There’s plenty to enjoy about Materialists, from the sparkling indie soundtrack (Cat Power! Harry Nilsson! John Prine!) to the flattering rose-hued glow of Shabier Kirchner’s cinematography, to Lucy’s enviable working-girl wardrobe.

For all its exquisite boxes-within-boxes compositions and cleverly designed sets (the production design is by longtime collaborator Adam Stockhausen, who won an Oscar for his work on The Grand Budapest Hotel), this whole movie unfolded for me as if behind a thick pane of emotion-proof glass.

Whether or not this one is really the last in the series, Final Reckoning is a noble exemplar of a dying breed: the big, dumb, fun action blockbuster with a bona fide movie star at its center, putting it all on the line—and hanging on for dear life—just to keep us at the edge of our theater seats.

Especially during its third-act descent into the surreal netherworld of its protagonist’s mind, Friendship plays out as if it were a 97-minute-long I Think You Should Leave sketch.

It’s both a wildly ambitious meditation on American history and a rip-roaring good time.

I couldn’t tear my eyes away from the screen during Warfare, even if they were sometimes half-covered during those many cutaways to lacerated flesh. But leaving the movie, my main sensation was relief that that brutal viewing experience was over, rather than reflection on the meaning of the Iraq War, on the experience of war itself, or on the success or failure of this particular attempt to represent it.

It appears to be relying on name recognition to garner an initial burst of curious viewers before word gets out about what a dud it is.

The movie suffers from a constant lack, not of resources but of imagination, of inspiration—of, to put it simply, fun.

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

Above all, Mickey 17 is remarkable for the savagery of its satire of 21st-century capitalism.

If the latest escapade is not quite as sparkling as its predecessors—in 2021, the second entry briefly surpassed Citizen Kane as one of the highest-rated movies on Rotten Tomatoes—it retains their warmhearted and cheekily funny spirit.

True to the rom-com tradition, the film ends in apologies, tears, and redemptive hugs, but the sour taste it leaves behind feels less like victory than like morning sickness.

Sadly, You’re Cordially Invited eventually founders on the same rocky shores as many recent attempts to revive the rom-com.

Just 97 minutes long, Hard Truths is a deceptively slight movie that can barely contain its titanic central performance.

The magisterial (yet also often funny) performances from virtually every member of the cast, the rigor which with it explores complex characters and ideas, and the sheer painterly beauty of its compositions make this one of the few movies this year I almost immediately went back to see for a second time.

What keeps Babygirl from feeling preachy or self-serious is the film’s sense of humor and playfulness when it comes to matters of sex.

Mufasa was almost inevitably destined to be Barry Jenkins’ worst movie, and it is. But it’s not a black mark on his record, just a blank space on the timeline.

Scene by scene, there’s nothing not to enjoy about this lushly animated ode to exploration, teamwork, and pluck, especially if you’re a parent of small kids on the hunt for a fun family outing. But for all its verve and polish, Moana 2 seems more like a consumer product, in some subtle but unmistakable way, than the first film did.

Despite the movie’s arguably excessive run time, it takes seriously its mandate to keep the audience not just entertained but dazzled.

Gladiator 2 (or as it’s spelled in the opening title, GladIIator) sadly comes off as less a reinvention of the original than a curiously literal retread of its plot beats, characters, and themes.

Though Emilia Pérez is not a movie intended only for female audiences, it’s one that reflects deeply on the embodied experience of being a woman, a condition that some characters endure as a form of imprisonment—one unhappily kept wife sings of her life in the proverbial “golden cage”—while others look to womanhood as a potential site for personal and societal reinvention.

McQueen clearly wants to broaden the archetype of stiff-upper-lip Englishness into something more inclusive. It’s a worthy message, but one that sometimes seems to take precedence over the characters and story rather than emerging organically from them.

It’s a crowd-pleaser, funny and sexy and raucous, while also being startlingly wise and tender.

By any reasonable measure this is a terrible movie, too long and too self-serious and way too dramatically inert, a regrettable waste of its lead actors’ boundless commitment to even their most thinly written roles.

If this unusually thoughtful exploration of parenthood, emotional connection, and the coexistence of nature and technology is the only installment we get, load your offspring onto your back and tote them to the movie theater while you can.

I will say—with as much clarity as I can muster through the tears once again blurring my vision—that the final 15 minutes or so of His Three Daughters are what lifts the movie out of “impressively fine-tuned family drama starring three excellent actresses” into the stratosphere of “transcendent work of art whose insights into the meaning of human impermanence you may want to change your life to be worthy of.

After two hours and 20 minutes of flamboyantly repulsive variations on this well-worn theme, even the strongest-stomached and most feminist of viewers could be excused for muttering, We get it already.

As simply a genre exercise, Rebel Ridge would be exquisite work, but what elevates the film even further is its rare intelligence and conscience.