Barry Hertz

Most of all, though, it comes off as unsure, even afraid, of just what it wants to say about America today, resulting in a sometimes amusing, sometimes stilted lecture that indicts everyone, and no one.

Touching, if by-the-books, documentary.

A rags-to-riches tale that is inspirational in the most sentimental and predictable of fashions, Bigger squanders most of the potential that comes with dissecting such an underexplored world as the nascent body-building industry. At least he nails the casting, with the intimidatingly fit Tyler Hoechlin and Aneurin Barnard as the Weider brothers, the charismatic Julianne Hough as Joe’s wife.

All About Nina is a compelling, honest and occasionally messy middle finger to the expectations placed on female entertainers – or just simply women at all.

It makes for intriguing and often gripping viewing, but delivers a more confounding experience than is necessary. Still, the director knows how to break those bones real good.

Its mystery elements are infused with a uniquely Feig-ian sensibility, equal parts broad comedy and ironic winks. The genre-meld shouldn’t work as well as it does, but Feig wrangles all the disparate elements under his control.

There is a strange emotional detachment to Felix van Groeningen’s adaptation, which renders the tale needlessly cold.

A majestic feat of filmmaking, an intimate portrait of a family that also serves as a broad portrait of a changing nation.

Mandy is, if it’s not clear yet, not for everyone. But for those who think nothing of staying up past midnight to devour the strange and fantastic, it hits the sweetest of spots.

The director simply trusts that his performers and sun-dappled visuals will carry the film forward. And he’s right – there’s little narrative propulsion to Too Late to Die Young, yet it hums along with a vibrant humanity all the same.

It’s not that every film has to achieve some grand epiphany, but Touch Me Not is not nearly as satisfying as the primal act it’s obsessed with.

It's a my-brother's-keeper drama, except when it's a violent comedy. It's a tale of There Will Be Blood-levels of greed, except when it's a high-ho adventure.

It's fierce, it's lean, it's mean, and it has at least three first-pumping "Hell, yeah!" moments.

This Altman-esque drama about the rise and fast fall of the 1988 presidential hopeful has a lot on its mind – morality in public office, the state of journalism, the often paradoxical nature of running a campaign based on lies – but spends too little energy dissecting those thoughts.

Edgerton, who also plays the tightly wound chief of the conversion-therapy organization here, wrings devastating performances from his cast, including Lucas Hedges as Garrard, and Russell Crowe and Nicole Kidman as his parents.

By twisting around preconceptions of what an outer-space epic should be, French auteur Claire Denis returns to the fertile ground of her Trouble Every Day era, using genre to dig beneath themes that others would only treat as skin-deep.

Mid90s doesn't feel like a recreation of an era so much as a lost artifact of the time. There's one predictable and regrettable narrative beat toward the end, but otherwise Hill has crafted a debut that will last a lifetime.

Led by a magnificent Viola Davis, the cast is ridiculously stacked. The action is tremendous. And the ultimate message – that nothing comes for free in America – is devastating in its swift brutality.

It is immersive, engaging and dizzying filmmaking.

On the whole, the film slays in all the right ways: killer cast, killer one-liners, killer kills. But there's a distinct sense that the story is stitched together from other, hastily discarded plot lines – even the simple manner in which some characters get from Point A to Point B is messy.

It's a jumbled mess, to put it mildly.

Part political satire, part fantasy, part I-don’t-even-know-what, Diamantino is exactly the type of surreal concoction that begs to be discovered by unsuspecting audiences.

Just as it seems that Noé will tip over into the truly extreme, he backs off. If this is the dawn of a new, slightly restrained Noé, we might need five more stages to process the pivot.

The impact of modern vice upon the Wayuu is a captivating tale never told before, and the final few minutes are brutal in the best possible way

Levinson displays some amazing technical chops – most of which can be traced back to Joseph Kahn, but never mind – and there’s one standout home-invasion sequence toward the end. But some warnings are best heeded.

Entire passages stretch along at a too-leisurely pace, allowing whatever anger Jia is surely carrying to too frequently cool off. Still, by the film’s New Year’s Eve-set finale, there’s little doubt Jia can create masterful cinematic moments when he so desires.

Corbet’s work is a big, sloppy wet kiss to all manner of rise-and-fall clichés. Yet it mostly works, with Corbet as eager to display his influences...as he is to prove he can handle his own gonzo-spectacle set-pieces.

Director David Mackenzie (Pine's collaborator on Hell or High Water) dabbles in some interesting aesthetic experiments – including a doozy of a single-take scene in the film's opening minutes – but the narrative is cut, dried and left to rot under the soggy Scottish skies.