Detroit is an audacious, nervy work of art, but it also commemorates history, memorializes the dead and invites reflection on the part of the living. In scale, scope and the space it offers for a long-awaited moral reckoning, it’s nothing less than monumental.

Provost’s film is, in the end, a story about attaining the wisdom that comes from forgiveness and the acceptance of those things — namely the past and the future — that none of us can control.

Tinged with madness and heartbreak, Endless Poetry is the unmistakable byproduct of, as the character of Alejandro puts it, “a heart capable of loving the entire world.”

Landline offers viewers a rueful glimpse of a vanished time and place. Along the way, it’s often unexpectedly and guffawingly funny.

Strange Weather is wise about loss, showing the ripple effects of an untimely death. It is hardly an original concept, yet it handles this subject with the care and integrity it deserves.

Ultimately, Atomic Blonde is, like its heroine, something of a machine. Lit by glowing neon, fueled by the rhythm of ’80s power pop and fashioned from stiletto heels, cigarettes, guns and sunglasses, it looks and sounds good, but it isn’t much of a conversationalist.

Thunderstruck is an after-school special that lucked into a couple of NBA all-stars for its ensemble. The language is a little coarse for a family film. And, yes, sometimes it feels like a Durant highlight reel - or an OKC Thunder infomercial - stretched to feature length, with the occasional life lesson tossed in to balance the film's obvious commercial angle. [24 Aug 2012, p.T34]

Perhaps more banter would have helped sustain interest. As the body count burgeons, the surprises become unsurprising, and the climax proves anticlimactic.

Filmmaker Kirsten Tan riffs on the tropes of both the buddy film and the road trip movie in her absurd yet subtly observed feature debut Pop Aye.

Girls Trip accomplishes exactly what it sets out to do: shock and amuse. Along the way, it reminds us how important old friends can be.

Oldroyd’s brilliance (and Pugh’s) is to probe this age-old archetype — the Gothic antiheroine, the adulteress — and find pathos and cruelty. It’s also to uncover the complex web of hierarchies — of race and class, as well as gender — that ensnare and empower her.

"Valerian” is an expensive, handsome but dozy invalid of a movie.

Dunkirk isn’t comfortable to watch; it never relents or relaxes. At the same time, it’s impossible to look away from it.

The most interesting parts of this conversation come when Dorf­man talks about the art of portraiture.

City of Ghosts provides a grim reminder of what journalism should look like, and why its stakes are literally life and death.

By the standards of the traditional ghost story, A Ghost Story isn’t much of one. By the standards of the moody art-house meditation on love, loss, memory, forgetting, attachment, letting go and the nature of eternity, it’s pretty darn great.

For viewers who aren’t hostile to mysticism, vegetarianism and endless chanting, it’s a stirring story.

The story it tells is conventional, chronological and straightforward. And that’s enough. With a story this charming, who needs bells and whistles?

Quirky to a fault, the film’s most absurd moments are nevertheless grounded by the human need for connection.

Marie Noelle fills the story with passion, debate and human contradiction. If the material ultimately eludes the director’s grasp, wandering off on unfocused tangents, it’s because of its ambition.

War for the Planet of the Apes may have the body of an action film, but it has the soul of an art-house drama and the brains of a political thriller.

Beyond ­middle-schoolers, it’s unclear who would enjoy this derivative, cliche-filled exercise in horror lite.

In the end, 13 Minutes isn’t about the timing or logistics of one man’s plot to kill Hitler at all, but about what made that man tick.

Every element of the movie feels fabricated, from the stilted conversation to the ­all-too-convenient obstacles the movie keeps throwing in the path of progress.

The Little Hours seldom rises above a clever but lightweight one-liner.

Moka is a stark, moody mystery that doesn’t actually contain much mystery. Instead, it excels as a character study and a dynamic face-off between two formidable actresses: Emmanuelle Devos and Nathalie Baye.

A shattering vérité portrait of the disintegration of Iraqi society in the period immediately following the withdrawal of U.S. troops from that country, this urgent, of-the-moment film doesn’t explain the ensuing chaos as much as plunge viewers into it firsthand, offering a terrifying, ultimately moving portrait of the effects of war, both physical and psychic.

As usual in Hui’s films, the personal and the political are stitched tightly together.