[SPOILER-FREE REVIEW:] Johnson sticks with the Star Wars house style and seems pleased to have the opportunity to inspire children with this story of overcoming inner conflict to become one’s best self, the key ingredient being hope.

Annette is a student. I went to see her in her house...and she had books of Gloria and she had Post-Its everywhere.

Like the hilariously inept melodrama of The Room itself, Tommy Wiseau offers Franco a gold mine of oddities.

Lady Bird’s unvarnished, unglamorized high-school drama has the quirky humor one expects from Gerwig...Ultimately, it’s a mother-daughter love story, replete with the tribulations of painful individuation.

Soderbergh’s here to have fun, and his mood is contagious.

A harmonious set of themes, about vocation and ambition...the role of family...and the meanings of life and death.

These comic-book cinematic universes...train audiences to see the forest for the trees...Enjoy the trees. For the forest is a tad gnarly.

Isn’t about anything more than the spy game and how to make it to the end of the board...Then, too, there is Theron, whose kind of un-performance in repose keeps breaking out into ferocious fighting that suggests a feral Jackie Chan.

Only insurance premiums can say whether we’re in for a Daddy’s Home 3 that adds Dick Van Dyke as Lithgow’s dad and Clint Eastwood as Gibson’s dad.

It's touchy ground when you get on flag territory these days...

A rollicking comedy...Waititi revs up this vehicle for a wild ride...

On balance, Wonderstruck should capture the imaginations of precocious kids up for something a little deeper than usual.

An old-fashioned action-adventure story with star performances, given a sacred tinge by its real-life roots.

This age, which hasn't been named yet, it hasn't been mapped yet, it hasn't been defined and labeled: everything's possible...There's an intimacy that you can have with your same-sex friendships...that you may never achieve again in life. 

Kogonada’s cleverly integrated use of the architecture, beautifully framed from visual and narrative standpoints, lends his freshman feature a sense of modernist mastery...

A strange and beautiful beast indeed, Blade Runner 2049 is a science-fiction epic for adults, somehow released in 2017...Blade Runner 2049 dreams big.

Seal’s story is a fascinating one worth investigating...As played by Cruise, he’s like Maverick gone to seed.

Catches one off guard with the characters’ open-hearted gestures under duress...feels as if it single-handedly restores humanity to the movies.

Has a mindset trapped in the 1980s, when Chuck Norris ruled the roost of disposable shoot-em-ups. This repulsive macho fantasy seems expressly designed to appeal to the readers of Soldier of Fortune Magazine.

As a story to speak to our hearts and minds, it's an utter failure, and perhaps so too even as a disposable corporate product. 

Strong performances and production carry the day. This pop culture psychodrama still works, and linked up to its pending sequel should add up to a bit more than the sum of its parts.

Reichardt in no way pushes her material, instead giving the viewer the space to live in this space with the characters, observe them and listen to them, and then draw one’s own conclusions about thematic import.

If the dish has lost its pizazz, it remains comfort food for comedy connoisseurs.

On paper, Annabelle: Creation lays out lazy character development and logic, but on screen, it gets the job done more often than not as an unpretentious talk-back-to-the-screen audience picture.

[Mooney:] It is nice, though, these pieces that get cut have a chance to live somewhere and that people can watch them. So there's certainly disappointment when your sketches keep on getting cut, but...

Slate cements her status as a kind of later-day Lucille Ball, gifted in physical comedy and possessed of a dithering combination of smarts and free-flowing emotion.

Rigorously staged and artfully photographed...Christopher Nolan applies his trademark ingenuity and clockwork precision to an otherwise straightforward story.

Evokes the sort of tough-minded historical war drama John Milius used to write, with an eye on what war can do to the individual.

An action-packed, beat-the-heat distraction...Lands close enough to the summer-movie sweet spot that the quibbles feel a bit churlish.

Functions...not only as a boilerplate rom-com that’s consistently amusing and possessed with charming leads, but also as a heartwarming drama.

Military-Industrial Uncomplicated...Despite the theme that “Magic does exist” (“It was found long ago. Inside a crashed alien ship”), The Last Knight is all mirthless jokes and thrill-less mayhem.

It’s no great leap to see Strutt as Trumpian, but Beatriz at Dinner has bigger fish to fry than any one figure...make[s] our nation's political intractability the stuff of comedy and...dramatizes the spiritual exhaustion of our time.

Gets the franchise back on track with a story that U-turns to the heart of the 2006 original.

A sturdy origin story, this education of Miss Diana Prince, establishing her as a compassionate badass who consistently proves her bravery, strength, and commitment to justice.

Soft-touch kids may enjoy the smooth-jazz romance of this ludicrous fantasy, with true love challenged by caring but misguided parental overprotectiveness, but the story fails to deal honestly with its what-if scenarios.

Despite the multiple genres, The Space Between Us feels thin in its plot, and corny in the telling...

This newfangled Arthur comes up short on grandeur or even old-fashioned matinee adventure, trading them in for cosmetic Game of Thrones grot.

In this sort of Quantum Leap for dogs, a soulful, gender-confused, repeatedly reincarnated canine goes on a magical journey of Hollywood formula. Come with me, and you’ll be in a world of pure manipulation.

Tower only reveals what he’s willing to reveal...Still, the focus should remain, and does, on the food itself, and the tenacious, productively persnickety, beautiful mind it took to serve it up.

The pivotal realization--that, in the end, using your heart beats using your head--works as a pithy instruction manual for this diverting but disposable adventure.

Norman’s thoughtful dramatic construction, built around a central symbol of a pair of shoes, addresses politician’s voracious desire to 'go places,' ever outpacing forethought of where that ambition will take them...

An effervescent but edgy rom-com about love, career, the insecurities men and women felt (and, sadly, still feel to some extent) around burgeoning feminism.

We find ourselves, with Gloria, neck-deep in an allegory of id. You can hope and pray otherwise, but your inner demons will always come out: some way, somehow, some day.

[Ross:] One of the most rewarding things about working with Brett is the word 'options.' He likes options. And that's very stimulating for an actor.

Art is my form of religion. It's my way of dealing with mortality...I never saw Fawcett's story as a tragedy. There was a level of transcendence to it.

Interjections of color—and the narrative implications of them—are but one way in which Ozon creates and subverts expectations...Ozon remains interested in the stories people tell to one another, the horrible truths and the comfortable lies.

Polished but hollow...It’s another sign of the times that Hollywood thinks we can no longer handle the original storyline. 

Will give die-hard Star Wars fans multiple orgasms...runneth over with Star Wars spectacle.

A deeply disturbing study of mass hysteria, a lasting cultural document of "a shameful memory"...and a culturally specific but widely relevant snapshot of that late-'60s moment of student rebellion being met by violent institutional crackdowns.

Empathetic and self-searching...a highly witty, deeply humane look at people who may be too conscious for their own good, people who think and feel too much ever to be truly happy.