[A] solid yet subtly sphinxlike new drama from filmmaker Hirokazu Kore-eda.

The Boss Baby (adapted from the 2010 book by author and illustrator Marla Frazee) is a sweet adventure tale about sibling rivalry that ultimately becomes a moving tribute to family and brotherhood.

The Blackcoat’s Daughter is a visually striking masterpiece of mood and carefully calibrated storytelling. If only its technical gifts...were in service of a better — or at least more original — story.

A murky stew of sin, vengeance and expiation boils up and over in Dig Two Graves, a flawed but gripping horror-thriller, handsomely wrought on a slim budget by filmmaker Hunter Adams.

Life has cool effects, real suspense and a sweet twist. It ain’t rocket science, but it does what it does well — even, one might say, with a kind of genius.

Its virtuosity, wit, fleet performances and cool self-awareness notwithstanding, T2 doesn’t feel like a necessary film as much as a respectful and respectable exercise in fan service.

There’s a story here, all right, but it’s a heartless and bitter one.

Few films are both genuinely erotic and off-putting enough to inspire the occasional walkout. Raw succeeds at both.

Song to Song is a painful movie to watch, not only because it’s so dithery and overlong, but because it reveals Malick to be a filmmaker far more interested in surfaces than his vaunted intellectual depth would suggest.

This Beauty and the Beast isn’t predicated on starry-eyed romance or animal attraction, but the solace of mutual loss and understanding, which makes it all the sweeter.

Betting on Zero makes such a strong and effective case that the company does, in fact, engage in shady business practices that it’s likely to leave viewers in a state of Documentary High Dudgeon (that brand of cinematic outrage that is not entirely unmixed with a pleasurable feeling of moral superiority).

Donald Cried succeeds on its own modest terms, but watching its title character can be painful. This is not a movie for people who’d just as soon forget their own teenage mortifications.

You don’t need to be familiar with Assayas’s previous work to enjoy Personal Shopper. It works in two realms: as an engrossing ghost story and a drama that addresses profound matters of life and death.

The inherent superiority of the written word notwithstanding, Batra has done a credible and even commendable job of translating Barnes’s intricate prose to the screen, opening up some of its corners, burrowing into its time shifts and, most gratifyingly, elaborating on a few otherwise marginal characters.

Depending on how you take your twee — sparingly or, as is the case in this preciously concocted tale of English misfits, slathered like marmalade over a crumpet — it will either delight or quickly cloy.

Director Mark Pellington (“I Melt With You”) at least recognizes that the setup is little more than a freakish showcase for Mac­Laine do her blunt-spoken-battle-ax thing.

This is not a film about Neruda’s life or controversial death. This is a film for folks who are unfamiliar with the writing of Neruda, or maybe even skeptical about poetry in general. They may not cherish every word of the poet’s most heartbreaking lines, but they’ll understand the man who wrote them a little better those who already do.

Morality is hardly the main concern of The Ottoman Lieutenant. Instead, it’s content with hackneyed romance and soaring strings.

If Reilly’s presence gives Kong: Skull Island its playful, gonzo edge, it’s the title character himself who gives it soul, morphing from a monster into a brooding symbol of the colossal folly of military belligerence and hegemonic hubris.

This is a movie squarely directed at adolescents in all their untamed desire, outsize emotion and near-bottomless self-obsession. The filmmakers have crafted a canny delivery system for their life lessons, by way of a movie that balances escapism, candor and ethics with admirable aplomb.

Both grimly naturalistic and infused with classical values at their most thoughtfully composed, Land of Mine is epic but deeply intimate; elegant but tough.

It has, simultaneously, the exhilarating feel of a departure and the finality of a full stop.

Gaga looks like fun, but the soul-revealing “Mr. Gaga” makes clear the sacrifice Naharin’s dedication has exacted from family and dancers alike.

It may not sound like it, but calling this barely 70-minute Swiss stop-motion film “heavy” — as in substantial and almost swollen with feeling — is a true compliment.

The story takes a couple of sharp turns, ultimately revealing that it isn’t a romantic comedy after all, but a shambling drama with a few mildly amusing pratfalls.

There ought to be no lack of firepower in telling this shameful tale. Too often, however, Bitter Harvest is guilty of overkill.

Though pleasant to watch, Torun’s feature debut feels more like a meandering montage than a structured narrative, and it could easily be half as long.

Intermittently diverting as it may be, the movie bears all the earmarks of a cobbled-together, made-by-committee product, poorly aimed at its tween-and-younger target audience in look, tone, music and story.

Like all great movies, Get Out faithfully obeys the conventions of its genre — in this case horror films shot through with brutal wit and sharp-eyed allegory — while getting at profound psychic and political realities. The shocks and the laughs are thoroughly entertaining, but it’s the truth of Get Out that’s so real.

Although the relationship lacks a certain fire, the acting is superb.

The slapsticky, sight-gag-heavy yukfest, which is filled with the kind of phallic humor you may have sniggered at when you were 16, floats like a dead butterfly and stings like a B-movie.

When the climax does come, it arrives with a bra­cing blast of campy absurdity so flamboyantly deviant that it glows with a kind of perverse brilliance. But the setup is starved of logic, the film’s vital oxygen.

The documentary I Am Jane Doe is the kind of film that lifts up a rock that’s been sitting in plain sight year after year, with only a heroic few bothering to see the slithering reality underneath.

Like a miniature universe made entirely of millions of tiny plastic bricks, The Lego Batman Movie looks and feels like it could only have been put together by a roomful of mad geniuses, moving in a ballet of well-choreographed creativity: It’s simultaneously epic and humble.

It isn’t easy to explain the appeal of the “John Wick” movies, and they are inarguably not for every taste, but there is a purity to them that transcends their barbarity and has something to do with the central character.

The real problem, when all is said and done, isn’t the movie but the man with the microphone in its spotlight. Despite two comedy consultants who worked on the film, De Niro’s Jackie never comes across as especially funny on stage (or especially likable off).

If the conceit feels obvious and strained, it still gives Farhadi and his actors ample room to explore the ambiguities of commitment, ethics and revenge in a society where mistrust in public servants runs deep.

Even if you agree with the film’s argument that teenagers shouldn’t be locked up for life when there are other ways to save them, “Monsters” doesn’t offer a convincing argument that a screenwriting class is that lifeline.

A brilliant piece of filmic writing, one that bursts with fierce urgency, not just for the long-unresolved history it seeks to confront, but also in its attempt to understand what is happening here, right now.

I Am Michael, is an intermittently affecting — but not entirely convincing — conversion story.

If de Wit’s idea of story is sometimes gratingly simplistic and sentimental, there’s no denying its primal classicism, or the seductive pull of sound and image at their most pure and unfussy.

Toni Erdmann, it turns out, is Hüller’s movie all the way, with her character not just matching wits with the bumptious, often irritating father, but ultimately coming into her own with the genuine feeling he seems determined to deflect.

The purpose of A Dog’s Purpose isn’t to solve philosophical riddles but to warm the cockles of dog lovers’ hearts. That, it does — as well as a wet kiss from a slobbery tongue can.

The most ironic thing about Gold is this: For all its efforts, the movie seems to know it’s sitting on a gold mine of a backstory, but it just can’t figure out how to get the stuff out of the ground.

In the end, The Founder is little more than a deflating reminder, as if we needed one, that the winner takes all, and integrity isn’t always the key to success.

For all the outrageousness of Kevin’s alters, the movie falls oddly flat: less tantalizingly enigmatic “et cetera” than “blah blah blah.”

After dispensing with the sluggish setup of the film’s first act, Berg shifts into high gear, powerfully evoking the feelings of dread and white-knuckle excitement that much of America no doubt felt as the manhunt progressed.

The idea is unabashedly silly, yet Monster Trucks is more involving than it sounds. Characters and conflicts are sharply defined, and director Chris Wedge handles the action with clarity.

The visual and performative elements are polished enough in Live by Night, but it lacks any sense of urgency.

The Bye Bye Man had a relatively modest budget, and it shows in the special effects, which tend to be more funny than scary.

As a celebration of personal and social history, 20th Century Women takes the audience back. But it also lifts us up on a wave of openhearted emotion and keen intelligence. It bursts with the sad, messy, ungovernable beauty of life.

Whether by dint of his source material or his own maturity, the filmmaker has invested the surface sheen with tenderness and emotional depth. It’s no surprise that Julieta is marvelous to look at, but it possesses just as much substance as style.

The whole endeavor runs a high risk of drowning in melodrama. But the movie avoids that pitfall, because nothing about the story or characters is easy or straightforward.

What becomes clear in the course of the movie is that Jarmusch has constructed his own version of a poem, with recurring images and themes that allow him to delve into the nature of commitment, artistic ambition and how inner life is shaped by the tidal pull of place and history.

The morale of [Scorsese's] story is ultimately both tough and nuanced.

Lion is a complex movie, with its profound themes of home and identity, and its tonally disparate halves. A smartly understated approach to Brierley’s story holds it all together. Sometimes the truth alone is enough.

Ringing with both ancient wisdom and searing relevance, Fences feels as if it’s been crafted for the ages, and for this very minute.

Despite flashes of brilliance, Why Him? is perfunctory and boorish, the sort of film that already has begun to fade from memory before you’re too annoyed by it.

This bracing movie...gets off to a spirited start and rarely lets up, sharing with viewers a little-known chapter of history as inspiring as it is intriguing.

Sing ends, predictably and without straining, on a high note, with everybody’s problems resolved. If only real life could so easily be realigned, by a singing pig.

It’s incrementally more fun than it is silly.

Tyldum...isn’t a dynamic stylist as much as a competent executor of what’s on the page. He gets Passengers to where it needs to go, which is a resolution in keeping with a movie that wants to have its cake and eat it too, no matter how much credibility it strains, or how many political and ethical quandaries it elides.

By observing the struggle of the miner with a mix of resignation and resolve, the movie hints that this struggle is the struggle of every worker.

For sheer inventiveness of story, language, visuals and theme, The Brand New Testament is, quite nearly, a divine comedy.

The movie manages to be simultaneously superficial and heartbreaking. That’s no easy feat — nor is it a laudable one.

The real star in La La Land is the movie itself, which pulses and glows like a living thing in its own right, as if the MGM musicals of the “Singin’ in the Rain” era had a love child with the more abstract confections of Jacques Demy, creating a new kind of knowing, self-aware genre that rewards the audience with all the indulgences they crave...while commenting on them from the sidelines.

By no stretch is this a disaster on a par with Lucas’s misbegotten prequel trilogy. Still, at least until its final section, Rogue One lacks the zip, zing and exhilarating sense of return to form that “The Force Awakens” conveyed so lightly.

Suffused with wry humor, vulnerability and radiant warmth, Huppert’s performance captures that delicate period in life during which resignation morphs into graceful, even grateful, acceptance.

Despite bloody mayhem, Sword Master is more swashbuckling ballet than epic battle.

The film’s success is due to the twinkly commitment of the large and talented cast.

Simultaneously warm and clear-eyed, “Best Worst Thing” is an unblinking look at how the sausage of theater gets made, as well as an emotional memoir.

Overall, “Shoot First” is a breezy look at a professional whose work remains endearing, despite some highfalutin claims.

This taut political thriller, set amid the soulless office architecture of K Street, has an ostensibly liberal bent, but its antiheroine’s Machiavellian methods turn the film’s subject away from its cause, portraying lobbyists and politicians in a dark light.

Superbly shot and accompanied by an alternately angular and lyrical score by Mica Levi, Jackie would have been an exceptionally smart, intriguing movie as an astutely conceived, well-crafted meditation on political mythmaking. In Larraín and Portman’s hands, it becomes something deeper and more emotionally potent.

The Duelist will leave viewers scratching their heads over any number of questions, but the most gnawing one might be: Why did everyone get so dressed up for a bloodbath?

The Eyes of My Mother looks marvelous.... But that’s about all this absurd, illogical and underwhelming thriller has going for it.

Manchester by the Sea is a film of surpassing beauty and heart. Even at its most melancholy depths, it brims with candid, earnest, indefatigable life.

By showing animals in all their mundane splendor, Seasons makes a case for conservation.

While the main themes of Moana are identity and self-discovery — familiar territory, to be sure — the film manages to enliven such well-traveled latitudes with a breeze as fresh as the islands.

If Beatty was not trying to make a movie about Hughes, he utterly failed, because the love story of Frank and Marla is more like a framing device — a gateway drug to get the audience into the theater so that Beatty can chew some scenery. Even so, he chews it quite well.

As the espionage plot surges toward its nail-biting conclusion, the path it’s traveling feels less open-ended than preordained.

Jokes about race, women’s anatomy and little people are sprinkled, like rancid pepper, over a script that depends on the inherent humor of cuss words. Not that coarse language can’t be funny, but here it appears to be evidence of a toxic mix of laziness and sociopathy, not defiance of seasonal propriety.

Kennebeck may be a newcomer to feature filmmaking, but her grasp of the material is accomplished.

As with giallo, The Love Witch features deliberately wooden acting, and can be a little boring at times. But it’s a stunningly photographed, fascinating reinterpretation of classic melodrama.

Although it’s intended as a satire, director Feng Xiaogang’s movie has a literary tone, a leisurely pace and relatively few laugh-out-loud moments. It captures not only Lian’s frustration, but also the exasperation of the authorities who must deal with the demanding woman during her 11-year quest for justice.

Elle would be too clever by half — not to mention fatally offensive — were it not for Huppert, who in her portrayal of Michèle owns the movie from its opening moments to its bizarre, but not entirely surprising, denouement.

Snarky and sensitive in just the right measure, what initially looks like a glib exercise in adolescent mortification has the nerve to dig a little deeper. And it winds up mining a little bit of wisdom and compassion in the process.

The halfhearted attempt to tweak the boxing-movie formula is a diversionary tactic. No amount of feints will change one fact: Bleed for This has no new moves.

The film’s subtly observed moments are more powerful than any of its technical wizardry.

It’s a tale bluntly told that arouses intense, evanescent emotion and then leaves you haunted, long afterward, by provocative but arguably answerable questions.

The plot thickens, along with the emotional tension, which was always the best part of the Potter universe, and not the dazzling special effects.

You don’t have to understand the lyrics — or even like the music — to find We Are X entertaining, even, at times, moving.

By looking closely, clinically and ultimately compassionately at one eccentric practitioner of a dying way of life...Peter and the Farm nevertheless manages to harvest not just understanding of one peculiar, broken little man, but a broader wisdom about the cycle of seasons that we all must endure on this planet.

What elevates the film is not just its beautiful setting in the French Pyrenees but also how the beautiful mountain exteriors serve as a metaphor for characters’ inner lives. Téchiné keeps his distance from his subjects, allowing their emotions to reveal themselves and delivering a payoff that is ultimately a delicate one.

Is it a good movie? Not particularly. But if you’re a forgiving filmgoer in need of a smile, it’s a reasonable diversion, one that ties up its message of love — if a bit too neatly — into a holiday bow.

For every misgiving The Eagle Huntress invites, it offers inspiration in equal measure, taking the audience on a beautiful, thrilling journey to a part of the world that is still largely inaccessible. And it introduces them to a young woman who gives bravery a bracing, unforgettable face.

Intimate, moving and superbly underplayed, Loving is every bit as soft-spoken and subtly implacable as its protagonists. It lives up to its title as a noun and a verb, with elegant, undeniable simplicity.

Muted, measured and meditative, Arrival brings taste and restraint to a genre in the midst of a mini golden age: It comes in peace.