On its way to an uncathartic climax that somehow involves a black-market-fenced oil painting and an Amsterdam shootout, The Goldfinch throws in so much diversionary character work that you wonder if anyone thought the stew was going to be edible.

Breathtakingly risky but valid under scrutiny ... Jojo Rabbit isn’t perfect; sometimes it strains to reconcile Waititi’s more relaxed beats (“Let everything happen to you,” is a line from poet Rainer Maria Rilke that gets big play) with his visual fussiness. But he’s legitimately breaking new ground. It will find an audience that gets it.

Murder, skulduggery and an avalanche of plotting makes Rian Johnson's latest a retro pleasure for those who enjoy being dizzied.

The film doesn’t know how innocent it wants to be. Establishing shots of Manhattan’s 1998 skyline arrive in the cutesy form of a colorful diorama, just like Mr. Rogers’s show, but that gesture feels utopian and unearned, not to mention a little boring.

The Personal History of David Copperfield feels, to a large degree, like a writer’s stunt. If you’re in a mildly irreverent mood (like Iannucci himself), you won’t complain too loudly about that.

Waves shudders with ambition and nervy style; it never quite relaxes out of its harrowing first hour but the longer it stretches out, the more humane it feels.

It definitely demands patience ... but it rewards it with a similarly narcotic effect.

Sure, some of the historical detail is terrible (did Henry V really get crowned topless?) and Shakespeare purists may scream heresy, but director David Michôd has done something genuinely fresh and confident with this well-told piece of English folklore.

Kids train for guerrilla fighting in a gorgeously atmospheric film that feels like a transmission from the future.

Even as it drifts into narrative indiscipline, you appreciate the movie’s attempt to make sense of a troubled, beclowned present.

The Informer is a film that favours brawn over brains, punching its way through any plot predicaments. A smart hairpin or two would have made it a juicier watch.

Inna de Yard becomes more like a concert movie, with a spine of cultural history, than a narrative documentary.

An uneventful, overly stuffy approach to a painter who, as this mother continually tells us, was considered outlandishly strange.

Joaquin Phoenix is devastating as the villain-in-the-making in this incendiary tale of psychological escape and psychopathy.

It doesn’t have the balls to be ‘McHarold and Maude’, but it does deliver an engaging, prettily scored (Debbie Wiseman), likeable warning about the dangers of wasting your life.

It’s often thrilling, occasionally improbable, sometimes confounding, but like its director, Ad Astra is never bound by the gravitational pull of the ordinary. Strap in.

Featuring powerhouse performances by Scarlett Johansson and Adam Driver, Noah Baumbach's divorce drama is a bruising tour-de-force.

It’s frenetic, brashly executed and so full of shooting, you’ll stagger away with tinnitus.

As games go, this one’s a little too easy to outfox, but it’s worth playing if you need a quick diversion, or if the chess moves of The Favourite felt overly vicious—Ready or Not is pure checkers.

Though its come-on is playful, this documentary sinks into some swampy subjects, including racism, secret biowarfare and political assassination.

The idea that we would want even a few of these draggy, didactic scenes (the poorly paced French plantation sequence plays better with self-satisfied critics than with audiences) may remind you of one of Marlon Brando’s immortal lines, the one about an errand boy, sent by grocery clerks to collect a bill.

This animated sequel is tighter, funnier and sillier than its predecessor. It’s worth chicking out.

Generation "Home Alone", now grown up and maybe with children of its own, will be amused in the moment, but the film’s heart isn’t as subversive as it wants us to believe.

It’s defiantly cheesy and very hard to resist.

“Stories heal, stories hurt,” we hear in voiceover, and while any horror film would unavoidably literalize such a claim, this one can’t hold a candle to the power of the page, as read by a thirty, ghoulish mind.

When featherweight Domhnall Gleeson, as an intense angel of death, is your feminist Irish mob movie’s most interesting asset, you need to find Hollywood’s witness-protection program immediately.

Between epic bouts of bickering, Dwayne Johnson and Jason Statham save the world in an offshoot that gets the job done.

While it lacks the emotional intensity of the duo’s Oscar-nominated The Square—a rousing 2013 look at Egypt’s Arab Spring—The Great Hack still feels of a piece, inviting viewers to contemplate the power and irreversibility of their online footprint.