From its cute-fake soundstage-town setting to the authoritative yet chummy voice-over narration (courtesy of Nick Offerman), The Life of Chuck works doggedly to give you the warm fuzzies—and a little bit of that fuzz goes a long way.

It’s not that Armstrong is wrong about the targets of his mockery. He just doesn’t seem to have much more insight into them than the average extremely online observer who’s spent years despairing over the same headlines.

What Lawrence does in Die, My Love is so delicately textured, even within its bold expressiveness, and its fiery anger, that it leaves you scrambling for adjectives. It’s the kind of performance you go to the movies for, one that connects so sympathetically with the bare idea of human suffering that it scares you a little.

It’s smart, hugely entertaining, and profound in a way that’s anything but sentimental.

The Phoenician Scheme has none of the lavish, kooky excess of, say, The Grand Budapest Hotel. And the plot, with its fixation on intricate, not-quite-cricket business deals, is—let’s just come out and say it—boring. But Anderson seems to be expressing an indistinct dissatisfaction with the current world order in the best way he can: in a parade of color that’s somehow less colorful than usual.

It’s a picture that stands strong on the side of art, of history, of working to solve the puzzle of things that maybe at first you don’t fully understand. It’s both a shout of joy and a call to arms. It’s all about the bold, muscular act of caring.

If this wigged-out modern Western doesn’t quite work, it’s at the very least a cry of vexation over what our country, messy at the best of times, has become, thanks to a virus that found its way not just into our lungs, but into our very lifeblood. Dr. Aster has listened in on America’s heartbeat; the diagnosis is that we’re basically a mess.

It’s big, extravagant, and at times very beautiful to look at. The story is the problem: packed with expository dialogue, it feels as if it were written to be digested in 10- or 15-minute bites.

How much Tim Robinson is too much? Maybe the exact amount you get in Friendship, the feature debut of writer-director Andrew DeYoung.

The Accountant 2 is not, and is not trying to be, a movie about the realities of autism. Even so, it challenges us to think about how our brains work, why we do and say the things we do—and to recognize that even though we may think there’s a normal way to respond to social cues, not everyone is wired the same way.

What makes Sinners, set in 1932 Clarksdale Mississippi, so effective—so chilling, so hypnotic, and occasionally so grimly funny—is the way it yields to mystery, never seeking to overexplain.

It’s a fun, open-hearted picture, and even if it lacks the wistful subtlety of the original, it ends up on the same landing note: the people we love best are always worth fighting for.

A movie that does little more than tick off a selection of action-movie boxes—though some of them are at least ticked off with a satisfying click.

If The Amateur is unremarkable, it’s also efficient and effective, and sometimes all you need is a movie that gets the job done.

If a movie can be elegant and brutal at once, this one is: the dissipating smoke from the grenade hangs in the air, a pinkish-gold mist; polka dots of sunlight stream through a scattering of bullet holes in a door.

It’s the kind of movie that miraculously makes you feel better about everything.

Mostly, though, Death of a Unicorn just feels like exhausting, enforced fun: its plot goes everywhere all at once for no discernible reason. All the actors are appealing and engaged with the task at hand, but they're at the mercy of an unfocused plot.

It’s convenient to grumble about updates that mess with the classics, but there’s nothing in the new Snow White that dishonors the earlier Disney version. If anything, it reminds us why we loved it.

The time may feel right for a wry dystopian sci-fi adventure-comedy. But as satires go, this one is more mild than habanero.

Black Bag succeeds on its chilly wit, and on the cool, nervy appeal of its two stars. Blanchett strides through the movie with lioness grace; Fassbender makes George’s robotic use of logic seem like an aphrodisiac.

There’s something safe and cozy about Mad About the Boy that made me long for the unruliness of the first film.

In an age of chaos, what we really need is focus, and You’re Cordially Invited chases down every distraction in sight.

Presence follows you home, long after the camera has stopped rolling.

There’s something about A Complete Unknown that pushes against traditional Dylan worship and cuts a path toward something far more beautiful, flawed, and human.

No matter what you take away from writer-director Halina Reijn’s daring, alluring, and ultimately joyful Babygirl, one idea flutters around it like a potent perfume cloud: both desire and the memory of it are what make us feel alive.

Nickel Boys is a picture on the move, a work that’s traveling forward, the thing we always ask for yet often don’t know how to accept when it arrives.

That’s the magic of Leigh; it’s white magic, not the dark kind, drawing out compassion we almost don’t want to feel.

The film’s rhythms occasionally falter—this is Malcolm Washington’s feature debut, and it's an ambitious project for a beginner. But the inherent strength of the material always shines through, largely thanks to Deadwyler.