Ann Hornaday

A pulpy grindhouse B-picture tricked out in art house pretensions, counting on the siren call of sex and violence to fleece the rubes. Choose your own adventure. And maybe bring a barf bag.

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.

Bardo seems to be Iñárritu’s deeply personal — if hermetic — attempt to make sense of the conflicting and unresolved impulses that have animated his life and art over the past two decades, during which he’s gone from promising emerging filmmaker to Oscar-winning superstar.

"Wakanda Forever” winds up feeling hopelessly stalled, covering up an inability to move on by resorting to repetitive, over-familiar action sequences, maudlin emotional beats and an uninvolving, occasionally incoherent story.

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.

It’s possible to see why McDonagh’s fans love his quirks and clever structural feints (the war of wills in “Banshees” often plays out like variations on a theme), as well as his characters’ willingness not to be liked. But what they find at the end of the filmmaker’s rainbow is less likely to be a pot of philosophical gold than prosaic self-satisfaction.

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.

It’s all diverting, if not ultimately sustained. Although the cast is thoroughly committed, as “Amsterdam” wends its way to its hysterically pitched climax, it sometimes feels like it’s two very different movies.

Reductive, ghoulish and surpassingly boring, “Blonde” might have invented a new cinematic genre: necro-fiction.

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.

A movie that’s not a disaster, but not particularly distinguished; a movie that, in the end, will wind up being as forgettable as its own bizarre publicity.

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.

What should be a cinematic journey into amazement and otherworldly adventure instead becomes a tedious, word-heavy slog — all the more disappointing considering the director in charge is George Miller.

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.

What starts out as a slick, streamlined delivery system for mayhem, carnage and quippery finally finds its inner Agatha Christie. For all its supercool posturing, casual cruelty and lurid overcompensation, “Bullet Train” was a cozy all along.

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.

With Elvis, Luhrmann matches Presley’s drive and instinctive charisma and raises him for sheer nerve, simultaneously hewing to the hoariest conventions of Hollywood rise-and-fall biopics and seeking to gleefully subvert them at every turn.

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.

With its outré images and pulsating shots of human viscera, Crimes of the Future is clearly meant to shock, as well as reference very real anxieties about technology, genetics and environmental degradation. But as the convoluted plot wears on, Cronenberg’s transgressive kink looks more and more played out.

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.

The classic college party-crawl comedy gets a smart, self-aware refresh with Emergency, a funny, adroitly executed satire that manages to find genuine laughs in the unlikeliest places.

If this all sounds too insufferable and in-jokey, fear not: Gormican, with the help of his fabulously game ensemble cast, keeps the balloon afloat with a light touch, crisp pacing and an overarching mood that’s more goofily endearing than smugly self-amused.

As arresting and elaborate as the images are in The Northman, there are just as many sequences that revert strictly to pulpy, B-movie type.

Top it off with Pinaud’s final dedication, and The Rose Maker turns into a film that wears its emotions lightly but generously, like dew on a blush-colored petal.

In The Automat, Hurwitz and writer Michael Levine trace the rise and fall of Horn & Hardart, illuminating not just a surprisingly compelling corporate history, but a facet of American culture that feels both brimmingly optimistic and thoroughly extinct.

Based on a spare, exquisitely crafted novel by Graham Swift, this thoughtful but ultimately inert dramatization respects its source material and tries valiantly to give arresting visual expression to its finely layered themes.

The two actors have charisma to burn, finely tuned comic chops and the kind of smoldering physical star power that manages to look effortless and superhuman at the same time. But even gifts as prodigious as Bullock’s and Tatum’s can’t keep “The Lost City” afloat.

Master might be a horror film, but its scariest elements are off screen, in the form of the persistent social realities that inspired it.

After Yang again demonstrates Kogonada’s mastery of form, framing and composition. But audiences will be forgiven for wanting to reach through the screen to mess it up a little, if only to inject some recognizable warmth and spontaneity.

Welcome to “The Batman,” yet another lugubrious, laboriously grim slog masquerading as a fun comic book movie.

Kuosmanen has given us another affair to remember, this time about love as something for which you’d not just go to the ends of the Earth, but to the beginning of time.

Trier and Reinsve have gifted audiences with a movie that understands the ecstasy of diving into the unknown, the flush of new love, the beauty of connecting amid unspeakable loss.

It’s a movie that’s all too happy simply to go through the motions when its star is clearly capable of busting bigger, more interesting moves. Luckily, there are other films in the sea. This is one that Lopez should have left at the altar.

Filmmaker Clint Bentley makes a tender, visually poetic feature directorial debut with “Jockey,” a closely observed portrait of a man embarking on the downslope of his career.

Thanks to his courage and Rasmussen’s compassion and creativity, “Flee” morphs from a tale of dispossession to a testament to the power of narrative — to overtake a life, and to liberate it.

Licorice Pizza is at its best — and is genuinely charming — when it’s simply focused on Gary and Alana — two mixed-up kids trying to make their way in a world that feels promising and perilous in equal measure.

For such a compact and efficient vessel, “The Tragedy of Macbeth” pours forth seemingly endless wellsprings of language, emotion and psychological depth.

Wachowski seems to be at war with her audience, rewarding them with deep-cut callbacks one moment only to roll her eyes at the entire enterprise the next.

Maggie Gyllenhaal makes a quietly astonishing directorial debut with “The Lost Daughter,” a crafty treatise on maternal ambivalence that delivers an unsettling emotional wallop.

Not content with simply stoking rage and self-righteous superiority, McKay dares to infuse Don’t Look Up with an authentic, unironic sense of grief.

Spielberg and Kaminski have enjoyed a fruitful collaboration for decades, but their work on West Side Story brings the partnership to breathtakingly poetic expressive heights.

For all its beauty and poignancy, The Hand of God suffers from a strange paradox: It goes on too long but somehow doesn’t go far enough.

In this mesmerizing, revelatory and deeply compassionate film, viewers are left with an indelible impression of girlhood at its most precarious and indomitable.

Like The Father last year, The Humans makes the set a character in itself: Karam has concocted a diabolically creaky duplex whose wonky corners and jury-rigged improvements take on an increasingly sinister patina as the meal progresses.

Johnny’s tentative dip into family life artfully captures the tedium, terror and confounding ecstasy of parenthood, but it more eloquently conveys the pain and discovery involved in simply trying to do one’s best.

Once again demonstrating her own strong, clear vision — not to mention superb control of her craft — Campion proves her ability to illuminate hidden truths and let us see what was hiding in plain sight all along.

Will Smith delivers a ferocious, all-consuming performance in King Richard, a thoroughly entertaining portrait of Richard Williams — better known as Venus and Serena’s father.

For its frequently painful contours, there’s an abundance of pleasures to be had in Belfast, Kenneth Branagh’s irresistible memoir about growing up amid the Troubles in Northern Ireland.

The Souvenir Part II may bring an end to the introduction of a marvelous filmmaker to a wider world. But far more promisingly, it suggests what, with luck, will be an exhilarating next chapter.

Zhao might have her eye on the nuances, but ultimately even a filmmaker with her sensitivity and vision can’t bend the Great Marvel Imperative to her will.

The Electrical Life of Louis Wain tells its story with sympathy, but too many quirks and try-hard flourishes. In the welter and spin of tics, voice-overs, set pieces, images, flashbacks and dream states, the man himself gets as lost as a kitten in the rain.

There’s attentive scrutiny here, and a surfeit of playful style, but precious little genuine curiosity or interest.

The Last Duel is an entertaining movie, even an intriguing one. But audiences might be forgiven for thinking, upon leaving the theater, that they’ve just been very nobly and very honorably mansplained.

At its core, Mass exerts the power of ritual at its most reflective and galvanizing, reveling in human connection at its most arduous, persistent and sublime.

With Titane, Ducournau joins the crowded realm of elevated horror, to increasingly outlandish and alienating effect.

For its eventual lurid machinations and hyped-up emotionalism, the film winds up being a handsomely efficient one-man show. Like the man Gyllenhaal so convincingly embodies, it gets the job done, even if it inevitably goes over the top.

My Name is Pauli Murray delivers a lively, revelatory litany of all the things Murray got right first, in a career that was driven by equal parts intellectual curiosity and call to service.

The Eyes of Tammy Faye gives viewers an absorbing, amusing and provocative chance to rethink yet another train wreck who turned out to be, of all things, human.

With The Card Counter, Schrader has reverted to form, but he’s remade it anew at the same time. He’s done it again, with crafty, haunting power.

In the tradition of such bracing musicals as Kinky Boots, Billy Elliot and Prom, Everybody’s Talking About Jamie has exuberance to burn, high spirits galore and a brand of message-driven escapism that’s as insistent as it is worthy. Resistance, in other words, is futile.

Cinderella, the latest of countless adaptations of the centuries-old rags-to-riches story, is far less interested in enchantment than in dismantling the entire sexist, classist racket.

Even at its most glancing and superficial, Together offers a diverting attempt at capturing recent history, in all its maddening contradictions and compromises, recriminations and rages. It reflects a time when all we had was each other, for better or — way too often — for worse.

As a director, Penn knows how to create arresting tableaus that draw the eye and spark the viewer’s own sensory past. As an actor, no one is better at finding honesty in the moment. Like the antihero at its center, the essence of Flag Day remains tantalizingly elusive, potently evoked but never fully realized.

Rather than a meditation on desire, Ma Belle, My Beauty becomes a portrait of how people simultaneously crave intimacy and keep each other at bay. Viewers may wish there were more to it, but what’s there is teasingly intriguing.

Respect is nominally a movie about a woman finding her voice, but more accurately it’s about her taking full possession of it.

You’ll laugh, all right. You’ll cry. You’ll do both at the same time. CODA is just that kind of movie. And thank goodness for it.

As absorbing and illuminating as Sabaya is — and as courageous as it is as an act of filmmaking — the viewer can’t escape the fact that it’s men who have taken these women hostage, men who are rescuing them and men to whom they are returning, as long as they obey their conditions and patriarchal codes.

For audiences who prefer their movies to be as weird and even off-putting as possible, Annette comes fully wrapped as a pretentious, arty, occasionally breathtaking, ultimately misbegotten midsummer gift.

As in life, what drives most of the drama in this overstuffed but often thought-provoking movie is a failure to communicate.

Despite its unconventional source material, it turns out to be surprisingly well-crafted, elevated by breathtaking central performances and the stylish, slyly knowing sensibility of director Janicza Bravo.

Ewing joins a generation of filmmakers who are using every piece of cinematic grammar available to communicate the emotional core of their stories and characters, fusing the impressionistic liberties of drama with more visceral truths to startling and potent effect.

The result is something akin to cinematic hypertext, and thanks to Thompson’s steady hand, the brief but deep dives are richly rewarding.

As gratifying as it is that Johansson has finally gotten the movie her character has long deserved — not to mention a worthy and equally watchable foil in Pugh — “Black Widow” simultaneously feels like too much and too little. Do svidaniya, Natasha — we hardly knew ye.

Director Pedro Kos makes lively use of archival footage and animation in Rebel Hearts, but the stars are the women themselves.

Still, despite some distracting contrivances, Summer of 85 transports viewers to a place, time and feeling that feel altogether real, and not nearly as far away as they initially might seem.

If F9’s repetitive stunts-and-speeches structure begins to pall, this is a movie that knows its lane and stays in it, however recklessly.

Beyond the music itself, The Sparks Brothers offers viewers a bracing example of musical curiosity and extraordinary resilience — not to mention the singular pleasure of working at your craft long enough to be accused of ripping off the acts who have been stealing from you for 50 years. The Maels live. And living Mael is the best revenge.

To quote In the Heights itself, the streets are made of music in the first genuinely cheerful, splashy, exuberantly life-affirming movie of the summer.

Thanks to the taste and shrewd judgment of director Julio Quintana, this funny, heartwarming movie provides just the right combination of adventure, character-driven humor, spiritual depth and inspirational uplift.

Plan B possesses the requisite number of outré sight gags and gross-out humor to qualify it as a sophomoric teen flick. But director Natalie Morales keeps the action running smoothly, allowing her two gifted stars to deliver genuine breakout performances in vivid roles.

Whatever good intentions were brought to bear in Cruella are lost in an overlong, awkwardly shaped mash-up of coming-of-age drama, caper flick, action adventure and fashion world sendup.

New Order recalls 2019’s Oscar-winning Parasite, but unlike that film’s superficial rich-people-bad/Quentin-Tarantino-good message, this one is far more grounded, both in reality and genuinely original thinking.