With The Way Back, O’Connor works so hard to avoid sports movie cliché that he pares the film down to something unsustainably lean. Without Affleck’s gravity, The Way Back would just drift away.

Rarely in Big Time Adolescence does anything feel canned or beyond the realm of the credible. All the characters in the film seem to have inner lives; we believe that they exist past the confines of the film. It’s a pleasure to be in their warm and appealing company, even as the proceedings take a turn for the mildly dire.

It’s a fine movie: cute, clever, moving, and engagingly-told, an altogether painless confirmation of what we should all agree is Pixar’s basic aptitude for keeping kids’ asses in seats and parents from pulling out their hair.

The Invisible Man loses its personality as it tumbles into the third act, and with it goes a lot of the emotional fiber Moss has worked so hard to spin into something rich and memorable. She still holds her own as the movie crumbles around her, but her performance deserves better than what Whannell ultimately gives her.

It’s a freeing movie, not without its flaws and missteps, but wonderfully alive with all the looseness of new possibility.

The Father is an act of understanding, radical in its toughness and its generous artistry.

Promising Young Woman is not always surefooted in its style or substance, but Mulligan is consistently riveting throughout.

Shirley is a relentless film, ceaselessly in motion. Its actors, then, must go chasing after it, with Moss leading the fearless charge. She brilliantly maneuvers the film, moving in fluid response to Decker’s stimuli.

On the Record itself is a thorough and self-aware film.

Colangelo grapples with all that is unfixed in this story with wise consideration. Worth finds its ultimate value in accepting what the film, and we, cannot ever determine for certain.

The film looks away from that pure artistry too often, turning instead to its limited, and far less satisfying, view of Swift’s complicated star profile.

I don’t find Bonello cold. I find him alert, alive, and frequently inspired—if unexpectedly limited, at times. Zombi Child amounts to a curiously fragmented display of his talent. But much of the good stuff is here.

Downhill is a clever movie when it could have been profound, had, perhaps, Faxon and Rash been willing—or capable—of digging deeper.

Though premised on the slight pretenses of Twitter, the world of Bravo’s film is no fictionalized, seedily appealing underbelly. It’s simply America: often frightful, sometimes grimly amusing, and ever rattling along in its entropy.

Somehow, a James novella whose subtext has been debated for over a century has been rendered almost free of subtext—and it sort of works.

The Gentlemen is a homecoming film, reuniting Ritchie with his once-signature style of narrative jumble and jocular menace. Watching it, I felt the calm of familiarity wash over me, the dim feeling like I’d somehow folded back into a time simpler only for having already happened.

Technically speaking, Dolittle is a film made for children. So we should probably mostly view it through that lens. In that regard, the movie is perfectly okay.

If In Fabric is initially hindered by the literalism of Strickland's vision, it still manages to prove irritatingly suspenseful, at times even pleasurably shocking.

The mysteries of Atlantics, and there are plenty, are rooted in the question of what the lives of those men were worth—and of what, just as urgently, the life of a young woman like Ada might be worth, accordingly. But Diop’s approach to that question is elliptical, borne of a plot that mixes genres, religious superstitions, and the modernity of the cell phone age, into something wily and unpredictable.

Jewell, to its credit, is anchored by one of the more complex heroes in Eastwood’s canon. But I’m still not certain it finds the most cutting or convincing path through this story.

The film never obscures what it’s about. This is, after all, the story of a martyr. But because it’s recounted by a director whose cosmic visions are deliberately meted out through the most minute details, things most other films overlook—the ephemera of everyday experience, the gestures, glances, and sudden flights of feeling that define us without our even recognizing them in the moment—it all feels that much more particular.

We’re served both the galvanization and the despair, the victories eked out bit by painful bit and the looming defeat, as an implacable monolith dismisses puny mortal concerns like so many gnats. It’s tough stuff, but it’s worthy stuff too.

It’s an ugly stray who smells bad and should not be invited into your home, certainly. And yet it is its own kind of living creature, worthy of at least some basic compassion.

It’s a turgid rush toward a conclusion I don’t think anyone wanted, not the people upset about whatever they’re upset about with The Last Jedi (I feel like it has something to do with Luke being depressed, and with women having any real agency in this story) nor any of the more chill franchise devotees who just want to see something engaging.

1917 is a rattling wonder of form, an audacious undertaking that nonetheless bobbles or cheats on a few occasions.

It’s a paean to the loving of a thing, rather than a movie that gives that thing an entirely new existence, free-standing and self-possessed in its own right, despite Gerwig’s narrative tinkering.

While I admire the movie’s attempt to more deeply mine the identities of sister-princesses Anna (sweet, non-magical) and Elsa (restless, can control snow and ice), its discoveries are rushed and are served up half-baked.

A part-clever, part-misshapen global caper, Charlie’s Angels—like Stewart—connects a few solid kicks in all its flailing.