Its heartwarming and clear-eyed approach to first love and the challenges of coming-of-age distinguishes it from its contemporaries.

The two leads, Wu and Golding, are charming and genuine, and the supporting performers around them keep the whole mad story spinning—this thing is never boring.

It’s simply a movie that makes you feel welcome.

Statham is the real thing, and he’s key to the effectiveness of this good-natured and often highly ridiculous adaptation of Steve Alten’s 1997 sci-fi potboiler.

The Miseducation of Cameron Post may not hit as hard as it should. But it at least suggests that the only real losers in life are those who presume to read God’s mind.

The picture has a charming, low-key vibe that is, here and there, brushed with just a trace of adult melancholy. It’s good for kids, but maybe even better for adults who could use a little calming something.

A well-meaning handspring of a movie that doesn’t necessarily land on its feet.

Mission: Impossible—Fallout may be the best Mission: Impossible movie since the first, made in the dawn of the cat-Internet age, 1996, by Brian De Palma. Or perhaps it’s just the one with the mostest: even by the franchise’s extravagant standards, Fallout throws off Hope-diamond levels of grandeur.

Blindspotting is entertaining, but it also packs an emotional punch. Sometimes, even the place you call home can make you feel like a ghost.

Mamma Mia! Here We Go Again is terrible. And irresistible. How a movie that’s almost not even a movie can be both of those things at once is one of the mysteries of filmgoing, and one of its puckish pleasures.

It’s all just Dwayne Johnson getting the job done. There ain’t no mountain, nor skyscraper, high enough for him.

The most of-the-moment movie on the landscape right now — it may end up being the most politically and culturally relevant movie of the year. As a piece of filmmaking, it’s far from perfect.

It has to be more of the same, but better, and the movie doesn’t quite succeed. You can’t really make a bigger, better Ant-Man — that just means defying the diminutive, carefree scale that made the earlier movie work in the first place.

There’s no such thing as perfect love in families; often it’s the fine threads of tension that actually hold things together. Granik’s "Winter’s Bone" was greatly admired for the way it presented “ordinary people” of the Ozarks. But Leave No Trace is better.

If you’re looking for a movie that speaks to the moment, a mindless action-thriller probably isn’t it.

Perceptive, probing and ultimately devastating, The King is for anyone who cares about where this country has been and where it’s headed.

Fallen Kingdom is so committed to thunderous spectacle that it fails to capture the poetry of these beasts in all their spiky, scaly, long-necked wonder. They deserve better.

Movies don’t have to be bigger and bolder than we ourselves are. Haley’s films are things we can reach toward – there’s an intimacy and candor about them that feels welcoming.

The new Superfly isn’t a great work of artistry or of cheap thrills — it’s so in between it’s practically bourgeois — but in the swagger department, it just squeaks by.

If Incredibles 2 harbors a current of seriousness, what really makes it work is that it is so purely delightful.

There’s some creepy, spooky stuff in Hereditary, images and ideas that just might surface in your nightmares. But the radical, undiluted humanness of Collette’s performance is the movie’s most haunting effect. There’s nothing supernatural about it. Call it the best humans can do without witchcraft.

With a promising cast like that, not to mention the glittery party setting, Ocean’s 8 should be great fun. Instead, it’s a kind of noncommittal semi-fun.

Dern’s mastery is so complete that it makes conversation about the actor’s skill or the awards she’ll likely win seem unworthy; her performance ignites the screen with increasing tension, stuffing a lifetime’s worth of repressed trauma into a moment.

Leto is one of those movies that whisks us into a world that feels both familiar and fresh, like a sense memory of a life we might have lived if we’d been born in another decade or on another continent.

If it’s hard to understand exactly what Godard is trying to say in this brief scrapbook scamper—it clocks in at one hour, 25 minutes—just watching it is a strange, melancholy pleasure, and an open window into the world of things that worry its creator.

The film ends with a syrupy coda that betrays its earlier subtlety. But Ronan and Howle are the keepers of its true spirit.

Star Wars lore is woefully lacking in sex appeal — even Han Solo is more of a guy’s guy — but Glover has an unruly, charismatic elegance. He belongs in a better movie, but at least he perks this one up.

Part of the movie’s understated triumph lies in its casting: Hawke is an actor who clearly cares, and worries, a lot–the tree of life is practically etched into his forehead.

Although 3 Faces is far from Panahi’s best work, it’s still a solid primer on how much a skilled filmmaker can achieve with very few resources.

BlacKkKlansman is both hilarious and exquisitely direct, and had it been made before November 2016, you might call Lee’s approach a little alarmist. But if anything, he’s restrained. This is an angry film as well as a hugely entertaining one, and Lee has complete control over its shifting tone, minute by minute.

It deftly walks the line between appropriately somber and great, sophisticated fun.

Disobedience, based on a novel by Naomi Alderman, cuts deeper than your standard forbidden-love story, largely because the actors are so attuned to their characters’ anguish.

A multifaceted, bittersweet delight.

There’s no pacing in Avengers: Infinity War. It’s all sensation and no pulse. Everything is big, all of the time.

It’s not always clear if we’re supposed to think the “new” Renee is basically unbearable, or totally awesome. The movie has many more flaws than Renee does: It isn’t as light on its feet as it should be, and Kohn and Silverstein frame some of the gags too broadly, particularly a boardwalk bikini-contest scene that’s dragged down by some crude gross-outs.

Although Chappaquiddick doesn’t address Kennedy’s subsequent legislative record, it’s the silver-lining storm cloud that hangs over the movie.

If you focus on the acting alone, it’s fun to watch these two circle each other–but the movie around them doesn’t bring us any closer to the heart of this aggrieved city.

Disquieting and skillfully crafted thriller.

The movie is at its best when it’s sopping with sentimentality and when it goes right over the top in its depiction of dorky destruction. Everything in between is a drag.

Blockers has a loopy sweetness, but it’s smart, too.

Ambitious, sweet-spirited.

Haigh, perhaps driven by some misguided sense of narrative purity, refuses to loosen the screws, and it’s almost too much to bear. If you make it through Lean on Pete, you’ll feel weariness in your bones afterward. The ache may not be worth it.

If A Quiet Place has one flaw, it’s that it never lets up. There’s little breathing space between its breathtaking moments. Even so, Krasinski has made one of the most poetic horror movies of recent years.

Unsane isn’t easily dismissible, especially if you think of it as just one fragment of the wild terrazzo of Soderbergh’s career, which includes jaggedly brilliant genre classics like "The Limey" and offbeat crowd-pleasers like "Magic Mike." The movie is worth seeing for its craftsmanship alone.

Isle of Dogs...buckles under the weight of its own finicky whimsy. By the end, you might feel exhausted, like a border collie who’s worn a circular groove in the carpet. And you didn’t even make the movie–you only watched it.

Johnson has a sense of Anastasia not just as part of a pristinely arranged tableau but also as a sensualist, with all the attendant nerve endings and complex emotions that that implies. Johnson is fearless about stripping bare, but her bold flirtiness is inextricable from her dignity: the sauciness of her mother Melanie Griffith and the marble-cool poise of her grandmother, Hitchcock blonde Tippi Hedren, merge in her.

The sections detailing the men’s childhood in Sacramento, with Judy Greer and Jenna Fischer playing beleaguered moms? Not so exciting. But then, the very averageness of these conscientious, gutsy guys is precisely the point.

The movie is smart, lavish and fun without being assaultive.

The movie’s hero, Thomas (Dylan O’Brien), is low-key and likable, though it’s his best pal, Thomas Brodie-Sangster’s Newt, who gets the most dramatic moments. He’s charming to watch, but by this point, it’s futile to wish for a cure-all.

[Fanning] plays Wendy as a person and not a condition.

It’s hard to shake the feeling that 12 Strong–based on Doug Stanton’s 2009 book Horse Soldiers, about U.S. Special Forces troops who traveled to Afghanistan shortly after 9/11 to confront Taliban forces–should add up to more than it does.

It is truly something to see; for among all the lives to be ruined it is a visual rhapsody, attentive to every nuance in the spectacular land and foliage around the family home, following the lives within as meticulously as it traces the dramatic changes in weather — from clear day to torrential showers — in one of the longest, most intricate and beautiful tracking shots in cinema.

As The Commuter rattles on, the plot becomes more and more implausible — though again, believability isn’t what we’ve signed on for here.

Bell is terrific at conveying Peter’s impatience with Grahame’s movie-star neediness as well as his ultimate reckoning with how much he loved her. And Bening is extraordinary, serving up a seemingly contradictory cocktail of fire and vulnerability.

Writer-director Greta Gerwig’s semiautobiographical Lady Bird is both generous and joyous, but when it stings, it stings deep.

But for sheer, go-for-broke nuttiness, The Greatest Showman stands alone in the landscape of this holiday season’s crop of movies, and I urge you to give it a chance.

The movie is a surprise, the good kind, an instance of a filmmaker zigging just when you’re expecting him to zag.

This is a beguiling, somewhat grisly drama, based on something that happened to one genuinely unhappy, messed-up family.

There’s no doubt Phantom Thread will be forever lauded as a great fashion movie, but I don’t think it’s even a good one. Its view of how fashion is made feels desiccated and airless, as if beautiful clothes can come into being only under a dome of oppression and anxiety.

Even if its goals are lofty, the movie is so fleet and entertaining that you never feel you’re being lectured to. This is a superhero movie for real grownups.

Jumanji: Welcome to the Jungle has a pleasant, affable spirit, and Johnson is wholly charming.

No matter how much money has been poured into a movie, it’s emotional generosity that matters, and Johnson gives without squandering. His great gift is that he knows when to stop.

Mitchell — who was so marvelous as Eazy-E in the 2015 "Straight Outta Compton" — is superb here, as a young man struggling with what it means to be at home within his own heart, and within his country. Mudbound — tough and bittersweet and, in places, painfully brutal — is all about what it really means to be an American.

Where to lay the blame for Justice League’s just OK-ness? The movie is a jumbo-sized blur — not terrible, just underwhelming even amid its desperation to impress us.

Directed by the enormously talented New Zealand filmmaker Taika Waititi, it’s well intentioned but ultimately numbing, an instance of fun overkill whose ultimate goal seems to be to put us into a special-effects coma.

Cavendish would become a lifelong advocate for the disabled, and the film’s tone is at times overly reverential. But the actors carry the story ably.

Kids have no idea they’re feeling wonder — just feeling it is the thing. That’s the lightning in a bottle captured by director Sean Baker in The Florida Project.

Even if Blade Runner 2049 never forgets where it came from, it somehow keeps losing its way. The picture’s moodiness is excessively manicured; this thing is gritty only in a premeditated way. Mostly, it feels like a capacious handbag, designed with perhaps too many extra compartments to hold every cool visual idea Villeneuve can dream up.

If only every actor we loved could leave us with a farewell film like this one.

Cruise plays Barry as an aw-shucks raconteur, and the routine is amusing at first. But midway through American Made, even Cruise devotees might decide enough is enough.

The documentary is a riveting piece of work.

The performances in Battle of the Sexes, agile and perceptive, keep the game alive every minute.

Director Andy Muschietti’s It, adapted from King’s disquieting 1986 epic of the same name, doesn’t cut very deep and isn’t very scary. At its best, it’s a sometimes-entertaining evocation of the way kids think and talk within their little cliques, and of the way they protect one another with fierce loyalty.

George Clooney’s statement-making black comedy Suburbicon, playing in competition here at the Venice Film Festival, is a misfire on nearly all counts.

School Life is a bit woolly in its pacing, but the picture’s easygoing structure is part of its charm—it mimics, perhaps, the passage of time at Headfort itself.

Mother! is ambitious and dorky, like a Hieronymus Bosch painting redone as swirl-art. It’s entertaining to watch, because it’s not easy to see where it’s going—though you might feel a little underwhelmed when you discover where it ends up. The main reason to keep watching is Lawrence, receptive and radiant.

There’s enough magic, and extraordinary visual imagination, to smooth the edges of the movie’s problems.

Dickinson is superb at tracing that veiled anguish, and Hittman--who wrote and directed the 2013 film It Felt Like Love--is a discreet and sympathetic guide to his fractured world.

People who love typewriters--you know who you are--shouldn't tap the space bar once, let alone twice, before rushing to see Doug Nichol's agile, deeply affectionate documentary California Typewriter. But anyone who loves machines, poetry or, better yet, the poetry of machines should see it too.

Patti Cake$ motors along steadily on Macdonald's unsentimental charisma.

Independently financed and distributed by Soderbergh, Logan Lucky is a magnificent movie that comes disguised as a modest one. Or, as I like to call it, a Joe Bang.

Whose Streets? is rough around the edges, like a torn photograph whose borders have also been raggedly burned. But that's more a strength than a liability.

Winterbottom is a gifted and extraordinarily versatile director. In the Trip projects, he may have found something of a meal ticket, but he still goes beyond the call of duty in making them cinematic.

Realistically, it’s probably not possible to dance your cares away. But the determination of these girls makes you believe in it.

Given how eagerly awaited this film has been, it’s safe to say that readers who love the series deserve a movie version made with more imagination, and less rote efficiency, than this one.

A well-intentioned picture, it’s also a flawed one. This is filmmaking that sets out to make its points but fails, in big ways and small ones, to forge an emotional connection with most of its characters.

Brigsby Bear is a sweet-natured picture with an undercurrent of prickly energy.

Glowering from beneath the bangs of her moonbeam-platinum bob, Theron’s Broughton is equal parts air, light and iron. We’re just the moths clustering around her flame.

The actors are all terrific.

Girls Trip is just fun, a movie that—even within the context of its broad, exaggerated humor—never seems to be trying too hard.

Dunkirk is extraordinary not just because it’s ambitious and beautifully executed, but because Nolan, who both wrote and directed it, has put so much care into its emotional details—and has asked so much of, and trusted, his actors.

Lowery can't always keep the movie from drifting through the mists of pretension, and the tremulous, too-precious score, by Daniel Hart, is sometimes intrusive. Still, the picture's visual imagery--the cinematographer is Andrew Droz Palermo--is so restlessly poetic that it's hard to turn away.

The movie around him is sometimes glancingly light. Other times it works way too aggressively at being entertainment, rather than just breathing. But Holland, as both Parker and Spidey, is always fun to watch: His bumbling uncertainty and his boyish eagerness make him believable not just as a crime fighter but as a kid.

It’s not going to change the summer-blockbuster landscape single-handedly, but at least it comes by its thrills honestly: This is a spectacle that trusts us to think.

The plot, though, is only the lid of this Pandora's toy chest. Inside, the alert viewer will find humor, imagination and a little Oriental mysticism.

Wright has orchestrated every swerve and near smashup—and one glorious foot chase—with precision, a rarity in action filmmaking these days.

The Big Sick succeeds in doing so many things that romantic comedies — to the extent that they’re even made anymore — have failed to do for years.

Really, as "Hangover"-style dumb entertainments go, it’s certainly good enough. Which isn’t to say it’s anything close to what what women want.