The Aeronauts is hobbled time and again by the attempt to add the juice of fiction to a story that could and should have stood on its own. The truth, in Hollywood terms, is never enough.

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.

Varda by Agnès goes out not with a bang but a graceful farewell, as the director sits on a beach, a sandstorm whipping around her as vows to “disappear in the blur” and slowly fades from the image.

As the film moves toward its painfully inevitable climax, Queen and Slim fulfills the promise made by Waithe and Matzoukas to create a new form of protest art. Their film isn’t meant to lionize these two everyday people-turned-folk heroes, but to celebrate their strength and pride.

Want to see a master class in acting? Watch Jonathan Pryce and Anthony Hopkins show how it’s done in The Two Popes, a fiercely moving and surprisingly funny provocation that pivots on speculative conversations between the German John Ratzinger, a.k.a. Pope Benedict XVI (Hopkins), and Argentine Cardinal Jorge Mario Bergoglio (Pryce), the future Pope Francis.

What a kick to watch whip-smart director Rian Johnson shake the cobwebs off the whodunit genre and make it snap to stylish, wickedly entertaining life for a new generation. That’s what happens in Knives Out, a mystery that takes the piss out of Agatha Christie clichés.

What makes it a Haynes film, besides the evocative camera genius of Haynes regular Ed Lachman, is something intangible and mysterious. The director’s admirers will think immediately of "Safe," the 1995 indie classic starring Julianne Moore as a wife and mother who thinks she’s being poisoned by something unidentifiable in the environment. That feeling of dread pervades throughout, and deepens the film’s scarily timely themes beyond the usual demands of docudrama.

It’s a quietly radical take on the art of finding one’s voice, playing out both in front of and behind the lens.

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.

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

We could give you 21 reasons not to see 21 Bridges — and not single one that’s worth the price of admission.

Yes, it’s grim and gloomy — and like Lil Peep’s music, there’s also a sense of catharsis in all of this. More than anything, Jones and Silyan seem to be fashioning a postmortem that plays like his greatest hits, in which wounded wooziness somehow gives way to exhilaration and a warped sense of uplift.

Atlantics pulls you into an experience. The empathy machine runs at full speed here. Ada, c’est moi.

Yes, you would watch these two in virtually anything. You just wish it wasn’t this. They deserve something sturdier and far less head-slappingly preposterous, and that’s the truth.

Luckily, Stewart, Balinska, and Scott are just the angels you need when a movie needs rescuing. They make the salvage operation that is Charlie’s Angels go down easy.

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.

Luckily, Mangold fuels his true-life plot with enough flesh-and-blood action to leave you dizzy.

You may also feel so exhilarated watching an insanely creative voice in animation flex his storytelling muscles that you don’t realize the huge lump in your throat.

Even in the face of grievous misfortune, the characters created by Schults exude a tenderness that allows this achingly intimate drama to move past sorrow and hit you like a shot in the heart.

It’s a documentary that starts as a nonfiction portrait and ends as a horror movie.

Emmerich can crack the whip on computer pixels like nobody’s business. But in sacrificing a reckoning on the human toll of war for cardboard characterization and showoff fx, he’s left an empty space where the soul of the film should be.

It’s a movie that knows in its bones that there are no easy answers. Just the human struggle to find connection. And it’s that vision of unadorned, no-bullshit life, played out against the background of Hollywood film fantasy, that makes a connection so strong that audiences won’t want to let go.

Doctor Sleep relies way too much on borrowed inspiration and eventually runs out of — pardon the word — steam. But this flawed hybrid and King and Kubrick still has the stuff to keep you up nights.

How does a small tale of love found and lost emerge as a major triumph and one of the very best movies of the year? Marriage Story is more than just a career high for writer-director Noah Baumbach (The Meyerowitz Stories, The Squid and the Whale); it’s a peerless showcase for its stars, Adam Driver and Scarlett Johansson, who turn this tale of a contentious divorce into a "Kramer vs. Kramer" for the 21st century.

It makes sense that Last Christmas isn’t coming out at the end of December but right on the cusp of Thanksgiving. It’s a bona fide holiday-movie turkey.

It’s an exhilarating and profoundly sorrowful work.

It’s not a stretch to say that Linda Hamilton is the main reason you should rush out to see Terminator: Dark Fate posthaste.

It’s a big role, written with dimensions of sainthood that might defeat a lesser actor. But Erivo is up to every challenge, never losing Harriet’s compassionate humanity even as the film moves to the Civil War and pumps up the action at the expense of characterization.