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.