Jake Coyle

The film, directed by Jeremiah Zagar, isn’t the farce you might expect. Rather, it’s one of the most textured and affectionate films about basketball that’s come along in a long time. Starring Sandler as a road-weary NBA scout and with several teams’ worth of all-stars in cameos, Hustle has a surprisingly good handle and feel for the game.

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

The antic chemistry between Mann, Cena and Barinholtz is stellar. Together, they capture the panic, embarrassment and sentimentality of young-adult parenthood as they scramble after their kids, none of whom need saving.

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

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.

Time is the fundamental metric of prison life, which makes a documentary like “Daughters,” filmed over years, uniquely, maybe even monstrously capable of capturing its passing.

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.

Rarely has a film conjured such a thick atmosphere of dread and wonder as “Annihilation,” a movie that unfolds, grippingly, as an existential mystery.

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

It’s the kind of comic, eminently British underdog story that Frears excels at. And with Sally Hawkins playing Langley as a woman undeterred by pompous academics and condescending naysayers, The Lost King makes for a charmingly droll tale of long-ago and not-so-long-ago reappraisal.

As The Mule ambles toward its conclusion, it draws closer to Stone, and maybe to Eastwood’s legacy, too.

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

The movie, written by Matt Damon, Ben Affleck and Nicole Holofcener, is not the tale of manly valor that it first appears. The Last Duel is more like a medieval tale deconstructed, piece by piece, until its heavily armored male characters and the genre’s mythologized nobility are unmasked.

Mountainhead adheres to the tradition of the HBO movie; it’s lean, topical and a fine platform for its actors.

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.

Though it may be a chaotic shamble, Chazelle’s film makes this one point brilliantly clear: Cinema will be tamed for only so long; the parade will go on.

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.

What it certainly is, though, is a very solid comic book movie. It’s a little surface over substance, and the time capsule feeling is pervasive. This is an earnest-enough superhero movie where even the angry mob protesting the superheroes turns quiet and pensive.

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

Burton’s Dumbo, while inevitably lacking much of the magic of the original, has charms and melancholies of its own, starting, naturally, with the elephant in the room. Of all the CGI make-overs, this Dumbo is the most textured, sweetest and most soulful of creatures.

While Destroyer can be overwrought and mechanical, it’s an often gripping, well-crafted crime drama with distinction of its own in the genre, an almost always male-dominated one.

Unsane, a pulpy psychological thriller, is an exercise in both genre and technology. It’s a B-movie iMovie. And it’s 98 minutes of proof that the laborious apparatus of filmmaking can be not only light on its feet, but fit snuggly inside your pocket.

Good Boys mines that gulf between childhood and adolescence like few films have before.

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.

For a long, sun-addled stretch, Lorcan Finnegan’s beach-set “The Surfer” simmers as a deliciously punishing nightmare, driving Nicolas Cage into his most natural state: a boil.

You Won’t Be Alone enchants in its novel perspective and in its sharp-shifting protagonist’s unquenchable curiosity. The witch, once so set in stereotype, has never felt so enthrallingly elastic.

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.