring portrait of a funnyman who’s realized that some things just aren’t that funny.

Whereas the jokes in the “Grown Ups” series feel reactionary and bullying, the family-friendly Hotel Transylvania gags (in the script by Sandler and Robert Smigel) instead come off as clever and humane, even when they’re making fun of helicopter moms and lawsuit-sensitive summer camps.

Stonewall somehow manages to be simultaneously bloated and anemic, overstuffed and underpopulated.

The Internship delivers what it promises, no more and no less, and faulting it for not being a rougher, tougher, smarter film about how much we all seem to live our lives through our work today would be like yelling at a spoon for not being a knife.

A thoroughly unpleasant experience.

The film’s so inflated with moral importance that it becomes ridiculous, a Lifetime movie shoved into a cage and fattened with sermons and platitudes until it is ready to be served up cold and bland.

Sicario calls to mind the films of the 1970s — not necessarily the ones we think of as capital-I Important, but the seamy, sweaty thrillers that subtly slipped in anti-establishmentarian messages amid the violence. It mixes arthouse and grindhouse into a most satisfying cocktail.

The New Girlfriend is a delicate figurine: too quaint to feel necessary in the current climate of ever-bolder representations of trans lives, and yet rescued from disposability by its delicate beauty.

When an infidel makes a film about traveling to an Islamic country that doesn’t accept his way of life, you expect a little more tension.

If you think man-crack is the apex of hilarity, A Walk in the Woods just might be the movie for you. It’s all right there in the trailers: slapstick, womp-womp one-liners, the premise of old buddies going on an adventure.

"90 Minutes" is one of the better faith-based films out there.

It’s a lush and intriguing experience that works so well for so long that it can’t be undone by a few flaws.

You don’t have to love De Palma’s movies to find De Palma a fascinating look at a vital period of American film history, through the eyes of a controversial artist.

Pawn Sacrifice is intelligent, absorbing, never boring, and skillfully tense when it should be.

Even if you think you’ve seen this movie before, Headland’s gift for outrageous dialogue... and Sudeikis and Brie’s comic chemistry make Sleeping with Other People a treat from start to finish.

A perfect example of how lame, lazy material strands good actors, resulting in a movie that looks great and feels less so.

Ultimately, Equals fails because Silas and Nia aren’t all that much more interesting as a romantic couple than they are as zombie-like individuals.

Anchored by exceptional performances by the main actresses, Breathe is a confrontation with the terrifying volatility of adolescence.

One of the most tedious apocalypses to come down the chute in recent years, this series gets lamer, and lazier, with each entry. The only ‘Trial’ offered by this film is the ordeal of watching it.

Shyamalan has had some difficulties as a director of late, and it’s understandable to hope that by placing him back in the realm of lower budgets and more manageable expectations he could impress us yet again; that turns out not to be the case this time.

Director Tom Hooper shakes things up a bit with The Danish Girl, proving that he’s capable of making a movie that’s both steeped in awards-season prestige and in possession of a pulse.