Wonder Woman won’t reinvent the superhero franchise, or the origin story. But it does show how compelling they can still be, when someone is allowed to do them right.

When its pet topics enter into conversation with one another, revealing a throughline underscoring the basic rights of everyone working on a film project, Subject cruises along. In the film’s most propulsive sections, passion is as paramount as self-awareness, with vigorously cut documentary snippets affectionately emphasizing its self-critical points.

Cooper isn’t reinventing comfort food, but he is cooking it well. You may not remember it in a few months, but it goes down easy and leaves you feeling surprisingly full—and in a world of stiff, larger-than-life, emotionally vacant Oscar-bait any day, sometimes that can be enough.

Old is not Shyamalan’s best film, nor is it the best film so far this summer, but it’s both a chilling summer escape and an empathetic reminder that other people are working against us as just as quickly as time, when all we have in our time left is each other.

The triptych of dark, minimalist fables that comprise Kindness share actors, an unnerving Twilight Zone tone, and a series of rhymes and echoes that sometimes feel like a chorus repeatedly transposed into different keys. But they most immediately, obviously share a lack of interest in being liked.

Some of the film’s punchy dialogue pops us on the nose now and again with its Themes (specifically its notes on sexism and the American Dream), but if you’re willing to look past that and a contrived half-hour detour, I Care A Lot is a savvy and wicked endeavor peppered with personality.

With a deft docudrama approach (that doesn’t overdo the usual extra-shaky handheld camera and overtly grainy visual tone), Padilha shows a commendable technical control over that rare movie that could have benefitted from being much longer.

Hotel Mumbai may not be a perfect example of its genre, but its restraint from ideological grandstanding and a top-notch technical control of tone make it worthy of a watch.

Anyone nostalgic for their grandmother’s cooking will no doubt feel its inexorable pull toward the kitchen.

This is a daring, unsettling, inscrutable and at times deeply boring venture into the farthest boundaries of horror esotericism, utterly unlike anything that most viewers will have ever seen before.

It’s possible to fuse pulp with prestige while still saying smart things about the seismic political shifts required for creeps like the Proud Boys to skitter from the rocks they live under and infest society’s better elements. The Wrath of Becky makes no such effort. It’s built to thrill and made for chuckles, offset by Seann William Scott’s looming menace.

Compared to the stark comparison in Camperforce of Jeff Bezos’ unparalleled global wealth to the fact that nearly one-third of American households headed by people 55 years and older have no pension or savings to their names, Zhao’s Nomadland can’t help but come off as somewhat toothless.

If Grashaw had simply trusted his instincts a little more and allowed Josiah to exist as a simple meditation on one family’s traumas, it would have easily joined the ranks of the great cinematic Southern Gothic horrors.

Men is a horror film operating largely under nightmare logic and allegorical rumbling, and in a broad sense can’t offer many true surprises.

Perhaps the most endearing aspect of Sly is how it re-emphasizes that the real Stallone is, in fact, a pretty chatty, even loquacious guy. Even his references to his own limitations name-drop enough artists to undermine that lunkheaded image.

It’s an overwhelming horror movie—maybe a little too overwhelming.

The Takedown isn’t a radical or revolutionary movie (it is still about good-guy cops), but it’s refreshing relative to its genre contemporaries.

On its terms, and especially with an ending I read as ambiguous, The Woman in the Yard is also unflinching enough to maybe count as daring, and maybe Sollet-Cerra’s most viscerally moving film. It’s also among his least playful, least comforting. Your anxieties can’t follow you around if you can barely make it out of bed.

The Pink Cloud explores the often reactionary nature of humans, especially when tasked with imagining a future completely uprooted from convention.

It’s not a great standalone entry into the Fast canon, but as the franchise speeds towards its finish line, it’s still satisfying to know that it’s in the hands of someone well-versed in the series’ strengths and still willing to imagine new ways to crash its toys into each other.

Despite Shook’s occasional heavy-handedness, the film mostly reaches the glaring social critiques its strains for. If you can put up with substitute social media app interfaces and won’t whimper at fuzzy images of brutalized doggos, Shook is worth a shot.

Ant-Man has more than its share of logic lapses and convenient (read: sloppy) scripting, but most viewers won’t care. In much the same way Guardians of the Galaxy was powered by the charisma and affability of Chris Pratt, Ant-Man is buoyed by the charm of Rudd.

Antebi sets his own tone and masters it. The movie has the rush and the desperation of a fresh start.

The primary fascination of Won’t You Be My Neighbor? lives when it stands outside this man and stares at him, unfathomably, wondering what in the world must have made him tick. The film tries to do more than that, with varying levels of success, but that’s the core: Who is this guy?

It’s her unstoppability, her tireless drive to see through the work she believes needs doing in the field of sexual enlightenment that gives Ask Dr. Ruth real urgency, lifting what’d be an otherwise breezy character portrait to near essential levels.

For those looking for more razzle-dazzle with assless chaps, Magic Mike’s Last Dance may test your patience with its meandering middle. But Channing Tatum is so damn skilled as a dancer, comedian and romantic hero, he rewards the patient.

More casual viewers’ mileage may vary on which stunts are laugh-out-loud funny and which are abjectly horrifying, and the rickety carnival rollercoaster ride works better when the other passengers—whether fellow audience members or the on-camera talent—are screaming and laughing along in equal measure.

Revived and pumped up for the sequel, Wan’s synthy semi-psychedelia still makes for a delightful trip, but maybe Aquaman and the Lost Kingdom could have used a little fresh air; for all of the eye-popping colors, creatures and action flourishes he engineers in and around the sea, there isn’t a single sequence as front-to-back satisfying as the surface-world rooftop chase in Italy that popped off the screen in the first movie.