Jake Coyle

The whimsical, unpredictable artistry of “Kajillionaire” turns out to be no con, at all.

In the bleak, everyday struggles the Dardennes dramatize, they are always, thank god, keenly on the lookout for grace.

After Yang may not reach the heights it’s seeking, but it’s easy to respect it for trying to tackle profound questions and reach a register of high-minded reflection.

Gloria Bell isn’t a dour midlife character study but a warmly affectionate one, in large part due to Moore’s radiant, lived-in performance as a woman committed to self-renewal.

High Flying Bird is a heady movie, full of political thought about sport, entertainment, race and power. Rather than float on production value, it sustains itself on the tension of ideas, exchanged rapid-fire in gleaming office towers.

Toggling between Texas Hold ’Em and Iraq War nightmares makes for a head-spinning collision. But I think the incongruities of The Card Counter also give it its power. Schrader’s film is so self-evidently the impassioned work of a singularly feverish mind that its flaws add to its humanity.

[Petzold] turns “Miroirs,” a slender and sweet 86-minute puzzle, into one of the more lovely and profound little movies about how hearts can be mended by just opening a door.

Generous in humor, spirit and sentimentality, Anthony and Joe Russo's Endgame is a surprisingly full feast of blockbuster-making that, through some time-traveling magic, looks back nostalgically at Marvel's decade of world domination. This is the Marvel machine working at high gear, in full control of its myth-making powers and uncovering more emotion in its fictional cosmos than ever before.

One of the more sheerly delightful movies of the year.

Just as the film’s near-sole setting — a remote mountain cabin beneath the peaks of northwestern Italy — beckons Pietro (Luca Marinelli) and Bruno (Alessandro Borghi) throughout their lives, the intoxicating atmosphere of The Eight Mountains is a cherished retreat I’m already eager to revisit.

The Personal History of David Copperfield is one of the more lively, colorful and whimsical Victorian costume dramas you’re likely to see. It’s a movie flowing with fresh air, which isn’t something normally said of adaptations of 700-something-page books.

Till, an aching wail of a movie, is a story in many ways about the inevitable tragedy of American racism.

Monroe, steely and strong, cuts like a knife through this almost cartoonishly severe film. Nasty stuff? Yep.

As cinematography, Malcolm & Marie (shot by Marcell Rév) is great. As cinema, not so much.

Alice, Darling is a little thinly sketched and lacks a strong sense of directorial perspective. But, in shirking genre contrivance, Nighy gets the most essential thing right, authentically capturing a not-uncommon real-life experience with rare nuance.

Much is just out of reach in Arnow’s shrewdly perceptive and very funny new film.

Maestro is a fine portrait of a complicated marriage. But for a man who contained symphonies, that leaves a lot of notes unplayed.

Not all of it works. Heavy doses of melodrama and flashy surrealism sap some of the lurid spell of “Love Lies Bleeding.” But this feels tantalizingly close to the idealized version of a Kristen Stewart film.

Pearce, sweaty and grungy, steadies Memory; it’s his film as much as Neeson’s.

This is an unusually soulful coming-of-age movie considering the number of spinal cords that get ripped right of bodies.

It’s an exploration that touches not just on policing and justice, but astronomy, politics, phrenology and race.

Bahrani, with Paolo Carnera’s vivid cinematography, builds a dense, incisive film that nevertheless feels uneven in structure.

Kids movies so often bear little of the actual lived-in experience of growing up, but Yamada Naoko’s luminous anime “The Colors Within” gently reverberates with the doubts and yearnings of young life.

Flora and Son, like a B-side to Carney’s earlier hits, may sound a little like a tune you’ve heard before. But it’s sung with enough heart to have even the coldest cynic humming.

Paolo Sorrentino’s films can be overwrought, grotesque and uneven but they are rarely not alive. His latest, The Hand of God, is a catalog of wonders — of miracles both banal and eternal.

Spencer may be a let down as a story about Diana, but as an exaggerated portrait of Stewart, it’s magnetic.

The story is so sensational that you almost wish Cassandro was instead a feature-length documentary.

Locked Down is inevitably, and intentionally, of the moment. But I hope some of its off-the-cuff spirit lasts after the pandemic. So much Hollywood moviemaking is laboriously preordained.

There are few more daring actors around right now than Moss, and “Shirley” may be her best performance yet. She’s brutally cutting but the pain of every slight ripples across her face.

Nouvelle Vague, with a young Godard making things up off the cuff and on the fly, is a reminder how less can be so, so much more. And how it’s nice, as a young filmmaker with big ambitions, to have some company.

The movie’s earnestness carries it through these less smooth moments. So does the cast. Any opportunity to see Freeman or Harris, still at the top of their games, is a chance to be treasured.

The Two Popes might promulgate an optimistic portrait of the Catholic Church and its leaders. But in these sweetly sincere scenes, you forget Benedict and Bergoglio are pontiff and pontiff-to-be. And the moment of respite from the world’s arguments and divisions feels like a benediction.

It lives in the unglamorous and sleepless postpartum haze of breast pumps and swaddles. But like “Poppins,” Tully is a fantasy of parenthood — a homely fairy tale about a haggard mother who’s feeling her younger, former self slip away.

There’s an upside to the film so eagerly jumping from anguish to slapstick, from social drama to buddy movie. Blindspotting is, like the Oakland it so dearly loves, always many things at once.

Baltimorons is one of those little movies you might stumble across and be surprised that it hooks you. It does so despite — or more likely because — of its complete lack of flashiness or any self-evident attempt to “hook you.” Instead, it manages that simply with low-key charm and a warm, unpretentious humanity.

Polite Society, the feature film debut of writer-director Manzoor, creator of the British sitcom “We Are Lady Parts,” is a fun and increasingly preposterous comedy. But it’s propelled by an infectious and genuine punk-rock energy. Make no mistake about it, the sisters of Polite Society are here to take down Pakistani tradition, the patriarchy and anything else you got.

Antoine Fuqua’s Equalizer 3, a taut and textured sequel to Washington’s vigilante series, isn’t one of the actor’s best films. It wouldn’t crack his top 10. But it vividly encapsulates Washington’s formidable on-screen potency.

What carries it through, above all, is the great command of Bigelow (“Zero Dark Thirty,” “Detroit” ), who knows perhaps better than any working filmmaker how to turn bracing real-life, or near-real-life crises into heart-pounding thrillers.

The Good Liar is a kind of film one wants to love. Such old-fashioned genre movies, let alone those starring actors in their 70s and 80s, are hard to find these days. But in trying to take a simple crime set-up and stretch it into a more sweeping tale of vengeance and victimhood, The Good Liar has to make some fairly preposterous moves to get there, and it doesn’t do a very good job of cloaking them.

Not all the jokes land but they do fly. Bottoms, a queer comedy with a chaotic beat, is here to break stuff — and that’s a very good thing.

If the framework is less inspired, the story remains grand.

The “Jackass” gang make for a rollicking antidote to the beautiful, unblemished people who play superheroes that never so much as bleed.

Bones and All can be both brutal and beautiful. You have the sense of seeing a movie that in shape and style reminds you of countless others. But, well, cannibalism just has a way of throwing things off balance. The result is something that feels both archetypal and otherworldly.

With an immense sense of scale ranging from mosquito to (Jason) Momoa, Dune renders an age-old tale of palace intrigue and indigenous struggle in exaggerated cosmic contours. Like any drift of sand, Dune feels sculpted by elemental, primal forces.

Pointed as the message of Plan B is, nothing supersedes just letting these two characters — traditionally bit players at best in high-school comedies — be themselves. They’re a pair of the most authentic 17-year-olds lately seen at the movies, something owed very definitely to two stars in the making in Verma and Moroles.

In broad strokes, Westmoreland’s film succeeds as an inspirational period tale so much for today about a woman seizing her independence.

Mutant Mayhem...can’t entirely get over the feeling of trodding over well-covered turtle ground. But if we must go once more into the ooze, the film by director Jeff Rowe (co-director of “The Mitchells vs. the Machines” ) and co-written by co-producers Seth Rogen and Evan Goldberg, is probably the best of a not-so-stellar franchise.

Woman of the Hour will surely send many looking up this stranger-than-fiction story. But Kendrick’s achievement is in capturing, from a woman’s point of view, just how hard it can be to pick a serial killer out of an all-male line-up.

That Crazy Rich Asians is a rom-com where the mothers are its most vital co-stars is one of the movie’s best attributes. Though some of the satirical edges of Kwan’s book have been smoothed down, it remains a love story more about immigrant identity and Chinese heritage than romance.

All the pieces here are fine but nothing is distinct from dozens of films before it. You would swear that the movie’s star AI wrote it — and even gave itself first billing, too.

Tick, Tick... BOOM! is a tender ode to Larson, just as it is a tribute to all Broadway pursuit.

Bird may go down as a rare miss for Arnold but you can still see the keenness of her eye and the nimbleness of her camera, with her regular cinematographer Robbie Ryan. And that’s true never so much as when the camera is on Adams, a talent, whose melancholy eyes say more than all the theatrics around her.

What most vividly comes across in The Fight is the never-ending nature of freedom and democracy.

Fair Play has been hailed for reviving the long-dormant-but-often-missed erotic thriller. While there are bits of that in Domont’s film, Fair Play is neither especially erotic nor much of a thriller. What it is, though, is often gripping battle of the sexes set in a toxic, misogynist corporate world where power and sex are inextricably linked currencies.

In more ways than one, Mann’s movie feels like a much-needed feature-length refuge from today’s anxiety-producing devices. Unlike many of Pixar’s moving metaphors of parenthood, this one is, affectingly, for the kids.

The Biggest Little Farm can at times feel like a larger, better-produced version of the kind of viral video that spreads on Facebook, equal parts uplifting and self-congratulating. It’s a self-contained film about a self-contained paradise.

Spaceship Earth, with a glowing score by Owen Pallett, doesn’t cast judgment on most of its subjects. It’s content to go along for the ride, marveling at all the surrealism. You’d say the story was out of this world if it wasn’t so much of it.

There is no doubt that these sequences are quite easily, in form and execution, a cut above what most any other action film is currently doing.

The Killer is a terse, minimalist thriller in the cool, cold-hearted tradition of Jean Pierre Melville’s “Le Samouraï.” But while its methodical and solitary assassin acts and moves like cunning killers we’ve seen before, he blends into a modern background.

Though there are elaborately choreographed long takes that smack of contemporary moviemaking, “Splitsville” belongs more to a screwball tradition stretching back to the 1930s.

May not be the most heartening portrait of our political system. But it’s a vital one and it provides reasons for optimism, too.

For a movie that was in so many ways about a country mouse (bunny) coming to the big city and finding endless varieties of wildlife, both upright and shady, the “Zootopia” sequel spends too much of its time away from its mammalian metropolis. Even Nick Wilde — no longer scheming, more in touch with his feelings — doesn’t feel quite so wild now. The fun caper spirit of the first movie is alive enough to carry Bush and Howard’s film, but you can’t help feel like sequel-ization also means domestication.

For an actress who’s hustled to get to this point, “One of Them” days is perfect platform for Palmer, scrappy and unstoppable.

Where Haynes excels is in teasing out the personal and professional connections that mingle throughout.

It’s one of the freshest college movies in years, a nano-budget breakthrough of rare sensitivity that announces more than one new talent.

Brittany Runs a Marathon starts comically; its first moments, with Brittany working as an usher at an off-Broadway theater are its funniest. But it grows increasingly earnest. That’s part of the movie’s charm but also what leads it a little off track.

By bringing the migrant crisis into a horror-film realm, His House has forcefully captured the traumas of the refugee experience. The grounded performances and pained faces of Dìrísù and Mosaku offer no easy answers.

That a movie called “The Sheep Detectives” tries to impart lessons of morality and mindfulness is, of course, laudable. A wide swath of entertainment aimed at children makes no such attempt. But “The Sheep Detectives” could have used more slapstick and less CGI sincerity.

Though I’ve been apprehensive about the flamboyant severity of Lanthimos’ movies, I found “Bugonia,” a chamber-piece gut punch, hard to shake.

Thrilling because it puts the future in the hands of the young. “Arco” dares to imagine a fate for them, somewhere over the rainbow.

As unkempt and overwrought as “Die, My Love” is, it’s not a movie that’s timidly weighing in on parenting and gender roles. There’s plenty to admire in Ramsay’s uncompromising and delirious portrait of marital hell, particularly in the bracingly raw performance of Lawrence.

Okuno’s taut feature artfully reconstructs a Hitchcockian thriller around, yes, a blonde heroine in Monroe, but one with her own gaze and distinct anxieties.

They are outcasts, weirdos, laughing stocks and whatever you call Nanaue. That makes The Suicide Squad — as ridiculous as it is to say about a movie that renders a bloody rampage with gushes of animated daisies and birdies — kind of beautiful. Plus, the shark in jams is funny.

Whannell has the talent and cunning to turn The Invisible Man into a chilling and well-crafted B-movie. But if you’re looking for anything more than that, you’ll probably come up empty.

The Batman is darkly dour stuff — potent but erratic. It’s as though the filmmakers, working in the very long shadow of “The Dark Knight,” have opted not to rival the moody majesty of Christopher Nolan’s genre-redefining 2008 film but instead to simply go “harder” — blacker, more cynical, a total eclipse.

Casarosa’s film comes and goes like a soft summer breeze, but that doesn’t stop it from being utterly charming and, by the time of its magnificent final shot, a little devastating, too.

Even as The Menu teeters unevenly in its third act and things get gruesomely less appetizing, its greasy last bites succeed in capturing one common aspect of molecular gastronomy: The Menu will leave you hungry.

If Spider-verse was about how anyone can be Spider-Man, No Way Home is a more authorized Spider-Man compendium; its tone leans more operatic than antic. Still, Watts has a human touch that can be lacking in superhero films, and nearly all of the actors who appear in No Way Home come across as individuals despite the high-concept narrative.

The movie isn’t always quite up to the task. It would be better if it went further and wrestled more with the online world than used it as another bits and bytes background. Really, it doesn’t quite live up to the title. Ralph could have done more damage.

By its nature, “Exit 8” is sparse and repetitive. But in the not-especially-decorated annals of video game adaptations, it’s one of the most compelling and clever meldings of the two mediums — cinema and gaming — we’ve seen yet.

Onward makes the most of its strange assemblage to tell a sweet and moving story — enough so to leave you yet again shaking your head at Pixar’s magic act.

Written and directed by series veteran Dean DeBlois, “The Hidden World” may not overwhelm in its necessity.... There are two compelling parts of “The Hidden World” that validate it.

Blinded by the Light isn’t a new tune, but it’s sung with an infectious passion and it captures something sincere about the globe-spanning, life-changing influence of great pop music.

Blitz feels stuck between a conventional war drama and something more adventurous and probing. It doesn’t coalesce the way McQueen’s best work does, but the frictions that drive Blitz make it a singular and sporadically moving experience.

What absolutely, undoubtedly does work is Moore and Swinton together. If some of the more melodramatic or crime-movie flourishes feel forced, the central relationship of “The Room Next Door” is consistently provocative.

Theater Camp might have worked better with a “Meatballs”-style structure, focusing on a camper and a counselor. But it knows how to put on a show. With songs written by the screenwriters and Mark Sonnenblick, Theater Camp in the end hits just the right note between satire and sincere.

It doesn’t all fit together, and I Care a Lot has ultimately no way of resolving its fairly ludicrous plot. But it’s strong, gripping, unpredictable pulp, and Pike pulls something off that few else could as a protagonist. She’s quite detestable and completely compelling.

The movie is unabashedly romantic about the Vandals but it’s equally dubious about the rugged masculinity they embody, too. “The Bikeriders” has its hands firmly on the throttle just it does the brakes.

I wouldn’t begrudge anyone who just wants to see her and these actors together again. But the movie, well stocked in Prada, could have used a bit more of Streep’s unflappable devil.

Regardless of any incongruities, “Monkey Man” makes for a forceful directorial debut from Patel. More than anything else, he brings a compelling gravity to a film that is quite serious about getting seriously brutal.

The film, earthy and sober, refuses to be carried aloft by sentiment, instead navigating a difficult and painful path toward self-preservation and renewal.

For some Marvel devotees, Ant-Man and The Wasp will be a clever enough diversion in between the more main-event releases. But it’s pretty much exactly what I’d want in a superhero movie: a funny cast, zippy action scenes and not an infinity stone in sight.

Anthony Fabian’s charming adaptation, snuggly tailored to star Lesley Manville, proves the durability of a good fairy tale and a smashing dress.

It’s an admirably fun and light movie about more serious issues of representation and equality.

The Old Guard, while in many ways typical, is wonderfully unconventional in all kinds of less obvious ways.

Yellow Rose sings an affecting, sorrowful and defiant song where dreams collide with a cruel reality.

While Radical, an audience winner at the Sundance Film Festival, is formulaic in its approach, it gets enough out of it likable cast to earn at least a passing grade.

Rocketman is happiest with its feet far off the ground in a dreamy pop splendor, with headlights all along the highway.