Yet for all the bleakness, Better Man is one of the most visually inventive and uplifting films in recent years.

A dense, challenging piece, Soundtrack to a Coup d’Etat is more associative than explicative.

In his debut feature as a director, The Valhalla Murders creator Thordur Palsson lets the icy-blue pitilessness of the inhospitable Westfjords permeate every frame and every moment.

Chalamet embodies Dylan in a quite literal sense; he’s clearly studied the tape and does a more than passable mimicry of Dylan’s voice and performing style. Problem is, it’s an intentionally opaque characterization, in a film overcrammed with musical performances – onstage, in the studio, on the bed noodling on a new song – which basically means half the movie is like watching pretty good karaoke.

There’s an important message in here, especially when it comes to the financial inequality between men and women in sports. But rather than using the 17-year-old Shields’ pugnacious attitude to really explore how she landed body blows on the sexist establishment, The Fire Inside just ends up shadow boxing.

Even compared to his last film, the bifurcated dual character studies of In Our Day, A Traveler’s Needs feels less like a completed movie and more like an acting exercise.

For all the provocativeness of its premise, Babygirl is notably committed to nuance, even if the pacing doesn’t always feel intuitive. It marks a major leveling up for Reijn, cements Dickinson’s rising star status, and reminded me – for the first time in a long time – of what a truly terrific Kidman performance looks like ... and, yep, sounds like, too.

There’s nothing erotic about this wheezing, rotting, carnivorous corpse, and Eggers rebuts the “sexy vampire” nonsense by depicting a supernatural abusive relationship. If you think that there’s anything sexy about how he rips the throats from babes, that’s on you.

In this brightly colored world, Trost makes images pop and vibrate, making this latest in the beloved series easy to watch in a way that seemingly evades most modern multiplex fare. Sadly, that’s one of the few areas of clarity in Sonic the Hedgehog 3.

Mufasa is a small triumph for Jenkins and a small tragedy for Miranda, which means it’s a fine movie in an ocean of fine movies.

Small in its movements and thoughtful in its observations, All We Imagine As Light is quietly resonant – so quiet you might wonder if it has much impact.

Oppenheimer never quite embraces the absurdity and madness of his own proposition, and instead engages in a surprisingly flat tragicomedy of manners.

In the subtle subtext of having a solitary creature like a cat find companionship in a boat full of animals who have lost their pack, their flock, or their herd, we will find a tender story about knowing where we are meant to be.

In his three-acts-and-an-epilogue structure, Guadagnino inserts more story than Burroughs intended, and Queer becomes aimless.

What struck me more was the film’s interpretation of Bailey’s coming of age not as something to be mourned or that comes on too soon. Instead, it’s an activation.

There’s none of the visceral artfulness that Scott managed in the original. Quite simply, if you can’t make man-on-baboon hand-to-hand combat interesting, why do you think you can make a sword fight fun?

These characters have become so dear; I longed for something more climactic, more cathartic for them. Still, for the time we have with them, they make terrific company.

In George’s odyssey, McQueen attempts to emulate and skewer the classic British boys’ own adventures by juxtaposing it with social realism, but it ends up divided between the two instincts. Blitz is also burdened by a surprisingly leaden script filled with paper-thin Cockney stereotypes.

Fortunately, as directors Beck and Woods have become deviously adept at giving the audience what they want – rock-solid scares.

In this charming, funny, tear-inducing, and instantly recognizable world, and through the (in)actions of Grace, Elliot tells a gentle, touching, bitter-but-ultimately-sweet fable with a warming message: It’s OK to leave your shell behind.

Like every good musical, Emilia Pérez is a movie with big feelings, even if the feelings sometimes (often) outpace the logic.

This is an undeniable star-making performance for Madison, who finds the grace and charm and stupidity and selfishness and wild-eyed wonder of Mikey, a tough survivor who falls for the oldest fairy tale in the book.

As a trilogy capper, The Last Dance is barely a shuffle and a shimmy.

Crowley doesn’t blink at the cradle-to-grave graphic intimacy of Payne’s script, and in Garfield and Pugh he finds a duo who understand the deceptions and devotions of a beautifully flawed relationship. Watch ’em and weep, kids.

This is the antithesis of a sequel for sequel’s sake. Instead, it’s second verse, even catchier than the first.

If there’s a complaint to be made about Look Back, it’s that there’s not enough of it: Adapted from Chainsaw Man creator Tatsuki Fujimoto’s one-shot manga of the same name, the story it tells is purposefully contained.

Most importantly, Sherman and Abbasi deflate the myth that has dominated the last decade, that somehow Trump is some kind of aberration from the historical Republican Party, perverting it to his will.

Taken on its own fluff piece terms, Piece by Piece is an interesting sprint through three decades of cultural relevance and relatively scandal-free living. If Pharrell’s happy, then it seems we have to be too.

The Nightmare Before Christmas said that it’s all right to wrap a few scares up under the Christmas tree. Terrifier 3, the latest in the extreme gore franchise, sets fire to the decorations, cuts off your eyelids, and makes you watch the whole house burn.

If the cast blurs together, the expert costume and production design, filmed in lusciously retro 16mm, give the eye plenty to enjoy.

Picture scenes of excess followed by degradation, shame, teary promises of “never again,” resolve to start anew. Then the record skips and we’re right back to the beginning of the song, and it doesn’t sound any better on repeat listen. The Outrun hits similar beats, yet manages to do so in ways that feel novel at first, and ultimately transcendent.

Phillips sets the stage for a courtroom procedural – and then rolls a hand grenade into the middle of that weighty stage with a series of song and dance numbers.

A model and artist’s muse turned photographer who shot unforgettable images of Europe at war, Miller was then largely forgotten by the establishment, until her son revived her work after her death in 1977. Underappreciated in her time, one wishes better for her than this underwhelming biopic.

Even though the film is a jumble that oftentimes leaves its top-notch cast unmoored and renders its science-fiction elements somewhat anemic in light of our current expectations from special effects, Megalopolis is truly one from the heart, an outpouring from one cinephile to his tribe.

Weaving, who excels at this kind of character-driven action-horror, plays perfectly with our empathy, wordlessly guiding us through this damned land.

The key to a great literary adaptation is not to slavishly replicate but to find a way to change everything for the new medium except the heart. The Wild Robot, the 49th animated feature from DreamWorks Animation, doesn’t just put a digital coating on that heart, but celebrates every vibrant beat.

Revenge proved that Fargeat can combine astonishing, lurid, hyperpsychosexualized visuals with incisive social commentary. Yet there’s a vibrant audaciousness to The Substance that’s matched and complemented by her cool examination of the cost of youth and beauty. She can swing between cerebral drama and body horror, but this is definitely not a Cronenberg knockoff.

Writer/director Megan Park follows up her debut feature, the South by Southwest award winning high school shooting drama The Fallout, with another look into the lives of teenagers. But whereas her first film took a suffocating dive into the emotional extremes of their inner lives, coming-of-age comedy My Old Ass is sweeter without being cloying.

Seeking Mavis Beacon is a dizzying product of our digital age. In its look and energy, which uses a desktop screen as an aesthetic and organizational device, the zigzagging film can have the feel of too many browser tabs open, emblematic of its wide-ranging but sometimes under-explored topics of interest.

Harper and Will both come off like good eggs, and the tears wept on both sides – about the decades of deep pain Harper felt denying her true identity, and the terrible realization for Will that he was blind to that pain – are liable to goose sincere tears of your own.

It’s hard not to feel that Look Into My Eyes would pierce the veil with greater insight if Wilson wasn’t so credulous about everyone’s good intentions.

McKellen – now in his mid-Eighties, still sporting – hasn’t brought this kind of twinkling malevolence to the screen since his starring role in 1995’s Richard III, which coincidentally transposed its story of power grabbing and backstabbing to 1930s, fascists-rising England, the very same milieu of this acidic drama.

Burton and his writing team waste the opportunity of a sequel to fix the errors of the past, and instead double down on the most problematic elements of the original.

It’s as if Hot Fuzz was under the cultural and chemical influence of Sixties and Seventies psycho-pharmaceutical mind expansion conspiracy fantasies rather than Eighties action flicks and real ale.

Indie filmmaker Azazel Jacobs (The Lovers, Terri) has assembled so many tender spots – sibling estrangement, dead moms, dying dads, the sad drudgery of hospice care, the messed-up family dynamics we reproduce in successive generations – that you might reasonably wrap the entire film in a trigger warning for anyone who’s ever had a family, full-stop. But it – his deft script, their aching performances – is absolutely worth the trauma watch.

This is a character study in extremis, built around the strengthening bond and rising tension between an aimless serial killer lover and her more driven but mysterious counterpart.

What makes The Front Room universal is that it’s ultimately about power, about who runs the house.

Vromen does make some efforts at re-creating the period. But what links 1992 to the era is that it feels like part of that wave of low-budget late-Nineties Heat knockoffs, all featuring a cast that can do better but hey, a paycheck is a paycheck. 1992 is just Hard Rain with the riots standing in for a storm.

If Slingshot leaned into that character study, rather than roughly gaffer-taping it to a deep space thriller, maybe it wouldn’t stall out on the launch pad so badly.

Too slight to be intriguing, too overstretched to be absorbing, too predictable to be surprising, L’autre Laurens doesn’t exactly waste its potential but does little with it.

I suspect where the plot goes will be polarizing; I’m not sure they landed the plane was my first thought when the credits rolled. But days later, Between the Temples has stuck with me. On the zoom out, I think it’s simply marvelous.

At every point, Strange Darling is a grisly melding of deviously experimental form and terrifying function.

Art historian Thomas Negovan has excavated countless hours of rushes and raw footage from the archives to assemble a new film, hewing as close as possible to Vidal’s original story. In doing so, the debauchery, majesty, and brutality are finally revealed in all their unhinged glory.

Holland has honed an impressive ability to sustain nerve-fraying tension, and her brutal, field-level depictions of trauma orchestrated by oppressive political structures seeking to manipulate the hearts and minds of some, while dehumanizing others renders Green Border an angry, visceral masterpiece.

Sirocco is structured like a children’s book, as a young person’s guide to grownup emotions. Yet it may well be grownups – who can use the story to look back at times in their lives when the word “awe” wasn’t preceded by “shock and” – who will take most from it.

Out of a tight, terrific cast, it’s Collias’ performance – so alert and contained, its potency comes on later, like a time-release pill – that gets under your skin. It’s a star-making turn: not just a good one, a great one.

Originality is what made Alvarez famous. If only he showed more of it here when it comes to storytelling, not just innovative jump scares.

My Penguin Friend is ultimately a charming story of quiet resilience and healing as much as it is about a man and a bird. May we all find such friends.

It Ends With Us pours most of its nuance into the beginning, middle, and harrowing climax of its central relationship.

There are so many underdeveloped themes that it’s not hard to see what Singer was trying to achieve, and how short he falls.

It’s in this space that masculinity is interrogated, imagination is nourished, and these men get to be defined not by their past trauma but by their resilience and renewed capacity for joy. This is the space in which the empathic Sing Sing soars.

Lackluster and slow even in its supposedly hi-octane chase sequences, much of the blame lies with director Doug Liman.

Dipping between English and Irish, and borrowing wholeheartedly from the fictional music doc/concert format of A Hard Day’s Night (hey, steal from the best), stylish musical comedy-drama Kneecap the movie is an accurate-ish biopic of the real Kneecap, with Dochartaigh, Annaidh, and Cairealláin playing themselves.

Scorsese’s outsized presence in the documentary – its very framework built around his relationship to Powell and Pressburger – ends up jamming an immovable object between viewer and subject.

Just because the jokes about micro-dosing, Crossfit- and social media-obsessive city folk are a little obvious doesn’t mean they won’t resonate with any townie aching for the before-days.

Dìdi, the debut narrative feature from award-winning documentarian Sean Wang, can be seen as a tale of code switching, but that could potentially just pigeonhole it as an immigrant story. It’s broader than that because it’s a more universal study of being a teenage boy, trying to find something like a sense of identity and working out which lies you can and can’t tell yourself.

So whether you’re here for obscure characters like Charles Xavier’s lost twin Cassandra Nova (Corrin), grisly sword vs. claw fights, queer comedy, MCU mythology, the cover of Uncanny X-Men #251, or just Jackman and Reynolds having a blast being hams, Deadpool & Wolverine has you covered.

Heavy-handed and stuffed with cardboard characters, everything about Twisters save for Powell feels like a pale imitation of what made the original such an unexpected smash of a disaster movie. Lightning definitely does not strike twice.

It’s smart enough to gesture at current-day concerns – most especially in the dangers of a flexible relationship to truth – but not incisive or insightful enough to land a punch.

It’s not a grand landscape but a small portrait of wistfulness and wanting in the West, fluttering and touching.

The story, alas, is colorless and flat: a terribly earnest picture of two sad people looking for somebody or something to jump-start their battery.

The narrative is too flat, too drily filmed by César-nominated cinematographer Jeanne Lapoirie (8 Women) to induce much emotion or debate about Anne’s hypocrisy and abuse of power.

Perkins’ greatest and most stomach-churning achievement is in a slow shift of perspective, leading the audience from the bleak and eerie serial killer thriller of Harker’s world to the fiendish reality of Longlegs, and an enigmatic denouement that will be puzzled over and studied. Hell truly awaits.

The destination may seem inevitable, but the twists, turns, and merciless bloodshed make Kill a trip well worth taking.

The pleasures are in watching Maxine navigate through the bloodshed to the denouement she deserves, and watching West cut into the seductive allure of cinema.

The script by Mike White (who may have been locked in the writer’s room by Illumination Studios after working on the superior Migration) and series co-creator Ken Daurio feels like a stack of B-plots stapled together rather than a full story.

Despite being marketed as a story about empowered women playing sports, the film doesn't show all too much camaraderie or empowerment.

There’s an insufferable longwindedness to Kinds of Kindness, each installment dragging on beyond the point of patience. Watching becomes a chore, made heavier by Robbie Ryan’s often flat cinematography and the pacing created by Lanthimos’ longtime editor Yorgos Mavropsaridis.

The seated dance between Johnson and Penn is witty, earnest, honest, and overflowing with kindness, making Daddio a remarkable story of two strangers opening up to each other.

If you grew up in the 1990s post-hippie Massachusetts performance arts scene (as Baker did), Janet Planet may tug on your nostalgia, but you may not feel otherwise drawn to its ethereal qualities.

While some filmmakers fade into obscurity during their time away from the screen, The Bikeriders is a welcome reminder that Nichols’ thoughtful explorations of economic tension and toxic masculinity are more relevant now than ever.

Squibb’s charm, her gutsiness, and her sharp, subtle humor fill the movie with warmth and veracity.

O’Sullivan’s script is also a remarkable document of community theatre: again, often a place for cheap laughs about hams and backstage romances, but it’s never played for comedy at the character’s expense.

Ultimately, and as is to be expected, In Our Day is not revelatory or revolutionary. It’s a film about being comfortable from a filmmaker who is comfortable with who he is.

It leaves a lot of room for interpretation – depending on how you come to it, you could read Dog and Robot’s relationship as platonic or romantic, straight or queer – but the takeaway is all tenderness.

It’s such a simple story but told with such grace, tenderness, compassion, and wonder, that all its strangeness seems familiar and welcome.

This is Michael Bay for the John Wick generation: bombastic filmmaking at its finest with complex, multi-level action sequences that give the stunts room to breathe.

For neophytes, there’s still much to enjoy – cinematographer Steve Cosen’s painterly framing, exuberant scenery chewing (Linney makes a meal out of one vignette’s rotted teeth) – but the thematic resonance between story and storyteller gets a little lost when you’re only working off the reenactments’ CliffsNotes.

Director Scott Glosserman began his film as a found footage mockumentary before flipping into a conventional slasher for the final act as a deliberate, subversive plot point. Nash keeps his deliberate pacing to emphasize the grisliness.

It’s not that it’s unfunny or completely without charm: it’s that the script feels like an abandoned The Secret Life of Pets sequel into which Garfield has been crowbarred.

You think you’re watching a breezy-seeming comedy, then you’re seduced by two expert flirts, and then suddenly you’re genuinely stirred by a carpe diem monologue on the malleability of identity. I mean, what even is this? An absolute gas.

If you’re just along for the spectacular ride, then Furiosa is Miller at his nitro-fueled, chrome-covered, overblown best. But if you’re trying to make any sense of this, you’ll find it increasingly stalled out.

In a drama that depends on its organic structure, the constructed nature is a little too visible under the skin.

Taking its title from her second and final critically-acclaimed blockbuster album, music biopic Back to Black gives you all those details you’ll recognize – but not much beyond that.

Generous and warm and howling funny, there is such a light touch to Babes, you might not even clock the depth of its observations – its inspections – of body and heart both.

I Saw the TV Glow presents a potent rumination on identity, repression, and self-acceptance.

To its credit, the film never feels like a patchwork, but rather a cohesive whole. Or to be more specific: a haunting and meditative yet often hilarious cohesive whole.

Propper’s greatest success is that she doesn’t overdramatize tragedy and trauma. Awful things do occur, but in an organic way, so that the inevitable reaction is a sense of stunned shock. That’s why there’s no sense of judgement: Instead, there is just Propper’s overwhelming sense of empathy for what it is to be young right now.