With its charming character animation and inventive art direction, The Grinch is a vast improvement over Ron Howard’s live-action adaptation of the same story.

Takes a turn for the dark side that will satisfy the franchise’s adult fans even more.

Finally, one of our finest actresses has been given material that calls on her to utterly transform herself — vocally, physically, seemingly existentially — and prove how gifted she’s been all along.

Lee plays the actors off one another to create a compelling exploration of human nature. South Korea’s official Oscar submission, Burning culminates in a finale so astonishing that it will sear itself into viewers’ memories for years to come.

The result is a classic on a par with “Winesburg, Ohio” and “Our Town,” a narrow slice of contemporary American life that manages to be both admiring, yet capable of polite skepticism.

This tedious slog through the highland muck should win no Oscars, only groans and raspberries. Even the much-buzzed-about glimpse of a nude Pine, as his character emerges from a lake, doesn’t make this worth watching.

In this immersive, often deliciously sensuous documentary portrait of the late opera star Maria Callas, viewers are treated to another rise-and-fall story of a great but tortured artist, this one punctuated by the occasional real-life bed of roses and pleasure cruise.

Boy Erased is a showcase for Hedges, who played a closeted boy in “Lady Bird” and who plays a teen with a different sort of burden in the upcoming drama “Ben Is Back.” In each of those roles, the boy-next-door actor finds just the right combination of ordinary and anomalous.

In the end, “Nutcracker” is a delightfully old-school diversion. The plot may not always hum with the clockwork precision of one of Drosselmeyer’s mechanical toys, but like a music box, it nevertheless plays a sweet tune.

Good intentions only go so far, especially when they mask tawdry melodrama. Even the best movies push emotional buttons, but they work because viewers become wrapped up in the story. This one is so manipulative you can hear the gears grinding — until they lock up.

Winds up being giddily entertaining, first as an exercise in so-bad-it’s-funny kitsch, and ultimately as something far more meaningful and thrilling. Every now and then, a film comes along that defies the demands of taste, formal sophistication, even artistic honesty to succeed simply on the level of pure, inexplicable pleasure. Bohemian Rhapsody is just that cinematic unicorn: the bad movie that works, even when it shouldn’t.

It takes every resource available to a recently minted Oscar nominee — but does almost nothing with it.

The film lacks the very imagination it touts, along with another trait that it links to exceptional athleticism. That’s obsession.

The powerful and affecting documentary On Her Shoulders doesn’t rehash Murad’s suffering in painful detail. Instead, filmmaker Alexandria Bombach, who made the 2015 Afghanistan documentary “Frame by Frame,” chronicles Murad’s more recent life, revealing her to be a compelling and inspiring subject.

Mid90s” is often painful to watch as Stevie puts himself through the punishing rituals of proving his street bona fides. But Hill takes even the most treacherous dangers in stride, suffusing his story with as much tenderness as stark terror.

You’ve never seen Melissa McCarthy like this. And she’s not even the best thing about her new movie.

The result, Bisbee ’17, is a fascinating exercise in nonfiction filmmaking as a performative, interdisciplinary, collective act, as well as a provocative inquiry into how selective memory, ideology, shame and unspeakable trauma shape what we come to accept as official history.

Mulligan’s eccentric energy is her greatest strength, but it makes for a slightly wobbly — if just this side of wonderful — film.

What works best here comes between the movie’s heavy opening and its lightweight conclusion.

Here, however, Atkinson may even outdo Cruise, with the comedian hurling his 63-year-old body into the service of comedy.

Sometimes feels like a horror movie with a contact high.

As the chief avatar for parental distress, Carell is sympathetic if not always entirely convincing: The toughest moments of Beautiful Boy simply seem out of his range as an actor, especially when he takes reportorial zeal one step too far by trying hard drugs himself.

Fortunately, the maudlin moments are offset by fine performances, flashes of humor and a visual sense that’s more astute than the script.

A balanced and deeply satisfying documentary assessment of his work, which is lavishly on display in hundreds of the artist’s images.

A blistering political satire that may rip the bandage and the scab, as well as a lot of the skin, off a political wound that has barely had time to heal.

Greengrass employs a handheld camera effectively, as usual, to simulate confusion, panic and terror. He cuts away from the most horrific moments of slaughter.

Like its protagonist, First Man doesn’t go in for theatrics or gratuitous emotion, however justified. It gets the job done, with professionalism, immersive authenticity and unadorned feeling, of which Armstrong himself might just have approved, however apprehensively.

Not all of its surprises are pleasant ones, but there is a certain satisfaction in experiencing a yarn that is so obstinately un-anticipatable.