Despite the story’s familiarity, its star manages to turn its many tropes into a winning formula.

For all its melancholy and grey, snowy landscape, The Motel Life never feels totally hopeless, thanks in large part to colorful ancillary characters (not to mention occasional trips into Frank’s mind).

Tim’s Vermeer makes a convincing case that Vermeer could have painted the way Jenison says he did. It also makes a pretty powerful ancillary point: that some people are both geniuses and geeks.

The Force Awakens strikes all the right chords, emotional and narrative, to feel both familiar and exhilaratingly new. Filled with incident, movement and speed, dusted with light layers of tarnished “used future” grime, it captures the kinetic energy that made the first film, from 1977, such a revelation to filmgoers who marveled at Lucas’s mashup of B movies, Saturday-morning serials, Japanese historical epics and mythic heft.

Kingsman delivers on its promise of escapist fun, with a touch that alternates between Galahad’s old-school polish and Eggsy’s roguish charm. Like the rookie who knows that you have to make a few mistakes while following the master, the movie shrugs off its missteps with a wink and a smile that makes them easy to forgive.

The great strength of McQuarrie is that, even when he’s leaning into the laughs, he plays it straight — he doesn’t sacrifice inviolable core values in the name of escapism, whether in the form of smart writing or superb production aesthetics.

Because of its adorable protagonist, laugh-out-loud gags and touching premise, Paddington succeeds in a way most CGI/live-action hybrids do not.

The Punk Singer, like the best documentaries, captures more than just its subject, fascinating though she may be. Anderson manages to capture the feel of an era and the excitement surrounding a fresh feminist voice.

To say that there is also a monomania to the film is, if anything, an understatement. But it is precisely that sense of tunnel vision that makes Fury Road such a pulse-pounding pleasure.

The fact that Beyond the Lights is so effective at both celebrating and critiquing extravagance and artifice can be credited to Prince-Bythewood’s shrewd understanding of the highly pitched cinematic vernacular she’s working with. Even more crucially, when it came time to cast the transformational figure at her fable’s center, she found the real thing.

The film is an effective, even heartwarming, tale of one man’s commitment to teaching that playing by the rules is more important than winning.

What’s most fascinating about Afternoon of a Faun — and what the movie could spend more time delving into — is ballet’s grueling and fleeting nature.

There is an obliqueness to In Bloom. Writer Nana Ekvtimishvili, who directed the movie with Simon Gross, doesn’t spell things out, and the complete story never comes into focus... But when the truth is so troubling, sometimes part of the story is more than enough.

The film has a sulfuric, Dostoyevskian quality — and sick sense of humor — that captures the muted aquarium that Los Angeles becomes at night, a spell that’s broken once plot overtakes mood.

As provocative as the questions it raises are — questions about connoisseurship vs. populism, personal expression vs. the market, and the dark arts of press, publicity and shrewd self-invention — the film’s achievements stay on the surface of those themes rather than plunging deeper.

In its own way, the movie version — handsomely directed by Phillip Noyce and featuring an appealing, sure-footed cast of emerging and veteran actors — aptly reflects The Giver’s pride of place as the one that started it all, or at least the latest wave.

For No Good Reason rambles too much for its own good, compared to more traditional documentaries. The most rewarding parts of the film feature Steadman simply talking about his influences (Picasso, among others) and his youthful goal of changing the world through art.

The latest film adaptation of Far From the Madding Crowd will delight fans of period dramas. It checks off the required boxes with solid acting, gorgeous cinematography and all the frustrating, glorious emotional restraint that you expect from a romance set in Victorian England.

A bracing, quietly exhilarating documentary.

Amy Schumer proves her cinematic bona fides in Trainwreck, a strikingly assured feature film debut in which she proves herself as authentic an actress as she is deft as a writer.

Rahim delivers a fairly strong performance. Yet the last third of the film loses some focus and emotional resonance.

It’s an oddity, and all that strangeness is what makes the movie hard to shake.

Viewers may get the sense that The Imitation Game leaves Turing’s essential mysteries intact, but they will nonetheless find even the most public contours of his story ripe with drama, excitement and deeply affecting resonance.

The movie can be over-the-top and the characters are rarely anything more than vile. And yet, the whole thing is mesmerizing.

Nichols establishes such a grounded sense of atmosphere and such superb control of mood and pacing, that the odd hiccup barely matters.

Rosewater doesn’t hector, nor does it giggle about the issue of press freedom. It’s an impressive and important piece of storytelling.

It’s an exceptional film, not because of its protagonists’ impressive triumphs, but because it honors their struggle.

Unbroken may not exactly be mired in sanctimony, but it’s standing, almost up to its ankles, in an unhealthy sense that its subject — about whose simple humanity the film otherwise goes to great lengths to illuminate — is a candidate for sainthood.