Bitches, it’s always a good month in America for an antigun movie. The newest, Spike Lee’s Chi-Raq, might be the best ever. It’s sexy, brash, and potent — a powerful weapon in its own right.

The uncommonly entertaining horror film, the third from the Cam and How to Blow Up a Pipeline team of Daniel Goldhaber and Isa Mazzei, is a clever, nastily contemporary riff on what the original represents — not just the blurring of what’s real and what’s not, but the urge to rubberneck at gore and treat the ability to be unshaken by it as a point of pride.

Before our eyes, Every Little Thing comes to embody the fragile yet uncontainable mystery of all life.

The mystery may be resolved, but the suspense and uncertainty remain. And so, Guiraudie ends his film on a cold, almost cruel note of existential solitude that just might, if you let it, break your heart.

It's a truly prodigious piece of work, resembling a career summation far more than a maiden voyage.

Ibelin is an overwhelming film, ugly tears all the way down. It starts off with the most unspeakable of tragedies and then, as it winds its way back through Mats’s life, becomes a bittersweet story of empowerment, acceptance, even joy.

It’s painful, paranoiac stuff, and your heart breaks for Tyler, who feels increasingly trapped among a crew of rowdy, drunk, irreverent white dudes, as these little injustices mount.

Alongside Gladstone’s expressive performance, Fancy Dance’s ability to choreograph that criticism gives the film a singular grace.

Jenkins and cinematographer James Laxton’s palette is rich and warm, its colors deepened by a score by Nicholas Britell that ranges from a distant, forlorn trumpet to a string quartet in which the players dig in as if they’re having their own dialogue between hope and despair. The close-ups are immense, the emotions archetypal.

At the age of 78, Andersson continues to make films that desire to capture no less than a grand sense of human existence — and that somehow achieve it. Here’s hoping this one isn’t his last.

Nope is a work of sly devastation from writer-director Jordan Peele.

BlacKkKlansman is a nuanced story of race in America, but Lee doesn’t take any chances with vagueness or ellipses, nor should he. As much as BlacKkKlansman plays with the mechanics of blaxploitation fantasy, it doesn’t leave one with any question about what’s real.

A film that transcends its obvious timeliness to say some elemental things about personal loyalty and institutional betrayal.

The resulting film is bizarre to the point of ­trippiness, yet it’s one of the most lucid portraits of evil I’ve ever seen.

20th Century Women is irreducible, too, although certain adjectives and adverbs do leap to mind: generous, reflective, absolutely delightful.

It recreates the sensation of drowning in your own hormone-churned emotions so vividly that the film would be difficult to watch if its very existence didn’t serve as a kind of pressure valve. And it provides reassurance that while things may get worse before they get better, this period of life does pass, and eventually you get enough distance to look back on it from the outside as well as from within.

What reveals Pontecorvo as an artist, and not simply a propagandist of genius, is the sorrow he tries to stifle but that comes flooding through anyway--the sense that ALL sides in this conflict have lost their souls, and that all men are carrion.

The movie is gorgeous, mesmerizing, poetic; the lyricism actually heightened by harsh jets of gore.

Unusually grounded for a Marvel superhero epic, and unusually gripping.

I was shocked to discover that I was actually … touched. Climax is a small miracle, and if this is Noé going soft (for him, of course), that might actually be a very good thing for the movies.

If Timbuktu has a “takeaway,” it’s a deeply humanist one and so, in this context, political: that there’s no such thing as a monolithic Muslim culture; that the threat is nowhere near as great to Westerners as to the people of Mali, Syria, Iraq, Yemen, etc.; that ideology is deaf and blind and anti-life; and that cinema (and all art) can blow it to what I’d once have called Timbuktu.

Sheridan’s actors work with their intellects fully engaged--and they engage us on levels we barely knew we had.

This so-called “children’s film” selects a variety of phobias and stitches them into a patchwork of shimmering terrorscapes and half-baked ideas about secret societies, the occult, and, of course, dirt-bike-racing in rural England. In other words, it’s perfect.

The how of Tillman, Mabry, and Wells’s telling distinguishes their story. The Hate U Give should be an epic, and it is: Yes, it’s a teen melodrama, but it’s also an elegantly constructed piece of world-building, a love story, a family history, a sociological spiderweb of cause and effect of the hate referenced in the Tupac-coined titled. If this is what the next wave of YA adaptation will feel like, we are in a good place.

It’s that rarest of psychological thrillers: one that actually lives up to the words “psychological thriller.”

Whenever it gets down to the business of making Tom Cruise run and jump and drive and fly in and out of things, Dead Reckoning manages to astonish.

Nichols has a genius for making landscapes and everyday objects resonate like crazy, for nailing the texture of dread.

Furiosa — somber, steady, and supremely twisted — is a reminder that none of this stuff is really supposed to be cool.