Dick Johnson Is Dead is the best reminder possible to cherish your loved ones while they’re still living — to take that extra photo or video as something to hang onto once they’re gone.

The film is, in the end, Hawkins’ to own. Her eyes — and her posture, her voice, her jittery movements — defy any show-stealing, and lend a solidity to a film that might be a little flimsy otherwise.

Its unusual structure makes it both novel and ungainly.

Scare Me plays some thoughtful games with the idea of horror-comedy, and eventually, Ruben uses the self-aware humor to sharpen the shocks.

The humor being volleyed around in Hubie Halloween isn’t malicious; Sandler, as Hubie, is almost always the butt of the joke, and the gags are mostly gross-outs rather than jabs at any specific people. Hubie Halloween may not be Uncut Gems, but it excels at being what it is: a comedy that’s easy to watch, and easy to forget about.

The match of material and star works so well that the story’s relative simplicity and undercooked quality aren’t too much of a stumbling block. It’s a perfect next step for Brown, and hopefully a sign of greater things to come.

Night of the Kings occasionally strays too far into fantasy (and CGI), even though the more grounded scenes are what truly make the film sing. Still, it’s a stunning work. Lacôte’s tribute to the power of stories is a powerful story in and of itself, celebrating oral traditions and the rituals we create for ourselves in order to make life just a little more bearable.

Vinterberg’s ending offers an unlikely sense of catharsis, even though it isn’t truly happy, turning the film into something fresh and affecting. On top of all that, the film provides the opportunity to watch Mikkelsen give perhaps his best performance yet.

Every aspect of Wolfwalkers is thoughtfully, beautifully rendered, and the story is full of twists that keep things unpredictable until the finale. It’s one of the most impressive films of the year, and the best animated film of 2020 thus far.

American Utopia will last past the current moment, past the pandemic, but in the cultural context of its upcoming release, it feels both like an electric current and a balm.

The journey Zhao has crafted is marvelous, exploring literal peaks and valleys as well as emotional ones.

The film is easy on the eyes, and its cast is strong, but that doesn’t make up for a thin story. The action keeps moving by necessity, given how many characters are in play, but stop to inspect the proceedings, and it becomes clear that that movement isn’t based on much.

New Mutants doesn’t feel like a movie made for teens. It barely even feels like a movie that was made about teens.

The maze Kaufman is leading us through is a mystery, as he never pulls back far enough to show us the whole thing. But as itchy and claustrophobic as the paths are, they ultimately lead to a sense of hope.

Brendan Walsh’s cold survivalist thriller, Centigrade, is a creatively crafted claustrophobic study of a fractured marriage. Strongly acted, the drama wallows in melancholy while presenting peaks of hope amid its simple icy setting.

At its best, Children of the Sea steadily envelops viewers with curiosity, drive, and calmness. It’s a sensory concert.

Mulan handily clears the bar set by live-action duds like The Lion King and Beauty and the Beast, but it still fails to recapture the magic of the movie it’s adapting. It forgoes the strongest ideas in the animated film (the songs and the humble origins of heroism) in order to try to tell a more conventional story.

It’s the rare teen movie that doesn’t seem like it’s mostly a fantasy, that gets beyond the big, artificial beats of series like Glee and Riverdale.

Though the filmmakers hoped to balance the historical atrocities of slavery with contemporary racial oppression, Antebellum — yet another unnecessary slave movie — rarely feels like a horror flick. Instead, its needless brutality, ropy character work, and misguided twist make it easily 2020’s worst movie so far.

Candace Against the Universe does everything Phineas and Ferb does and then some. It’s a natural evolution of the show for Disney Plus, relishing in the series’ perfectly timed humor, updating reference points for the fun of it, and adding an emotional layer that resonates

Like its predecessors, Bill & Ted Face the Music is ultimately just friendly fluff, but Winter and Reeves are charming together, and the need for Bill and Ted to grow up a little helps give the film a backbone.

The film’s experimental nature makes it tougher to swallow than a conventional biopic, but also more interesting and rewarding to engage with. Great performances help keep the whole enterprise anchored — Hawke and MacLachlan are wonderful as men caught in conflict with each other — and the anachronisms provide food for thought long after the film has ended.

It’s just enough entertainment to provide fodder for one diverting sleepover, but it’ll be forgotten as soon as the morning dawns.

Though the plot beats of The One and Only Ivan are predictable, given that it’s a story about sad caged animals, there’s enough genuine emotion threaded through the formulaic story to make the movie enjoyable, surpassing some otherwise cheesy moments.

As it turns out, “Don’t try to understand it, feel it” is mixed advice. Viewers won’t be able to fully understand Tenet’s dialogue, and they’re likely to have the same problem in trying to understand its convoluted plot. But there isn’t much there to feel, either, making the experience feel more like a math exam than a mesmerizing action film.

Even without being compared to Train to Busan, Peninsula lacks the grounding to be able to stand alone. There’s never a dull moment, but there’s nothing to make a lasting impression, either.

Even as a low-key Netflix time-waster, Fearless isn’t that much fun, except for people who really, really like the idea of super-babies.

The doc never feels propulsive, or even particularly informative, and it never has to. For people who remotely enjoy the existence of dogs, Well Groomed is one of the most wholesome, joyous, purely enjoyable documentaries in the streaming world, and Stern doesn’t aspire to anything more.

It’s rare to see an anime story that solely focuses on adults navigating the issues of maturity, personal development, and a stymied future. It’s even rarer to see anime that simultaneously tackles those ideas, and wraps them in such an extravagant visual fantasia.

Howard explores the life of the lyricist and the magic he brought to some of the most famous Disney melodies.

Finding self-identity through the guidance of her ancestors, Beyoncé lays bare that celebrating Blackness isn’t just an appreciation of the past. Black Is King is a reclamation of our thriving future.

Unfortunately, The Rental unravels. Rather than building on the characters’ moralistic inequities, and relating them to their unknown voyeurist, Franco lets the final act wither under the weight of facile jump scares and an unimaginative killer who apes one of horror’s iconic maniacs.

Amulet attempts to yoke together serious drama with over-the-top genre satisfaction. Instead, it winds up tying itself in unsatisfying knots.

The film’s plot, adapted by Simon Rich from one of his short stories, is unfortunately saggy. But Rogen’s performance remains rock-solid throughout.

Seimetz has crafted the perfect anxious monster, repeating an idea often enough to let it take root without explaining so much about it that it can be rationalized away. It’s all nestled within a dark — and at times, darkly funny — psychological horror movie.

Project Power’s burst of color comes from its central conceit and Joost and Schulman’s sense of style. It’s bright and attractive, but it fizzles out quickly. Tomlin’s idea is innovative, but the story he tells with it is tired.

Greyhound’s greatest asset is its sense of spectacle, unfortunately somewhat diminished outside a theater setting. But Schneider and Hanks keep Greyhound compelling through detail, and through the sheer power of Hanks’ furrowed, determined brow.

At times, Relic reaches something like lyricism, which lifts a bleak horror movie above hopeless wallowing. The movie isn’t so much doomy or depressing as it is clear-eyed and resolute about its own horrors.

With The Old Guard, Prince-Bythewood is taking a lead of her own, showing that this old genre still has much more life left in it, if it’ll let outsiders take charge.

It’s highly competent throughout, and outright brilliant at times, but it lacks the necessary level of connection with the real world. And by the end, it’s lost track even of its own hard-earned but fragile sense of emotion.

Writer-director Jeffrey Brown may not be an innovator, but he has a poetic knack for coaxing the old roots of dread into fresh, cancerous bloom.

The presentation of this filmed version is occasionally rickety, but not nearly enough to stifle such a stellar production.

Director David Dobkin doesn’t land every single beat, but he taps into that well of carefree exultation so potently that the movie’s stumbles hardly register.

The satire is goofy and insightful. But unlike The Daily Show’s ripped-from-the-headlines comedy, or Stewart’s grim debut feature, the hostage biopic Rosewater, his second feature feels like it was broadcast from another galaxy, and is only now reaching our current Earthly conversation.

The story of The Vast of Night is nothing particularly special. The storytelling, though, is spectacular.

It’s a lean, smartly shot horror-thriller, and though most of the characters are thin, the performances lend them more depth.

As in his stand-up comedy and his appearances on “Weekend Update,” Davidson’s take on himself is self-deprecating without sacrificing emotional honesty. With Apatow and Sirus’ help, he’s created a self-portrait that feels genuine, and perfectly captures both his appeal and his potential as a movie star.

The chemistry between stars Kumail Nanjiani and Issa Rae keeps the romantic comedy charming.

Though Stein assembles his early sequences with precision, laying out geography and shorthanding through set design, that sharpness is undermined by basically everything else in the movie, from micro to major.

The pall of death automatically makes The Trip to Greece a more somber affair than its predecessors, but doesn’t make it devoid of fun.

The animation decisions in The Willoughbys heighten the message of redefining family, connecting the medium directly to the storyline.

This isn’t a movie about car chases and explosions, it’s about the squirmy but satisfying feeling of watching justice done, and it’s a pleasure to watch the pieces fall into place.

Barker’s obvious care and respect for his subject makes Sergio stirring to watch. But as Craig Borten’s script leans more and more on romance, the film flounders.

What’s frustrating is that The Wrong Missy isn’t entirely devoid of self-awareness.

With The Half of It, Wu has crafted a love story that tackles love in all senses, not just romantic, prioritizing not just who gets to kiss who, but what each character hopes and dreams for. They’re so well-realized that watching The Half of It feels like the beginning of a new relationship. It’s exciting, enticing, and filled with hope for what comes next — in this case, seeing what else Wu has up her directorial sleeve.

Director Michael Scott, working in a moody color palette that often makes the movie look like an extended episode of Riverdale, keeps the surprises coming at a pace that ensures no one will think too hard about the fact that there aren’t really any clues to follow. The pleasure of Dangerous Lies isn’t finding out whodunit, but simply yelling, “What?” at your screen as increasingly unbelievable twists play out.

Green’s approach to stories — finding larger truths rather than focusing on the most sensational aspects — vaults The Assistant into extraordinary territory, as it sheds light not only on the actions of abusers in power, but on the people around them, who can’t or won’t do anything to change the status quo.

Capone is an ambitious, impressive film. But there’s a bittersweetness to it, too.

The movie is brisk, good-natured, and amusing, but these aren’t qualities that demand the resurrection of a low-rent cartoon empire. The charm of Scooby-Doo and his friends doesn’t have anything to do with the world of bizarre Hanna-Barbera TV curiosities they helped spawn. It comes from their mysterious ability to survive well past their seeming expiration date.

The concept of a kid getting magical powers that help him escape his mundane life isn’t anything new, but The Main Event stands out by avoiding overplayed clichés and focusing on the emotional message.

The textures and sounds littered throughout the film plug up the plot holes effectively enough to keep the film sailing for its 91-minute duration, but there’s no glue keeping that confetti in place, and those flaws open up again as soon as there’s enough breathing room to look at them properly.

Viewers who are justifiably stressed about contagion and infection might not consider Sea Fever the right kind of light evening viewing. But for people who can handle the strong quarantine vibes, Sea Fever is a solid, engaging creature mystery.

Ma’s performance remains a rich source of color and emotion; the thinness of Angela’s character, on the other hand, becomes a pall hanging over the movie.

It’s the rare romantic comedy that doesn’t underline viewers’ needy true-love fantasies by saying “This couple was destined to get together,” so much as it says “Eh, this could happen, I guess. Whatever.”

The mash-up of tones is a tough one, as is the film’s central pairing, but it works just well enough.

The clarity and care with which Hittman handles a relatively straightforward story lends Never Rarely Sometimes Always an urgency greater than it would have if she tried to moralize about making proper care more easily accessible to (and less stigmatized for) women.

This would-be tale of female empowerment spends too much time worrying about visuals rather than the story it’s telling, and it loses any sense of catharsis as a result.

The film isn’t without its flaws, but they’re all forgivable in light of how well it hits the feel-good bullseye.

At heart, Vivarium is a puzzle, a story full of twists and thin on character development. To the film’s credit, the alien-ness is effective, lending Vivarium the tenseness of a horror movie and engaging the audience where the story fails.

By focusing on specific individuals and the shared starting ground of Camp Jened, the filmmakers find a concrete thread to follow rather than getting lost in how much history there is to cover. More importantly, they bring a personal, empathetic touch to the story that makes it feel immediate, relatable, and like a call to further action.

It’s a movie designed for people who like their future-fiction thoughtful and relevant, and for people who enjoy the runaway-train feeling of having no idea where a given story could possibly go next.

The plot about being true to yourself is still relevant, but Stargirl addresses it at a surface level, without ever really going beyond the main character’s mildly quirky aesthetic.

The goal isn’t to find a killer, so much as it is to emphasize the ways women’s stories are often dismissed, and how people who aren’t well-off aren’t offered the same institutional consideration and care as the rich. It’s a compelling point to make, but one almost lost in the movie’s murky execution.

The movie looks a little like a lost Tony Scott project, but not quite enough — the style isn’t as tactile. Most of its ridiculous conviction comes from Diesel. He’s given plenty of better performances, but here he’s especially convincing in the role of a guy who legitimately believes he has nothing better to do.

The movie’s mock-jaundiced attitude toward social media is itself satirical, and there’s a germ of a funny idea about how principled liberals can get entangled in pointless social media battles and infighting. But it’s eclipsed by an unavoidably moneyed perspective that presumes privileged people are inherently liberal, rather than attacking the hypocrisy of rich liberals in particular.

As Berg and Wahlberg (perfect partners, even in name) ascended inexorably toward a parodic level of Bostonian-ness in Spenser Confidential, I wondered if I wouldn’t be having a better time just getting a more concentrated dose of Arkin in The Kominsky Method.

If only every film could achieve the sublime tenderness of First Cow.

The explosive fury of Bacurau’s slow-burn climax is a gratifying payoff to the film’s suspense, but without the deliberate measures taken to make the rest of the story count, it’d ring hollow.

If the creator’s words are to be trusted, and this is My Hero Academia’s final film, the series has departed on an exciting high point, among the series’ greatest moments.

It’s colorful and charming, and it’s certainly unique in its story specifics. But it also feels safe, simple, and soft-edged compared to Pixar’s wilder swings for the outfield.

Like The Snowman, The Last Thing He Wanted fails to give its audience all the clues necessary to form a coherent picture, and flops in spite of what should be a killer director/cast combination.

This Emma fully earns its titular period, as well as an early place on any list of 2020’s most enchanting films.

Watching a foot-tall plaything flip over a dinner table would be either hilarious or terrifying, and either direction would be an improvement over the flavorless slurry Bell is dishing up.

Fantasy Island isn’t especially scary, but scares don’t usually seem like the point of a Blumhouse horror gimmick. At their best, these movies have the energy and shamelessness of a carnival ride, where the enthusiasm means more than the atmosphere. Fantasy Island knowingly steals from everywhere, and sometimes cleverly incorporates its derivativeness into the filmmaking.

With the energy of a Saturday morning cartoon that comes and goes, Fowler’s movie entertains and sneaks in a message about feeling sad, alone, and unmoored. It’s not for longtime Sonic fans, but it’s guaranteed to be someone’s nostalgic favorite in the year 2038.

Birds of Prey is a messy, leg-breaking, heartwarming, inspirational good time.

This is the kind of film where viewers can let themselves flow with the film’s emotion, or entirely ignore the action and just get lost in the beauty of the imagination. Either way, it’s a luscious trip to take.

The artistry at work in The Wave isn’t enough to keep the film from caving in under its middling story.

The strangeness of the material isn’t VHYES’ primary attraction; it’s the atypical mode of storytelling and sense of sincerity.

In an exhausted, introspective, dad-jokey way, Bad Boys for Life gives these boys a definitive ending. It isn’t one fans ever expected, but it’s highly watchable.

Characters go from one place to the next with no explanation and no second thought, and even single scenes play out as if someone attacked the reel of film with a pair of scissors.

The film isn’t especially scary, but it has a creepy, pervasive grimness, well-acted by the impressive ensemble.

Cats undermines itself in both editing and musical arrangement, barely has a plot to hang its hat on, and is CGI-ed into oblivion. Yet there’s something weirdly wonderful about just how committed Hooper is to his vision, which feels like it should have been audience-tested into something less phantasmagorical.

The film feels clumsy, hurried, and above all, like an admission of creative defeat.

It’s a disappointment to discover that Bay’s new Netflix movie, 6 Underground, is utterly joyless.

Even as Howard screws himself over with blustery bravado, it’s hard not to root for him. It’s a testament to Sandler’s performance, categorically the best of his career, but also to the Safdies’ skill behind the camera.

For the most part, Black Christmas is a breath of fresh air. Unlike their 1974 counterparts, these sisters are more than just bodies to be dismembered; they’re forcefully bonding together to fight back against an oppressive system.

Welcome to the Jungle didn’t need a follow-up, but The Next Level actually ups the ante, rebuking flagging reboots by addressing its material thoughtfully. It makes the return to the jungle a thrill, and, crucially, makes it easy to imagine coming back for more.