One thing that Loving gets right in a way that few civil rights dramas do: It insists on racial discrimination as a systemic problem, not merely an interpersonal one.

Like the space mission named in its title, Project Hail Mary pulls off a seemingly impossible task, combining big-budget Hollywood spectacle with small-scale craft. The story it tells, of two lonely but intrepid problem-solvers bridging the huge cultural distance between them to collaborate on addressing a shared cosmic threat, is unabashedly humanistic and hopeful, not to mention timely.

Like Ghibli’s classic films, especially Hayao Miyazaki’s, it lavishes as much attention on the natural world as the creatures who inhabit it. But though it has the shape of a fairy tale, The Red Turtle’s perspective is distinctly adult, and its vision of nature is harsher than Miyazaki’s.

Soul Kitchen is sprawling, undisciplined, raucous, occasionally crass-and so full of life you forgive it everything.

But Cate Blanchett ... ahhhh. She doesn't impersonate Katharine Hepburn, she channels her.

This installment is all about the grown-up kids. The three young leads - especially Emma Watson, who can do more with a still face than any actress her age - are all terrific

Sensationally made and in patches pretty nerve-jangling.

Hackman gives the con-man lines a simple, straight-ahead urgency that makes the man first hilarious and then, as the pleasures of human company are withdrawn and his resentment begins to bubble up, inexplicably touching. This is a great performance.

The whole movie, of course, is a setting for its jewel, Catalina Sandino Moreno as Maria: With her clear, round eyes, long dark hair, and radiant transparency, she brings to mind two of the loveliest ingénues of the last quarter-century -- Meg Tilly and Jennifer Connelly.

The result, like much of Radner’s comedy, is entertaining, appealing, and more soft-centered than challenging or acerbic.

Ocean’s 8 is in many ways a mirror image of its predecessor, but it’s most delightful when it follows its own path toward girly transcendence.

The movie is both clever and ruthless at exposing the ratings board's inconsistencies and hypocrisy.

Private Parts is so riotous that you almost don't remember how unfunny Stern can be on his radio show.

Powerful and then some.

The movie is good enough to put a chill into the late-summer air. Salva has nasty surprises in the grim, minor-key last third, during which the feeling dawns on you that sleep for the next few nights won't come easily.

The bad news is that Before Sunset is not as delirious an experience as its predecessor. The good news is that it's wonderful anyway, and in ways that tell us something about our romance with "Before Sunrise."

Essentially a solemn, splintered meditation on lost love: a movie about personal space, in space.

It thaws the soul.

An extraordinarily potent brew.

On American screens, at least, there is an almost shocking dearth of honest stories about European colonialism, one of the greatest forces to reshape the globe in the last half-millennium, and Kent’s humanist revisions of the rape-revenge and Western genres represents a visionary attempt to rectify this. It may not always be easy to sit through, but we’re nonetheless lucky to witness it.

Makes for quite an emotional roller-coaster ride. You don't know whether to celebrate or mock, to laugh or weep.

Idiocracy is easily the most potent political film of the year, and the most stirring defense of traditional values since Edmund Burke's Reflections on the Revolution in France.

It proves that male action stars can triumph not only over space but, more important, over time.

Lithgow and Molina play Ben and George with such depth, tenderness, and history that their affection for one another’s bodies (there’s no sex, but loads of snuggling) seems like a natural extension of their pleasure in being together.

The tone is tongue-in-cheek, with teeth gritted so hard you can taste just a hint of blood.

It’s all captured vérité-style by the filmmakers, who, like everyone else in this utterly sweet production, display great affection for the totally foolish theater kids (of all ages) who inhabit this world.

The movie made me laugh a lot anyway. It has a big, inventive cast of loons and a great premise.

One of the more lyrical sci-fi action thrillers ever made, in which space and time become love slaves to the directors' witty visual fancies.

Craven guides us expertly down a series of blind, bloody alleys, a journey that's more pleasurable than frustrating. On account of his steady hand, the last act is as good as could be expected: skillfully conceived and entertaining in its preposterousness.

A movie I snickered at more than once but never stopped staring at in wonder. This isn’t Nolan’s best film by any stretch, but it abounds in the qualities that are among his strengths.

In moments--the early moments--Sunshine can feel like a new genre classic, albeit one heavily in debt to its predecessors.

A nutty, zany, wacky, unruly, spastically hilarious hodgepodge that hits at least twice as often as it misses—which is a big deal, since there are more gags per square foot of celluloid than in any film since Joe Dante's "Gremlins 2: The New Batch" (1990).

Voices pile in asking for nothing more or less than to make themselves clear. When the Levees Broke is a monument of oral history. Without fanfare, Lee orchestrates a multivoiced blues for the common man.

That the studio gave a first-time director the freedom to explore these potentially sensitive themes, and to do so in a tone that is boisterous and playful rather than handwringing or self-serious, is a promising sign for Pixar’s future.

The best Spike Lee movie to come along since 1992's "Malcolm X." It's also the first Spike Lee movie since "Malcolm X" to star Denzel Washington, and just as Jimmy Stewart and Alfred Hitchcock brought out the best in each other, Denzel and Spike need each other like vermouth and gin.

Compliance examines, among other things, how misplaced faith in authority can lead to abuse on a systemic scale. It's a deeply moral movie about the failure of morality, as grueling to watch as it is necessary.

The mixture of cartoony stylization and regional realism is completely original--and a testament to the genius eye for color of the great cinematographer Roger Deakins and the designer Dennis Gassner.

If his (Zhang's) fight scenes don't fully intoxicate, though, his color and compositional rigor compensate for much. See Hero on the biggest screen you can find, and sit close enough for all that spiraling silk to tickle your nostril hairs.

Cheadle is extraordinary.

BlacKkKlansman may well be the first film to frame the Trump era as one of regression in response to the progress of the Obama years.

For all its relative subtlety, Kill Bill, Vol. 2 remains a cartoon: Its wit is broadsword rather than rapier, and its motives are elemental. The banter is second-tier Tarantino: a cut above his imitators, but below the standard set by "Pulp Fiction" and "Jackie Brown."

It's an exquisitely crafted period picture that keeps promising more and more as it goes along--smarter ideas, richer themes, spookier plot twists--and keeps delivering on every promise, right up until the rug-pulling and overly hasty final sequence.

The whole thing vanishes pretty quickly from memory once it’s over. But for that hour and a half of fluid, kinetic filmmaking, you are putty in the hands of Steven Soderbergh, a reliably pleasurable place to be.

Unexpectedly delectable.

A passionate and rousing piece of filmmaking--a civics lesson with the punch of a good melodrama.

Embedded in this seeming valentine to the movies is something pricklier, sadder, and smarter.

It’s action-packed without being too violent, and smart without taking itself too seriously.

When it's idling in neutral, and we're watching Stark putter in his workshop or seduce unsuspecting journalists, Iron Man abounds in that rarest of superpowers: charm.

The thoughtful and leisurely paced Marley is an exemplary music documentary in almost every way - but the area in which it falls short is an important one. Like a surprisingly large number of films about musicians (whether biopic or documentary), this one is curiously resistant to letting the audience hear its subject's songs in their entirety.

The recent film it most recalls is "You Can Count on Me" (2000), another small treasure about a fractured family that managed to be moving without troweling on the sap.

No part of us is allowed to relax. Ever.

In typical Jonze fashion, the film is loose and anarchic yet deceptively well-controlled, its fourth wall always in varying states of permeability.

Somehow, Assisted Living jells. Maggie Riley is astoundingly convincing, and she and Bonsignore's Todd have an unforced chemistry that catches you off guard.

If Hereditary was about being trapped, Midsommar is about the terror of being let loose, the giddy, sickening rush of freefall. You laugh at its audacity, or maybe just to keep from losing your own grip on reality. By the time it’s over, you can’t wait for night to fall.

With a theatrical setting, a large ensemble cast, and musical numbers, Altman and his crew are in their own tailored version of heaven.

The second hour, though, strides toward its impressively unstinting resolution with magisterial confidence. With the characters finally stripped of the hardness they’d been forced to wear, their raw selves glisten in the sun until it’s time to wearily tie the carapace back on.

Babel has great expectations for itself: It wants to be a movie about big ideas and big emotions at the same time. Aided by gorgeous locations and classy trappings (cinematography by Rodrigo Prieto, theme music by Gustavo Santaolalla), it succeeds for the most part.

Directors Ian Bonhôte and Peter Ettedgui’s smartest tactic — the one that makes McQueen such a pleasure to watch, even for fashion outsiders — is giving viewers a front-row seat to the runway, then letting us judge the designer’s oeuvre for ourselves.

True Crime gives you sleaze on toast--a heap of tabloid bathos, a dusting of high-mindedness, a dash of gallows humor. It's a bizarre concoction, but it's riveting.

Thor: Ragnarok is a much goofier film than its 2011 and 2013 predecessors, and also a better one.

It’s all so pleasantly familiar I might as well have been hanging out with these guys for years.

Its unthwartable tempo of quips, gags, cameos (Sly Stallone!), and loud noises rarely feels grating if only because of how loving it feels toward its characters and soundtrack, and how respectful it is toward the limits of its audience’s appetite for superheroic universe-building.

It’s a teen sex romp well suited for the summer of 2019: feminist but not preachy, raunchy but not nasty, emotionally intelligent but not sentimental.

Gives off the same vapor of impending tragedy—of a fate neither just nor unjust but ineffably, wrenchingly right.

With a woman-with THIS woman-all the invincible-spy clichés feel fresh and fun again.

Marcel the Shell with Shoes On struck me as an animated film like no other I can recall. It’s a story about the difficulty and necessity of making yourself vulnerable that is itself the product of an unusually intimate artistic collaboration, literally a couple’s shared in-joke that took on a life of its—or his—own.

In dramatic terms, Osama couldn't be much simpler. The director is aiming for a sort of tone poem of repression, the girl robbed first of her childhood, then of her burgeoning womanhood.

Zobel and Modi have crafted a thoughtful narrative about the experience of navigating and attempting to accommodate others' personalities.

Like their Star Wars forebears, Boyega’s Finn and Ridley’s Rey are brave, funny, and admirable but also imperfect, uncertain, and sometimes afraid. That is to say, they’re genuine, multisided characters with believable motivations—no small victory in a movie designed with the express purpose of breaking world box-office records.

It's particularly exciting to get to see an inventive underground work like This Is Not a Film in the wake of Iran's first-ever Oscar win for Asghar Farhadi's great film "A Separation." It's becoming clear that the blossoming of Iranian cinema, which has been going on now for at least 20 years, is too strong a force for the government censors to contain.

This wouldn’t work if not for Holland, whose Peter Parker is the kind of self-conscious, quietly exceptional outer-borough teen without whom the entire concept of Spider-Man would sputter.

In spite of its standard biopic gaps and simplifications, Walk the Line gets the big things right.

Everything we love about biblical-movie kitsch is here, only concentrated and heightened.

Now, nearly 50 years later, Americans’ reproductive choice is again in jeopardy, making The Janes not only a crucial part of the historical record but a searingly contemporary film about the power of mutual aid and collective action.

A minor-key ghost story with major jolts.

The Guest isn’t here to deliver an earnest social message about the state of veterans’ affairs. Instead, the way good horror movies do, it channels our collective fear, guilt, and rage by creating a monster.

Breezy, brief, and often a howl.

Maggie’s agonizing zero-sum struggle to balance a life of military service and a steady relationship with her son feels fresh, raw, and real — even if the conflict it enacts is as old as the transition between The Iliad and The Odyssey, between the horrors of the battlefield and the difficult journey home.

By focusing on the power of cannily staged collective action to turn the tide of public opinion, Selma achieves a contemporary relevance that few historical dramas can — especially those built around real-life figures as encrusted in layers of hagiography as MLK.

Star Trek Beyond may not go where no Trek has gone before, but it’s that very fidelity to the show’s original values that will keep fans trekking to the box office.

Feels fresh and satisfying. Maybe it's the presence of Jason Statham, the British action star who has a physicality like no other actor out there right now.

Living Out Loud becomes an ode to openness, to letting in everything that the world throws at you.

Edel's clear-eyed and exhaustively researched account is unique in its refusal to either romanticize or villainize the terrorists. It's a study in the seductive appeal, and inevitable failure, of the attempt to bomb one's way to a better world.

Belongs to that most promiscuous of genres -- the go-for-it sports melodrama -- but transcends it and then some.

With an actor as great as Gene Hackman in the lead, a lot of scenes even breathe.

As she's being put through her Oxford-prep paces, Jenny complains about "ticking off boxes," and at times, this film seems to be doing just that: coming-of-age drama, check. Youthful illusions shattered, check. But as with first love, so with the movies: The right girl makes it all worthwhile.

A thriller that isn't kinky isn't much of a thriller. And Cellular has the best kinky phone gimmick since "Sorry, Wrong Number" (1948).

The first real Jackie Chan picture crafted for the American market, is a terrific piece of junk filmmaking.

A gleefully crummy buddy comedy that uses horror-movie conventions as catapults to hurl the audience down one "whoa, dude!" narrative wormhole after another.

Tumbleweeds is gorgeously nuanced.

No movie in the last decade has succeeded in psyching out critics and audiences as fully as the powerful, rambling war epic The Thin Red Line.

The rocky but loving relationships Amy has with her father and sister are every bit as important to the story as the connection she shares with her (would-be) boyfriend, and all three parts of her life affect and change one another, just like in—imagine that!—real life.

Knives Out is a sendup of twisty murder mysteries with all-star ensemble casts that also loves and respects that silly tradition.

A dazzling, repellent exercise in which the case against men is closed before it's opened.

I reckon 90 of the movie's 106 minutes are thriller heaven. The windup, alas, isn't in the same league: Both humdrum and confusingly staged, it pales beside the volcanic climaxes of Franklin's "One False Move" (1992) and "Devil in a Blue Dress."

Though both highly stylized and highly stylish, Drive isn't hurting for substance. It has rich, complex characters and a storyline that's both emotionally engaging and almost sickeningly suspenseful.

This movie keeps a lot of balls in the air: generational and cultural conflict, hospital drama, screwball banter — and only rarely lets one drop.

Even though the film is full of laughs, the jokes hover on the edge of the abyss: This is a world in which lurid colors and extravagant gestures are means of filling the void.