A surprisingly fresh didactic comedy that preaches the hollowness of glamour and status and the American cult of winning.

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.

Lee has managed to again make a movie worth debating, wrestling with, and maybe even hating, depending upon how you feel about him as a director.

Wherever these two love-crazed lesbians’ poorly-thought-out plans take them, we’re along for the dizzying ride.

Girls State’s most engrossing characters don’t wind up being those who prevail, but those who persist, who dust themselves off and find a way to keep going forward.

Calvary gives Gleeson ample opportunity to explore his talent for anchoring a movie, making it deeper and richer than the script and direction might otherwise allow.

From an aesthetic and technical perspective, her achievement is laudable, but there’s something underfurnished about this movie, a lack of historical, intellectual, and thematic richness. For all its elaborate design and carefully calibrated mood, it comes down to the tale of a randy fox in an impeccably preserved Greek Revival henhouse.

The Mustang, "The Rider," and "Lean on Pete" all end on fragile notes of hope for their central figures, even as their futures remain uncertain. The horses, notably, are less lucky. Equine counterparts in horse movies serve a variety of functions, but mostly as proxies for the heroes’ struggles and signals of their ultimate nobility. That is more or less true of The Mustang, and the movie’s final scene is a hair too literal in that respect.

I wanted to fall under this movie’s spell as if watching one of those early 20th-century immigrant melodramas — instead, it felt like visiting a meticulously appointed but too-tidy historical museum.

For a movie about the policing of borders, couldn't this one have policed a firmer one, between credibility and incredibility? Between seriousness and self-seriousness?

Each stop is ever so slightly better than you remembered. Not another teen movie, indeed.

It is not a superhero flick as we have come to know the genre but a road movie and a Western, one that plays with the myth of the aging cowboy.

There may be deeper, more intangible fears buried beneath this rowdy, raucous thriller’s grody surface—luckily, you won’t have time to stop and ponder them while you’re being chased by a supersized zombie wielding a severed head.

When the groom's enormous procession fights its way through the hard rain and muck to the bejeweled bride, Nair's chaos downright sparkles.

The movie is surprisingly moving in its focus on the character who’s often felt like the show’s biggest drag.

The case could be made that The Disaster Artist is a little too sunny for a movie about a clearly damaged man whose lifelong drive to create something beautiful only led to his becoming a symbol of grand-scale failure. But in addition to making me laugh, hard, at a time when cathartic laughter is all but a medical necessity, this portrait of the artist as a not-so-young weirdo struck me as peculiarly moving.

The Bill Cunningham captured here is a puckish, eightysomething man with electric energy and a wish to devour all of New York through his camera lens.

The movie has become a kind of highway-safety film for the rock community.

Throughout this terse, entertaining parable (it won the grand prize at this year's Cannes Film Festival), the Belgian-born writer-directors Luc and Jean-Pierre Dardenne ("La Promesse," 1996) immerse you in the sensations of Rosetta's life.

For all its tasteful spareness and eerie, diaphanous mood, Blue Caprice feels, in the end, insubstantial. It’s a true-crime story that illustrates little about the crime in question and a character study whose characters, even when haunting, remain stubbornly opaque.

Has the note-perfect melancholy of a classic young adult novel.

Like Someone in Love is a movie that never quite lets you through to the other side of the glass, but it’s dazzling to watch whatever drifts by on the surface.

Like "Anvil!," Sacha Gervasi's 2008 documentary about two lovable, bickering metalheads, Beats, Rhymes & Life is a music documentary with a buddy-movie heart.

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.

Dolemite Is My Name delivers on titties, funnies, and kung fu, all mixed up in a syrupy nostalgia that makes the picture’s feel-good populism go down easy. It’s only when the credits roll that you might notice there was little there but froth.

The film’s scruffy, smartass band of brothers, along with Gunn’s light directorial touch, make for an invigorating breather after too many summer weekends of hammer-wielding superheroic solemnity.

The miracle of the movie is the Bolger sisters, who are so direct and matter-of-fact that they hardly seem to be acting. But their simplicity is radiant.

Fukunaga's vision of Jane Eyre is refreshingly un-Gothic. Though all the story elements are in place for a thunder-on-the-moors-style gloomfest (and though there are, in fact, several thunderstorms on moors), this film is low on Romantic atmospherics and flooded with natural light.