One of the more fun things about M3GAN, besides the batshit megabitch AI in pop starlet’s form at the center of the movie, is that this is all, immediately, such a bad idea.

New director Nia DaCosta — the sort of filmmaker who can handle both a continuation of the racially charged Candyman mythology and a radical take on Henrik Ibsen’s Hedda Gabler — brings pints of fresh blood to the proceedings, as well as a keen eye for compositions and an inherent sense of how to sustain tension.

It’s not cynicism but a chuckling curiosity that fuels this sideways parable, which aligns it with Lanthimos’ past work in the most perfect of ways. You can’t say that it’s a movie for everybody. But it takes all kinds.

It feels both timeless in its ability to channel a universal fear of mortality and if it has arrived, regrettably, right on time.

Outrageously, even shamelessly, entertaining.

The famous Assayas light touch keeps his film above the fray of didacticism. So dig in as an expert cast puts a scintillating spin on every verbal volley. Non-Fiction is a bonbon spiked with delicious wit and malice.

It isn't the sex that shocks here, it's the chilling core of loneliness. Intimacy dares to cut deep, and its daring gets to you.

If it is indeed possible for a film to be both stylish and tasteless, then A Fish Called Wanda certainly fills the bill.

Anyone who’s ever wondered what a rom-com collab between Nora Ephron and Tom of Finland might look like now has a definitive answer to that question.

Redford plays the game of filmmaking to reveal what he holds sacred: story, character, feeling, thoughtful pacing, and an alertness of nuances of honor and shame that most movies skip in the rush to the rush.

In Cry-Baby, Waters has created a crackpot jamboree that captures the Fifties, then parodies and transcends the period; any resemblance to Nineties greed, prejudice and repression is intentional. At forty-three, Waters remains unrepentantly juvenile. It’s his saving grace. What he can’t fight, he ridicules. The mirror Waters holds up to the world is distorted, turning everyone into a grotesque. But we can still see ourselves in it And laugh.

It’s a genuine revelation, and the sort of holy terror that restores your faith in a genre.

These kickass Barbies bring heart to a machine tooled genre.

Ruben Brandt, Collector is always a feast for the eyes, but it’s the intellectual curiosity on display that raises the bar.

There is real joy in how this man lives perpetually in the moment, embracing the small, unassuming pleasures of the present.

Some of the footage, shot by crew members, radiates hold-your-breath suspense, especially when the Maiden pushes through the ice floes of the Southern Ocean, near Antarctica. You’ll have your heart in your mouth as the yacht enters the final stretch.

Everyone seems to be having a blast, and the filmmaker knows how to take both the ensemble he’s assembled and his congregation of Knives Out fans — call us Blanc-heads — to church, literally and figuratively.

It could have been a straightforward documentary about the David Bowie story — but who wants straightforward when it comes to Bowie? Instead, Moonage Daydream is a gloriously innovative trip into the Thin White Duke’s mind, written, directed, and edited by Brett Morgen.

A mesmerizing deconstruction of the brute nature of love.

The filmmaker has given us a pitch-perfect, punk-as-fuck portrait of a movement. She’s also reminded us that, regardless of bygone victories, the fight still goes on. Here’s a blueprint for resistance.

The Tragedy of Macbeth is Joel’s first outing on his own but, in this regard, he’s made a movie that suits the broader world of his work. That he’s done so most cogently through a character most other approaches to this play have barely noticed only makes it that much more thrilling.

A hilarious hodgepodge, in which De Niro gives his best comic performance to date.

Nunez is a major filmmaker who thrives working in a minor key. He makes Ruby a romantic fable with a tough core of intelligence and wit. It’s a real beauty.

The fighting spirit of this female quartet blazes through every frame of this galvanizing film. “We did this without knowing shit,” says Vilela. That’s just a beginning. Way before the movie ends, you’ll feel their fire.

Scores a solid hit.

Allenphiles will have a field day mining the film for inside dope. Are the clips from Shanghai and Billy Wilder’s Double Indemnity — movies in which men are set up for a fall by dangerous women — a sly dig at Farrow? Better to see Manhattan Murder Mystery for what it is: Annie Hall replayed in a minor key by a filmmaker who sees the comedy, tragedy and transience of love and can’t stop playing the game. Allen’s readiness to step on a laugh in favor of feeling may cost him at the box office. But in this time of private hell and public scorn, it will help him endure.

A shockingly intimate and deeply affecting film about the roots of sexual role playing.

Hollywood retreads of foreign films are rarely a good idea (did you see Miss Bala?), but Gloria Bell is a playful, pleasure-giving exception.

It’s a testament to Yamazaki’s work as both director and screenwriter that Minus One feels like a wartime character drama first, kaiju film second.

Egoyan is an acquired taste, but once in, you’re hooked. Exotica is Egoyan’s most accomplished and seductive film to date — even tackling acute psychic distress, Egoyan’s deadpan comic eye never flinches.

The antique charms of the story can still seduce us when done well, and director Jean-Paul Rappeneau, who freely adapted the play with Jean-Claude Carrière, knows how to fashion a sumptuously beautiful, hugely entertaining spectacle that also stays alert to the cadences of the heart.

In crafting a fierce, fragmented, downbeat film about a character who makes the wrong decision as a man by being right as a cop, Penn flies in the face of what sells in Hollywood. Godspeed.

Australian writer-director Jennifer Kent creates a woman’s revenge tale fueled by a righteous anger at the evil men do. There’s not a whit of audience coddling. You’ve been warned.

Disney delivers an uneven but sensationally entertaining sequel to the Oscar winner that pulls out all the stops.

Sweeney has finally got her serious-actor moment and delivered.

For all of its curated channeling of past midnight-movie programming, In Fabric doesn’t feel like it’s cut from the same cloth as anything else. It’s a singular trip into a singularly warped mind.

If you can say nothing else about this free-form valentine, it’s genuinely eye-opening.

This comedy is packed with p---- jokes, the cruder the better.

Keeps the pulse pounding without sacrificing laughs or logic.

One the feats of McQueen’s movie is that, by the end, the ability to read — proof of having been educated — is all the more powerful for seeming exceptional.

The doc’s goal: Don’t think of the Go-Go’s as a bit of Reagan-era nostalgia, the musical equivalent of a Rubik’s cube. Think of them as a first-tier, kick-ass rock group, period, full stop, the end. Mission accomplished.

The Laundromat ends on a pre-credits image that feels destined to become a meme. Everyone’s hands are dirty, it tells us. Maybe it’s time hold folks accountable and clean up our act.

It truly is a solid match of moviemaker and source material. Yet none of this would work as well as it does without Craig.

The talented Mr. Minghella has made an imperfect movie but not an impersonal one. His morality tale means to get under the skin, and does.

A wise man once said that every film is a documentary of its own making, and Philip Hartman’s No Picnic doubles as a chronicle not just of a lost paradise but a forgotten era — of downtown NYC, of genuinely independent moviemaking, of an alternate version of the “greed is good” go-go Eighties.

What Will & Harper is, at its heart, is a portrait of a friendship and how the fundamentals of a deep and lasting bond doesn’t change even when the people within it do. That alone makes it worth the trip.

Mira Nair’s lush, heartfelt romance glows with humanity and desire; it puts the “passion” back in “compassion.”

If Sunset doesn’t hit with nearly the impact that "Son of Saul" does — and it doesn’t — his look back at the chaos before the storm solidly establishes Nemes as a major world-cinema voice.

Dead Reckoning never rises to that best-in-series movie’s level, though McQuarrie (and cowriters Bruce Geller and Erik Jendresen) concocts set pieces and the cast carves out stand-alone moments that stick with you past the credit roll.

You leave this movie with questions about this odd-duck of a humanist, who eased children through the thorny feelings that come with fear, bullying, divorce, and trauma. You also leave grateful for how Hanks and Heller respect the privacy and complexity of a man who knew life was never as simple as it looks. A Beautiful Day in the Neighborhood is a movie that speaks from the heart. Let it in.

Nouvelle Vague is as much a testament to being young, idealistic and a cinephile — full of opinions, drunk on your own taste, and madly in love with the movies — as it is a making-of recounting.

This West Side Story proves someone can still leave their mark on the legend without building it from the ground up. It’s a classic Spielberg joint, a classic hat-tip to Hollywood, and a classic, period.

Guided by the fierce, fully committed performances of Driver and Bening,The Report is a bristling reminder that truth still matters. Naïve? Maybe. But, damn, do we need it now.

Green’s slow-burn style might not spell box-office windfall in a cinema era of short attention spans, but her artistry is indisputable.

The reason you need to see Bull, however, and we do not use that verb lightly, is Morgan. The calm, concentrated, understated manner in which he presents this man, who’d rather have a battered body than a bruised pride, is something to behold.

If Rustin only gives you a slice of a story — you could make seven different films out of his life and achievements — it assures you walk away knowing who Bayard Rustin was. The same can be said for Colman Domingo. Attention must be paid a hundredfold.

Think "Sex and the City" with men, only in Italian and with lots more hollering and hand gestures.

As the director puts it: “This movie is an accumulation of scenes based on Van Gogh’s letters, common agreement about events in his life that parade as facts, hearsay and scenes that are just plain invented. This is not a forensic biography about the painter. It is about what it is to be an artist.”

As in all of his movies, Malle exhibits in Pretty Baby his characteristically detached, skeptical, lucid, moral — not moralistic — attitude toward life.

The Outpost gets it crucially right by bringing home the meaning of heroism as a collective action. The you-are-there ferocity of this sequence, brilliantly abetted by the prowling, handheld camerawork of Lorenzo Senatore, ranks with the best interpretations of combat on film. Your nerves will be shattered, guaranteed.

Minahan wants us to see ourselves in the dark mirror of this outrageously funny satire. He's built the laughs wisely so they stick in our throats.

Such wild zigzags in tone — between bumbling physical comedy and lightly stinging satirical observation, between heartbreaking vulnerability and bursts of gleefully vicious, slickly choreographed violence — ought not to work at all. And yet they do, thanks to Jensen’s calm, slightly wry command of the story, and a cast that have all understood the assignment, even when their respective assignments are all quite different.

It’s a thrill ride from a director who, recently prone to intriguing, one-off experiments, knows we didn’t exactly need reminding that he’s still got it, but reminds us anyway — flaunting what he has because, well, he can.

Schindler's List, despite blatant compromises, is a rending historical document. But the film's near-certain victory is based less on merit than on the marketing of its ambitious intentions. The academy doesn't judge movies, it weighs them by subject matter. On that basis, Spielberg's epic tips the scales.

A delicate gem.

It's the new year's first happy surprise.

No tears go by on Marianne’s part as she reminisces, though you’re a stronger person than we are if you don’t choke up at the documentary’s closing number.

Bruckheimer and director Tony Scott have wisely set their course by Will Smith, who is sensational in a dramatic role that leans on him to carry a movie without the help of aliens or Big Willie-style jokes for every occasion.

What instantly elevates Gasoline Rainbow to the canon of teen hangout movies, several notches below American Graffiti and Dazed and Confused but still trespassing its way into the Pantheon’s foyer, is how well the Ross brothers’ methodology captures the free-floating moment between dwindling childhood and dawning adulthood.

For all of the multiplex-friendly fun Wright’s conjuring with this over-the-top spin on dystopian sci-fi blockbusters, the prevailing feeling here is dread. Most filmmakers would have diluted the grit and genuine sense of moral free-fall. Wright doubles the dosage. Every adrenaline rush comes with a chaser of low rage and simmering despair.

[Keaton] delivers a chilling performance, imbuing what could have been a one-note nut case with unexpected reserves of feeling. The acting and direction don’t fill in all the credibility gaps, but they do make for classy, crackling suspense.

Lacks the cumulative impact of "Boyz," since Singleton allows repetition and sermonizing to dull his theme about the infantilization of black males. But Baby Boy leaves you shaken.

One Fine Morning is yet more evidence of how far Mia Hansen-Løve can push her naturalistic style, using seemingly plain storytelling to advance intellectual ideas that rarely feel drawn from the mind because they are so in tune with felt experience: feelings and attractions, the passing of time, the sense of a life being lived. This movie is no different.

Yes is easily the most controversial film to hit theaters this year so far. It’s also, for all of the intoxicating rush of Lapid’s excessive style and cup-spilleth-over storytelling, one of the more sobering and vital ones as well.

As with other movies that capture the joys of cooking and the carnal thrill of eating, this French romantic drama is as much an ode to regional bonne bouches as it is an epic tale of two epicures.

What elevates The Rental is the dynamite acting from the four leads.

The fact that In a Violent Nature sets up a storytelling style that utilizes highbrow aesthetics while still keeping one foot firmly planted in the genre gutter is what makes this feel like a once-in-generation slasher flick.

Be warned that it is a gateway drug. It’s also the sort of movie that makes you understand why people fall in love with movies in the first place.

Timely and smartly entertaining.

Writer-director Gerard Stembridge keeps the amoral laughs bubbling.

You leave impressed that Anderson can still manage to do what his does best without succumbing to self-parody here. The blueprint may be familiar. But it’s still a pretty foolproof plan.

It’s faint praise, even in the post-MCU era of the genre, to say that Superman is a solid superhero film; the caveat is hiding in plain sight. What Gunn has pulled off is something more complicated, more interesting, and far tougher: He’s given us a Superman movie that actually feels like a living, breathing comic book.

What is certain is that Mossfegh’s exploration of secrets, lies and liberation plays well on the page, but works even better on the screen. Good luck in getting this movie out from under your skin.

It’s the actors who make this real-life legal procedural come alive.

Fremont is neither game-changing nor revolutionary. It’s merely a throwback, in the best possible way, to a low-fi aesthetic and low-key way of storytelling you thought had gone the way of the Triceratops. That, in fact, is what makes this deceptively placid, supremely wry movie so damned moving.

They Live, Carpenter’s 1988 paranoid freakout, deserves to be thought of as a masterpiece, an artist’s defiant last grab at substance before losing the thread. It’s a cheesy but lovable movie.

Nanny starts as a movie about a reality that we’d rather not face — the plight of Black domestic workers, of immigrants, of the barebones fact of financial survival — and ends as a movie about reality that we cannot bear. That is the horror of it — and, in Jusu’s hands, the galvanizing thrill.

Lumet has a reputation for speed, and when a film doesn’t engage him, as in Family Business, the result seems rushed, sloppy. But in Q&A, with all the actors perfectly cast and on his wavelength, he works wonders. Nolte is electrifying.

It’s the war between the bonds of family vs. the pull of wealth — a global theme across wide borders and cultures — that gives the film heft. But even when the script drifts into moralizing, it’s the emotions that hold sway.

The film is well-paced, tightly edited and engaging, and at times, it’s quite inspiring.

Keeps the laughs coming, and a dynamo named Steve Zahn is the cheif reason why. It's a one-joke movie, but the cast knows how to sell it.

An actor with a handful of shorts under his belt — including a Cesar-nominated 2017 one that served as the basis for this feature — Ladj Ly juggles a variety of perspectives, subcultures and intersecting storylines like a pro.

The Woodman has recovered his common touch. On him, it looks good.

The practical effects, meaning the real stuff the computer never touched, make all the difference when you’re asking audiences to see the characters as human instead pawns in a digital game.

All the pieces hang together. You can't say that about many movies.

The Way of Water is like its predecessor: sincere to the point of being brash, wide-armed and open-hearted toward the world it loves and vengefully, comically violent toward the people who arrive to destroy that world. It’s a better movie than the first outing because Cameron lets things get weirder, wilder.

Auteuil and Depardieu spar hilariously, and writer-director Francis Veber, following "The Dinner Game," offers another delicious treat.

Poetic is a word that goes thrown around easily and abundantly, especially when it comes to documentaries that forego any sort of standard interview-clip-context-rinse-repeat format. But it’s hard to think of a better adjective to describe the early sequences of Honeyland.