The Story: This year's collection of Academy Award nominees for Best Live-Action Short. The Lowdown: Despite the relatively maudlin tone favored by Academy voters this year, none of it is remotely as depressing as Fifty Shades Freed or any of the other dreck in theaters this week. Obviously, my advice would be to watch the shorts instead.

The Story: Christian Grey and Anastasia Steele get married, and we're supposed to care because ... reasons? Anyway, it doesn't go as planned. And then it does. The end! The Lowdown: Bottom-of-the-barrel quality.

In Brief: As much as I love Elevator to the Gallows, I've never been quite as enamored of Louis Malle as some others in my sphere. I remember having long arguments in the Manhattan video store where I worked after college, surreal rhetorical exercises in which I espoused a position that incest is gross even if it's French.…

The Story: A laudanum-addicted psychologist is tasked with proving that Sarah Winchester, heir to the Winchester Repeating Rifle Co., is insane so that the board members can wrest control of the corporation from her — but he gets more than he bargained for when he discovers that her labyrinthine mansion may be as haunted as she claims. The…

In Brief: Yasujiro Ozu may be best remembered as one of the Japanese cinema's pre-eminent social realists, but his early career wasn't always so serious. Tokyo Chorus (1931) shows a lighter side of Ozu, already establishing his visual tone and narrative tendencies despite having made his directorial debut only four years prior. Clearly influenced by Ozu's self-professed…

In Brief: This understated little comedy from writer/director Bill Forsyth (Gregory's Girl, Being Human) offers slice-of-life veracity and social conscience in a slightly saccharine satire, a perfect example of what Andrew Sarris might have termed a "lightly likable" film. Late-period Burt Lancaster sets the story of an oil company trying to buy a picturesque Scottish island in motion,…

The Story: Figure skater Tonya Harding ascends to the heights of her sport as an Olympic competitor before being publicly disgraced for her participation in the 1994 attack on Nancy Kerrigan. The Lowdown: A film that teeters on the brink of tonal dissonance and smug self-satisfaction before being redeemed by exceptional performances from its central cast.

The Story: An Army Captain must brave the vicissitudes of  merciless fate as he escorts a dying Cheyenne chief back from a military prison to his ancestral homeland. The Lowdown: Bleak, brutal bloody, this revisionist Western transposes the easy answers and unimpeachable heroes characteristic of the genre with characters defined by their flaws and shaped by their suffering in a…

The Story: A scrappy group of teens immune to a global pandemic must infiltrate a walled city to rescue their friend and overthrow the shady organization seeking to exploit their blood for a cure. The Lowdown: A cacophonous conclusion to a YA franchise that drastically overstays its welcome.

In Brief: F.W. Murnau's 1926 interpretation of the classic tale of a pious alchemist who sells his soul to the devil in exchange for knowledge, youth and the love of a beautiful young woman is possibly the most accurate recounting of the story ever filmed. Murnau draws heavily from Goethe's play but also from older…

The Story: A world-renowned dressmaker enters into a contentious May-December romance with a young waitress. The Lowdown: A far more compelling film than its superficially frivolous premise might imply, Daniel Day-Lewis' swan song ranks among P. T. Anderson's best work to date.

The Story: Two young men in an activist group fall in love at the height of the AIDS epidemic. The Lowdown: A thoughtful and sensitive meditation on enduring life, love and loss in defiance of unremitting despair.

The Story: A young boy has a summer fling with an older man in the Italian countryside. The Lowdown: A premise worthy of more than a cursory eyebrow raise, executed with an emphatically eroticized male gaze that serves little purpose beyond its own sensual gratification.

The Story: Documentarian Greg Barker is given unfettered access to President Obama's inner circle during the waning days of his administration. The Lowdown: A protracted exercise in preaching to the converted.

In Brief: Extremely late-period Kurosawa, from a time when the lauded auteur seemed to have either given up or lost the knack entirely. While Kurosawa often delved into the melancholic, especially in his later works, Rhapsody in August (1991) digresses into the downright maudlin. While the film offers some vaguely humanist sentiment about the bombing of Nagasaki,…

In Brief: Given the awards push behind The Shape of Water, I thought it might be an opportune time to revisit the film that made Guillermo del Toro the oddest bankable director working today, Pan's Labyrinth (2006). When my illustrious predecessor reviewed this one over a decade ago, he put it pretty bluntly: "This isn't just the best…

The Story: Paddington becomes embroiled in a mysterious treasure hunt when a deluded actor steals a book the young bear cub intended to purchase as a birthday gift for his beloved aunt. The Lowdown: Atypically palatable children's fair that shows an uncommon degree of respect for its audience as well as its source material.

In Brief: After my first viewing of Une Femme Mariée (1964), I recall being struck by the fact that it was not so much a strange film as it was a strange film for Godard to have made at the height of his mid-'60s prowess. It's a relatively conventional love triangle, following a repressed married woman whose dalliances with…

In Brief: An early starring turn for Judi Dench and a precursor of things to come for director John Madden (Shakespeare in Love, The Best Exotic Marigold Hotel), Mrs. Brown (1997) is a decidedly offbeat period piece exploring the platonic love affair between Queen Victoria and Scotsman John Brown (Billy Connolly). Dench is characteristically fantastic, and Connolly more than…