The third and final entry in French writer-director Florian Zeller’s acclaimed trilogy of plays about conflicted family values in perpetual crisis, The Son is a bold, harrowing and unflinchingly sobering film that is admittedly not for every taste, but an unavoidably intelligent piece of filmmaking for mature viewers that I highly recommend.

The Good Catholic is a sober, thoughtful and well-made little gem about a young priest torn between his dedication to God and his sudden physical and emotional attraction to an unconventional woman who forces him to question his faith and his purpose. It’s a small film in every way, but I found it riveting.

In the end, it’s the animals who conquer the emotions and provide the suspense in The Zookeeper’s Wife.

There are humorous intrusions (e.g., an art show at Jeanne’s gallery that includes Nazi symbols constructed from penises), and great performances throughout.

A mildly entertaining but well acted, sumptuously photographed and smartly written comedy with dark undertones about culinary addiction that can only be called “delicious.” See it and then check your cholesterol.

Sweet and well-intentioned but bland and disappointing, The Miracle Club is one of those slow, meandering Irish dramas that inspire more respect than excitement.

In a bravura performance that is the primary don't-miss reason for its existence, he (Carlyle) gives California Solo all he's got; even in scenes that just exist to pass the time, his presence informs the essence of the man he plays and the humanity of the film itself.

A riveting homage to an extraordinary force as dynamic as she was unique.

Lanthimos is so sure-handed and masterful in his craftsmanship, his cast so able and willing to crawl into whatever strange corner that he leads them to, that you cannot help but respect the man and his bizarre creation, even while resenting its obtuseness and self-regarding nature.

The beating heart of the film, this performance is further evidence of what a gift Foxx’s late career shift to supporting parts has been for filmgoers.

It’s not dull, you won’t dare doze, and there’s something to be said about a cast of bloodthirsty carnivores in the middle of an actor’s strike.

It’s pretty foreboding, loaded with atmosphere, dark as midnight and thick as a deadly fog. Also very well made and justifiably terrifying.

While the man in the title may have played a part in ushering us towards this unfortunate state, Mike Wallace Is Here is nonetheless a refreshing return to a more promising era when a swashbuckling, nicotine-huffing newsman made powerful people sweat for our collective edification.

Prison has long been seen as fertile soil for drama, but no movie has engaged with that idea quite like Sing Sing. This isn’t a legal drama or an escape thriller, but an exploration of what storytelling and artistic expression can do for a person who dearly needs an outlet.

It’s all so confusing that I found it next to impossible to keep up with who’s who, how they’re related to each other, and why—and I found the script too baffling and sentimental to care.

The movie moves as slowly as the oncoming fog, but Juliette Binoche is always a pleasure to watch, despite an awkward coda set in London that I found jarring.

Sensitively written and carefully directed with keenly observed nuance by Leland Orser, who also plays the grief-stricken husband driven to the brink of madness by the sudden death of his son, it’s a film that touches the heart with the tenderness of understatement.

The result is a film so personal you watch transfixed, caught up in a life that is constantly enthralling, with a universal appeal that extends beyond the exclusive Hills of Beverly.

It's uneven, but its optimistic message-lost causes can find strength through friendship and bonding-is contagious.

The best thing about Gangster Squad is how they got the 1940s accoutrements right.

Surprising, inventive and crisply, merrily written and directed by Derrick Borte, The Joneses is a brisk, captivating entertainment. Think Ozzie and Harriet on speed.

You have to admire the sheer physical scope of this epic, even if there are no animals in it.

The real pleasures are not to be found in the sweeping shots of the Great Smoky Mountains but in seeing how Mr. Redford and Mr. Nolte’s characters learn to get along.

The high-thrills onscreen version, which adheres relatively closely to reality, is taut, exciting and will send viewers to frantically search Wikipedia for the rest of the story.

It’s a good story, but too slow-moving for its own good. The cast works diligently, and Keener is scrappy but calm throughout, with a convincing naturalism as a woman with tremendous strength and a powerful belief in civil rights—at a time when most women were reluctant to speak out against political corruption.

As long as the kids stay in the picture — thankfully, that’s most of the movie — Spider-Man: Homecoming is the fun playdate most of us have been looking forward to since the character stole Cap’s shield last spring in "Captain America: Civil War."

The result is fascinating, informative, educational and totally entertaining.

Sensitively directed by Francis Ford Coppola’s granddaughter, Gia Coppola, it’s a film about a familiar subject, but with a heart as big as the Vegas strip and a style of its own that holds interest from start to finish.

British character actors are the best in the world, and King of Thieves provides a perfect example of why. Like the distaff side of today’s British royalty that includes Judi Dench, Maggie Smith, Joan Plowright and Eileen Atkins, it’s a marvel to watch Caine, Courtenay, Broadbent and Gambon go at each other with an aplomb that dazzles.

Buried beneath its furious, catch-as-catch-can approach to humor (Wine Country never met a joke it didn’t like), the film is a moving and nuanced portrayal of how difficult it is to be open and vulnerable even to those who love us utterly and without apology.

Walking Out is a skillfully made thriller with a pair of very talented actors who knock themselves out, in more ways than one, to guarantee that it never becomes boring.

The plot may be formulaic, but there’s nothing predictable about Ben Affleck’s commitment to the role of Jack, or the subtlety and sincerity with which he plays it.

Both Hosseini and Alidoosti underplay their parts with an apparent naturalism. And, yet, Farhadi constantly reminds the audience that they are watching a movie, that these handsome folks are actors playing actors in a film.

See it and prepare to be stunned and exhausted at the same time.

Anthony Hopkins plays the king of the hops, and he is excellent. So is the rest of the movie, a sober, no-frills account about the highest ransom ever collected up to that time — $10 million and counting.

Not a great film, but Moving On is a pleasurable enough way to kill an hour and a half without regret.

Thankfully, refreshingly, The Spectacular Now never once feels like a cautionary tale.

Sensitively directed by the Israeli duo Mihal Brezis and Oded Binnun, The Etruscan Smile is a perfect example of what can happen when a great, versatile and powerful actor raises familiar material above and beyond the level of mediocrity.

Remakes are odious, but Speak No Evil, while thoroughly unneeded and unasked for, is an Americanized remake of a 2022 thriller from Denmark that services its original material well, thanks mostly to a sprawling, contradictory and totally galvanizing centerpiece performance by James McAvoy.

Directed by Kevin Macdonald (The Last King of Scotland), it’s basically another tough genre workout that is all too familiar, with enough tension and violence to keep an audience alert if not riveted.

Sovereign is an ambitious, above-average action thriller with the extra bonus of being a thought-provoking civics lesson.

Eventually The Florida Project (the working title Disney gave to his dream in its planning stages on the drawing boards) sucks you into a world you would never otherwise know anything about.

Depression is a tricky subject for a movie aimed at a target audience that is depressed enough already. But this one justifies its challenges to feel-good escapism through honesty and integrity.

Turns out to be more suspenseful and keenly plotted than most, with a compelling centerpiece performance by Dan Stevens (Downton Abbey) that deserves attention.

When it finally ended, I felt like I had traveled the distance in the next sleeping bag. It’s exhausting but exhilarating.

Ridley Scott does a meticulous job of unraveling myriad gruesome facts in the case, and although it’s no surprise how it all turns out, the way a complex crime is played to the final throw of the dice by opposing forces is both admirable and focused.

The senior set deserves a few crumpets with their tea, and Part Two, which takes up where the original left off, aims to satisfy.

Its virtues are many and this filmed version of Hardy’s fourth novel is well worth seeing. It rises head and shoulders above most of what we’ve been seeing lately.

This is a movie where the charming guys fire holes into the un-charming guys while blowing stuff up and telling mildly funny jokes. Its story is absurd, most of the dialogue not spoken by one of the two leads is laughable, and save for a draggy middle section when the plot mechanics keep the bad boys separated, it’s a lot of fun.

My biggest problem with Flight is not the unanswered questions it raises, but the eleventh-hour epiphany just in time for a happy ending. Maybe I'm naturally cynical, but I simply don't believe that people are basically good at heart - and I don't buy into sudden salvation. Otherwise, Flight is one hell of an entertainment.

Fortunately, this is a filmmaker as talented as he is brave and stubborn. Hostiles breathes fresh oxygen into a genre as old as a Confederate cough.

In retrospect, it's preposterous. But while you're gasping for air, it's one hell of a thrill ride, like being stuck on a malfunctioning roller coaster for an hour and a half at top speed, and unable to get off.

Best of all, I applaud the director's triumph of intimate terror over preposterous puppets and noisy computer-generated effects. In The Bay, the mayhem is both fresh and thrilling.

In a movie without adults, the children are spontaneous and natural. And Ms. Ronan is captivating throughout.

It is quirky, dark, much maligned by feminists and too slow for some tastes, but it's a work worth seeing again, and Ms. Weisz is wonderful in it.

The Grey avoids smug clichés, takes you to places you least expect and settles for no comfortable solutions, while it explores the dark shadows of the male psyche and finds more emotional fragility there than you find in the usual phony macho myths from Hollywood.

Better films about senior citizens displaced by a greedy housing market have been made. (Anyone for Vittorio De Sica’s Umberto D, or Ira Sachs’ recent heartbreaker Love is Strange, about a homeless elderly gay couple?) But the humorous script by Charlie Peters (based on a novel by Jill Ciment), fluidly directed by Richard Loncraine, makes this an agreeable experience.

Elegant and understated, Belle is a true story about the effects of slavery on 18th-century England, told in the style of a sweeping romantic saga by Jane Austen or the Brontë sisters.

We need silly rom-coms to get through the long, hard days of reality just like Ireland needs tourism dollars after the pandemic, so why not celebrate Irish Wish for the joyous entertainment that it is.

The Descendants is a soap opera with Hawaiian shirts.

It all sounds dreadful, like the pilot for another brainless comedy series on network TV, but it grows on you.

Overwhelmed by bad country-western ballads, Two Step is flawed but it makes you laugh and cringe at the same time, and passes 90 minutes painlessly.

This movie is so raw and depressing that in one brutal scene Ms. Connelly is so desperate for a fix that she injects a hypodermic needle into her vagina. Don’t say I didn’t warn you.

Gunn is much better suited to the material than either David Ayer or the trailer house that re-cut the previous film, though while the end result is gorier, funnier and occasionally more heartfelt, it doesn’t quite coalesce into something totally fun, or totally meaningful.

A structurally messy but emotionally effective coming of age movie that gets a lot of it right. High school is an ordeal only the fittest can survive.

Peel away the big budget genre film’s veneer of Western Civ citations—embodied by references to artist and inventor Michelangelo, composer Richard Wagner and the romantic poets Lord Byron and Percy Bysshe Shelley, among others—and what you have is rather conventional Lego blocks of sci-fi horror.

While there’s something dispiriting and cynical about this conflation of product placement and pop commentary, it does give the film a kitchen sink quality: there is literally something for everyone.

It’s sappy at times, but so was Schitt’s Creek and the gentle sweetness of the film will likely appeal to a lot of viewers.

Although the film centers on Trump, a divisive man and genuine threat to American democracy, Sherman and Abbasi leave space for The Apprentice to embrace larger themes. It’s about the possibility of corruption and how easily money and power can entice us.

Omni Loop is good enough at telling a story sweetly, but it does falter in its 110-minute runtime. The sci-fi elements are left to the wayside at times, even when they seem ripe for making metaphors and deepening the story.

By crisscrossing time frames, Crowley, working from a script by playwright Nick Payne, halts his film’s momentum and lessens the overall impact of the central romance.

Like that dash across the freeway, the dirty jokes, bad language and bursts of violence end up being something that we have to grit our teeth to endure to get a glimpse of the inner lives of these boys, which are far richer than we typically see from a Hollywood comedy.

Yes, it’s a bit helter-skelter, but it is also an adequately enjoyable and untaxing way to kill off a couple of hours.

It’s sexy, violent and creepy, but damn if it didn’t keep me glued to my chair with tension.

It’s not much of a movie, but it feels good and leaves you with life-affirming optimism.

I Used to Be Funny reflects on essential concepts, even if it doesn’t always grasp them in a satisfying way. Still, it’s worth watching Sennott in almost anything.

The true star of the show, however, is M. Night Shyamalan, whose camera work remains a marvel. Most of Knock at the Cabin takes place in a single room with its protagonists trapped in a stationary position, and yet Shyamalan continually finds new ways to frame the space, the characters, and their relationships to each other.

Mulligan’s raw portrayal of a woman trapped by invisible walls is certainly powerful — she keeps the film afloat even when it falters — and the way Fennell gives human form to those walls imbues the film with a simmering rage. However, these handful of strengths are hardly enough to render its other failings moot.

There’s plenty of magic in Fantastic Beasts: The Secrets of Dumbledore, but viewers will need a summoning spell to conjure up a tangible plot.

There’s nothing else to watch or care about in the entire film anyway. Once again, a great actress is on her own.

There is a cool detachment to the presentation of the story that, while perhaps fitting for a movie about a crime so carefully calculated it defies imagination, nonetheless serves to undercut the film’s high stakes.

It is just that when some of its lines fall flat, pulling in portents of a future we all know well, it wakes us from a dream few of us want to be over.

My reservations about Copperhead are outweighed by the noble intentions that inspired it.

The result is an old-fashioned play turned into an old-fashioned movie that looks like an old-fashioned play. Nothing happens and everybody talks incessantly.

So which side of the movie finally prevails — the lackluster conventionality of its text or the breathtaking singularity of its visuals and action? The latter does, if just by the nose on Brad Pitt’s perfectly imperfect face. Combined with the film’s lavish technical achievements, his classic movie star sturdiness makes Ad Astra a memorable filmgoing experience even as the story it tells slips off into the ether.

Written and directed with precision and sensitivity by Thomas McCarthy (The Station Agent), it revives the pleasant art of storytelling most of today’s young filmmakers have all but abandoned, and cures (temporarily, anyway) my allergy to Adam Sandler.

It’s mostly nostalgia that keeps the movie going, although Grace is very compelling and should have been allowed to properly lead the film.

Megadoc is a mood piece and a process piece, shot up close with lo-fi video equipment, but it’s never allowed to probe deeply enough.

The unfolding action is never farcical enough to make the film satirical or outright funny, but it’s also never imbued with enough historical gravity to truly matter.

This time around, super-spy Ethan Hunt feels overshadowed by star and producer Tom Cruise and his own unquenchable desire to climb buildings, cling to airplanes, and sprint across rooftops. It makes for a great theatergoing experience, but not necessarily a great film.

A mixed bag of dumb jokes and unspeakable violence that is a big improvement over his (McDonagh) other work (it towers over Seven Psychopaths, which was one of the worst movies ever made) but not good enough to write home about at today’s inflated postal rates.

The Girl sounds like a real mess. It isn’t. It’s just a slow, well-made human interest story on a very small scale, ultimately touching but as inconsequential as a slice of pineapple at a Hawaiian luau.

Five Nights in Maine is too inconsequential to spend money on in a major release, which, I predict, will be brief.

Die Another Day is the most thrilling, lavishly designed and imaginative Bond picture in years. It is also the most preposterous.

You watch the movie like you read a book, which leads to eventual tedium. You can’t put a bookmark in a movie, come back later, and pick up where you left off.

With little action, no suspense and an ending that fails in every way, Matt Damon is the only thing memorable about Stillwater.

Enola Holmes isn’t a revolution or revelation that is going to forever alter the course of cinema, but it is enough of a charming and cheerful change to give Netflix a new franchise.

Dual can occasionally feel like a one-joke film that never bothers to be funny, or where the comedy comes off as so arch that it lands as something else entirely.