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.