Endlessly entertaining and frequently hysterical, “Anora” is one of the year’s best films and a formidable Oscar contender.

Writer-director Greg Jardin’s seductive — if occasionally difficult to follow — movie is a wicked spin on a familiar tale: a group of friends spending a dramatic drunken evening in a big, luxe house.

For nearly two and a half hours, director Todd Phillips’ pathologically unnecessary movie cycles through so many potential reasons to exist. But, as “Deux” grows increasingly disturbing, repulsive and strange on the hunt, it ultimately never finds a satisfying one.

It’s a breathtakingly human film — about a bird and a bot.

From beginning to end, the craft — directing, acting, writing, editing, design — is just not there.

In The Life of Chuck, the pieces come together much too obviously. And the takeaways — that a person is the product of experience, and don’t judge a book by its cover — are well-tread to the point of total flatness.

Wolfs, a so-called comedy written and directed by Jon Watts in which Clooney and Pitt play rival New York fixers tasked with discreetly disposing of a dead body, is a dreadful, laugh-free slog that tests the limits of what star power alone can salvage.

Lets viewers uniquely into Springsteen’s creative process: Choosing a set list, adjusting tempos, collaborating with background singers. In short: Getting the band back together.

It’s hard to imagine audiences being more glued to another movie this year, so sexy and stirring the story is from start to finish.

Since the characters barely get a chance to catch their breath, let alone say their piece, we don’t learn much about them beyond familiar traits. However, Reitman’s aim isn’t to seriously illuminate that fateful night so much as to energetically add to showbiz mythology.

While I needle “Conclave” for being far from realistic, its meticulous detail is evidenced immediately by the ceremonial removal of the papal ring from the corpse and the sealing of his apartment. Visually, the entire film’s a stunner.

At the start, “The Cut” is an adequate, typical gloves-and-shoves picture. And then, with a snap of the fingers, director Sean Ellis’ film turns absolutely interminable.

Vitally, though, the director gets a terrific performance from Jerome, which prevents “Unstoppable” from falling into the traps so many athletic yarns do.

Heller’s enjoyable film is not the cringe fest you walk in expecting it to be, even if the premise will be a hairy leap for some moviegoers.

I enjoyed this ride of titillation, torment, insanity and exploitation to such a preposterous extent that I’ve considered signing up for online therapy to wrestle with it.

This belabored movie, which is much more serious than its predecessor and takes nearly an hour to take off, feels like it lasts a Day-O.

It’s an impressive first effort from Kravitz that, like the island and the women, immediately has us in its grip.

The bonkers ending will be a talker. At first, I was skeptical, segued to disturbed, and then thoroughly creeped out. It’s a wild choice, however, one with a hint of precedent elsewhere in the series. And it serves to differentiate what is, admirably, a highly deferential film.

It Ends With Us is, despite its failings and indulgences, a highly emotional and absorbing couple of hours.

Unfortunately, for the time being, the star of “Tár” and “Blue Jasmine” is stuck as the lead of the worst movie of the year — a grueling, 102-minute endurance test that’s as lifeless as the video game it’s based on.

There aren’t really game-changing shocks here so much as detours. Shyamalan takes what your non-serial-killer father might call the scenic route. The destination? Meh.

Director Shawn Levy’s laugh-a-second movie is easily the best Marvel has delivered since 2021’s “Spider-Man: No Way Home,” and provides similarly nostalgic pleasures in its whiplash-inducing number of retro cameos — none of which I’ll spoil, for fear of my own life.

Twisters, the disaster movie starring Daisy Edgar-Jones, is an oddity in 2024: a reboot that’s actually worth your time.

What’s so unsettling about his Longlegs is, as big and cartoonish as he is, the weirdo is just believable enough. You could run into him late at night at a highway rest stop or, God forbid, on an empty subway platform. Cage makes a meal out of the murderer...During this so-so summer at the movies, something’s finally got legs.

Director Greg Berlanti’s romantic comedy, which imagines that Richard Nixon’s administration really did film a fake, backup moon landing in 1969, is a mystifying misfire all along the way from initial concept to end credits.

Everything uniquely special and hilarious about the 1984 fish-out-of-water hit is gone, replaced by commodity streaming mush that looks like every other ho-hum action-comedy right now.

It’s hard to believe Costner left “Yellowstone” to make such an embarrassing, poorly told mess.

Smooth as fresh asphalt, the film makes us pine for a pothole or two.