Ann Hornaday

Tough, tender and observational, “Sorry, Baby” suggests that Victor’s promising career has been suitably launched.

To his credit, Gunn pushes a much-needed reset button on “Superman,” banishing shadows and pretentious self-seriousness in favor of a bright palette, brisk storytelling and occasional jolts of bracing humor.

There’s no better time for a throwback than summer, and “F1 the Movie” is here to send audiences to a blissful era before constant cape slop, when the movies were loud, their stars were hot and the male main-character energy was flowing with exhilarating abandon.

Maybe “Materialists” marks the emergence of a new genre: the rom-con, not in the sense that it’s against the vicarious pleasures of flirting, seduction and finally finding true love, but that it’s painfully aware of the coldhearted calculation that so often lies beneath.

At its fleeting best — in its meditation on the transactional and the transcendent — this one feels like it’s reaching for something more than surface charm.

Once Perry brings his magnum opus to its many climactic conclusions, the bait-and-switchy gamesmanship and sheer swing of his conceit have become irresistibly contagious, and viewers can’t help but be moved.

The Last Rodeo may not be bodacious, but it’s a satisfying ride.

The story, held at well-mannered arm’s length by Piani, never gets too messy; even Agathe’s deepest psychological issues — a phobia that makes travel difficult and, later, the explanation of its traumatic roots — are handled with efficient, unfailingly discrete politesse.

The Final Reckoning stays true to those core tenets, even if it too often feels baggy and redundant. It’s a nesting doll of life-and-death deadlines within life-and-death deadlines, with one wildly improbable stunt leading to another, even more wildly improbable stunt.

In an era beset with dizzying setbacks in the ideals it celebrates, Ain’t No Back to a Merry-Go-Round feels particularly necessary right now.

Friendship is primarily a movie for Robinson’s hardcore fans, but, for the Tim-curious, it serves as an amusing — if haphazard and uneven — introduction to his distinctive sensibility.

Thanks to its thoughtful protagonists and filmmaker Jeremy Workman, what starts out as a quirky human interest story becomes a profoundly humane portrait of creativity and community.

It’s certainly a movie nobody asked for, as Marvel itself acknowledges. But it’s here. And it’s just fine.

Sinners gives sensuous, supernatural, often electrifying expression to the belief that we’re all simultaneously captive to our histories and capable of so much more.

Warfare is a process movie: It’s less interested in character development and “narrative” than in simply plunging viewers into an environment and giving us a sense of what life is like within it.

Regina King gives a lively, convincing portrayal of pioneering U.S. Congresswoman Shirley Chisholm in “Shirley,” an earnest, curiously listless biopic of a woman whose legacy suffuses modern life, even as it goes unacknowledged.

The story is a familiar one — a young immigrant fetches up in New York to seek his fortune, only to be buffeted by a bumptious city and cut to the quick by its competitive edge — but Torres reshapes it into something simultaneously more fantastical and far more real.

It’s all meticulously conceived and impressively staged, but becomes repetitive and monotonous, devolving for anyone not completely steeped in the “Dune” universe into a hazy orange-and-ocher soup of dust, smoke, flames and sand.

The fact that writer-director Wim Wenders has called a movie about cleaning toilets “Perfect Days” might strike some viewers as the height of absurdity, even perverse humor. But once they get a glimpse of Hirayama in action, the dreams (literal and figurative) behind the drudgery reveal themselves in a series of revelatory moments.

Binoche is so gifted, she no longer seems to act anymore: She just is, in all her serene confidence and physical charisma, and “The Taste of Things” provides the ideal showcase for those ineffable gifts.

The direction and performances in “How to Have Sex” are so spontaneous and naturalistic that the film often plays like a slice-of-life documentary; it’s not necessarily a fully realized story, but as one chapter, it’s extraordinarily vivid.

What begins as an intriguing visit to a forbidding but fascinating past becomes the kind of perfunctorily moralistic fairy tale that Kahlen himself might scoff at, before getting back to work. Like the wilderness it depicts, this is a movie that ultimately might not want to be tamed.

Origin, Ava DuVernay’s audacious, ambitious adaptation of the equally audacious and ambitious book “Caste,” operates on so many levels at once that the effect is often dizzyingly disorienting. But hang in there: Viewers who allow themselves to be taken on this wide-ranging, occasionally digressive journey will emerge not just edified but emotionally wrung out and, somehow, cleansed.

On the most surface level, “The Zone of Interest,” which Glazer adapted from Martin Amis’s novel, is about denial and Hannah Arendt’s banality of evil. But the mental contortions Rudolf and Hedwig go through to justify their own monstrosity go beyond obliviousness into something far more insidious and timeless.

Its elegiac themes might make All of Us Strangers sound like a bummer, when it’s anything but. This is an intriguing, increasingly mystifying rabbit hole disguised as a romantic drama, with all the sensuous pleasures the genre suggests (not to mention some superfun synth-pop cuts from Frankie Goes to Hollywood and Pet Shop Boys).

American Fiction would be an enormously entertaining and observant comedy even if it just stuck to the hilarious, if cringey, lengths to which the White establishment will go in the name of psychic safety and self-protection. But Jefferson overlays the story’s most biting wit with layers of warmth, sadness and discovery that make this movie far more than the sum of its parts.

Fallen Leaves casts an irresistible spell, one that’s as playful as it is full of longing and pathos.

Because McNamara wrote the script, Poor Things brims with his signature polished, sophisticated humor; because Lanthimos directed, it’s full of envelope-pushing zaniness and self-amusement, especially when it comes to Bella’s increasingly uninhibited sexual appetites.

It's a love story as unruly, passionate and expansive as the flawed and fascinating people at its center. Bravi.

As regrettable as Hite's fate was, The Disappearance of Shere Hite goes a long way toward rectifying the wrongs done to her, whether in the name of erasure, ridicule, or willful misunderstanding.

Nicolas Cage goes delightfully, derangedly meta in Dream Scenario, a smart, dizzyingly entertaining horror-comedy that morphs into scathing social satire.

All Dirt Roads Taste of Salt doesn’t just announce a promising new talent in Jackson. It serves as a shimmering, dreamlike reminder that movies are as good for poetry as for prose.

Filmed in subdued tones of burnished browns, The Holdovers might best be described as the movie version of that favorite pair of corduroys that miraculously still fit: stylish, if a little worn in places, softened by time and made more generous by the life lived inside them.

If it sometimes feels a bit contrived, and if its conclusion will leave some viewers unsatisfied, Triet has made a film that succeeds brilliantly — on terms that are as exacting, rigorous and precise as her unflappable heroine.

Despite its over-credulous willingness to go along on what through one lens amounts to a massive ego trip, Nyad manages to be a celebration of perseverance, self-belief and learning how to be loved.

There’s no doubt that Killers of the Flower Moon reflects a shift in energy that is defensible — even necessary — from an ethical point of view. Narratively, that pivot results in a film that, it must be said, feels leeched of the energy and vigor viewers associate with Scorsese at his most exhilarating.

After years of dabbling, lyrically and literally, Taylor Swift has come for American cinema, and we can only wait for her next move.

Throughout the film, it’s Baez who holds the audience spellbound, not just in live performances that remained transfixing from the late 1950s to the 2010s, but in her very being.

She Came to Me exists in between things: airy romance and psychological depth; operatic fantasy and gritty reality; farce and fatalism. Writer-director Rebecca Miller executes that balancing act with lighthearted audacity in a film that aspires, with fitful success, to resurrect the lost art of screwball comedy — with some literal opera thrown in for musical measure.

Propelled by a funny, charismatic turn by Hewson (who infused such unpredictable energy in the terrific Apple TV Plus series “Bad Sisters”), Flora and Son is a feel-good movie that largely earns its sentimental uplift, one sick burn and soaring musical number at a time.

Regan directs Scrapper with exceptional verve, interrupting the narrative with witty documentarylike asides whose framing evokes the poppy aesthetic of Wes Anderson.

Filmed in Augusto and Pauli’s handsome brick-and-timber home in Chile, and punctuated by home movies and news footage of Augusto in his prime, The Eternal Memory mostly eschews voyeurism for its own maudlin sake.

Smart, sensuous and stylish, Passages is all about pleasure: the giving of it, the getting of it, the art and pursuit of it, and what it all can cost.

Kokomo City, D. Smith’s impressive debut documentary about Black trans sex workers, arrives in time to be an audacious, endearing, illuminating, often amusingly ribald primer.

Richly observed and paced with relaxed, unforced ease, Afire doesn’t ignite as much as smolder. It’s a slow, steady burn.

As a filmmaker at the height of his powers, Nolan has used those prodigious skills, not simply to amaze or spectacularize, but to plunge the audience into a chapter of history that might feel ancient, as he reminds us, but happened just yesterday. By making that story so beautiful, so elegantly crafted and compulsively watchable, he has brought to life not just J. Robert Oppenheimer, but the still-crucial arguments he both started and tried to end.

Viewers who have nurtured a loving if complicated relationship with Barbie might feel seen by the end of the film. Whether they’ll feel satisfied is another question entirely — especially when it comes to the film’s letdown of an ending, which was no doubt perfect on the page but lands with a deflating, didactic thud. Then again, that gnawing sense of ambivalence was no doubt precisely what Gerwig’s “Barbie” was aiming for.

The good news isn’t just that Dead Reckoning lives up to its star’s notoriously high standards; it’s that it isn’t even over yet.

Chile ’76 turns out to be a paranoid thriller altogether worthy of the era it captures with such cool, self-contained style.

Celine Song makes a quietly spectacular writing-directing debut with Past Lives, a lyrical slow burn of a film that expertly holds back wellsprings of emotion, until it unleashes a deluge.

L’immensità lives up to its title: It’s a small but all-encompassing portrait of how life feels in a certain time and place — when the broken pieces of one’s true self are invisibly coming together, even when getting them to fit feels too overwhelming to contemplate.

It’s just this impressive amalgamation of realism and stylization that allows “Across the Spider-Verse” to transcend its narrative shortcomings: Even at its most obscure or muddled, it’s never less than a pleasure to watch.

Reality isn’t just stranger than fiction: It’s subtler, sadder and exponentially more haunting.

Bailey nails the iconic moments (that head toss) and the high notes, but also her character’s combination of spunk and innocence. She delivers a lovely performance that’s all the more accomplished for being delivered amid crashing waves, sweeping vistas and the crushing expectations of generations of fans. As a new generation’s Ariel, she makes The Little Mermaid her own — with confidence, charisma and oceans of charm.

As a slice of life spiked with mordant, uncynical humor, it’s deliciously entertaining. In other words, it’s another Holofcener movie, which means it’s perilously close to perfect.

There’s a certain kind of French movie that’s a quintessentially French movie: stylish, intellectually engaged, alert to adult emotions and problems. Other People’s Children is that kind of movie — it tells a small-canvas story that loses none of its poignancy for refusing to overreach or give into fatal self-seriousness.

As a portrait of a young woman testing the limits of the shame-based system that has controlled her, The Starling Girl plays like a warmer, more radiant companion piece to last year’s “Women Talking."

R.M.N. is as gripping and scrupulously humane as Mungiu’s admirers have come to expect from an artist of supreme discipline and dramatic skill. It’s one thing to be a master of mise-en-scene; it’s all the more impressive when that talent for detail — pictorial and behavioral — results in an illumination of the world that’s both ruthless and surpassingly compassionate.

BlackBerry, a funny, insightful corporate biopic, tells the unlikely story of how a ragtag team of Canadian computer nerds invented the titular device — a combination “pager, cellphone and email machine” that would revolutionize modern communications until it became known as the thing you owned before you got an iPhone.

As a thriller channeling the deepest anxieties of its era, however, How to Blow Up a Pipeline feels urgently, unmistakably of its time.

Apparently, the answer is yes: Working from a well-judged script by first-time screenwriter Alex Convery and enlisting a superb cast of appealing ensemble players, Affleck has created something that Hollywood has seemed incapable of making in recent years: a smart, entertaining movie that, for all its foregone conclusions and familiar beats, unfolds with the offhand confidence of the most casually impressive layup.

This is a tough, beautiful, honest and bracingly hopeful movie about mutual care and unconditional love, with a transformative and indelible performance at its core. A Thousand and One isn’t just worth seeing — it’s worth celebrating.

With Hawkins’s alternately elfin and flinty performance at its center, The Lost King winds up being a paean to amateurism and unconventionality.

With Palm Trees and Power Lines, Dack has created a haunting portrait of how trust is manipulated and abused; the trust she builds up with her characters and audience, however, remains steadfast, resulting in a film of disarming candor and power.

For the most part, Creed III is a matter of clear, straightforward storytelling, with a well-balanced variety of action, feeling, character development and fan-pleasing callbacks. It’s a good movie.

No Bears would be thoroughly engaging simply as a wryly funny fish-out-of-water story, with some diverting film-within-a-film metatext thrown in for thoughtful measure. But as Panahi’s stories mirror and merge, his deeper observations come into sobering and ultimately deeply moving focus.

The movie may or may not be entirely true to Brontë, but it is surpassingly, and often deliciously, Brontë-esque.

Baby Ruby makes a valuable contribution to the emerging cinematic literature on the unspoken realities of women’s lived experience — with style, disarming honesty, and a steady and intelligent hand.

Dhont tells a familiar story in what feels like a fresh and urgently new way, with sensitivity, sadness and promising glimmers of hope.

Rather than a self-indulgent portrait of two amazing men and their amazing careers, “Turn Every Page” bristles with ego and good-humored tension.

With skill and sensitivity, Polley turns an on-the-nose political debate into a bracing declaration of independence.

Still, for all its attractively appointed torpor, Corsage offers a provocative retort to the fetishistic depictions of Elisabeth that have become commodified in Austria over the past 125 years. It tears open the candy box to reveal something poisonous at its center.

Olivia Colman delivers an alternately delicate and ferocious performance as a cinema manager in Empire of Light, a tender, tear-soaked valentine to the ineffable joys of moviegoing.

By turns silly and scathing, Glass Onion once again demonstrates Johnson’s gift for critiquing culture in the name of good fun — or, perhaps more precisely, having fun by critiquing culture.

The Fabelmans does it all, with an expansive spirit and that quintessential Spielbergian combination of honesty and sentiment. It tells the truth, at a honeyed, ameliorating slant.

You Resemble Me would be a vivid, beautifully acted reflection of dispossession and cultural dislocation if it stayed one thing. But, like its mercurial protagonist, it changes shape to become a deeply meaningful meditation on narrative itself, blending fact and fiction into a seamlessly poetic whole.

"Eat the rich” might be a popular theme this movie season, but The Menu takes the idea to extremes that finally overpower the palate.

She Said takes a story we thought we knew and gives it new, utterly shattering life.

Armageddon Time is a pungent, disarmingly honest evocation of love and loyalty, striving and struggle, and how identity morphs from one generation to the next. In revisiting his own coming of age, Gray has managed to illuminate a much larger one that hasn’t stopped.

As always with Östlund, his most profligate flights of fancy tack close enough to reality to ring queasily true.

Tár, the film that wraps around its mesmerizing antiheroine like a fawn-colored cashmere wrap, is less a movie than a seductive deep dive into an unraveling psyche of a woman who’s simultaneously defined by and apart from the world she has so confidently by the tail.

Like any successful comedy — or movie, for that matter — “Bros” succeeds in its specificity: in this case, gay life and culture that are brimming with foibles, contradictions, triumphs and failures just waiting to be mined for comic gold.

Following Cushman’s epistolary structure, Catherine Called Birdy unfolds as a series of diary entries, narrated in a self-satisfied tone that grates over time. Still, Dunham keeps the action brisk and the humor quotient high, as Birdy foils a succession of suitors, often by way of slapstick high jinks and general over-the-top japery.

The Woman King may be a fable, but its power is real: Her name is Viola Davis, and she’s nothing less than magnificent.

Ultimately, “Loving Highsmith” provides a valuable addition to the larger record of the author’s enigmatic life, rather than a comprehensive chronicle itself. Which might be altogether fitting for a woman who always seemed to prefer to remain just out of reach.

With “1982,” Mouaness gives viewers an immersive, ineffable sense of what it feels like to have the world shift under your feet before you even know it.

Three Minutes: A Lengthening unspools like a not-so-minor miracle. It’s a work of poetry, power and ruminative grace.

Uneven, ambiguous and unnerving, “Sharp Stick” undoubtedly has a point to make. What that is, precisely, might be subject to debate.

This is a weird and wonderfully expansive story, adroitly executed by Morosini with the compassion to mine it for humanism rather than droll, oddball quirk. By putting viewers inside the strangeness of what happened to him, he provides the audience the rare privilege of genuinely laughing with his characters instead of at them.

Although the jokey anecdotes and animated sequences give “My Old School” buoyancy and momentum, that tone sometimes fights with content that isn’t nearly as larky as the film portrays it. Still, there’s no denying that Brandon and his exploits make for an engrossing, often witty meditation on what it means to grow and evolve.

There are moments when Mrs. Harris Goes to Paris resembles the cinematic equivalent of nursery food: over-egged but soothing, and perhaps a much-needed respite from a world in danger of spinning off its axis.

What turns out to be the most moving and meaningful thing about the film isn’t the song at its center, but the work ethic of a man who might have disappeared from the public eye for years at a time but never stopped sweating every word.

By now, it must be said, the quips are beginning to wear a little thin, the vinyl-era needle drops a little less cool, the quotation marks a little more obvious among the ironic references and self-mocking bonhomie. Still, Thor: Love and Thunder is out for a good time, even if the journey doesn’t feel quite so novel or giddily buoyant.

Even a character as sincere and innocently wise as Marcel isn’t above fan service, even if it means taking a sweetly captivating idea an inch too far.

Good Luck to You, Leo Grande turns out to be a wise, amusing, unexpectedly touching exploration of human psyches, the bodies that house them and radical self-acceptance — by way of a literate two-hander executed by actors at supreme ease with each other and, by extension, their audience.

Writer, director and actor Cooper Raiff delivers an ingratiating turn as a cheerful lost soul in Cha Cha Real Smooth, a post-college coming-of-age story of intergenerational lust and the rocky road to adulthood.

Actor and screenwriter Joel Kim Booster gives Jane Austen a brisk, lighthearted refresh in Fire Island, a hedonistic — but disarmingly sincere — ode to the eponymous gay vacation spot.

Like the hyper-competent aces at the story’s core, this is a movie that defines its lane early and sticks to it, with finesse, unfussy style and more than a few sneak attacks of emotion.