Alonso Duralde

Z for Zachariah feels like a genuine rarity: an American movie that doesn’t tell you what to think or how to feel when the credits start rolling. Contemplating our doom doesn’t seem like a bad idea when it’s done this skillfully.

Band Aid might sound gimmicky, but Lister-Jones keeps the emotions firmly rooted and the characters believably contextualized.

Nocturnal Animals packs a real punch and confirms that “A Single Man” was no fluke.

Delightfully unpredictable and surprisingly shocking, this is the kind of wintry wickedness that will see you through both Halloween and Christmas, especially if you like those holiday flavors together.

"Quantumania” may not swing for the fences as ambitiously as recent entries like “Wakanda Forever” or “Doctor Strange in the Multiverse of Madness,” but it does take the wildly disparate tones and plot threads that are seemingly endemic to this series and turn them into an entertainingly cohesive whole. To be continued, obviously.

In the recent flood of superhero movies, several have managed to be quite good — but Wonder Woman ranks as one of the few great ones.

The unspoken joke of the title is that this movie really wants to be called “Freaky Friday the 13th,” which is not a bad starting point, but the line dividing gory violence and farcical hilarity — which Landon has skillfully walked in the past — gets too blurry for the movie’s own good.

If incoming director James Wan (“The Conjuring,” “Saw”) falls the tiniest bit short of what Justin Lin brought to the third, fifth and sixth entries, Furious 7 nonetheless ranks a very successful fourth place overall, with at least one gargantuan set piece that ranks among the series’ finest.

Even those who object to Bowers’ revelations may find themselves unexpectedly empathetic to his life story, and that’s thanks to Tyrnauer’s compassion. There’s plenty of gossip to be found here, but there’s also no shortage of humanity.

There is wit and there are explosions, and while none of them represent a step above “Guardians of the Galaxy,” neither do they impugn the memory of one of the freshest and most fun of the Marvel movies.

There is some humor to be found here, of course, and a bit of exploration of the sheer boredom of being trapped for days inside four white walls, and moments of real connection between Bahari and both his family and the political revolutionaries he gets to know on the street. But Stewart doesn't pursue any of these ideas enough to stick, resulting in a film that relates incidents without ever really telling much of a story.

For those of us who come to these movies wondering what Tom Cruise will be climbing, clinging onto, or falling off of, this sequel delivers the goods.

There’s a great deal to enjoy here, and fans of “Black Panther” won’t necessarily leave feeling disappointed, but there’s a sense of strong elements not quite coming together.

There are no build-ups or pay-offs here, just a lot of random moments of people saying stupid stuff, and fashion people being gently lampooned.

Jurassic World: Rebirth doesn’t go anywhere particularly unexpected — besides being a big-budget, corporate-backed franchise film advocating that medical advancements should go public rather than be patented by drug companies — but the cliffhangers are choice.

If The Peanuts Movie never quite reaches the melancholy of earlier films like “A Boy Named Charlie Brown” and “Snoopy Come Home,” it nonetheless respects the importance of failure and disappointment that Schulz always included in his storytelling.

With its combination of workplace sitcom and social activism, Barbershop: The Next Cut feels more like a binge-viewing of multiple episodes of a TV series than a movie, but even on that level, it’s a show worth watching.

The Book of Life manages to be genuinely surprising and engrossing.

What truly anchors Save Yourselves! is the specificity of the two leads and the sharpness with which Mani and Reynolds perform the roles.

There’s a lot to like about director Kenneth Branagh’s gorgeously fanciful tale.

Blink Twice emerges as a true late-summer surprise, a witty genre film with more on its mind than surface excitement, that draws its sense of dread out of real-world pain without ever exploiting that pain, that serves as an evergreen reminder that if the party seems too good to be true, it is.

It’s cohesive and cathartic enough to make a fourth entry unnecessary, but at the same time, it’s entertaining and gorgeous enough to make the prospect of same something to welcome.

Giving the film credit where it’s due, Wonder never cheats in its pursuit of emotion. It’s never mawkish or manipulative, and its characters are so well-established both in the writing and in the performances that the movie ultimately does the hard work of earning those damp Kleenexes.

It may well be that we’ll eventually stop looking at these Marvel films as discrete, individual experiences rather than chapters in an epic binge-watch, but even by those standards, Avengers: Age of Ultron feels like a solid but overstuffed episode, one more concerned with being connective tissue than anything else.

There’s a goofy spree of a movie buried deep within Sausage Party, but it’s missing both the spree and the goofs. This comedy needed to be a lot smarter if it wanted to succeed at being this stupid.

Come for the city-flattening; stay for the political satire.

The Founder never steps up to become the biting satire of American capitalism it so begs to be. The film is not here to praise Ray Kroc, but neither is it here to bury him.