Who doesn’t want to be lauded for being absolutely rubbish at something we love? The Phantom of the Open is a good reminder that you don’t have to be the best to achieve your dreams.

Written by comedian Joel Kim Booster, who also stars, the movie reframes the traditional rom-com by putting gay men into the leading roles and inviting viewers to experience drama and relationships that don’t often get the Hollywood spotlight.

There is still something to be said for skillful, old-fashioned filmmaking, and director Joseph Kosinski has done plenty of it here. The result goes with popcorn like butter, and I liked it in spite of myself.

Anchored by a haunting lead performance by Jessie Buckley, Men is an unsettling drama about the cultural pathology that holds women responsible for the actions of men, focused not so much on how it feels but on what it does. It’s quiet but visually verbose, mixing obvious and obscure metaphors in a way that would get tiresome if not for its modest 100 minute runtime.

It’s not a guilty pleasure; it’s actual pleasure. If there was ever a time to run into Downton Abbey’s welcoming embrace it’s now.

A gentle yet high-caliber mash-up of Sartre and Wes Anderson’s Bottle Rocket, Carmichael’s film is irreverent, serious, and heartrendingly sad in ways so crushingly honest that the unlikely outcome is spiritual uplift.

Almost too agonizing to watch, I urge you not to miss it, and sincerely hope the people who made it are making immediate plans to set up a mandatory screening for the Supreme Court.

It’s a true story so strange it makes you wonder what other untold chapters of World War remain.

Every good magician knows that the real trick is making the audience care. For all of Doctor Strange in the Multiverse of Madness’s mind-bending universe jumping, that particular magic never manages to arrive in the theater.

A charming, understated and completely enjoyable frolic about how ordinary people can do extraordinary things that seems doubly startling because, while seeming implausible, it also happens to be absolutely true.

A sports anime focused around a group of orphans which makes the conscious decision to compete over basic necessities instead of participating in everyday society is the seed of a fruitful idea. But instead of playing to his strengths Araki has settled for lowest common denominator storytelling.

It is an absurd premise, one made even more so by its execution, which at the hands of veteran Hollywood thriller director Martin Campbell (the one-time director of Bond films who has been in movie jail since 2011’s Green Lantern) is often lackluster and, on occasion, shockingly inept.

A poignant and moving coming-of-age story, and an example of the way cinema can make real both memories, without losing their bitter honesty, and dreams, without compromising on their glowing promise.

From its gas-passing piranha (voiced by In the Heights’ Anthony Ramos) to its reliance on phrases like “butt rock” and “grumpy pants” that seem grown in a lab to make the 12-and-under set giggle, the movie plays its target audience like a fiddle.

A free-wheeling ride through the best of the actor’s filmography.

The Northman is a big-budget epic, but it retains those indie roots, with Eggers bringing in all of the elements that have made his past films so aesthetically successful.

The movie spends the bulk of its largely inert runtime painfully unaware that it is an example of the self-indulgent narcissism it’s intended to send up.

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.

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.

This is a director whose only interest is in entertainment without a trace of originality. He isn’t interested in quality, only in length, noise, and stale ideas from old movies. There’s plenty of all three in Ambulance.

The movie is sewer drainage, but it does give Melissa Leo a rare chance to quote lines by the Bard she would never otherwise be asked to deliver.

Watching The Lost City is the cinematic equivalent of slogging your way through monkey poop.

This movie is as lifeless as the bodies Morbius drains and throws on the floor.

Stan’s trip to the moon may fade into the ether, but his ride down the highway with his brothers and sisters, all of them unsecured on the flatbed of a pickup truck is so brimming with immediacy that it won’t even matter.

Written and directed by Daniel Kwan and Daniel Scheinert, collectively known as Daniels, the movie is an explosion of creative weirdness that is equal parts exhilarating and overwhelming.

Rory Kennedy’s Downfall: The Case Against Boeing is a swift and beautifully clear documentary about many things, chief among them the cost of profit above all.

It’s a movie that relies on the sort of nuance Rylance has mastered, and he unfolds the layers of his character, Leonard, with the same precision that goes into crafting a custom suit.

It’s not exactly a dull watch—two hours pass quickly—but it’s a purposeless one. Everyone involved, especially the puppy, deserved better.