This Oscar nominated film (Best Foreign Film) from Denmark is about as complicated and difficult a story to tell, but writer-director Martin Zandvliet more than succeeds.

It’s post WWII in Denmark, and a group of Nazi youth POWs is tasked with clearing a beach of thousands of mines. Their commander, a Danish Sergeant (an excellent Roland Moller) views his crew with contempt at first, treating them harshly. Over time, the fact that they are just young boys begins to wear on him, especially when some of them meet their deaths on the beach.

The cast is beyond good here, delivering a story that has echoes of All Quiet on the Western Front. It’s a difficult film in that it portrays wartime German soldiers in a sympathetic way, and the film will justifiably irritate some.

In the end, it’s about the horrors of war, its aftermath, and coping with the hatred and bitterness that follows. The movie is a heart wrenching experience, especially in how Moller’s character endures an emotional rollercoaster. Moller makes everything the Sergeant goes through seem authentic and convincing. This is a brutal film, and it should be.

Chris (Daniel Kaluuya), a young African-American man, is a little nervous. He’s going to visit the parents of Rose Armitage (Allison Williams), his white girlfriend. Rose is relaxed about the trip, but Chris is a little anxious. His anxiety proves justified shortly into the trip.

Upon arrival at her large estate, her parents like Chris. They really, really like Chris. Actually, parents Missy and Dean (Catherine Keener and Bradley Whitford) like Chris at a level that’s a bit unsettling. Chris shrugs it off at first, as does Allison, but strange things start happening.

Writer-director Jordan Peele, the comedic performer from TV’s Key & Peele, and the adorable, funny cat movie Keanu, delivers a huge cinematic surprise with Get Out, a twisted, darkly satiric, nasty little horror film that pulls no punches when it comes to race relations and dating. Peele has cited Night of the Living Dead and The Stepford Wives as inspiration for this journey to the dark side of his creative soul.

Those films’ influences are detectable, and I’d say you could throw in a pinch of Rosemary’s Baby with a side of Being John Malkovich as well.

Two of the hardest things to accomplish with a movie are to make people laugh and get them legitimately scared. Get Out manages to do both for its entire running time. Peele takes taboo subjects and stereotypes and doesn’t let his pen get restricted by fear of offending anybody. This is an appropriately evil, scabrous movie.

This year’s secret screening at South by Southwest has been out in the U.K. since January, but a little over a hundred festival goers were treated to an early screening of the anticipated sequel to the 1996 hit, Trainspotting.

If you’re afraid that Trainspotting 2 will be yet another flat sequel that falls short of the emotion reached in the original, don’t worry, you won’t be disappointed.

That was probably due in part to the awareness of Danny Boyle, the film’s director, during the creation of the film.

“We had this expression where sometimes it would be said out loud and sometimes it’d be there unspoken in people’s eyes as they looked at you, and the expression was: ‘this better not be shite, Danny,’” he said during a Q&A with Ewan McGregor, who plays Mark Renton in the film, and moderator Richard Linklater.

It was like visiting an old friend, and true to the movie’s plot, one that you wanted to hit over the head with a barstool as you revisit the range of reactions to one of Scotland’s most defining pieces of cinema in the last 25 years.

Trainspotting 2 took the fast-paced energy of the its predecessor and gave it a facelift.

Seamlessly capturing the feeling of the first movie with less of gore that lent itself to the original’s character, Trainspotting 2 was a modern revisiting of four friends struggling with their past as the persistence of time pushes them forward.

Mermaids do strange things in this movie. They eat dudes, they dance in strip clubs, they sing in elaborate musical numbers, they cut off their bottom halves and have them replaced with human legs, and they have lots of sex. Mind you, some of that sex culminates with hearts being ripped out and devoured.

Two mermaids (Marta Mazurka and Michalina Olszanska) come ashore, get jobs in an adult club, and commence their strange musical careers. One of them falls in love with a band member and considers going the human route, while the other just eats hearts and thumbs. Its moviemaking at its most trippy, a sort of Splash! meets Gaspar Noe. IMDB.com says this is the first musical to come out of Poland, and that the movie is based on Hans Christian Andersen’s “The Little Mermaid.”

Don’t let the lineage to the classic fairytale fool you; this is a horror movie, and the kids won’t like it unless, of course, your kids are blessedly warped. However, if you like David Lynch, Mamma Mia!, Hedwig and the Angry Inch, gore and punk rock, you might want to give this a go.

Director Agnieska Smocynska is a nutball to the highest degree, and God bless her, because this is a lot fun.

Director Pablo Larrain is a busy man, having directed both Jackie and this, a beautiful and creative look at the life of Chilean poet Pablo Neruda (Luis Gnecco).

The film isn’t a biopic in the traditional sense in that it mixes fact and large doses of fiction as it creates an investigator character (Gael Garcia Bernal) in search of Neruda after he’s gone into hiding for being a communist.

The film is faithful to the real story of Neruda in showing some of his actions before going into hiding and while he’s fleeing, but it becomes something altogether different when the Bernal character is on screen. It plays with the notion of his character in ways that break the fourth wall, and it’s impressive.

Bernal gets a chance to truly shine in his role, as does Gnecco. There wasn’t a lot written about Larrain last year, but he, along with the great Jeff Nichols, deserves extra kudos for delivering not one but two exemplary movies in 2016. The ending of this film is one of the year’s best.

Matt Damon stars in this mess, and this may very well represent the low point of his career, a career that has included the atrocious Jason Bourne and Hereafter.

He probably thought he was in safe hands because The Great Wall is helmed by director Zang Yimou, maker of such masterpieces as Hero, House of Flying Daggers and—one of my very favorite movies—The Road Home. Damon was probably all like, “Hey, Yimou is calling the shots. If anything, I’m going to look good in this pic!” Then … he saw his wardrobe. A wardrobe that begins with big furry wigs and beards, and then declines into a sad man-bun wig as the film progresses. He looks silly from frame one.

He sounds silly, too. He’s attempting some sort of accent here, a cross between Irish, Scottish and just plain dickweed. Every time he talks in this movie, it hurts the ears and the soul—especially the souls of those who love Matt Damon. It’s all in the service of a wannabe period epic about non-distinctive, stupid looking CGI monsters attacking China’s Great Wall, with Damon’s character being the savior with a bow. It’s a meandering, dull, ugly waste of everybody’s time.

Ines (Sandra Huller), a terse, corporate type is busy trying to conduct international relations involving big dollars when her dad Winfried (Peter Simonischek) shows up with a goofy wig and fake teeth as Toni Erdmann, corporate coach. He throws a wrench in the works with his prankster ways, and Ines must learn to lighten up or reject the dad.

The results, while a little predictable (and long winded) are fairly interesting thanks mainly to Huller, who anchors the sometimes-silly film with a true sense of realism. Her performance is top notch, and makes the film worth seeing. She also spends a good chunk of the film’s final act-which takes a major turn for the satiric-naked, which is pretty daring.

Simonischek is fun in the dad role, although his antics are sometimes a little too outrageous to buy in what is basically a serious movie about father-daughter relationships and coping in a cold business world. Director Maren Ade might choose to use a little more restraint with future films (this movie would work fine at two hours and didn’t need nearly three to tell it’s story).

While I’m not convinced any daughter would allow her father to mess with her at work in this fashion and is anything near realistic, it is a movie where make believe things happen, and a nicely enjoyable one at that. It was recently announced that the film, made in Germany, will get an American remake starring Kristen Wiig and Jack Nicholson, who will allegedly come out of retirement to play the dad role.

The original King Kong earned its spot as a cinema legend, but the remakes—John Guillermin's lackluster 1976 film and Peter Jackson's bloated 2005 effort—have done little to improve on the original, despite advances in film technology.

So it's great to see that director Jordan Vogt-Roberts has evidently foregone the "Kong comes to the big city on display and breaks loose" storyline in favor of something different. Exactly how different will be part of the fun of going to see Kong: Skull Island, but the trailer released today suggests we're going to have lots of big monsters brawling on Skull Island. Kong looks bigger than previous incarnations, although still too small to legitimately challenge Godzilla the planned 2020 King Kong vs. Godzilla throwdown.

That's a worry for another day. In the meantime, enjoy some nice monster-on-monster action in the new trailer. Kong: Skull Island opens on March 10.

This is the great Batman story that Batman v Superman failed to be.

Even better, it has Will Arnett voicing Batman with a new, super amped, still dark, but amazingly well rounded and sometimes humorous incarnation. After all these years of dark—and admittedly sometimes brilliant—Batman movies, it’s nice to have a vehicle where we can just have fun with the character.

Director Chris McKay, along with a long list of writers, has come up with a story that will please adult Batman fans as much as the kids who will most assuredly be dropped off at the local Cineplex to watch a movie while parents catch a break from the little mayhem makers. Arnett’s Batman not only faces off against the Joker (a very funny Zach Galifianakis), but finds himself in a scenario where he’s battling a smorgasbord of movie villains including King Kong, the Gremlins, Dracula, evil British robots and Voldemort (Eddie Izzard), to name just a few.

It’s a nutty plot element that also allows for Batman mainstays like Bane, Two-Face (Billy Dee Williams, who was Harvey Dent in Burton’s Batman) and the Riddler (Conan O’Brien!) to get in on the act. It’s a geek fest, a movie lover’s delight that has a funny little trivia bit at nearly every turn, and an emotional center—Batman has family issues, and the Joker longs to be hated—that gives the movie a surprising depth among the chaos.

Finding Dory got snubbed for this year’s Best Animated Film nominations. While I still find that a little shocking, the Academy did manage to nominate some decent films in its place, including this delightful, traditionally drawn effort from Michael Dudok de Wit.

There’s no dialogue in The Red Turtle, and it doesn’t need it.

A castaway washes up on a deserted island, occupied by only a few birds and curious crabs. He tries to make rafts to take him out to sea but a large, red turtle, one that will figure prominently in his life, destroys them.

The movie tells a story of the journey through life in a simple, enchanting way that winds up being quite moving. Out of nowhere, it becomes an effective tale about love, fatherhood and death. It doesn’t boast all of the technical wizardry and pretty colors of your average Pixar ventures, or the talking animals of Disney films. It’s just a plainly drawn, semi-magical, pleasurable movie experience that deserves its Oscar nomination.