Jake Coyle

The joys of First Cow are many. The thoughtful, unshowy textures of its clothes and surroundings. The fabulous chemistry of its two leads. The softly stirring guitar of William Tyler’s score. All of these details add up to a wholly original western, one with its own rhythms, ideas and iconography.

The tone is so farcical that the gruesomeness of some of Man-su’s acts come slyly.

Christopher Nolan’s Oppenheimer is a kinetic thing of dark, imposing beauty that quakes with the disquieting tremors of a forever rupture in the course of human history.

In Paul Thomas Anderson’s gloriously messy, madcap roller coaster ride through modern America, objects in the rear view may go out of sight, but they don’t disappear.

It’s the performances of Haim and Hoffman that most lend “Licorice Pizza” its authenticity. Neither has acted in a film before and their fresh-faced presences electrify the film.

When we talk about “movie magic,” the first thing that comes to mind is often something like the bikes achieving liftoff in “E.T.” But it applies no less to Alice Rohrwacher’s wondrous “La Chimera,” a grubbily transcendent folk tale of a film that finds its enchantment buried in the ground.

For a film about death, Lila Avilés’ “Tótem” is extraordinarily lived in.

Fallen Leaves is the best big-screen romance of the year even though its prospective lovers exchange only a handful of words and, for most of the film, don’t know each other’s names.

The Wenders’ movie that “Perfect Days” most recalls is “Wings of Desire,” where melancholy angels watched over Cold War-era Berlin and spoke of testifying “day by day for eternity.” “Perfect Days” has no such supernatural element, but its gaze is likewise attuned to what’s beautiful and meaningful in everyday living.

I’m sure for Johnson, Dick Johnson Is Dead will one day be a heaven-sent reservoir for remembering her father. But its larger gift is in spurring us all to meet mortality with humor and honesty, and appreciate loved ones while they’re here.

There is a searching, ruminative dialogue running throughout the film. Brown and editors Michael Bloch and Geoffrey Richman beautifully weave together disparate voices into a meditative chorus.

Jia Zhangke’s “Caught by the Tides” is less than two hours long and yet contains nearly a quarter-century of time’s relentless march forward. Few films course with history the way it does in the Chinese master’s latest, an epic collage that spans 21 years.

Hold Your Fire... burrows into the real roots of an oft-replayed movie scenario with insight and care.

The whodunit turns out not only to still have a few moves left but to be downright acrobatic.

By burrowing within the brutal propaganda of apartheid, Hermanus, in his intensely expressive, achingly sorrowful fourth film, has captured a mean machinery at work — one that still abides, long after the end of apartheid.

By exponentially multiplying worlds and Spider-Men, Across the Spider-Verse risks making itself dizzy. Yet it surprisingly, even movingly, stays true to the teenage emotions at its core and the parent-kid relationships driving all these multiverse convulsions.

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.

To say that the many parts of In the Fade are held together by Kruger would be an understatement. As a cocktail of grief, fury and regret, she’s a remarkably original protagonist — a chain-smoking, tattooed mother who, in her trauma, is always a breath away from drowning.

Black Bag follows a run of agilely directed thrillers by Soderbergh made with screenwriter David Koepp. They are both at the height of their almost-too-easy powers; the script, especially, is peppered with delectable dialogue.

There’s a profound, unresolvable melancholy to “About Dry Grasses” that’s hard to shake.

It’s Tassone’s perspective that Finley largely keeps to, which — if you don’t know the true story — lets Bad Education unspool if not surprisingly at least captivatingly.

[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.

The insanely winning Booksmart boasts too many breakthroughs to count. There are the two leads, Kaitlyn Dever and Beanie Feldstein, both of whom we’ve seen before but not like this. There is the director, Olivia Wilde, whose debut behind the camera is remarkably assured. And then there is the teen comedy genre, itself, which Booksmart has blown wide open.

Turn Every Page...is one of the finest films you’ll see about the craft of editing — not that there are so many of those.

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

Pitt, in particular, appears so utterly self-possessed. It’s a swaggering grade-A movie star performance in a movie that celebrates all that movie stars can accomplish — which, for Tarantino, is anything.

The Power of the Dog may in the end be more a twisty psychological thriller than a transcendent frontier epic. But the film’s shape-shifting transformation is also part of its ruthless finesse.

A Hero, in which Farhadi returns to his native Iran after a trip to Spain for 2018′s Everybody Knows, is one of the most labyrinthine moral tales you’re likely to encounter.

It’s a grand culmination of both Miyazaki’s extraordinary body of work and of a film that gathers, like a flock, or a symphony, so many of his trademark obsessions.

Of all the post-apocalyptic landscapes we’ve been treated to over the years, none is as beautiful nor peaceful as that of “Flow.”

It’s Pawlikowski second-straight masterwork, only one with a critical if seldom-seen error. His movie is too short.

Collective is not a walk in the park. But it’s admirably awake to the cause-and-effect tragedies that can follow seemingly slight or obscure governmental decisions.

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

Sometimes Bowie, who refers to his public persona as “an intoxicating parallel to my perceived reality,” seems to be weighing himself like he would a piece of art. With an electric eye, “Moonage Daydream” finds the slipstream of that reality.

A potent and vividly acted drama about the FBI’s subversion and assassination of Chicago Black Panther leader Fred Hampton.

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

“Balance is key,” one character says of nature in the film. “Evil Does Not Exist,” though, is boldly uneven.

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

Adapting Rosa Liksom’s novel of the same name, Kuosmanen has moved the book from the ’80s to the ’90s and lost some of the story’s political backdrop in favor of a more out-of-time love story.

Anime master Mamoru Hosoda makes movies that, even at their most elaborate, can reach such staggeringly emotional heights that they seem to break free of anything you’re prepared for in an animated movie — or in most kinds of movies, for that matter.

If Soto’s film is loose and gritty, its satire is remarkably precise. This is a farce of creative life where the only pure artistic intention is a joke.

Apollo 11 might not tell you anything you don’t already know about the moon landing. But it will make you feel it, and see it, anew.

There is a wonderful feeling in “Between the Temples” that anything can happen at any moment.

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

Much of The Favourite is caustically clever but it’s Colman who elevates it to something magnificent.

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.

In this remarkably fully formed debut, the moments that matter are the funny and tender ones that persist amid crueler experiences.

With a terrific ensemble, You Hurt My Feelings digs into the half-truths that keep self-doubt at bay in all of these characters.

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.

In very ’80s environs, Baumbach’s film always remains — purposefully, I think — a self-conscious work of literature adaptation, juggling big themes and highly literate dialogue with a screwball touch. It makes for a heady concoction too constantly interesting to ever be boring.

One of the more sheerly delightful movies of the year.

This West Side Story succeeds most as a revival not just of Robbins’ musical but of the best of classical, studio-made, big-screen cinema.

Unlike many of its more hollow predecessors, Black Panther has real, honest-to-goodness stakes. As the most earnest and big-budget attempt yet of a black superhero film, Black Panther is assured of being an overdue cinematic landmark. But it's also simply ravishing, grand-scale filmmaking.

Eighth Grade is a revelation of both a remarkably natural young performer and a clever, sensitive young filmmaker.

Soul turns out to be not an exploration of the afterlife but a wondrous whirligig of daily life.

Kranz’s film isn’t perfect. As the conversation ebbs and the four parents stagger out of the room and awkwardly part, the movie, too, struggles with how to walk away. But in this plainly photographed, mournful, restrained movie, the back-and-forth is bracingly sincere.

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.

It’s a preposterous and tasteless ode to the messy, nonsensical struggle and bliss of being human.

Rankin’s film, his second following the also surreal “Twentieth Century” (2019), is propelled less by narrative thrust than the abiding oddity of its basic construction, and the movie’s slavish devotion to seeing it through without a wink.

Can You Ever Forgive Me? sings best — or rather, grumbles spectacularly — when McCarthy and Grant are together. They are kindred misfits and malcontents happy for each other’s company.

Like Haemi’s melancholy dance in the half-light, Lee has beautifully, wrenchingly summoned an unshakeable sense of disquiet.

It’s all so handsomely shot and deliberately staged that you might at times worry that The Last Black Man in San Francisco is leaning more toward picturesque than profound. But when Talbot’s film rises to its rousing and sensitive climax, the fairy tale falls away and something authentically soulful emerges.

Part of the fun of Amazing Grace is watching not just those in the thrall of Franklin (Mick Jagger can be seen bopping in the back of the church) but witnessing the awe Franklin evokes.

There’s a wistful, warm feeling when wandering into a Hansen-Løve film. Hers are delicate dramas keenly tuned to the rhythm of daily life, and “One Fine Morning” is her most radiant film yet.

A prize-winner at last fall’s Venice Film Festival, “April” could be accused of leaning too much into an austere, art-film obliqueness. But Kulumbegashvili’s absolute control over the camera and the intensity of her calling make her film a grimly spellbinding and unforgettable experience.

Bairead’s sensitive and heartfelt film, which is debuting in many theaters Friday, is a stirring testament to what’s possible on a modest scale with a few well-chosen words.

The movie’s gathering momentum, even as it grows more claustrophobic, is owed to a few things. It comes from Ben-Adir’s artfully calibrated performance as Malcolm — here more consumed with doubt, worry and self-awareness than the usual firebrand portrayal. It comes from Odom’s deft sense of Cooke. And it comes from King’s remarkable elegance as a director.

Beyond any direct lines of connection between past and present, “Two Prosecutors” has the neatness and timelessness of a parable, one that Gogol might have written, and one that could resonate in any era where the naively courageous challenge fascism.

To a remarkable degree, “Robot Dreams” has fully imbibed all the melancholy and joy of Earth, Wind & Fire’s disco classic. Just as the song asks “Do you remember?” so too does “Robot Dreams,” a sweetly wistful little movie that, like a good pop song, expresses something profound without wasting a word.

It’s the movie’s own power trio of Barrino, Brooks and Henson that makes “The Color Purple” one of the most moving big-screen musicals in recent years. Each in their own way transforms suffering into exhilarating portraits of survival and strength.

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

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.

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.

Ly’s film excels in its lively verisimilitude, its terrific cast and its intensity. Les Miserables is a powder keg, always at risk of detonating.

Pugh never looks quite at ease in the ring in Fighting With My Family, but her performance is so layered with ambition and self-doubt that the film exceeds its familiar framework.

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.

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.

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.

Thankfully, someone has come to the not-hard-to-deduce realization that Clooney and Pitt are good together.

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.

Polinger’s film isn’t a comfortable watch and it’s not meant to be. It gets under the skin.

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.

Gladiator II isn’t quite the prestige film the first one, a best-picture winner, was in 2001. It’s more a swaggering, sword-and-sandal epic that prizes the need to entertain above all else.

Shyamalan doesn’t pump up the violence, nor does he rely on plot twists to carry Knock at the Cabin along. Instead, the film works as a brutal, neatly distilled kind of morality play that toys with fatalism, family and climate change allegory.

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.

Aside from verging on the one-note, that focus constricts the very linear, very self-contained Ad Astra, a taut but inflexible chamber piece in a genre given to symphony.

All the assembled parts here, including an especially high-quality cast (even Wendell Pierce!) work together seamlessly in a way that Marvel hasn’t in some time. Most of all, Pugh commands every bit of the movie.

It’s a little shaggy and you’ll occasionally yearn for a bit more humor along the way. But “Caught Stealing,” based on Charlie Huston’s 2004 novel, is a ride, foremost, in ‘90s nostalgia.

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

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.

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.

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

Velvet Buzzsaw doesn’t lead anywhere inward; it becomes just a litany of (exquisite) death scenes for art-world caricatures. Still, what caricatures they are.

Through twists and turns, The Painter and the Thief depicts not just the two-way transactional relationship between artist and subject, but the shared pain and mutual rehabilitation that can inspire and surround art making.

Watching The Trip to Greece at a time when such travel is impossible has only heightened the considerable pleasures of these movies (and made the food all the more appetizing). But mostly it’s reinforced the simple delight of sitting table-side with Coogan and Brydon. For all their trivial sparring, they are exceedingly good company.

Though Liman knows how to mix action and comedy as well as anyone, “The Instigators” is better whenever there’s less going on.

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.

The Vast of Night is, in a slinky way, about escaping small-town small-mindedness.

The chapters don’t cohere in a sustained rhythm, but in richly evocative imagery, The Green Knight makes its own vivid film language and pacing.

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.

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.

It’s based on Adam Mars-Jones’ “Box Hill,” but Lighton’s film largely avoids the darker, abusive turns of the novel. Lighton is more keen to enjoy the unfolding dynamics of a relationship in the extreme, one that ultimately, like any other, is guided by needs and wants.

As a movie, Priscilla is the diametric opposite of Baz Luhrmann’s “Elvis.” Where Luhrmann’s film was lurid and careening, Coppola’s is muted and textured. Her film is a kind of fairy tale that turns claustrophobic and cautionary.

It’s less Haigh’s mournful view of American society — one that, for sure, rarely finds American movie screens — that makes the heartfelt Lean on Pete stay with you. It’s Plummer’s wounded, achingly alone Charley, humbly striving across a darkening land, holding on desperately.

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.

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.

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.

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.

Nyad is balanced between Diana’s admirably insane ambition and Bonnie’s loyal (up to a point) support for her friend. In any case, it’s a reminder, like a pail of cold water, of just how good Foster can be.

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

A story about the victims of Sept. 11 maybe ought not to focus on a lawyer dispensing the cash. But Keaton — a truly great actor in his responsiveness to those around him — makes a compelling, initially tone-deaf listener to the stories that filter through Worth.

The jokes aren’t often Sandler’s best material but Hubie Halloween is as sweet and easily digestible as a Milky Way.

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.

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.

It’s a movie well engineered as a late-summer diversion — a big cat movie for the dog days of August — that Icelandic director Baltasar Kormákur (“Adrift,” “Everest”) insures stays well within the paths of man-against-nature films before it.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

Call Jane distinguishes itself as a stirring portrait of the birth of an unlikely abortion-rights activist.

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.

Babygirl, which Reijn also wrote, is sometimes a bit much. (In one scene, Samuel feeds Romy saucers of milk while George Michael’s “Father Figure” blares.) But its two lead actors are never anything but completely magnetic.

Aster, who also wrote the film, fills his movie with foreshadowing clues that give the gruesome events to come a cruel note of inevitability. There’s a curse on this family, whether by ghost or DNA.

It’s an affecting window into what remains very possibly the most benevolent broadcast ever regularly beamed out on the small screen.

Wakanda Forever is overlong, a little unwieldy and somewhat mystifyingly steers toward a climax on a barge in the middle of the Atlantic. But Coogler’s fluid command of mixing intimacy with spectacle remains gripping.

To a remarkable degree, Happening is viscerally connected with its protagonist, closely detailing not just her navigation of social taboos and restrictions but capturing her unapologetic determination. It’s a movie about abortion, yes, but it’s also a coming-of-age tale about a woman’s resolve.

I’m Thinking of Ending Things nearly sustains something beautiful and sad that blends consciousness and time.

The most memorable images in Still are those of a present-day Fox in frame, speaking straight into the camera. The effects of Parkinson’s are visible but so is the jaunty, self-deprecating actor we’ve always known.

Marcel the Shell With Shoes On could be considered a kids movie or an art-house indie (A24 is releasing). But its proper audience might be anyone who’s ever felt sanded down by life, and could use a roll in Marcel’s rover.

Here is a sweeping historical tapestry — no one does it better today than Scott — with a damning, almost satirical portrait at its center. That mix — Scott’s spectacle and Phoenix’s the-emperor-has-no-clothes performance — makes Napoleon a rivetingly off-kilter experience.

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

A slinky, slick caper that finds ways to distort expectations while unfolding a puzzle-box narrative.

Like its predecessor, “Dune: Part Two” thrums with an intoxicating big-screen expressionism of monoliths and mosquitos, fevered visions and messianic fervor — more dystopian dream, or nightmare, than a straightforward narrative.

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.

The documentary, directed by Bonni Cohen and Jon Shenk, is vigilant in widening is lens to capture the broader problems at USA Gymnastics.

But for all its fast-paced zaniness, The Mitchells vs. the Machines, scripted by Rianda and his writing partner Jeff Rowe (also co-director), is basically a good old-fashioned family road trip movie, and the Mitchells slide in somewhere between the Griswolds and a more accident-prone Incredibles.

As played by Johansson, excellent here, every action for Natasha is tinged with acceptance and revulsion for her own nature. Black Widow becomes, kind of stirringly, a movie not about franchise extension but sisterhood, improvised families and traumatic pasts.

It takes a little while to get going...The “Borat” sequel will make you laugh and squirm as much as it will send shudders down your spine.

What distinguishes The Nun is its silky, sumptuous shadows. Directed by British filmmaker Corin Hardy (“The Hallows”) and shot by Maxime Alexander (who was also cinematographer on the “Conjuring” spinoff “Annabelle: Creation,” The Nun shrouds itself so much in darkness that it at times verges on becoming a nightmarish abstraction. You almost lose sense of what exactly is going on, as Sister Irene falls into a labyrinthine abyss.

While Green’s Halloween, which he penned with Danny McBride and Jeff Fradley, has faithfully adopted much of what so resonated in Carpenter’s genre-creating film — the stoic killer, the gruesome executions, the suburban nightmares — what makes his Halloween such a thrill is how it deviates from its long-ago predecessor.

The Death of Stalin may be both Iannucci’s darkest and most timely satire yet. More than anything he’s done before, Iannucci has narrowed the distance between slapstick and savagery, prompting us to contemplate — even as we’re cackling — their uncomfortable proximity.

Vol. 3 is a messy, overstuffed finale. But you rarely question whether Gunn’s heart is in it. Sometimes it spoils some of that effect by trying too hard to juxtapose tonal extremes, and show off its brash juggling act. Yet whatever this sweet, surreal sci-fi shamble is that Gunn has created, everyone here seems to believe ardently in it.

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.

In Us, Peele has produced a terrifying artifact: a sinister ballet of doppelgangers and inversions that makes flesh the unseen underbelly lurking beneath every sunny American dream and behind every contented nuclear family. It’s a scissor-sharp rebuke to anyone who’s ever held hands and sang “Kumbaya.”

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.

By breaking down some of the old mythology, Johnson has staked out new territory. For the first time in a long time, a “Star Wars” film feels forward-moving.

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.

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

In this forensic portrait of war, the only way to not get what’s happening on the ground is to be too far from it. François Truffaut famously said there’s no such thing as an anti-war film because movies inherently glamorize war. “Warfare,” though, is intent on challenging that old adage.

Dosa uses July’s narration to frame the Kraffts’ story with a playful sense of wonder and whimsy — a sometimes overly intrusive, too neatly packaged device in a film where what’s on screen is so overwhelmingly powerful that it might not need the extra layer.

Gunda ultimately falls somewhere between banal and profound. Maybe it’s both.

Steven Spielberg’s Ready Player One, a rollicking virtual-world geekfest flooded by ’80s ephemera, doesn’t just want to wade back into the past. It wants to race into it at full throttle. For those who get their fix through pop nostalgia, “Ready Player One” is — for better or worse — an indulgent, dizzying overdose.

On the whole, the Ross brothers’ observational, immersive filmmaking gets close to something bracingly real.

Tenet lacks the elegant mastery of “Dunkirk” or the cosmic soulfulness of “Interstellar,” but it has a darkly grand geometry.

When “F1” does, finally, quiet down, for one blissful moment, the movie, almost literally, soars. It’s not quite enough to forget all the high-octane macho dramatics before it, but it’s enough to glimpse another road “F1” might have taken.

The ambitions of Wonder Woman 1984 may be just outside its grasp, but it seldom feels predestined or predictable — a preciously rare commodity in the genre.

To call this a field of dreams would be pushing it. But it’s a lovely way to pass some time.

Not everything works in “Superman.” For those who like their Superman classically drawn, Gunn’s film will probably seem too irreverent and messy. But for anyone who found Zack Snyder’s previous administration painfully ponderous, this “Superman,” at least, has a pulse.

The film, as you would expect, walks us again through the tremendous upheavals in Turner’s life. But it’s ultimately about Turner telling her story — why she struggles having to tell it; why she needs to tell it, anyway; and why she wants to be done with it.

It plays a little loose with facts but the righteous rage of “Dog Day Afternoon” is present enough in Gus Van Sant’s “Dead Man’s Wire,” a based-on-a-true-tale hostage thriller that’s as deeply 1970s as it is contemporary.

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.

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.

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.

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 actors are uniformly good. And by fusing two types of films that have long been bedfellows — slashers and pornography — “X” makes for a gripping shotgun marriage of genres.

The film is shot by Florian Hoffmeister with a cool, almost documentary-like perspective. It’s in these chilly, highbrow environs that Lydia operates with exquisite intellect and ruthless cunning — and Blanchett gives a colossal tour-de-force performance that may be the finest of her career, a career as decorated as Lydia’s.

This “Saturday Night” may have a legacy of its own; a lot of this cast, I suspect, will be around for a long time. And, ultimately, when the show finally comes together, it’s galvanizing.

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.

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.

It’s Jones who dominates the film

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.

There’s a mean potency to the borderland noir of both Sicario films, enough that it sometimes recalls another tale of explosions and drug enforcement agents on both sides of the border: Orson Welles’ “Touch of Evil.” Day of the Soldado is too sober and grim for the sweaty heat of “Touch of Evil.” But it has taken to heart one of its best lines: “All border towns bring out the worst in a country.”

While the movie isn’t quite as clever as it thinks it is, the Zellners have a sweet, likable sense of humor tinged with tragedy. And they remain filmmakers to watch.

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.

Yet the slapdash vibe of “Day Shift” has its charms. It’s built almost perfectly to be the kind of thing you might, after some scrolling, absentmindedly click to watch on Netflix and end of watching for its sheer watchability.

As the movie grows more abstract, it loses momentum. But an impassioned melodrama and a curiously sincere belief in the transformative power of pop music wrap “Mother Mary” in a gothic garb all its own.

McKay, director of The Lego Movie, is most at home in humor, and The Tomorrow War can be funny. It’s less adept at some of the operatic notes it tries to strike, but, well, aliens can be tricky.

Fuqua’s film is often harrowing and gripping but also less nuanced and too narrowly confined in genre conventions than its real-life protagonist deserves.

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

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.

Despite its grainy, VHS aesthetics, “The Smashing Machine” is a surprisingly conventional and oddly untroubled movie, albeit one that gives Johnson an indie-film platform for one of his finest performances.

Renfield never lets Cage really sink his teeth into the movie, leaving us still hungry for more.

Like its subject, “Man on the Run” inevitably pales next to films of the Beatles heyday. But it’s a meaningful companion piece about the end of an era and the start of a long and winding road.

As in most sci-fi movies, the set up of “Good Luck, Have Fun, Don’t Die” is better than its follow through. But the movie has a kinetic kick, and you could argue that it’s obsessed with the right things. We could use more movies similarly engaged.

Blue Beetle, light, lively and sincere, is a tribute to the tenacity and indomitability of Mexican-American families that have clawed their way into an often inhospitable society. Family members, usually plot points of some animating trauma in superhero movies, are here a central part of the action.

Triple Frontier has the good sense to take a macho, Expendables-like set-up and turn it inward. It just doesn’t go far enough.

If you accept the low-bar aspirations of “Frozen Empire,” you may get a pleasant-enough experience out of it. It’s a movie that feels almost more like a high production-value TV pilot for an appealing sitcom, with Rudd as the stepfather, than it does a big-screen event on par with the original.

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.

Ambiguous and damning at once, John Curran’s Chappaquiddick plunges us back into the summer of 1969: the season of Woodstock, the moon landing, the Manson murders and the lowest ebb of the Kennedy mythology.

This is an eminently pleasant movie, propped up by its indefatigable good cheer and King’s immaculately tidy craftsmanship.

Like any good high-concept comedy, Kinda Pregnant is predominantly a far-fetched way for its star and co-writer, Schumer, to riff frankly on her chosen topic.

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.

It could be that, if we’re talking about representing hard-to-tame adolescent urges in monster form, “Turning Red” — bold as it may be — can’t come close to matching the messy comic farce of “Big Mouth,” the far less family-friendly but much more true-to-life animated series that paired seventh graders with lascivious “hormone monsters.”

If some of King’s Wes Anderson-inspired pop-up book designs and skill with fine character actors is missing, the bedrock earnestness and unflaggingly good manners of its ursine protagonist remain charmingly unaltered.

The combination works well enough, though it’d be fairer to deem “You’re Cordially Invited” a funnier-than-average wedding movie than it would be a top-grade Ferrell comedy.

Ambulance pines for a visceral, breezily violent style of film that doesn’t slow down to ask too many questions. And while Bay’s film wouldn’t stand up to too much inquiry — this is a movie where a ruptured spleen is treated with a hairpin — it’s hard to deny its escapist panache.

While No Hard Feelings finally gives Lawrence (also an executive producer) a platform for some of the slapstick humor she’s so good at, it also feels like she’s been inserted into the framework of a quite male coming-of-age rom-com/fantasy.

What’s most disappointing about the film, considering its origins, is just how distant anything like real life feels. From the first moment Jamie slides on a pair of ruby red stiletto pumps, there’s not any doubt things are going to work out for him.

Kiri is exceptional in carrying a film in which she’s the only talking, present actor. But that a movie so threadbare manages to feel like too much is both the film’s accomplishment and its failure.

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

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.

Drop, a silly but suspenseful new thriller, carries on the tradition of “When a Stranger Calls” and “Phone Booth” by situating its tension around mysterious, threatening phone messages.

With some notable exceptions, this is a traditional treatment of an extraordinary life, complete with deathbed scenes that bookend the film and frequent lines, in Jack Thorne’s screenplay, in which Curie single-mindedly speaks of scientific progress less like a person than a grade-school teaching tool.

Much of F9 is kind of a slog. There are some not very dynamic car chases, a lot of flashbacks, ho-hum villains and an oddly prominent role for magnets. But when Taj and Roman reach zero gravity, the movie finally takes flight with goofy grandeur.

Opening on the heels of raging wildfires, Elemental manages to be a movie about fire and water without even a passing reference to today’s climate realities. Missed opportunities abound.

The pleasures of Uncorked are in how it gently eludes stereotype and brings a rich sense of texture to even its smaller moments.

What makes Annabelle Comes Home rise above its well-trod narrative are the actresses and Dauberman’s sensitive attention to each of them.

Like its characters, it’s drunk on what came before, relying too heavily on noir tropes. But its smart, thought-provoking concept isn’t so easy to shake off.

Taking each storyline at a time, all accompanied by flashbacks, gives each character some depth, even as the crowded film — at nearly three-hours long — verges on turning into a clown car. That sheer much-ness is in the spirit of King’s massive book. “Chapter Two” is, for better or worse, a horror carnival.

It’s a charming concoction of cliches cribbed from other movies, from Tron to Truman, without its own coding.

21 Bridges is well crafted enough to pass the time, but anything more than that is a bridge too far.

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.

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

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.

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

You end up questioning less why Smith and Lawrence are still making “Bad Boys” movies than wondering why such breezily watchable genre movie-star platforms more or less don’t exist any longer.

It’s no train wreck. Leitch’s film is colorful, cartoonish and well-choreographed. But the more-is-more manic energy of “Bullet Train” eventually peters out, since that’s all the movie was ever running on. Well, that and Pitt. His charm alone does wonders for the movie, raising it at least to the level of watchable.

Whether The Ballad of Songbirds and Snakes is enough to relight those embers remains to be seen, but it is a reminder how good a platform they offered young actors. It’s a ritual worth returning to.

Don’t Worry Darling is ultimately neither worthy of all the off-screen fuss nor quite the on-screen disappointment it’s been made out to be.

A clever concept, not a profound film. Terrifically acted and finely crafted though it is, it’s a brilliant but hollow exercise in perspective that calls more attention to its artful orchestration than it does life or loss.

Once the film — based on the nonfiction book by Damien Lewis — settles into a seedy, sunny West African setting and the nighttime heist finale, “The Ministry of Ungentlemanly Warfare” proves a spirited, if grossly exaggerated diversion.

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

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

It’s counting on your amnesia to the past, on screen and off, and it will readily supply you with two hours of mindless escape. It does the job better than most, thanks largely to its hulking hero.

Its plot turns can be rash or implausible, and the movie increasingly feels like ideas and set pieces strung tenuously together.

The Crimes of Grindelwald is often dazzling, occasionally wondrous and always atmospheric. But is also a bit of a mess. Even magic bags can be overweight.

None of this is likely to be enough for anyone to exclaim “Oh, yeah!” while hopping up and down and doffing their cap. But it is an hour and a half’s worth of superlative marketing that will whet your appetite for more Mario back home on the couch.

Many of its twists aren’t hard to see coming, and the movie sometimes lacks the scale needed for a sprawling battle. But a mustachioed Odenkirk with a shotgun is, by most metrics, more than enough firepower for any movie.

Ibiza, scripted by Lauryn Kahn and directed by Alex Richanbach (both Funny Or Die veterans and disciples of Ibiza producer Adam McKay and Will Ferrell) has a loose, natural rhythm that easily surpasses its cliche framework.

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

For those whose trips to Pandora have made less of an impact, “Fire and Ash” is a bit like returning to a half-remembered vacation spot, only one where the local ponytail style is a little strange and everyone seems to have the waist of a supermodel.

The real story of Ivan is more interesting even if it’s probably too dispiriting and shameful for a Disney movie. At the same time there’s some awkwardness in relating such an animal-rights tale with fart jokes and a celebrity voice ensemble.

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.

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.

Motherless Brooklyn is done well enough that you wish it had struck out on its own path, rather than crib from Robert Towne and Roman Polanski. It’s hard to forget it, but that’s “Chinatown.”

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.

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.

Godzilla vs. Kong, the only creature feature to dare wide release in some time, is a rock ‘em-sock ’em monster-movie revival with all the requisite explosions, inane plot twists and skyscraper smashing to satisfy most lovers of gigantic amphibians. Vive le cinéma!