These beasts awaken something within the people, making them kinder and more playful. If Kedi did the same for audiences, that wouldn’t be so bad.

Call Me by Your Name has a choking emotional intensity that will be apparent to anyone who’s ever dared to reach out to another.

Director Showalter does a beautiful job of twining Nanjiani and Romano’s similar slump — you smile at what a perfect almost-father and son they already are — and he steers Hunter to a rapprochement of uncommon complexity and grace. And we thought we were watching a Judd Apatow film.

Alas, this is a film that builds to a backroom compromise on carbon emissions, not the most thrilling of dramatic structures. The serious issue of global warming won’t be minimized by a mediocre documentary, but it has yet to find a filmmaker inflamed with rage and visual passion.

The film plays like a Trump-state "Big Lebowski," as Ruth and Tony’s amateur sleuthing teases out a much deeper conviction, perfectly stated by its main character.

You must see Oklahoma City, if only to know the enemy. They’re not stuck at the airport.

There’s no denying the movie’s climactic gathering of females bent on saving the species.

Lowery is committing to nothing less than the scope of eternity; frankly, sometimes it feels as much. But by doing so, he does more to explore supernatural sadness than any thriller I can think of. He’s crafted something strange and wonderful, with a romantic metaphysics all its own.

The movie has the proportion of a fable but the scope of a mythical lifetime.

Split trots out many of Shyamalan’s pet moves (it’s amazing how well we know this filmmaker), including his tendency to infuse genre nonsense with the deeper trauma of child abuse.

It feels too flabby for the company it keeps.

While Monster Trucks may be bizarre, haphazard and deeply silly, hey, it’s a movie about monsters that live in trucks. It was never going to be Citizen Kane.

If you like sexy vampires or ferocious werewolves, you can do much better than this exhausted, computerized sequel.

Wilson’s play, about dreams deferred and a son seeking approbation (The Leftovers’ Jovan Adepo), could have used a more cinematic rethink. But even flatly presented, it has a richness of rage that’s unmistakable.

The animation itself might not be the most inventive out there (this isn’t Pixar), but where Sing soars is in its one-by-one attention to its ensemble of beasts and its obvious passion for music: It’s nearly impossible to watch this film and not be humming the Beatles’ "Golden Slumbers" for days afterward.

Like the product that inspired it, The Founder is tasty enough while it lasts but never quite fills you up.

Tonally, it’s a touch awkward (like the movie as a whole), but Larraín’s endgame set on a snowy mountainside is as abstract as the final moments of "The Shining" — a film that’s also about the life of the mind.

The film aims for the stars but might have gone stratospheric if it cooled its jets ever so slightly.

It’s just impossible to get past the core ridiculousness and arm-twisting manipulation of the plot.

There’s a lot of cinema to admire here. And being reminded of the directorial talents of Affleck—undeniably a more accomplished filmmaker than an actor—is no minor event.

There might have been a thorny dark comedy in this chauvinistic pissing contest. But in trying to get us to like both opponents, the film undercuts most of its sharpest comic potential, leaving us instead with musty jokes.

Scorsese has hit the rare heights of Ingmar Bergman and Carl Theodor Dreyer, artists who found in religion a battleground that often left the strongest in tatters, compromised and ruined. It’s a movie desperately needed at a moment when bluster must yield to self-reflection.

Masterfully addressing the American racial divide, past and present, director Raoul Peck’s six-years-in-the-making documentary, I Am Not Your Negro, is a galvanizing, ominous film, thrumming with a sense of history repeating itself.

Jennifer Aniston delivers the saltiest lines as the company’s ruthlessly humorless CEO, though it’s a coal-lump of a part.

Along with the film’s hippy-ish musings on the relationship between humans and the elements, it gives the film a moving, supernatural touch.

By the end of this most ominous lullaby, it’s clear that the film isn’t a puzzle meant to be solved—it’s an oblique return to childhood, to a time when there was no clear boundary between imagination and reality, when everything you didn’t understand was beautiful and terrifying in equal measure.

Rules Don’t Apply flies along at an inhuman speed; the edits are sharp, skipping years at a time, and the production values are unshowy. Like everything this star-director has done, the film is deceptively smart. It’s just a little too late to the game.

What makes Always Shine transcend, though, is its long-telegraphed yet still unexplained switcheroo — not exactly new to fans of "Mulholland Drive" (or even "Freaky Friday") but near-experimental in its implications, given the context of two women struggling to make their professional marks.