Lindsey Bahr

Highest 2 Lowest may not reach the heights of some of Lee’s best films, but it’s the kind of film that makes you hope Lee and Washington have more to make together.

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

It is a fun experiment to be a fly on the wall for this bizarre night — a little dinner theater canapé that’ll make you laugh and think and be grateful (hopefully) that your friends aren’t this kooky. By the end, you’re ready to call it night too.

Working with a script from Drew Pearce (“Hobbs & Shaw”), Leitch packs the film with wall-to-wall action, in both the film’s movie sets and its real world. And with the self-referential humor, the industry jokes and the promise of a little romance, it feels like one of those movies we all complain they don’t make anymore.

While there is a case to be made for the final fight to, let’s just say, go a different way than it does, Creed III is still a knockout.

Piani has constructed a rare gem in “Jane Austen Wrecked My Life,” which manages to be literary without being pretentious.

Air coasts quite well on its compelling, funny and self-aware script (which even allows room for an amusing disagreement about who exactly came up with the name Air Jordan) and charismatic movie stars.

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.

Directed by Joel Crawford, with Januel Mercardo as co-director, Puss in Boots: The Last Wish has enough good jokes (script by Paul Fisher and story by Tommy Swerdlow and Tom Wheeler) to keep anyone amused for an afternoon at the movies.

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.

An intensely personal and truthful, if not entirely fact-based, account of joining the Marines as a gay Black man in the “don’t ask, don’t tell” era. It is the type of film — brave, raw and poetic — that will rightly put Bratton on the map as someone to watch, not to mention the standout performances of Jeremy Pope and Gabrielle Union.

In some ways “The Dig” feels like its own artifact too, like a lost Anthony Minghella film made 30 years ago and buried until now.

A film like this should give life to its characters and reveal essential truths beyond the book-report versions of their existence. But Ammonite keeps you at a distance on a rather vacant, but beautiful, journey.

It’s quite a riveting and though-provoking journey, with compelling and nuanced performances all around, and, although it is quite serious, not without moments of levity.

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

In playing it so safe and so familiar, “Elio” is missing a bit of that Pixar wonder, and mischief.

El Conde might stretch its gimmicky premise a little past its welcome, but it is an intoxicating, overwhelming and gruesome cinematic experience nonetheless, which would make a fitting double feature with last year’s great historical legal thriller “Argentina 1985.”

Midsommar is a waking nightmare and I mean that in the best possible way.

It’s pretty amazing just how compelling this is for being so simple, but it allows the viewer to really get wrapped up in the minutiae of it all: The performance, the landscape, the minor triumphs and major setbacks.

Glum and meandering, the Los Angeles-set mystery about a Hollywood starlet and her assistant starts off promising enough but trudges along aimlessly to a deeply silly and maddening end.

It’s hard to imagine seeing it anywhere but on the big screen. It’s the kind of movie that demands it.

Science and belief clashes aside, The Wonder is a transfixing, transportive film, anchored by the incomparable Pugh.

Alexander is pleasantly devoid of the vulgarity and too-current pop culture references that are the default mode for many contemporary live-action kids' pics, and its earnest celebration of family gives the movie a comforting throwback vibe.

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

Ultimately, “Sundown” is more of a spiritual sister to “Melancholia” with shades of “Somewhere." It is a portrait of a body whose soul has long since departed.

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

The Friend stretches on a bit too long, but it’s done with such care and a kind heart that it’s not hard to give it two hours of your time.

It is fun and wild at times, and Gomez fully commits to the bit of this woman who is being gaslit into insanity. But she and the film crescendo into absurdity, with little in the way of relief or catharsis.