Does it all work? Not quite, but you can’t fault a film for its ambition, least of all one that does manage to bring it all together for a deeply moving home stretch.

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.

Larraín’s odd little film dances to the beat of its own drum, that’s for certain. But it does pay off in a wholly satisfying way.

A twisted piece of grandly entertaining provocation. ... This is a dark satire that finds a way to make a case for understanding.

The Painted Bird ... is not the wallowing miserablist parade you might fear, yet not quite the Holocaust-themed masterpiece it wishes to be. But it’s always starkly compelling as a reminder of why war survival stories are essential to our understanding of innocence and beastliness.

Cretton has made and will make subtler movies, but probably none that will prompt as many mid-screening rounds of applause.

Well-acted, understanding, and literate ... But when the emotional honesty still doesn’t make for compelling drama, you’re left wondering why, even with all the lights on, there’s a conspicuous lack of galvanizing human detail in the contours of this story.

A Beautiful Day in the Neighborhood finds a gentle state of grace and shows the courage and smarts to stay in that zone, never rushing things or playing for drama.

It’s a solid chronicle of (the first part of) a fascinating life and career.

It’s got all the cinematic bravado of an expensive high school A/V project, and like a school project, it’s easy to root for the young people involved. They’re getting out there and they’re making a movie, dang it! Good for them! Not good for us, of course, but good for them.

Ms. Purple is a gorgeous film about one of the worst moments of many people’s lives, but isn’t the act of living just learning how to survive these irreplaceable losses?

Full of surprises ... It’s a historical piece that defies expectation and offers both the thrills of battle and a thoughtful critique of war and imperialism.

It Chapter Two is a much grander project than the first film.

The Perfect Candidate feels like a film that both represents a new era for women in the Muslim world and also one that will help push that movement forward.

A clunky, heavy-handed film that takes a pressing contemporary issue and flattens it under two genres the writer-director seems ill-equipped to handle — the mockumentary and the courtroom drama.

When Ramírez and Cruz, or Moura and de Armas, are on screen together, addressing the human cost involved in spycraft, Wasp Network becomes much more interesting. When it veers away from them, the film seems mostly comprised of conversations in restaurants, where new characters and organizations are constantly being introduced.

The Laundromat flails about, with an excess of bad ideas that undercut the justifiable outrage over the events depicted.

The broadness of Phoenix’s work allows the rest of the ensemble — particularly Conroy, Zazie Beetz as a single-mom neighbor, and MVP character actors like Bill Camp, Shea Whigham and Brian Tyree Henry — to dial it down and give effectively human-size performances.

While director Andrews, most known for his stage work, doesn’t always know how to lift this story beyond banal biopic choices, he’s certainly tapped into something special with Stewart, who continues to reveal new layers with each film.

Any controversy that might erupt over Roman Polanski’s decision to implicitly equate himself with one of history’s greatest victims of injustice is dissipated by the resultant film’s tepid listlessness.

A remarkably stylish and fascinating space drama.

With Marriage Story, Baumbach cements his reputation as one of this generation’s leading humanist filmmakers.

Instead of focusing on the strength of some of her material here, Utt strikes out in far too many directions.

Killerman lacks personality both stylistically and in its overall story construction.

It’s like we’re front-seat passengers, and though it induces much anxiety, “The Load” compels us to keep both eyes forward lest we miss whatever might happen next.

Kore-eda’s first film made outside his native Japan, it’s a fascinating exploration of the fallibility of memory and of how the truths we tell ourselves so frequently outweigh an empirical certainty.

A capably rendered, urgently argued portrait in courage that never quite rises above curious-footnote status.

A brainless, exploitative folly which gives John Travolta free rein to mine the history of cringe-worthy autism portrayals for an offensively garish Frankenstein pantomime of unhinged obsession.