A crackling, devious, and hugely satisfying old-school whodunnit with a modern twist ... Even if you do somehow manage to piece the whole thing together in advance, there’s no way of predicting the joy of watching it all unfold.

Robertson, a deeply talented musician and songwriter who is still working today, is a fascinating subject, but the really compelling stuff is lingering just out of the frame. Without a more well-rounded selection of voices ... or a more critical-minded director to give the film perspective, Robertson is free to obscure the bigger questions and deeper meanings, opting for self-mythologizing over self-reflection.

This spry yet increasingly bitter romantic drama is so vague and un-targeted that its social critiques feel less defined than ever. The anger is palpable, but its targets are hard to pinpoint.

The burden of familial obligation permeates Ms. Purple — who carries it and who passes it off, who outruns it and who lets it overrun them. It’s a ripe topic Chon clearly feels deeply, rendered in beautiful cinematography and delicate storytelling. It’s also a uniquely Asian-American story, rooted in loving specificity and beating with a universally human heart.

Once again, Reichardt has crafted a wondrous little story about two friends roaming the natural splendors of the Pacific Northwest, searching for their place in the world. The appeal of this hypnotic, unpredictable movie comes from how they find that place through mutual failure, and the nature of that outcome in the context of an early, untamed America has rich implications that gradually seep into the frame.

A quiet work with major ambitions, The Assistant is a significant cultural statement in cinematic form.

There’s enough potential with the balloon’s feats to justify an entire feature-length experience set within its basket, but The Aeronauts constantly interrupts the journey to shoehorn random tangents on the ground, and busies up the drama with underdeveloped side characters.

The King is so eager to be a mud-and-guts epic about inherited violence and the corruption of power that it loses sight of the rich coming-of-age story at its core.

It’s a whole lot less scary or fun the second time around.

The Perfect Candidate can feel sedate and disjointed as a broad portrait of empowerment, but this is nothing if not a movie of its time, and it sings — sometimes literally — whenever it hones in on the unique struggle through which Saudi Arabian women might seize upon this historic moment.

An asinine and self-serving call to action that tries to hide its basic incompetence behind a veil of righteous fury.

An overstuffed espionage thriller that bites off more than it can chew and never manages to find its footing, Olivier Assayas’ Wasp Network is an exceedingly rare gaffe from one of the greatest filmmakers of the last 30 years. Even so, his restless genius can still be felt percolating below the surface and struggling to come up for air.

The endearing chemistry between these characters and the movie’s breezy tone often clashes with the subject at hand. That creates a peculiar dissonance whenever the movie attempts to dig deep on matters of faith, or the bleaker controversies involving the Catholic Church today.

The Laundromat may be blunt, and the humor hit-or-miss — but it swings wildly at a worthy target, and eventually hits its mark.

Zellweger inhabits the role of the jaded, soul-searching musical icon reasonably well within a dreary and unremarkable saga that finds her grappling with her past, contending with pill-popping addictions and a broken family. It’s a familiar story that Judy struggles to freshen up, at least until Zellweger takes the mic.

If Uncut Gems leaves people rattled, disoriented, grasping for clarity in the chaos of one man’s hectic routine, that all speaks to the sheer precision of a visionary achievement in full control.

It’s good enough to be dangerous, and bad enough to demand better. It’s going to turn the world upside down and make us all hysterical in the process. For better or worse, it’s exactly the movie the Joker would want.

Like its heroine, Official Secrets is shouting into an echo chamber.

While the movie risks smothering the heart of its drama in all the movement and noise, the sheer sensory overload often leads to astonishing bursts of emotional sophistication.

As Vitalina Varela proves, Costa empowers his subjects by framing them as majestic storytellers and letting their stories take charge.

Damon and Bale are such magnetic onscreen figures that it doesn’t take much to inject their various arguments, smarmy asides, and high-stakes bets with plenty of intrigue.

Sometimes clever, often clumsy, and virtually always denying Kristen Stewart the space required to breathe new life into the film’s namesake, Seberg feels off-balance from almost the moment it starts.

A peevish and self-satisfied procedural that unravels the Dreyfus Affair with all the journalistic doggedness of “Spotlight,” but none of the same integrity.

Before You Know It doesn’t balk at quirkiness, but it never uses it as a crutch or the only way to process the story.

An awe-inspiring film.

The brilliance of the movie lies in how it starts from a familiar place, then sneaks into transcendence.

This wise and diaphanous little drama finds Kore-eda once again exploring his usual obsessions, as the man behind the likes of “Still Walking” and “After the Storm” offers yet another insightful look at the underlying fabric of a modern family.

Spurlock’s quest to put Chick-fil-A out of business is always entertaining — the filmmaker is still a charming and quick-witted man of the people, and his shtick has aged much better than Michael Moore’s — but if “Super-Size Me 2” isn’t quite as funny as the first installment, it’s considerably more horrifying.

There’s nothing particularly new or inspired about Zippel’s decision to simply train a camera on Friedkin and let him riff, but the man is such a captivating speaker that it ultimately doesn’t matter much.

Angel Has Fallen is the kind of movie that leaves you feeling restless and thinking about dinner long before the third act, but anyone who sticks it out until the bitter end will be rewarded with one of the greatest mid-credits sequences ever devised.

Like a great poem, End of the Century gives voice to a seemingly indescribable feeling, one anyone who’s ever fallen in love will recognize from deep in their soul — as if bumping into an old friend you forgot how much you liked.

Without the star power of Mandy Moore and the relative sophistication of the single location predicament, 47 Meters Down: Uncaged is just the last gasp of a shark saga that didn’t need to come up for air.

The more engaging question is where Bernadette disappeared to for the two decades before the movie begins. It may not be much of a mystery, but where Bernadette went is far more believable and broadly real a story than where she ends up. It’s a story that’s too complicated for Linklater to tell here.

Adam may not be above reproach, but its good intentions are infectious.

If Ready or Not never quite feels like a cult classic in the making — the scares are soft, the imagery is familiar, and the ending is so batshit that it confirms your nagging sense that the previous 90 minutes were holding back — it’s still wickedly entertaining from start to finish, and painted with enough fresh personality to resolve into something more than the sum of its parts.

For all of its heady ideas, some of which it explores to greater effect than others, Buñuel in the Labyrinth of the Turtles is most striking for how it illustrates that animation isn’t a mere subcategory of cinema. That movies have always been a unique medium for how they see reality and unreality as two overlapping roads towards the same truth.

The film has style in spades; it would have substance, too, if only it knew when to quit.

Moner’s charisma keeps things pushing forward, and so does the film’s appealing spirit. If only every big screen adaptation of a beloved existing property could feel this funny and fresh, there’d be less to fear about an industry besieged by recycled material that never takes a risk.

Gottsagen is sympathetic without being pitiable, sweet without being saintly, and funny without making himself the butt of every joke. While the writing is often perfunctory, Gottsagen has a way of making every story beat feel sincere.

A movie that’s scary enough to get under your skin, but not scary enough to stay there.

Despite some major narrative missteps, the film’s bold twist on the mob drama still has a refreshing quality. Maybe The Kitchen would have fared better as a series, with more time for its potential material to simmer.

Consequences thrums with a vibrant current — propelled by a dizzying churn of cigarettes, cocaine, fistfights, and shirtless young men — until arriving at its predictably explosive conclusion. The film’s perspective may be austere, but its heart is defiantly exuberant.

Hodge sells it, just as he sells the rest of an otherwise chintzy film, a Lifetime movie-like drama that falls short of engaging with the many thorny issues it dramatizes.

After a slow-burn first hour, Poulton and Savage unfurl a climax that unexpectedly brings together all of the pieces fighting for Mara. It’s nerve-jangling and raw, and the filmmakers earn their tension and the gruesome harm that comes with it. (There are plenty of snakes.) All that goodwill comes close to collapse, however, as Poulton and Savage charge toward the finale.

A winsome and delicate farce about a (fictional) Palestinian soap opera that people are able to enjoy on both sides of the West Bank, Sameh Zoabi’s Tel Aviv on Fire might be the film we need right now if it didn’t have so much fun taking the piss out of the notion that there could ever be a “film that we need right now.”

It’s certainly proof that even dumb movies can endeavor to enlighten the masses, and gels nicely with the broader message: If Hobbs and Shaw can learn to get along, there may be hope for all of us.

The Red Sea Diving Resort is a dull and derivative film that’s too in love with its heroes to bother with its victims.

For Sama isn’t a nightmare with pockets of joy so much as it’s a collective dream that’s playing out under a cloud of impenetrable darkness.

Longley’s follow-up to the Oscar-nominated “Iraq in Fragments” finds a way to negotiate between empathy and condescension.

As much as the suspense remains in play, its main threat has a certain robotic quality, and the humorless tone doesn’t help.

The film, like Billingham’s photography, is all the more powerful for its refusal to tidy up, explain itself, or try to glom some kind of retroactive grace onto an impoverished existence that was defined by boredom and neglect.

It’s the work of a studio that’s gobbled up the rest of the film industry and is still hungry for more. The Lion King feels less like a remake than a snuff film, and a boring one at that.

No matter what form it takes, The Great Hack exists as a giant contradiction sure to evoke strong responses from anyone impacted by its drama, which is basically everyone.

This silly trifle might not stand the test of time, or even be remembered by the time you get home, but it gets you where you’re going with a smile on your face.

As a feat of masochism, Phil is an impressive trick. As a movie, it’s a ghastly mess.

“Words of Love” struggles to thread the needle between a conventional bio doc and a more specific portrait of two souls who found some kind of refuge in each other.

Fans might be appeased by a successful bunt in a long summer of disgraceful strike-outs, but this is still a maddening failure when compared to the remarkable artistry of “Into the Spider-Verse” or the raw pathos of Sam Raimi’s “Spider-Man 2.”

The new movie basically jams the archetypes of a John Hughes teen comedy into a minimalist haunted scenario. While that’s not enough to suppress the underlying gimmickry of the storytelling, Annabelle Comes Home at least manages to charm and frighten its way through the purest distillation of the “Conjuring” formula to date.

While Maiden is satisfying on its own, it’s tailor-made for a remake that can dive deeper into a story that has so much life left in it.

By the time it’s finally over, the only person more exposed than its star is her director.

No matter how contrived or hackneyed things get, Buckley’s voice always breaks through the clouds like some kind of divine revelation. And that voice only gets more powerful when Wild Rose finally gives it something to say.

Child’s Play at once repudiates Mancini’s franchise by attempting to make it bigger and bolder while falling back on ingredients we’ve seen before, and seen better. While it sets out to skewer the algorithms that could destroy the world, the remake hews to a mechanical formula — and winds up a product of the same tendencies it’s trying to indict.

This is yet another instance where the film’s short runtime seems to have shortchanged the depth of reporting.

At what point does a story about one failing democracy become a story about all failing democracies? Perhaps there’s no way of knowing until it’s already too late.

This is the kind of mad science filmmaking worth rooting for: Aster refashions “The Wicker Man” as a perverse breakup movie, douses Swedish mythology in Bergmanesque despair, and sets the epic collage ablaze. He may not land every big swing, but the underlying vision is hard to shake even when it falters.

Murder Mystery is the kind of lazy and uninspired trash that can only be made by someone who knows that it doesn’t matter; bad movies are made all the time, but precious few pieces of content are so content to breathe in their own foul stink.

A familiar but arrestingly visceral crime story with a coming-of-age twist, Claudio Giovannesi’s Piranhas has an unusual relationship with its own predictability.

Even as the film’s scenes begin stacking into an unstable Jenga tower of contrivances, the turbulent father-son dynamic continues to hold strong.

Raw, empathetic, and so insistently humane that it plays like a fun 82-minute “fuck you” to the power structures of a country that wants to squeeze the life out of its poorest black environments, This One’s for the Ladies is at its best when it slows down and keys in to a small pocket of the culture where strippers and customers really can have co-equal standing in the community that brings them together.

To talk about Toy Story 4 is to talk about Forky. This is a movie that doesn’t initially appear to have any compelling reason to exist — the forced but satisfying third installment of Pixar’s signature franchise seemed to wrap things up when it came out almost a full decade ago — and yet Forky alone is enough to elevate this potential cash-grab into the beautiful and hilarious coda that its long-running series needed to be truly complete. Forky is the hero we need in 2019.

Men in Black: International, which launches Tessa Thompson and Chris Hemsworth into a bland variation on the same “MiB” routine, lacks the energy or ambition to make its intergalactic stakes into anything more than baffling cash grab. This misconceived attempt to inject a tired franchise with new life ends up as little more than an empty vessel.

A rambling magic trick of a movie that reanimates a hazy chapter of American history by unmooring it from the facts of its time, and even perhaps from time itself.

While it’s tempting to go easy on this frequently electric film, and forgive it for not living up to its full potential, the most satisfying thing about Lee’s spotty underworld adventure is the sense that we’ve been conditioned to expect better.

The Raft, like the people aboard it, floats along the surface of a vast ocean of mystery and memory. The result is a bizarre, captivating, and borderline unbelievable memory play that only supports a hypothesis Genovés wasn’t prepared to consider: We are blind to the world as it is when we only saw the world as we are.

It just sort of happens, and not even the movie itself seems to know why.

Khan’s film pulls liberally from the genre playbook — stars and co-writers Ali Wong and Randall Park haven’t been shy about the film’s early inspirations, especially classics like “When Harry Met Sally” — but it also offers its own charms, thanks to Wong and Park, who delight both on-screen and on the page.

This is an important and compulsively watchable portrait made by someone who understands the brute power of broadcast media and the people who make it for all the world to see, but it can only afford Mike Wallace with a little moment of truth, and the satisfaction of playing his part in the greater continuum of things.

The most damning thing about Domino is that it reaffirms what all but the filmmaker’s most deluded fetishists have long since concluded: The world has caught up with Brian De Palma — his fascination with voyeurism and violence have been sublimated into the stuff of everyday life — and the guy is basically just circling the drain.

The suspense builds creepily enough, with a classic fake-out in a strong first act. But when the movie turns into full-blown horror, which it eventually sort of does, the pacing of the violence is all out of whack.

Pavarotti, much like its subject, is fun and full of life for as long as it lasts, but as soon as it’s over you realize how little of it you got to see. Howard’s doc offers a crystal clear record of how Pavarotti brought opera to the world, but it leaves us guessing at what he might have left behind.

Godzilla’s interest in saving humanity never made much sense, but it’s this CGI creation with no dialogue that gives the film the continuity and character it lacks elsewhere. When Godzilla lights up his nuke-powered tail and lets loose his interminable scream, for just a moment, the MonsterVerse has something to offer.

Forestier and Seydoux are both fantastically desperate as dead end citizens who met each other at a very dangerous time in their lives, but Desplechin fails to make full use of his actors; instead of allowing them to shade in their characters, he pummels the audience into an ambiguous state of forced sympathy.

This poignant, minor-key work from the only major filmmaker to carry the torch of silent comedy into the 21st century is rich with feeling, even as it enters a self-reflexive zone that sometimes distracts from the legitimate concerns at its core.

Of course, it wouldn’t be a Ferrara movie without some jagged edges. “Tommaso” manages to feel rough and risky while somehow sensitive at the same time, like the best of them.

As a minor work, it provides an enjoyable snippet of rambunctious formalism that puts Noé in a category of his own.

Once The Traitor earns its title, the movie is overwhelmed by legal intrigue and mafia infighting, and flattened into a repetitive and somewhat impenetrable courtroom drama.

If Zombi Child gets snared in a web of symbols and ideas that it never fully manages to weaponize in its favor...it still provides a bold and compelling bridge between the living and the dead.

No filmmaker has ever loved anything as much as Abdellatif Kechiche loves butts.

None of this movie feels amateurish or unmotivated, but virtually everything on the periphery of its main plot manages to detract from what’s going on between Matthias and Maxime.

It drifts by with all the force of a mild summer breeze, and — as is typical of Sachs’ jewel-like work — it leaves you feeling like you could have spent another 90 minutes with these characters. For better or worse, this one also leaves you feeling like Sachs could have spent another 90 minutes with these characters, too.

[A] furious and fiendishly well-crafted new film. ... Giddy one moment, unbearably tense the next, and always so entertaining and fine-tuned that you don’t even notice when it’s changing gears, “Parasite” takes all of the beats you expect to find in a Bong film and shrinks them down with clockwork precision.

The film is itself a provocation; a fascinating document of a years-long conceptual project as well as the final (or next) piece of the complicated puzzle.

Viewed on its own terms, Running With Beto consolidates the feel-good trajectory of O’Rourke’s run into an engaging package that showcases his galvanizing impact up close.

The sequel remains charming, beautifully animated, and often incredibly funny, but there’s a sense that writer Brian Lynch realized Max’s story needed a lot more padding this time around.

While the movie’s rough production values and meandering plot never quite gel, Family Romance, LLC is a fascinating convergence of filmmaker and subject, providing the rare opportunity for Herzog to bury his observations in the material at hand.

The film’s bent towards revisionist superhero history is certainly compelling, but stuck in the confines of the horror genre, it flames out far more than it flies.

Smith puts on such an outsized performance that it’s easy for him to overshadow its smaller joys — and when Genie is suddenly silenced in a limp third act, the entire film suffers.

Tarantino’s desire to salute the creative thrill of storytelling is an inviting, welcome presence in American cinema, and his ninth feature suggests he really ought to work more often. But all the vivid callbacks to antiquated TV westerns and the forgotten characters in their orbit fall short of coalescing into much more than that.