Leah Greenblatt

Give Sam Raimi a multiverse, and he will take a mile. The director's take on Doctor Strange feels like many disparate and often deeply confusing things — comedy, camp horror, maternal drama, sustained fireball — but it is also not like any other Marvel movie that came before it. And 23 films into the franchise, that's a wildly refreshing thing, even as the story careens off in more directions than the Kaiju-sized octo-beast who storms into an early scene, bashing its tentacles through small people and tall buildings like an envoy from some nightmare aquarium.

Saints can't be what Sopranos was — without the time or the ones who've been lost to tell it, fuggedaboutit. But for a hundred-something minutes, it feels close enough to coming home again.

What keeps the film from feeling like period-piece amber, all whispered alliances and wiggery, is the keenly feminist sensibility of first-time director Josie Rourke (her background is largely in theater) and the fierce charisma and complicated humanity of its two leads, sovereigns till the end.

In the end, it’s their fundamental goodness — not all the wicked, winky “bad” — that’s easily the best thing about Boys.

If it all sometimes feels trapped in the amber of his intentions, Brooklyn still casts a quiet sort of spell: a meticulously, lovingly made mood piece, full of empathy for the ones who can’t speak — at least not always the way they want to — for themselves.

Here it often feels clumsy and maddeningly inconsistent, stranding Fraser in a melodrama undeserving of his lovely, unshowy performance. Whatever he wins for The Whale — and early prizes have already come — he deserves. The rest is just chum.

Forster (Finding Neverland, World War Z) never quite finds the alchemy in Milne’s timeless tales, or the melancholy sweetness of his being-and-nothingness koans. Instead it’s just an earnest tribute, tastefully faithful to the source — and flatter, somehow, than the story ever was on the page.

It’s British stage actress Erivo who feels like the real star. Her steely charisma and gorgeous powerhouse of a voice (Goddard takes every plausible opportunity to let her loose on a classic 1960s songbook; can you blame him?) is what gives the movie not just a different kind of heroine, but a heart.

It's a gentler, sadder movie than the dizzying trailer suggests, and less driven by plot than a stickler for storytelling like Alithea might prefer: a loopy little jewel-box reverie, slipped between two Furies.

It’s also a haunting, thought-provoking piece of work, made infinitely more powerful by all the things it chooses not to show.

It turns out that Rules Don’t Apply is hardly about Hughes at all. Instead, it’s a small-scale, lovingly filmed study of the blossoming romance between two fictional show-business newbies.

Jones reportedly did nearly all the stunts herself in a real balloon, and she makes the stakes feel fretfully real despite the dreamy, almost painterly quality of George Steel’s cinematography. By the time the story comes back to earth, though, that urgency is largely gone with the wind, and the film returns to what it was: a whimsical, oddly airless curiosity.

A nervy, deeply felt drama that gets a little lost on its winding path to redemption but still finds a way home.

Director David Leitch (Atomic Blonde, Deadpool 2) seems to know how to set up his outrageous set pieces, then get out of the way often enough to let his stars do what they need to do: Joke, chokehold, kiss, and smash until the helicopters come home.

Smallfoot has its own silly, beastie charm.

Gucci might have been a better movie if it had fully committed to the high camp its Blondie-soundtracked trailer promises. It's more serious than that, at least intermittently; a strange melange of too much and not enough. The script also skimps, weirdly, on the actual murder, which is treated mostly as a framing device and felonious afterthought until the final moments. But even a House divided is still more fun than it probably should be: a big messy chef's kiss to money and fashion and above all, movie stars — criming and scheming like they have nothing left to lose, until it's true.

A shiny-bright jukebox musical with a heart of gold and a plot of pure polyester, Mamma Mia! Here We Go Again works hard to be the feel-giddy movie experience of the summer. And it mostly succeeds in its own glittery, aggressively winsome way.

The story belongs to its young cast, and Lords' ramshackle comedy sweetly captures the rank anxiety, random humiliations, and undiluted hope of being young.

Mackenzie falls a little too in love with his battle scenes; by the fourth clash of blood and swords it all starts to feel like déjà vu, with different horses. At nearly two and a half hours, there’s clearly room to trim.... But he also films it beautifully in the natural light of candles, torches, and overcast skies, and there’s a solidness to the old-fashioned conventions of his storytelling.

It’s Nyong’o who makes Monsters worth spending 90 breezy, bloody minutes on; wielding her tiny guitar like she did a fateful pair of scissors earlier this year in Jordan Peele’s "Us," she’s both a warrior queen and a fallible, believable human woman — and never not a movie star in every scene.

Even at the movie's silliest and most unsteady moments, she's (Wasikowska) the ballast: a Judy bruised but unbowed — and finally, fully ready to punch back.

If you want a great monster movie that's actually also about people — how they think and talk and feel when they're more than just screaming kaiju chum in the water — try 2017's Colossal, currently streaming on Hulu. If not, maybe Godzilla vs. Kong's brawling lizard-brain shock and awe is exactly the void you came for.

What feels freshest, maybe, is the mere fact of two leads of color taking on all the tropes of the genre and making it feel as modern as they do.

As a surreal slice of history served up nearly half a century later, it feels oddly satisfying: A reminder not just of simpler times, but of all the other wild untold stories we may never know, just because no camera was there to capture them.

Fee steers Cars 3 like the sleek piece of movie machinery it is—a standard ride with a half-full tank, a gorgeous paint job, and not much at all under the hood.

Ultimately though, it’s all secondary to Saunders and Lumley’s riotous chemistry together.

Even within the stagy confines of the movie's Scenes From a Marriage setup, Horgan and McAvoy manage to tease out the more subtle and enduring bits in their characters' unravelings.

A movie about love and loss that doesn’t dissolve into soft focus when the hard parts start.