The ending doesn’t land, but there’s no denying the hilarious, poignant two-thirds that precede it.

Not everything Miranda and Levenson try with this film works, but even at its messiest, the movie is always meaningful.

The latest from Spanish writer-director Alberto Vázquez is transgressive and aggressive to a degree that’s hard to fathom: It weaponizes cute cartoon creatures against its audience, and introduces innocence and beauty in order to tear it apart on screen in the most horrific ways possible. The film isn’t an easy watch, but it is a bold and memorable one.

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.

Inside Out 2 is full of passion and empathy, letting the audience in on Riley’s inner struggle without always painting her as the hero, even in her own story.

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.

Director Jon M. Chu blows away all expectations and deftly avoids the movie adaptation pitfalls that could’ve worked against Wicked. The movie celebrates its musical-ness, instead of begrudgingly accepting it. It’s nothing short of wonderful.

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.

Pixar has been alternating between playing things safe with sequels to its hits and taking bigger swings with emotional human stories. Hoppers sits awkwardly between these impulses, recycling emotional moments and plots from other films while eschewing any clear moral or big moments of character growth.

Kline’s movie works best when it blurs the lines between the people of a nerdy subculture and the style of their obsessions.

By inhabiting the worst periods of his life, LaBeouf delivers one of the best performances of the year.

What’s especially strange about The Killer is that Fincher achieves almost everything he sets out to, but he sets that bar dispiritingly low.

The Long Walk is rife with simmering tension, complex emotional drama, deliberate pacing, gorgeous cinematography, and striking, horrific images.

Returning directors Jared Bush and Byron Howard once again blend the high-concept political messaging about embracing diversity with a blitz of visual gags, pop-culture references, and endearingly silly characters that ensure Zootopia 2 never feels too preachy. The film moves at a breakneck pace, driven by several major chase scenes and a flood of jokes that come so fast that even if one doesn’t land, there’s something else to laugh at a moment later.

Athena is arguably a style-over-substance movie, given how little time and attention it devotes to the personal drama underlying its politics. But in Gavras’ hands, the style is also the substance, with a restrained classicism giving way to baroque staging as each long take accelerates. Scenes build in ways that feel both narratively inevitable and visually prophetic.

A sense of play and joyful collaboration permeates Leonor Will Never Die, even as it engages with serious issues of life, death, and legacy. It reminds us that love, like creativity, is a living thing, and that both are meant to be shared.

The UK-born Jones apparently learned to sign, sing, and put on an American accent for the role, and you’d never know it — she holds the movie together in an astonishing breakout performance.

For all its virtues, Bros is a bit of a frustrating watch, a lovely Nora Ephron-esque charmer buried somewhere underneath the self-imposed burden of representing “5,000 years of queer love stories,” a tug-of-war between the micro and macro that nearly squanders its sunny central romance with an attempt (however noble) to be all things to all people.

Whether strictly factual or broadly truthful in a poetic sense, its approach to queer history as coded, long-buried document is its most exacting facet. But as a story of science, hidden desire, and sparks re-igniting the soul, it’s a languid affair.

Jusu paints a rich portrait of Aisha’s life as an undocumented Senegalese immigrant and nanny under the thumb of a wealthy white family, but the horror elements meant to visualize her internal struggles never quite cohere.

The brightly rendered details and Mulligan’s full-throated performance accessorize a film that ultimately might not be as groundbreaking as Fennell thinks it is regarding gender roles and heterosexual dynamics. But there’s an undeniable satisfaction to her brutish approach.

Every moment of M3GAN is both endearingly silly and sneeringly mean, which is what gives it its power.

Remi Weekes’ feature directorial debut not only exposes the horrors of the immigration system, but mines survivor guilt for a clever, bone-chilling thriller.

Demon Slayer: Kimetsu no Yaiba the Movie: Mugen Train is a brilliant encapsulation of the series’ strengths and appeal, filled with moments of pulse-pounding action, heady emotional gravitas, and fantastic character-affirming moments of levity and humor.

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 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.

What starts out as a sweet fairy tale turns into a metatextual romp that spirals in and out of itself, and gets deeply weird and weirdly deep. Sean Charmatz’s debut animated feature is an odd little gem that defies expectations.

The film is missing out on a cohesive vision, to the point where the audience will spend the entire film waiting for the flashbacks and summaries to end, and for DaCosta’s movie to finally begin. But by the end, she’s only offered a visually stunning homage to the original film. For a director of her talent, that isn’t enough.