Leah Greenblatt

It’s an artful, quietly affecting piece of filmmaking, more than worth the lessons learned.

Love, faith, Springsteen; that and a Sony Walkman are all it takes to surrender to the pure, ingenuous joy of Blinded by the Light, a Technicolor ode to the power of music so deeply tender and heartfelt that it disarms even the most misanthropic critic’s instincts.

At its core, the movie is too in love with love — or at least its messy, time-jumping ideal of it — for that kind of true discomfort comedy. That makes it less brave, maybe, but in this moment we're living in, who could begrudge a happy ending?

The screenplay, by Matt Lopez, leans bright and broad, but there are sweetly specific moments scattered throughout, from a whisper-fight over dominoes at the local social club to the frequent snatches of Spanish woven into the dialogue.

As the story unfolds over nearly a decade, Biggest becomes something even more impactful: a thoughtful and often profoundly moving portrait of the remarkable work involved in producing mindful food — and an eloquent reminder that so much of what we take for granted on our plates is, in its own everyday way, a miracle.

A neat, nasty little thriller with a brutally effective final third.

It's the combined incandescence of the stars at the center of the screen, not the ones meant to be gazed at through telescopes, that carries the movie; its best and truest source of light.

Colman, her eyes darting between hope and devastation, is so lit-up and specific (and funny, a quality that doesn't seem to get mentioned enough) that she lifts nearly every scene.

The result is undoubtedly a canny mediation on the vagaries of fame, but it feels more intimate and essential than that: a lifetime of searching and self-regard distilled, somehow, into a state of grace.

Egerton’s whole-body commitment captures not just Elton’s outrageous physicality — in costume designer Julian Day’s hands, he’s essentially a one-man Mardi Gras — but his enduring sadness and insecurity (and the self-sabotaging behavior it was too often funneled through) without tipping into showbiz-tragedy cliché. He’s the starry-eyed cosmonaut the part demands, but merely, endearingly mortal too.

There are more cohesive coming-of-age movies to be sure, and subtler ones. But God doesn't really try too hard to make it all make sense; it's just one boy's dolce vita, drenched in Mediterranean sun, hormones, and salt air.

Bombshell belongs to its three main female stars. It’s their fierce, finely shaded performances that transcend the film’s drab visual style and drier episodic moments — not just by speaking truth to power, but by confronting the audience’s own ideas of who the right to do that belongs to.

Whether its stronger rating and more somber tone will translate to a home-bound family audience, only time and streaming revenues will tell; in the meantime, Mulan might be the closest thing to a true old-fashioned theater-going experience the end of this strange summer will see.

What it does have in happy excess is Souza’s affable presence, and his remarkable trove of images.

With a cast so large and so consistently good, it's nearly impossible to single out more than a few players, though it's maybe most gratifying to see Holland so far from Peter Parker mode; his performance is delicately underplayed, which is not a claim Pattinson can probably make with a straight face.

For all the patently corny bits and some 17 attempts at an ending, Power still somehow makes it easy to suspend your disbelief and your imaginary degree in biochemistry, and just let it ride.

John Cena is top billed, and though his brick-jawed military man doesn’t actually get many scenes, he does get a disproportionate share of the script’s best lines. He gives good muscle, but Bumblebee brings something even more important — and actually transforming — to the series: a sense of humor, and a heart.

Murphy...brings so much hope and hunger and pure life force to the role that he makes you believe in every punchline, pelvic thrust, and egregiously misplaced karate kick.

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

Durkin captures it all with a sort of menacing restraint, building a deeply disquieting mood from long, almost voyeuristic shots and loaded gazes.

The whole thing is feverishly earnest and more than a little manipulative, but it’s also possibly the prettiest two hours of emotional ­masochism so far this year.

Does the movie’s pop-feminist message need to be as consistently, cartoonishly violent as it is? Almost definitely not. But in a world gone mad, the catharsis of Prey’s twisted sisterhood doesn’t just read as pandemonium for its own sake; it’s actually pretty damn sweet.

Welsh actor Pryce (Game of Thrones) is fantastic — a fussy, adulterous egoist in the Great Man mold of Norman Mailer or Philip Roth, with his own touchingly real frailties. But the movie belongs to Close, whose face, as she is courted and patronized, sexually betrayed and damned with faint praise, is a marvel of emotional intelligence and control.

Wang’s story outline shares the familiar contours of other immigrant tales: the Babel tower of half-spoken languages; the ties that bind across oceans, and the physical and cultural gaps that can still break them. But Farewell also has the freshness of her own distinct voice, a dry humor and low-key melancholy that infuses even the most quotidian scenes.

Pay no attention to the shades of late-night cable in the title; Speak No Evil is a lamentably generic name for a movie as stark and unsettling as Christian Tafdrup's queasy, inexorable thriller.

An ill-judged twist pitches the story sideways, but Crudup's performance holds the center. His pain isn't soggy or showy; it just feels true.

Honk for Jesus shares a lot of Tammy Faye's small-screen feel and sense for winky episodic comedy; like that movie too, it's held together by the tensile strength of the petite, bedazzled female at its center. Awards-season gold probably won't strike twice in a row for pastor's wives, but Hall deserves some kind of prize for the soul she pours into this part.

As Wick carves a path of stoic destruction across several continents, the series' longtime director Chad Stahelski, once Reeves' Matrix stand-in and longtime stunt coordinator, gets down to the business of what he loves best: creative kills, far-flung zip codes, and incalculable body counts.