Watts does her usual commendable job with the flatly written character but ultimately, as the title would suggest, she runs into a wall.

Irony can’t survive in Lee’s airless vacuum; he’s not an experimenter at heart, and as a result, his movie feels heartless.

Into the Inferno may be relatively minor Herzog — it’s sweet and rambling rather than laser-bolt intense like "Fitzcarraldo" or "Grizzly Man." But it is enormously satisfying, filled with wisdom, insight and molten lava.

Mottola has made some brilliantly idiosyncratic pictures: Superbad, Adventureland, The Daytrippers. But as Joneses’s director for hire, he’s allowed zero personality.

It doesn’t all work: The pace can feel a little slow, and there are points where Park tries to have his tasty feminist cake and eat it too. But mostly, this is smart, sumptuous and wonderfully indulgent.

As a piece of gore, Train to Busan takes the swiftest path from A to Z.

An unabashed piece of political activism arriving three weeks before the election.

The characters of 20th Century Women, more interconnected than most, generate a group narrative that’s just substantial enough to keep you in thrall by how uninhibited a movie can be.

A superior and recent take on this material, Robert Greene’s experimental "Kate Plays Christine," is worth seeking out, both for its sympathy and deeper grasp of Chubbuck’s unknowable pain. Ironically, Christine’s director Antonio Campos (Afterschool) is capable of exactly that kind of riskiness, but the instinct abandons him here.

The Dark Knight director has had a mortifying effect on movies. In this case, it’s almost as if Affleck’s somber plunge into the calamitous, Nolan-produced "Batman v Superman: Dawn of Justice" has followed him into other projects, like a heavy cologne. Avoid this one like the stink it is.

Sometimes Guest’s films stray into snobbery against flyover country, but Mascots mostly avoids that. It hides its toxic warfare under a furry guise.

What you will find is a film that toggles between impressive fury and a kind of made-for-TV blandness that does Nat Turner’s 1831 uprising — still controversial — no favors.

The film isn’t heavy on earth science, yet these orange-tinted tide pools and shuddering protomammals indicate a strain of serious research. The world is a miracle and a gift in the movie’s eyes; it would be no small thing if audiences left with the same sense of wonderment.

What comes across loud and clear is that 13TH is a serious, timely, important work with highways and byways of thought that are worth traveling for anyone who cares to understand why, as DuVernay argues, slavery didn’t end with slavery.

The movie lacks the visual snap that would push the humor into next-level American satire. Still, you can’t help but laugh at scenes that could be mini-cartoons in themselves.

Apart from one muted action sequence in which the participants try not to wake a sleeping bundle of joy (“Put that baby down,” one of them demands, and the order is obeyed, with a little tucking in), there’s scarce humor here for adults to relish. And Samberg’s characteristic snark has been sanded down to a nub.

James Franco makes a brief, charged-up appearance as Mitch, an alum of the fraternity, who laments that his wife and baby keep him away from booze. Schnetzer delivers a quietly devastating performance in the lead role.

A too-pleased-with-itself action comedy.

Roth’s material should have been brewed into a larger indictment of authority in freefall—a few incidental Nixon mentions don’t count—and we’re left to suck on actorly handwringing in lieu of larger ideas.

The movie is a coming-of-age story, but whose age is coming? That's the profound question we're left with, in a stellar adaptation that balances gore with black humor, ethical quandary, hope and—yes—plenty of brains.

Above all, Blair Witch is a triumph of sound design. The cracks, crunches and rumbles from deep in the woods enhance a terror that’s pierced only by the beam of a flashlight.

Jackie pummels you with grandeur, with its epic visions of the funeral and that terrible moment in the convertible (all of it rendered in pitch-perfect detail and a subtle 16-millimeter shudder). Yet the film's lasting impact is dazzlingly intellectual: Just as JFK himself turned politics into image-making, his wife continued his work when no one else could.

Moonlight takes the pain of growing up and turns it into hardened scars and private caresses. This film is, without a doubt, the reason we go to the movies: to understand, to come closer, to ache, hopefully with another.

What made Snowden so compelling in the excellent 2014 documentary Citizenfour reduces him, in the context of an Oliver Stone thriller, to a blur. Even Hackers was more exciting.

If Fuqua and his screenwriters (including True Detective’s Nic Pizzolatto) slightly botch the underlying theme of redemption—Ethan Hawke’s haunted ex-Confederate sharpshooter could have been more developed—it still makes good on its ideas of community pride.

Overall, there aren’t many shades of gray in Hacksaw Ridge, but it’s a movie that fulfills its purpose with vigor, confidence and swagger, and those battle scenes are impossible to take your eyes off.

It must be noted that Wrona, a director of uncommon promise, committed suicide at a festival where this film was playing. It’s impossible to know his private pain, but it seems like he got a lot of it up onscreen.

Documentary filmmaker Jeff Feuerzeig turns a controversial literary hoax that fooled the world (and many a celebrity) into a tale of a private desperation but tidies it up too much.

Raw, messy and unkempt (as a domestic cancer drama should be), Saturday Night Live writer Chris Kelly’s feature debut is also a woe-is-me gay rom-com, a showdown between siblings and—at its best—an out-and-proud minimusical. If that sounds like too much, it is.

Sully is so square, it’s a wonder it even gets airborne. Hanks’s walking iceberg never thaws; the actor is never as vulnerable as he was in Captain Phillips.

The saturation of Arvo Pärt instant-melancholia on the soundtrack feels a bit too pushy, but otherwise this is a confidently controlled, accessible yet piercing look at the insidiousness of grief. It's Moretti at his best.

A boxing movie in desperate need of Martin Scorsese (aren’t they all?).

This isn’t a straight documentary — part of what makes the film so suggestive is the idea that we’re seeing a double performance pitted against our own prurient interests. As for the movie’s final scene, you won't witness something as confrontational all year: a yowl from beyond the grave. It’s a small piece of revenge for a lost soul.

For 
the most part, you’re in the hands of a capable lunatic who has a tale to tell.

Taking the worst of it on the chin is star Jack Huston, whose Jewish prince turned galley slave, Judah Ben-Hur, suffers from a distinct lack of personality—he’s like a boulder that someone forgot to chisel into a statue.

Herzog’s latest, ostensibly about the internet, is divided into 10 sections, each taking on a blend of awe and uneasiness at a radically changed world that’s increasingly lived online.

The film doesn’t quite cut loose to hit emotional high notes, but Regina Spektor’s velvety cover of “While My Guitar Gently Weeps” poignantly completes a sweet, generous film.

A quiet, sneaky sense of dislocation vibrates through Chad Hartigan’s indie comedy, which contains so many ideas about race, child-rearing, fatherhood and accidental exoticism, that to call it a mere coming-of-age movie would be a shame.

When Phillips’s regular ace Bradley Cooper shows up—as a scowling war profiteer—it just feels like stunt casting and a missed opportunity for levity.

As with 1999’s deceptively deep South Park: Bigger Longer & Uncut and, more recently, The Lego Movie, the script works hard to invest its scenario with an existential and political dimension, crudely but effectively expressed.

With its engaging story, energetic soundtrack and slick production values, Nerve is an easy watch for restless young minds.

After 2012’s similarly themed "Sleepwalk with Me," Birbiglia continues to mine a scene he knows well, and even though he doesn’t strike you as a natural-born filmmaker (some of these scenes are as flatly lensed as the Saturday Night Live sketches being spoofed), he’s evolving as a confrontational dramatist.

Her whole life has been about beating the odds — it’s inspiring stuff.

The central idea here is as durable and effective as a well-told fireside ghost story, but in the cold light of day, the film fades.

Equals could be her least persuasive performance to date — and remember, Stewart has played a soldier at Guantanamo and a girl who dates a vampire.

The soundtrack offers the expected jazz, while Allen himself, now sounding mumbly, offers intermittent, awkward narration. In the pantheon of his films, it’s a pretty but minor distraction.

The Infiltrator works best when it owns its Miami Vice–esque sizzle: Composer Chris Hajian breaks out the percolating Jan Hammer synthesizers, and the ’80s decadence wafts offscreen like a stink.

It turns out it’s okay to cross streams: Here’s a summer movie starring a girl squad proud of its big brains and tacky jumpsuits. You could call that a supernatural event in itself.

Mike and Dave Need Wedding Dates follows a sturdy trajectory toward incipient maturity (and ceremonial catastrophe). If you don’t think about it too hard, you won’t hate it.

The movie works best in the clan’s private world (even if rock climbing in the rain seems like poor parenting). But then it deflates: Frank Langella, normally a welcome presence, is clownishly directed as a mean grandfather, and the plot abandons its tensions too abruptly.

The elliptical story of sibling despondency doesn’t quite hang together, though the groundswell of missed potential doesn’t come into focus until the film’s undeniably powerful closing moments.

The action is largely routine and the dialogue rarely more than functional, but DeMonaco, marshalling the franchise’s best production values yet, shrewdly taps into the angry zeitgeist; his vision of an America where the citizens are encouraged to express their basest emotions is more relevant than ever.

Writer-director Gary Ross (Pleasantville, Seabiscuit) knows how to please crowds, so there's fascination in his consistently wrongheaded impulse to add more historical details: lengthy scenes of exposition, even a leap decades into the future for a courtroom drama involving Knight's persecuted offspring. He's lost sight of the powerful drama at this story's heart, about the ennobling swirl of momentous events.

His rock music gets a decent airing, but you wish more of the man’s perversity came through: his intimidating ego, the way he could exhaust his bandmates. And seriously, where is “Valley Girl” and his amazing kids? Not bitchin’ at all.

The first half of Right Now, Wrong Then fits the usual mold, but the real joke begins when the movie abruptly starts over and our hero — seemingly aware of his Groundhog Day do-over — makes subtly different (and smarter) choices the second time around in a rich and playful revision.

Add to the list of actors who, beautifully and boldly, go it alone in their own survival movies the name Blake Lively. Do it without laughing, because she’s the shark here: Even though The Shallows, a tremendously entertaining bit of fluff, pits her against a computer-generated great white, the poor creature never stands a chance.

While Finding Dory is definitely the kind of visual pleasure we’ve come to expect from Pixar, its storyline doesn’t always reach the heights of inventiveness upon which the gigantic animation studio has built its reputation. The film lacks the psychological probing of Inside Out, the existential ponderings of Wall-E, the gentle, stoic sadness of Up.

Excruciatingly incoherent.

It's more like confession, the director still seething and replaying Vertigo in his head, lost in the curves of his career. De Palma is a public therapy session that upturns all expectations.

Forget cowabunga, this is cowadunga. Still, the Oscar for Most Shamefully Contrived Scene goes to the scriptwriters for managing to get franchise eye-candy Megan Fox into a sexy schoolgirl outfit, which, any shorter, would land the film with an R rating.

Breezy and vivid, Art Bastard ultimately delivers the person: criminally underrated yet still principled and generous. It just leaves you wishing for more defiance, especially when a conventional tone takes over with too many interviewees and overpowers the film’s most lucrative asset: a pulsating New York backdrop.

In a movie that deals almost exclusively in pals playing pop music and exposed penises, the boyish humor goes a long way. Call it a hit single, but don’t expect it to go platinum.

When Kriegman is heard at a Weiner low point asking, “Why did you let me film this?” you’re glad the question is asked. But there’s no answer: The narcissism is all up there onscreen, but shame will have to wait for the sequel.

Just funny enough to not feel like a retread.

Ryan Gosling in a physical action-comedy? Whoever thought of the idea should be crowned genius of the year. With dynamite timing and uproarious gestures, Gosling mines his diverse abilities and becomes a blast in The Nice Guys.

There are no memorable action scenes—the closest we get is a virtual rerun of the time-freeze sequence from the previous movie. And the script is just nonsense, comprised entirely of sarcastic asides, portentous gobbledygook ("The dawn of a new age will rise!" cries Isaac) and insider references that only the faithful will appreciate. Unless that’s you, it’s best to steer clear.

It’s ironic, but Keanu might be a better movie if it was more like TV: 90 plotless minutes of Key and Peele just goofing around on the mean streets might’ve been something really special.

Polite, earnest stuff, but it never quite adds up to much.

The Family Fang goes deep into dysfunction, but even more impressively, it smuggles in the daredevilish art theories of the late Chris Burden and his ilk.

The real-life setup is a knockout, both ancient and timely, and even though Rohrwacher never quite passes — she looks too much like Barbra Streisand’s "Yentl" — the movie is on to a larger point, namely about the fluidity of sexual identity and our universal penchant for self-reinvention. The film builds slowly but deserves an audience eager to discuss it.

There’s fascination in watching the always-intense Michael Shannon burrow into the singer’s interiority—he plays Elvis like a bored icon who’s outlived his usefulness. Spacey’s Nixon is a variation on his devious Frank Underwood, not in itself a bad thing.

When great actors meet a misguided script, the results can be hilarious. And so it proves with Criminal, a nutso mash-up of The Bourne Identity and The Man with Two Brains which, despite a laughable plot and ridiculous dialogue, somehow managed to attract Kevin Costner to the lead role, with support from Ryan Reynolds, Tommy Lee Jones, new Wonder Woman Gal Gadot and even Gary Oldman (who really needs to have a word with his agent after this and Child 44).

Cheadle is so good as the cryptic Davis—coiled to strike, soulful, wounded, boldly outspoken—that you wonder if a more traditionally structured biojazz picture à la Ray or Bird might have been a better showcase for what's obviously a passion project.

It all feels a touch schematic, trying to satisfy every audience type, when each haircut is different. Barbershop: The Next Cut actually ends up in the chair, with a highly symbolic snipping that could have come straight outta the 1950s.

First you laugh at McCarthy’s harshness in front of the kids, who aren’t used to her screw-the-competition ethos, then you sigh realizing this is no School of Rock.

By allowing viewers to step into the shoes of a wall-climbing Jackie Chan, a parkour-sprinting Daniel Craig or a bullet-spraying Ahnold, it does something that live action has never attempted before. The carnage flies—it’s possible to miss a lot of it. But if action movies are meant to be stunning, Hardcore Henry can proudly take its place among the giants. Even better, it lets you stand with them.

As scripted by Bryan Sipe, Demolition buries its lead actor under a rubble of clichés.

A hilarious, deeply relaxed comedy about male bonding, Richard Linklater’s baseball-minded latest ranks right up there with his masterpieces.

If you loved the first one, you’ll happily sit through this one. It’s just not quite as good.

If there’s any justice, dawning or otherwise, at the multiplex, audiences will reject Zack Snyder’s lumbering, dead-on-arrival superhero mélange, a $250 million tombstone for a genre in dire need of a break.

Midnight Special is a movie worth believing in. It's an alternative to the assembly line that turns hot young directors into purveyors of the latest shade of superhero spandex. Little here feels like science or fiction but sci-fi is exactly what this is, from the heart and out of this world.

[Farhadi and cowriter Mani Haghighi] prove to be stronger on atmosphere than on structure, aided by crisp, unnerving camerawork.

What it lacks in cohesion, City of Gold makes up for in its subject’s wit and wisdom.

Basically, it’s an electrifying three-person play, as the determined Winstead, the complexly furious Goodman and Tony-winner John Gallagher Jr. (playing a lucky neighbor who made his way down) have it out in scenes that impart the nauseating futility of George Romero’s mall-ensconced "Dawn of the Dead."

With a plot that plays like a string of incidental encounters, The Meddler could easily have felt like a glorified sitcom. But its heroine’s grief, her goodness and her complicated relationship with her daughter all feel so lived-in and true that the film stays grounded.

Robustly entertaining.

As the film totters to its predictable finale, the closing moments set up a sequel, a prospect far more terrifying than anything we've just seen.

Eddie the Eagle may suffice for a brainless Friday night, but an honest account would have been a lot more memorable.

Race is the most timid, lackadaisical movie that could have been made out of potentially classic material.

It’s not often that faith-based films, competing in the same marketplace that rewards action, embrace the deeper, more difficult idea of meeting hate with love, but Risen tries. It’s a drama that neither seeks to convert viewers, nor confront true believers with anything uncomfortable—only reaffirm their bedrock convictions, the ones that are worth repeating.

Nothing here will blow you away—think of this one as taking baby steps away from what's formulaic.

Visually though, Kung Fu Panda 3 is a candy-colored 3-D treat.

It’s an intelligent and intriguing meditation on issues concerning what it means to be Chinese in today’s and tomorrow’s world.

Romance, tragedy, toned bodies, conservative values: It can only be the latest from Nicholas Sparks.

It doesn’t seem new for them, yet as super polished, mannered, slightly surreal comedies go, the movie feels as rare as a unicorn.

A ridiculously infantile film, one that flatters itself by intimating a deeper comment about suppressed masculinity or romantic passivity.

En route to the harshest, most unremittingly bleak film of his career, Solondz unleashes some of his sharpest commentary on human mortality and regret.