Lindsey Bahr

Gray does a wonderful job painting a portrait of a moment of cultural upheaval through these two boys, their opportunities, their support systems (or lack thereof) and how it was an origin of sorts for the rot that festers today.

It is charming, genuinely funny and a breeze to watch.

Somehow, amid all the lighthearted anarchy, “Hoppers” manages to pull a few emotional strings too. After the heavy-handed “Elio” misfire, “Hoppers” might still feel fairly distant from the heights of peak Pixar; It’s also a big, joyful leap in the right direction.

Tuesday is ultimately a cathartic affair, whether death is top of mind at the moment or not. And it announces the arrival of a daring filmmaker worth following.

Samberg is predictably charming and funny here. But it’s Milioti, who may be best known at this point as “The Mother” from “How I Met Your Mother” or “that girl who was in that one ‘Black Mirror’ episode,” who is the big revelation, finally getting the spotlight which has been a long time coming.

The whole film in fact is something of a knowing contradiction: A small epic with a superhero budget, using technology like the oft-discussed de-aging process not for vulgar show or gimmickry but to add real heart and grandeur to a film that is trying to grapple with the scope of a life.

On the Rocks is perhaps more conventional and modest than Coppola’s other films, but it’s no less entertaining or profound.

It is sickly hilarious to make a movie in which so much consensual sex is had, often so gleefully, that is not the least bit sexy. Though Bella Baxter’s insatiable libido might be her guiding light at first in Poor Things, sexual liberation (or “furious jumping,” as she calls it) is only part of this fantastical, anarchic journey to consciousness.

It’s a perfectly crafted cocktail of vision, talent and script that will leave your mind spinning for days.

Scandalous fun and camp are, you imagine, relatively easy with performers like this. But to give it a soul, too? It makes it monumental.

For all the freedom and exhibitionism and sexual liberation that might be projected on social media, teens are still teens and people are still people and things still happen, casually and in quietly catastrophic grey areas. These are truths that are conveyed powerfully in “How to Have Sex,” a stylish, assured and moving debut from writer-director Molly Manning Walker.

Nitpicks aside, Shazam! is just a lightning bolt of unexpected joy that is certainly worth your time and money.

Amin’s attempts to get to the West with his mother and brother are harrowing enough to give you an ulcer.

“Moonlight” is a hard act to follow, and while Beale Street might not quite reach the heights of Jenkins’ instant classic of a best picture-winner, it is its own kind of marvel, lovely, transcendent, heartbreaking and as smooth as its jazzy soundtrack.

It is an exhilarating, distressing, funny and profound film, with one of the more memorable film scores in years, from composer Terence Blanchard.

This should be a no-brainer for anyone who watched the saga unfold on television, but even those who weren’t glued to the screen in 2018 should seek it out. The Rescue is easily one of the best documentaries of the year.

Navalny is so taut and suspenseful you’d think John le Carré had left behind a secret manuscript that’s only just coming to light now.

Goldin might not have known it when she started photographing her LGBTQ friends, but her work has always been about looking at the so-called fringe cultures in society, about showing the problems that the masses would rather just ignore and making them so urgent that you can’t look away anymore.

Everyone knows this story and how it turns out. But “Cyrano” does a wonderful job of letting you cling to the hope that it might go differently, as agonizing as it might be.

It might not be masterpiece material, but it has a soul and is an undeniably beautiful, worthwhile addition to the canon.

Although the event and aftermath were widely, exhaustively covered, I don’t think I’m the only one who lost the thread early. This not knowing is part of what makes Ryan White’s extraordinary documentary Assassins, about the trial of the two young women, so compulsively compelling.

Honey Boy will break your heart. It hardly matters if you’ve never given a second thought to the circumstances of Shia LaBeouf’s life, his childhood or his rocky early adult years. But this is the kind of universally moving work that can only emerge from something immensely specific and personal.

There is something comforting about the fact that we are capable of intense, collective cultural whiplash. That “who cares?” can turn to uncynical amazement in an instant. Is that the magic of the movies? Of continuing to push the bounds of the big screen experience? Of betting big on weird-sounding stories about giant blue environmentalists instead of superheroes every so often? Maybe it’s just the magic of James Cameron.

It’s a subtle, affecting portrait of relapse, punctured by a wildly cruel embarrassment that is brilliantly staged and executed.

It’s a film that on one level plays like a melodrama, with wild twists and turns fitting of soap opera cliffhangers. But there is something deeper going on too, underneath the beautiful surface and base pleasures of plot and simply watching Penélope Cruz through Almodóvar’s loving lens.

Haigh dares audiences to meet “All of Us Strangers” on its own astral plane as we whiplash between past and present in a dreamy 35mm haze of nightclubs and ‘80s sweaters.

Despair is not quiet for a broken father (Aaron Paul) and his troublemaker sons in Kat Candler’s brisk, transfixing drama, which takes place in blue-collar southeast Texas.

The dance sequences, in training and performance, are magnificent. Fiennes is fascinated by the athleticism of ballet, and the granular details of the flexing muscles in feet and forearms.