Amy Nicholson

As good as the movie is with its visuals, it’s just as skillful with sound.

Sirāt is taut and riveting and nearly all mood. You feel the exhilaration of veering off the path, the self-exile of speeding toward nowhere, the dread that this caravan has veered too far for its own safety.

It's impossible to watch The Punk Singer and not ask if feminism is dead. That's a fair starting question. But a better one is what if it isn't — what if we've just stopped recognizing it?

Though the pair whisper the word “love” in bed and even seem to think they mean it, this is not a movie about two people healing each other. It’s about two broken souls mashing their jagged edges together, hurting each other and those around them. And it’s fun to watch the blood splatter.

The Wolfpack is more like a diorama of the Angulos' unusual childhood than an explanatory documentary.

Bugonia is a hilarious movie with no hope for the future of humanity. What optimism there is lies only in the title, an ancient Greek word for the science of transforming dead cows into hives, of turning death into life.

Morgen’s structural inspiration is to organize Jane not around the facts Goodall found about chimps, but the emotions the chimps help this strong, independent woman find in herself.

Two things continue to hoist “Jackass” above its legion of imitators, many of whom are now found on TikTok. First, the razor-sharp slow-motion cinematography, which immortalizes writhing men in wet underpants with the devotion of Michelangelo sculpting “The Pietà.” Second — and more important — is the crew’s friendship.

Filmmaker Ratchapoom Boonbunchachoke’s snaky, surprising fable starts with a sneeze and explodes into a saga about bureaucracy, modernization and moral corruption. It’s electrifying.

Jinn is the rare coming-of-age story that doesn’t simply pat kids on the head and tell them they just need to love themselves. Instead, Mu’min holds her characters accountable for the way they discombobulate each other’s lives, while giving them the space to do better, if they can figure out what better is.

Dreams are incubators for dissatisfaction, Martins seems to sigh.

A Quiet Place: Day One, the startlingly effective prequel to the 2018 blockbuster about noise-sensitive aliens that devour anyone who’s ever annoyed a librarian, hits Manhattan with a bang, a nasty body count and a fair amount of audience suspicion.

Memoir of a Snail, by the Oscar-winning Australian animator Adam Elliot, is a grubby delight, a stop-motion charmer that feels like falling into a dumpster and discovering an orchid.

Glazer and Rabinowitz’s script can be patchy and manic, but it does its best work showing the contortions women undergo to prove their support, especially in today’s “yaaaas queen” era where everyone is a goddess.

Speak No Evil is the rowdiest horror flick in ages, a hilarious and venomous little nasty that cattle-prods the audience to scream everything its lead characters choke down.

Most of all, Coco hums with the idea that we’re kept alive by the stories people tell about us when we’re gone. Whether Coco itself will be an eternal story is iffy. But I’m glad it’s with us today.

Adams’s clear-eyed, open-minded doctor forces us to ask how much we’re willing to communicate.

At a time when judgment and self-righteousness outrank forgiveness and empathy, Nadine is the heroine we need.

Colossal has no patience for piety or punishment. Even when Gloria gets punched in the face, the film refuses to sob. Instead, it's oddly heroic.

It's possible to watch Silence and see a story about saints martyred by an oppressive government. It's also possible to see a told-you-so parable about imperialists who should have stayed home. I suspect Scorsese would be a little disappointed by either conclusion. But he stays quiet because he wants to challenge the audience to go deeper inside themselves, to separate our own religion (or lack of one) from the faith that guided us to it.

Like most coming-of-age flicks, Morris From America tries too hard to make friends. At least its scenes of unearned triumph are balanced by embarrassing bits that hit emotional bullseyes. It’s so likable I wondered if I was a sap for enjoying it, so I watched it again and liked it more.

Kong: Skull Island is an offering to the hungry mouths at the multiplex who want to cheer a movie that doesn't insult, or tax, their intelligence.

Don’t Breathe is a small delight, like stumbling across a shiny silver dollar.

It’s a hero story for wonks and scientists, people who spend their days surrounded by dry-erase boards inked with numbers and grids and yet go to work in a jumpsuit, their faces smeared with muck.

Like its star, Anna and the Apocalypse merrily charges through danger. It’s a genre mash-up populated with cliches...but McPhail finds small moments to make his characters unique.

At times, Wonder Woman feels like watching Splash with a shield — another babelicious naïf breaking all the rules. Yet the joke isn't on her. It's on all the men mistaking unsophistication for weakness. To be uncultured is to be mentally free; no one's put on a yoke. That's what makes Wonder Woman a knockout.

For the first time, a Marvel movie draws that pencil line from dream to screen. Where the earlier films felt hard and shiny and steel-colored — the look of bashing action figures on a sidewalk — Strange is ink-smudged and obsessive. It's defiantly old-school — not the cozy, apple-scented nostalgia of the first Captain America film, but that cold, back-of-the-library whiff of eraser nubs and mold.

Jaden Smith is destined to be a star by the force of will (and wallets) of parents Will and Jada Smith, both producers on The Karate Kid. But he's also got the raw material.