Jake Coyle

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.

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

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.

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

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 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.

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.

Someone Great has not exactly rewritten the rom-com rule book. Where it distinguishes itself is in the fresh faces of it cast (the rom-com is not known as the most diverse of genres) and in focusing on the hard realities of breakup rather than the fairytale of falling in love.

The pacing is sluggish when it should be quickening, and nothing in how Little turns out will surprise anyone. Yet the trio of Hall, Rae and Martin makes Little a consistently pleasant experience.

It’s not plot deviations from King’s novel that hamper Pet Sematary. It’s that, from early on, Kölsch and Widmyer, rely less on the detailed accumulation of atmosphere that King built his tale on, than jump cuts and music cues to build suspense. It puts Pet Sematary on a more familiar genre track.

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.

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.

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.”

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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

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

To both the movie’s benefit and detriment, the seas here are choppier than in the predictably (and sometimes boringly) smooth sailing of a Marvel movie. But the bright spots (Momoa, that octopus) can be difficult to really relish amid the oceans of exposition and a typically pulverizing, overelaborate screenplay.

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

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.

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.

The greatest tension in Larsson’s “Millennium” series is how Salander so bristles with unease in the world, even while she expertly manipulates everything in it. No such conflict is found in The Girl in the Spider’s Web, a commonplace thriller for an uncommon heroine.