Approach 10 Cloverfield Lane on its own terms, let Trachtenberg and his top-notch cast (Mary Elizabeth Winstead, John Gallagher Jr., and a ferocious John Goodman) yank you into their world, and try not to sweat through your clothes.

The film is replete with unforgettable images, stellar performances all up and down the cast, and genuinely original and thoughtful revisions of expected tropes.

Come for the bloodshed, stay for the sisterhood. Like Black Panther before it, The Woman King immerses us in African culture; only this time, it shifts the focus to real-life women and proves, without the corny factor, that we have always been warriors.

I still don’t know whether all (or even most) of Asteroid City’s ideas coalesce, so scattershot is the film’s pacing and plotting. But from moment to moment, it charms and moves in ways only Anderson can deliver.

While there are no chapter breaks or anything to formally guide the audience in that way, Into the Inferno feels unusually episodic by Herzog’s typically cohesive standards.

There’s a lot to sink your teeth into with Emily the Criminal, between its strong Plaza turn and a pitch-black moral core that refreshingly commits to the bit. But outside of those devilish comforts, a lot of Ford’s debut is frustratingly thin, more concerned with giving Plaza plenty of opportunities to bore through the screen with her eyes in extreme close-up than in really breaking down her psychology and the perverse romance at its center.

Gyllenhaal gives one of the most staggering performances of her career, and Colangelo’s deft command of tone keeps the lengths to which Lisa will go to stay close to Jimmy’s perceived greatness close to the chest right up to the end.

The relaunch of the classic comedy series captures exactly what made the original, and other movies from the team behind Airplane!, so essential: An almost non-stop onslaught of silly and random moments, rejecting any attempt at logic to instead go for the gut — which is to say, the belly laugh.

It’s a provocation, and for the most part, it’s an effective one. Yet for a film all about verbal and physical blows, Bodied seems to grow skittish when it comes to landing the nastiest ones, the ones that would call its own ideals into question. It’s just insightful enough to leave audiences wishing that it were more so.

Dickey pivots between storyteller, philosopher, hopeless romantic, philanderer, asshole, loyal friend, and belligerent drunk all the way up until the very end.

With Creep 2, you’re never truly convinced the narrative is going the way you think it’s going, and while that may be frustrating to some (aka, those who don’t understand the concept of psychological thrillers), it’s almost enchanting for those looking for one good scare.

Get Me Roger Stone offers its audience an unblinking, if disappointingly straightforward, look at the infamous operator.

Although it stumbles a bit at the end with a self-aware redemption that isn’t entirely earned or particularly in character, Diamond Tongues is still a brilliant and realistic portrait of the young artist as a bitter borderline failure.

Feature-length films generally aren’t nimble enough to reflect the current zeitgeist with such uncanny accuracy, but Blair’s neo-noir-comedy-thriller is that rare story that seems to have come along at just the right time.

It’s a feel-good story enlivened by the fact that there’s no overly sentimentalized hokum to be found.

A tightly constructed narrative, which examines the role of forgiveness,The Two Popes is a lowkey buddy comedy that simply follows two actors at the top of their game.

It’s a gripping, fascinating watch, an elegantly assembled portrait of the end result of influencer culture and late-stage capitalism – the blind leading the blind into an empty, insubstantial image of success and luxury that turns out to be nothing but smoke.

Though he’s been accused of re-carving the same dollhouse-scale miniatures over and over again, The French Dispatch finds Anderson continuing to fill out his increasingly elaborate skill set.

Theron’s a perfect avatar for Cody’s irrepressible empathy for her subjects, wounded and loving in equal measure, and she’s hardly been more watchable.

Darkest Hour spends so much time as an actor’s showcase for Oldman that it oftentimes forgets to remind the audience of the ongoing war around him. However, despite the film’s occasionally languid pace, Wright imbues enough urgency through Oldman to maintain an undercurrent of tension throughout the film’s two-hour runtime.

Chapter 2 is a hyper-violent piece of pulp action cinema through and through, but it’s also an exemplar of how to make such a film with style and intelligence.

Garland boldly asks us to take a step back, to forget about notions of who is right and who is wrong and simply focus on the horrors of what might happen if this happened at all. If you surrender to its abstractions, it proves a disquieting, terrifying watch.

Skating fans and Hawk aficionados will find a lot to like ... But it’s frustrating to see Jones’ approach fail to dig much deeper into the man than we’d already expect, opting instead to more broadly elaborate on the low-key death wish a lot of skaters seem to engage in.

At points the film simply observes the smaller, more innocuous moments of a coming-of-age story; much of it is framed in intimate medium shots and close-ups, and there’s a distinct kinship between the numerous wayward souls in its world that carries it along.

By firmly rooting all of the film’s sprawling drama in a singular conflict, directors Joe and Anthony Russo manage to do what many superhero films have struggled with in recent years: find a truly effective reason to pit superpower against superpower.

By the time Whitney reaches the point it inevitably must, Macdonald’s film stands as an archive of how preventable Houston’s passing truly was.

The world-building might not be 100% there, but it’s a true crowd-pleaser that’s paced within an inch of its life.

While Finley’s film may be slim on any truly insightful commentary about what makes Amanda and Lily tick, that’s almost beside the point. Instead, this is a film about the fine lines separating civility from chaos, and how it only takes a tiny push to send you across when you’re close enough to it.