"Buster Scruggs” is a singular illustration of what makes the Coen formula so appealing, and a reminder of so many better examples.

Credit to Cooper for delivering his best, most soulful performance while pulling double duty behind the camera, but it’s his co-star whose magnetism most draws you into their world — and keeps you there even when the film hits the occasional wrong note.

Non-Fiction isn’t a surrender, nor is it a call to arms. It’s an anxious — but strangely calming! — reminder that change is the only true constant, and that steering the current is a lot easier than fighting it. Nobody does that better than Assayas, even when it looks like he’s not even trying.

Fans of the director’s late-period work (particularly his last completed effort, the rapid-fire diary film “F for Fake”) will find it thrilling to return to those unpredictable, garrulous recesses, no matter the bumpy ride. Welles continues to contemplate storytelling, Hollywood, and his own troubled career by transforming these obsessions into a marathon of creativity.

Lanthimos wants us to examine the different reasons we grasp at power — avarice, self-preservation, even fear — and better understand its corrosive effects.

Roma is by far the most experimental storytelling in a career filled with audacious (and frequently excessive) gimmicks. Here, he tables the showiness of “Children of Men” and “Gravity” in favor of ongoing restraint, creating a fresh kind of intimacy. Like a grand showman working overtime to tone things down, he lures viewers into an apparently straightforward scene, only to catch them off guard with new information.

Destination Wedding makes the case that the two-hander isn’t dead, even if it struggles a bit when forced to come to a neat, movie-ready conclusion.

Abrahamson seems so coy about the haunting of the Ayres’ house that he refuses to allow the movie’s strongest aspect to take center stage, and the perils of The Little Stranger hover aimlessly throughout the movie like a specter in search of some elusive white light.

First Man is an anti-thriller of rare intensity, with lived-in performances from Ryan Gosling and Claire Foy heightening the sky-high drama at every turn. It’s not a comprehensive look at the Apollo 11 mission, but revisits that famous story from a more intimate angle, even as it delivers a satisfying ride.

The result is a singularly American riff on “The Act of Killing,” a fascinating and dream-like mosaic that’s less driven by residual anger than by cockeyed concern, less interested in exhuming the past than in revealing its value to the present.

It’s both way too much and also somehow not enough, but even the most exhausting stretches of this bloated import blockbuster are fearless enough to make you wish that American films would follow suit.

Despite a few predictable beats, What Keeps You Alive offers plenty of effective jolts, helped along by the chemistry between leads Anderson and Allen.

Faraut is able to conflate the cinema’s quixotic obsession with reality with the athlete’s similarly impossible dream of perfection. In its own playful way, his film celebrates the beautiful folly of both pursuits.

If The Happytime Murders isn’t the worst movie of the summer, I tremble at the thought of whatever’s coming out next week.

Weitz and Orton mean to question the individual’s role in a mass atrocity, but the abstract nature of their ideas never squares with the rigidity of their storytelling. As a result, Operation Finale doesn’t feel ambiguous so much as it feels like it lacks a point of view.

Despite a starring turn from Sam Rockwell (whose character arc boils down to mastering a Cockney accent) and a supporting performance that should help Phoebe Fox convert a small legion of new fans, this Blue Iguana is far less evocative of yesterday’s classics than it is of today’s direct-to-VOD dreck.

Without a bloody foundation of truth to ground their swagger in reality or give it some kind of moral purpose, these two certified alpha males are completely lost; it’s like they were given all the various bits you need to assemble a watchable action movie, but went into production without any idea of how those pieces might fit together.

Anchored by a brilliant Mélanie Thierry, whose stone-eyed lead performance is at the center of almost every frame, Finkiel’s film never betrays the distance that Duras inserted between herself and her own experiences, or that she wrote from the perspective of a vessel as much as she did a subject.

Every beat of the film might be obvious, but that doesn’t detract from the enjoyability of watching an indelible young heroine like Lara Jean figure out her own life and just maybe fall in love in the process.

A tasteless and incredibly undercooked serving of the internet’s stalest Creepypasta, Slender Man aspires to be for the YouTube era what “The Ring” was to the last gasps of the VHS generation...there’s one fundamental difference that sets the two movies apart: “The Ring” is good, and Slender Man is terrible.

Entertaining and exasperating in equal measure, it’s a nine-dimensional chess game in which the pawns think they’re working towards a better future, but the powers controlling them are only determined to maintain the status quo.

Fans of Kwan’s books will not be disappointed by Chu’s adaptation, as “Crazy Rich Asians” lovingly brings to life some of the novel’s standout scenes, even as Chiarelli and Lim’s screenplay snips away subplots that detract from Rachel’s journey.

Statham remains an appealing summer movie fixture, but sharks deserve better than this.

Even when Christopher Robin stumbles or steers itself into a corner, it never stops trying to understand what people lose when they let go of the things they love. The movie sells itself by keeping one foot on the ground at all times.

It’s a tough story, but told through a decidedly female gaze, Night Comes On blossoms into something beautiful.

However afraid she is to let things get too serious, Miller Rogen is powerless to erase the emotional undertow that carries this story forward. All of the pent-up animosity her movie doesn’t know what to do with becomes its greatest asset.

Less moment-to-moment funny than committed to a sustained pitch of devilish glee, Never Goin’ Back couches its silliness in a credible milieu of American malaise. The women may never understand how they might find a better place, but the movie makes the case that their unending commitment to getting there might be good enough.

The film zips through its final act at breakneck speed, doling out answers and riling up new conflicts with little care for how they impact a standalone story, just setting up for a franchise that might never come to fruition.