Ann Hornaday

A soaring, heart-bursting portrait of a group of intrepid Baltimore high school students guaranteed to bring audiences to their feet — whether out of vicarious triumph, overpowering pure emotion, or simply to pay tribute to the superheroines at the core of its infectiously inspiring story.

Detroit is an audacious, nervy work of art, but it also commemorates history, memorializes the dead and invites reflection on the part of the living. In scale, scope and the space it offers for a long-awaited moral reckoning, it’s nothing less than monumental.

Landline offers viewers a rueful glimpse of a vanished time and place. Along the way, it’s often unexpectedly and guffawingly funny.

City of Ghosts provides a grim reminder of what journalism should look like, and why its stakes are literally life and death.

The Little Hours seldom rises above a clever but lightweight one-liner.

A shattering vérité portrait of the disintegration of Iraqi society in the period immediately following the withdrawal of U.S. troops from that country, this urgent, of-the-moment film doesn’t explain the ensuing chaos as much as plunge viewers into it firsthand, offering a terrifying, ultimately moving portrait of the effects of war, both physical and psychic.

It’s a movie that not only puts human imperfections and incongruities on display, but also revels in them.

On its own terms, The Beguiled is a finely crafted, gemlike exercise in surface tension and subterranean stirrings. Seen through the prism of history and culture, it’s difficult not to feel that some essential truth has been lost in translation.

As charming as Baby Driver strives to be, the appeal starts to curdle once Wright makes his fetishistic aims clear.

Even at its most contrived, The Hero exerts a soothing attraction not unlike the man at its center.

As touching as Hayek’s performance is, Beatriz at Dinner too often forsakes nuance for caricature.

It provides a sturdy, often exhilarating bridge between the present and a past that not only isn’t distant, but isn’t even really past.

What’s missing from this production is the darkness — the perversity, even — that informs du Maurier’s work, and that would elevate an attractively illustrated story into aesthetically and psychologically vivid cinema.

I, Daniel Blake is about human value: disposable and abstract in one context; eternal, inviolable and sacred in another. They might underline the point a bit too thickly, but Loach and Laverty count on their audience to discern the difference, and to act accordingly.

Wonder Woman may not cure all the ills of pop culture’s superhero-saturation syndrome; in fact, in many ways it succumbs to some of its worst excesses. But at least it brings an exhilarating, vicarious kick to the sagging, bagging table.

It’s funny and sad and weary and wise, which feels just about right for now. War Machine is a weird, unsettled movie for a weird, unsettled time.

Paris Can Wait is a modest, genteel piece of cinematic escapism, a silky testament to sensuality as impeccably tasteful as it is utterly undemanding.

Presumably, Scott is giving the audience what it wants, but purists may wonder whether simply re-watching “Alien” would have provided scarier, more genuine jolts.

No one will ever credit Snatched with discovering new comic territory. But it earns its share of laughs by covering some well-trod ground.

Flustered, flirty and filled to the brim with compassion, The Lovers is charming, even when it’s proving how hollow charm can be.

Risk raises deep misgivings about its subject and its maker. But it’s still queasily, compulsively watchable — and probably necessary, if only as a cautionary example of how ethics, objectivity and agendas come into play in nonfiction filmmaking.

Peppering “Norman” with obliquely mordant observations about Middle East politics, Cedar effortlessly propels the narrative into a sweetly pensive character study of a familiar archetype, which he invests with an angel’s share of humanity and heart.

With his cultivated air of nonchalance, the trivialized, consequence-free violence and reverse-engineering of a plot threaded with convenient twists and unexpected arrivals, Wheatley seems intent upon lowering the stakes at every opportunity.

It’s a touching evocation of friendship, brotherly competition and artistic courage at the cusp of a new century.

The power of the film is cumulative, as the filmmaker spins a mesmerizing morality tale from the dross of daily life. In his skillful hands, the ordinary turns out to be anything but.

As a 30-something coming-of-age story, Colossal is as relatable as they come, its deadpan depiction of lost sheep recalling the Charlize Theron movie “Young Adult.” Vigalondo doesn’t evince the same cynicism and anger as that film reveled in so bitterly, but he’s also not one for easy allegorical equivalencies.

It’s the chemistry among these three fine actors that keeps Going in Style afloat, lifting it from the formulaic and forgettable — which, essentially, it is — and making it genuinely, if modestly, enjoyable.

This version may not break new ground, but it revisits familiar territory with a vibrant sense of style and welcome restraint. It exemplifies the kind of respectable and utterly unnecessary remake that now defines the Hollywood business model.