With a patient, compassionate, but penetrating gaze, How to Have Sex maps out the dangerous, murky territory of teenage sexuality and friendships.

The squibs are juicy, the nudity is full-frontal, and the psychedelic orgy sequence is extended. But there’s a trenchant point to all the blood, sex, and urine.

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.

Michael B. Jordan imbues this spinoff/threequel with a cinematic zest the series has never seen before, expanding the visual language of the Hollywood boxing movie in remarkable ways.

The result is a claustrophobic introspection into guilt and remorse, which hardly sounds like fitting material for a grandiose movie musical. But Oppenheimer’s focused approach to human drama makes it sing.

Mars Express is the rare example of an animated feature that warrants an almost immediate rewatch upon completion, if only to appreciate the craftsmanship of its presentation. It’s a densely layered sci-fi story that’s light on proper nouns, but heavy on subtext.

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

Turtles has familiar John Green touchpoints — a gimmicky story setup, a teen romance, a quirky best friend — but it turns the story inward and pulls off a fantastic character exploration, one that feels like a gut-punch in its best moments.

It’s a delight no matter how you slice it; for fans, it’s a reminder of what makes Almodóvar such a great director, and for neophytes, it’s an unforgettable introduction.

For once, fans’ “Did they do the book justice?” anxieties are misplaced: The movie version of Project Hail Mary is funny, strange, heartening, and completely satisfying.

Come for the fun gadgets and the kids saving the world, and stay for a message about recovery and kindness, delivered so earnestly that it isn’t saccharine at all.

It sounds ridiculous to say, but the Borat sequel is about as optimistic as a film about the current political moment can be right now.

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.

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.

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

Apollo 10 1/2 is a charming, visually striking blend of history and fantasy that captures the way children see and process historical events happening around them, and considers what they choose to remember — and how those choices affect them as adults, and the worlds they choose to build around them.

Luca isn’t trying to make people cry, the way some Pixar movies now feel obligated to do, but it still rings as a bittersweet experience. Instead of a tearjerker, it’s a fond memory, a soft sigh after a recollection of a time gone by.

No One Will Save You is not just a terrific horror-thriller, but one of the most surprising and entertaining sci-fi films the year has to offer.

Hamaguchi slowly pivots away from dispassionate naturalism, building to an impressionistic, opaque finale.

Evil Dead Rise is a movie made by sickos for sickos. It’s a fantastic update to the iconic franchise, a movie that upholds the manic glee of Sam Raimi’s original 1980s Evil Dead films while bringing in a taste for the disgusting and upsetting from Fede Álvarez’s 2013 remake.

If there’s one takeaway from Smoking Causes Coughing, it may be that: Life is short and illogical, and it often feels like one big joke that’s just a beat away from a punchline.

That go-for-broke violence has always been a core component of Mortal Kombat, and this reboot succeeds because McQuoid and his team remember that, and have the self-awareness to acknowledge it. It isn’t a flawless victory, but it is lizard-brain fun.

Weerasethakul’s Memoria doesn’t give too many answers. It moves at an interminable pace. But those are mostly strengths rather than faults, methods that force the audience to engage with the thoughts and collective memory buried deep within their psyches. In that sense, Memoria is a sensory explosion, and its dense, immersive shrapnel isn’t easily removable.

Through Durkin’s eyes, longtime fans and newcomers alike can see the paradoxical reality of pro wrestling — an entertainment that is both theater and sport, fake and real, and too often safer in the ring than outside of it.

In Penny Dreadful, Green demonstrated an ability to alternate between seeming preternaturally confident and absolutely tortured, and that contrast is on full display in Proxima.

So even as Furiosa is inevitably compared with Fury Road, both positively and negatively, put your trust in Miller’s weird, wild filmmaking.

The First Kiss That Never Ends feels like a grand finale, but the interesting thing about Kaguya-sama is how it implies that romance is continuous work, rather than simply fated.

Cregger merely uses the premise as a foundation for something more ambitious, delivering a lean, surprising film with effective thrills, while also giving viewers plenty to contemplate afterward.