Contributor: Paul Asay

If Passengers teaches us anything, it’s only as an afterthought. The film is an entertainment vehicle. And like the spaceship we see on screen, it does its job only halfway well.

Nocturnal Animals is a devastating movie about sin and retribution. It’s as searing as a thunderbolt, as poisonous as the strike of a snake.

So is it possible to make an effective exorcism story without, y’know, all that God stuff? No. And Incarnate proves it.

Believe stresses the importance of charity while lauding entrepreneurship and plain hard work. It celebrates the ties between people and questions the commercialism of Christmas.

Jackie is a moving, surprisingly spiritual portrait of a woman grieving in the public eye and, in so doing, shaping a nation’s story. And it reminds us all of just how important our stories are.

It’s sad this film about Howard Hughes lacks any sort of real moral underpinning. It seems the makers took its title, Rules Don’t Apply, quite seriously.

Bleed for This is filled with brutal blows, bare bodies and occasional blasphemy. It asks us to look at Vinny as a hero, but that’s not easy to see.

Wonderfully acted and deeply felt, Manchester by the Sea is also a difficult movie in every way.

Shut In is a thriller without the thrill, an exercise in jump scenes without the jumps. While it stays within its PG-13 confines, it strays wildly from any sort of logical cohesion.

Loving, with its intimate scale and sparse content concerns, is an accessible, sometimes beautiful story about one couple’s love.

Hacksaw Ridge is riveting cinema. But it’s also bloody—as bloody as we’ve seen on screen for a long, long time.

Aesthetically, Doctor Strange is a good movie, one of the strongest in the Marvel canon thus far. But is it a good movie? A movie suitable for you or your family? That depends.

Inferno is one of those movies where the villain seems determined to launch doomsday through the most convoluted manner imaginable … apparently just to give the hero something to do.

Moonlight, as mesmerizing as the movie is, isn’t just filled with problematic content: It gives us a message counter to what we believe God tells us.

Everything is much like you’d expect it to be on this ride. The characters. The plot. The peril. The content. Oh, yes, the content is exactly what we’d expect in a PG-13 actioner.