Souvenir Part II is an easy recommendation on every level, a film that stands comfortably alone and allows Hogg’s journey to filmmaking, and Honor Swinton Byrne’s capabilities as a performer, to finally shine in a light that almost every cinema lover will be drawn towards.

Casablanca Beats drums its ideas loudly and effectively. The result is a boisterous and crowd-pleasing delight, showing a community with deep specificity that nonetheless speaks to the concerns of young people all over the world.

Fear Street Part 3 is an absolute blast. But there’s tragic darkness prevailing here, as there has been through the previous entries. Yes, we’re having a good time with all this horror, but we’re also affected by the senseless death and dismemberment. There is no reveling in the spilling of blood here. There’s just a unique feeling of loss; the sense of cosmic injustice at young lives being cruelly snuffed out by thoughtless, uncaring hands. It’s oddly beautiful in a devastating way.

Space Jam: A New Legacy, both in its cravenly cynical development and release, is not a surprising film. The marketing didn’t lie. This movie is exactly what it looks like. And it’s a grim glimpse at a potential future of mainstream filmmaking. No thanks

The end result is a real pleasure, taking us along for a wild ride. Yes, it’s slightly too long, and Baker and his team could probably trim a bit to make things even tighter. Yet there’s so much charm at play, so much joy in watching even the moments of pain and embarrassment that it’s difficult to criticize.

There’s a lot of flash and style, and all in service of an empty story with unmemorable gunplay.

Pig is not the movie you think it is. It’s something far more beautiful, and far more painful. It is an existential meditation on the search for something. Anything. A kind of cosmic loneliness envelopes this film. It’s extraordinary.

This is a tonally rich, libidinously powerful, and psychologically complex tale told by a master filmmaker equally at ease with European art-film conventions and B-movie hijinks. It’s this exceptional balance between the profane and the profound that sets Benedetta apart, truly proving to be penetrating in its effect in more ways than one.

Followers of Carax will be warmed by his return if a little disappointed it doesn’t quite recapture the magic, while fans of Sparks (many newly minted thanks to Wright) may appreciate the foray into a different outlet for their art. For those of us open to the experience but without a baked-in attitude to love this sight unseen, Annette proves to be a deeply flawed picture that still has many moments to recommend it.

Fear Street Part 2 also thrives once it really gets going. There’s a certain rough patch at the start that the film thankfully shrugs off, eventually sucking us into its night-dark story of doomed youth. A potential – and potentially questionable – romance that blooms between Ziggy and Nick Goode (Ted Sutherland), the boy destined to grow up and be sheriff, is charming in its clumsiness. A side character like punk rocker counselor Alice (Ryan Simpkins) seems annoying at first, only to blossom into someone we’re actively rooting for. After two films, the real strength of Fear Street is in its characters, not its scares. No one is expendable meat here – but that doesn’t mean they won’t get ground up in the end.

It’s easy to enjoy the film’s light, airy charms, but once it’s over, you’re left feeling a little empty.

DreamWorks Animation can make solid family entertainment. But they haven’t this time.

The sentimentality threatens to veer into melodrama at points, which Pratt struggles to handle. But The Tomorrow War has got a trashy popcorn vibe to it that it wholeheartedly embraces, and a cornball machismo that you can’t help but get taken in by, even if just for a second.

The Forever Purge is at its best when it’s attempting to subvert the standard formula.

Fear Street is like a big soup pot full of everything – there are shades of Scream, A Nightmare on Elm Street, Stephen King’s It, Halloween, Friday the 13th, and more. Watching Fear Street brings back memories of wandering around musty video stores and browsing the HORROR section for the most lurid VHS box art you can find. There was something sacred about that experience, like going to church.

Black Widow is at its best when it’s a wacky family drama between Natasha, Yelena, Alexei, and Melina, with dashes of a spy thriller. But Marvel films can’t content themselves with staying small, and Black Widow falls victim to the big bombast characteristic of the studio. The result is a disappointing solo movie that ends up burying Natasha Romanoff once again.

There’s something here, beneath the glassy-eyed performances and the Instagram aesthetics, about class and privilege and the evils of men — and you could even make a case for False Positive being yet another effective display of gaslighting as horror — but any actual messages are too vague to parse.

Fuhrman’s performance is so unhinged, and Hadaway’s direction is so merciless, that The Novice constantly dances on the edge of character drama and full-fledged horror movie. It’s an impressive feat of incisively dark tone, even if the plot and characters are little more than shadows.

All These Sons falls short of Liu’s tremendous documentary feature debut, but shows that the Minding the Gap filmmaker is capable of tackling a complicated and knotty subject with the same kind of laser-focused intimacy that he showed in his first autobiographical outing. There may be a distance to All These Sons, but its clear-eyed compassion makes it a solid and effective follow-up.

Gaia is a dazzling bio-horror excursion.

The layered dynamics and pure, honest emotions underneath Luca‘s simple coming-of-age story are what elevate the film to one of Pixar’s best — and an example of what animation can be if they stop trying to race forward, and just stop and take a breath.

There’s nothing wrong with silly, even mindless action movies. There exists a whole slew of ’em that are an absolute blast to watch. But they get by on their entertainment value. There’s nothing entertaining about Infinite. It just sits there, lifeless, hoping to become a full-blown franchise with sequels galore.

Hitman’s Wife’s Bodyguard – a title, by the way, that is mostly misleading outside of a single scene where Michael serves as Sonia’s bodyguard – has a few brief moments of joy or wit. But most of those moments rely on the audience’s recognition of the all-too-famous cast (such as being delighted at seeing Banderas and Hayek share the screen once more, even with Banderas playing the bad guy). This film, even more than its surprisingly successful predecessor, is exhausting and obnoxious. A few good lines don’t save a slapdash, snarky mess.

I can’t remember the last time a film shook me like this.

Spirit Untamed is inoffensive, which both makes it far more tolerable than most other DreamWorks Animation titles and also not terribly good in and of itself.

After this solid set-up, The Devil Made Me Do It occasionally grows a bit murky.

Yes, it could’ve been worse. But as daring as this film’s costumes are, and as fun as Stone and Thompson (and Hauser and Fry, to be fair) can be, it can’t help but give into its lazier instincts.

After the empty soullessness of Fate of the Furious and the ribald nonsense of Hobbs and Shaw, F9 feels like Lin is pulling the franchise back on track. Whether that track is properly placed or not, or whether it’s actually a track that takes you off the deep end…well, your mileage may vary.