Director David Leitch is a little too nonchalant about the gigantic pile of corpses his heroine leaves in her wake. But damned if it doesn’t look cool as hell. And sometimes in life...all you want is something that looks super awesome, regardless of whether it makes any sense. Atomic Blonde manages that trick in spades.

The Emoji Movie is a waste of time, resources, and a bunch of comedians’ voices, plus a premise that actually had the potential to do some small good in the world. It’s less of a movie and more of an insult.

The reason films like Detroit are important isn’t just because they remind us that the more things change, the more they stay the same; it’s because watching them forces us to tread moral ground alongside the characters.

Dunkirk wants us to sense what made this moment so pivotal without reducing it to an individual tale. And at that, it succeeds richly.

War for the Planet of the Apes is the rare blockbuster that’s both entertaining and full of complexity.

Inside Out is as beautiful as it is abstract, as daring as it is intelligent. It's also the best movie of 2015 so far.

A Ghost Story isn’t all sorrow and grief. There’s a kind of deadpan humor throughout — the sheet ghost is comical, and there’s no getting around it — that complicates the film and rewards a rewatch.

Tom Holland masterfully channels Peter’s teenage angst, which could easily come off as melodramatic or superficial, and infuses it with respect. Watts’s artful work makes you realize how often we don’t take teenagers’ anxieties, joys, and fears seriously. Peter’s life in Homecoming is a frustrating, jagged journey toward figuring out what kind of person he is.

In the midst of what feels like a dark time, The House offers relief in its assertion that it’s okay to laugh at the lengths to which we must go to get by — up to and including an accidentally severed finger.

In Trump’s America, most people watching Netflix already have their minds made up about journalists — they may trust them, or they may think they’re the scum of the earth. Nobody Speak is a stirring argument that could sway some of the undecided viewers.

By letting the past speak for itself, The Reagan Show stays both sober and light on its feet.

If you can adjust to the idea that you’re not meant to sympathize with anyone, Lady Macbeth is quite a film.

It’s a seemingly straightforward “one last job” crime tale mashed up with a jukebox musical romance, part high-octane action flick and part music video, propelled by perfectly calibrated performances and a wicked sense of humor.

The Big Sick feels authentic because it isn’t afraid of complexity.

There’s fun to be had in The Last Knight, if you can find it among the chaos — and if you can remember it after the fact.

The Journey is the rare hopeful political film rooted in both reality and very recent history.

Rough Night floats on the strength of its performances and its anything-for-a-laugh sensibility.

Like all Pixar movies, Cars 3 is gorgeous...but like most of the studio’s 2010s output, its storytelling is perhaps too complicated to really register. The movie is constantly trying to outmaneuver itself, leading to a film that’s pleasant but not much more.

Harrowing, visually striking, and almost too on the nose for the current sociopolitical moment, It Comes at Night is one of the best films of the year.

Unfortunately, the thinness of The Hero gives Elliott little to work with, and he’s already a subtle actor, with a mustache and hound dog visage that tends to obscure facial expressions anyhow.

The Florida Project won’t let us look away. Nor, given its brilliance, would we want to. Instead, we laugh, we watch silently, and we’re challenged to stop simplifying people's lives so we can offer easy theoretical answers.

The result isn’t uplifting in the least. But it’s deliciously frightening, a cautionary tale for the careless and a horror film that posits a world devoid of any real goodness.

The violence and fights in Wonder Woman are intriguing not just because they’re stunning but also because of how emotional they are.

Elvis as a metaphor for America is a genius of an idea, and that central theme of Promised Land really works, even though it feels sometimes like the musician’s life is being edited and bent to fit a narrative.

Visages, Villages is quite a moving film, and speaks to a particular cultural mindset that knits art into the fabric of public life.

Most good films rely on their audiences to connect the dots a little, but Happy End is all dots, with none of the lines drawn in at all. The meaning is there, but you have to dig for it in the everyday events of a family’s life.

It’s not a great film, but it’s interesting one.

Dead Men Tell No Tales tries to serve far too many masters with its story.