The animal holds a mirror up to the human protagonist...how prone youth can be on the cusp of adulthood, how reckless when desperate or threatened, how vulnerably pure of heart. 
Ramsay’s limber direction and another phenomenal leading performance by Joaquin Phoenix lend the material an aching sensitivity and an arrhythmic but persistent heartbeat. 
There’s plenty...that doesn’t hold up to scrutiny and even more that feels conspicuously derivative. But tell that to your pants as you pee them. 
Conjures plenty of empty spectacle...but doesn’t underpin it with characters that move beyond the generic or, more crucially, the productively sharp satire that just maybe could have saved this ain’t-it-cool story from itself. 
Tales of the venal, the selfish, and the desperate, lurking--when not preening--in the halls of power. 
One can see the wheels turning, literally and figuratively... 
Galumphing narrative and flatfooted whimsy...a downright awkward kiddie blockbuster. 
A guy’s fantasy of an empowered woman’s story. She’s smart! She’s capable! She’s sexy! She’s nude! She’s degraded! Wait... 
Just manages to sustain its 'is it real or is it a game?' tension through to its climactic twists. 
Boilerplate Marvel, with a sleek, colorful look, cheeky humor, and familiar action beats...But Coogler brings enough to the table for a fresh vision, broadly appealing as well as inspirational in its representation for black audiences and women. 
This Peter is...the Ferris Bueller of rabbits. As such, many will love him, and many will find his zany wisecracks, blatant selfishness, and borderline amorality repulsive. 
McDonagh’s admirable shading of ostensible heroes and villains backfires as character inconsistency...Nevertheless, Three Billboards wickedly entertains and provokes... 
A contrived but effective parable of the American West, its painful legacy, and small measures of redemption...But our focus frustratingly remains on the white people and Blocker’s struggle to reach empathy... 
Work[s] out some timely issues of the runaway male ego, the dubious excuse of great art for grotesque personality, and the shock and awe attendant to the select few who can see through genius and, for better or for worse, cut to the quick. 
The heroic journalism depicted in The Post could hardly be more timely, it’s true, but Spielberg’s take rarely achieves dramatic traction. 
Takes a cogent look at the issues, making comprehensible the complex history of American higher education, the government's shifting role in supporting it, and the increasingly corporate exploitation of the American-dreaming underclass. 
Sorkin’s flair for whip-crack dialogue, structural shenanigans, and character chemistry remains a winningly shameless three-ring circus for the screen, and his thoroughly excellent ensemble help to distract from his infamous artifice. 
Much in it is invented or misrepresented...more easily forgiveable if the film had any subtlety or depth, but this ain’t that kind of party: it’s a wannabe thriller that unnecessarily stretches its running time along with the truth. 
Guadagnino has coaxed from his cast a film unmatched this year for lifelike rhythms and attention to human behavior. 
[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. 
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. 
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. 
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. 