Written and directed by Eugene Ashe, Sylvie’s Love is an ode to classic melodramas, with sumptuous set design, gorgeous costumes and an enveloping soundtrack of mid-century hits.

Many of the best scenes are silent, enhanced by a wonderfully wistful score by James Newton Howard.

Soul turns out to be not an exploration of the afterlife but a wondrous whirligig of daily life.

It has the makings of a stealth classic.

The tone shifts radically from one moment to the next, and humor is a regular companion to mayhem, pain, even violence. That brings us to the wild and harrowing ending. It’s an ending that may not be expected — well, it’s definitely not expected — but Fennell has said it was the truest way to end a real story of female revenge, not a comic-book version.

The ambitions of Wonder Woman 1984 may be just outside its grasp, but it seldom feels predestined or predictable — a preciously rare commodity in the genre.

Although the event and aftermath were widely, exhaustively covered, I don’t think I’m the only one who lost the thread early. This not knowing is part of what makes Ryan White’s extraordinary documentary Assassins, about the trial of the two young women, so compulsively compelling.

Eventually, the movie does seem to get where it’s going. A scene between Alice and Roberta touches upon issues of literary ownership and artistic license that haven’t yet been fully mined. It’s a bit late in the game. But the ride has been pleasant.

The Prom works hard to be a good time, and I hope it is for many who could use one.

The writing is wry and occasionally quite funny. It’s not unsurprising that it made for a good play. But on film it moves at a languorous pace. Like its characters, it’s not interested in getting anywhere anytime soon.

The film itself might not wrap up in any sort of tidy or satisfying way, but nothing leading up to the conclusion would lead you to expect something so basic.

When it’s at its best, I’m Your Woman feels like you’ve slipped through a trap door, revealing a hidden pathway in an old genre apparatus.

It goes without saying that the performance is brilliant, and yes, electric, but it’s also heroic. If there had to be a final role, what a gift that it was this, an exclamation point to a career that seems ever more momentous.

It might not be as novel as the first, but it’s essentially harmless, if a little chaotic, fun for kids and doesn’t need to be anything more than that.

Collective is not a walk in the park. But it’s admirably awake to the cause-and-effect tragedies that can follow seemingly slight or obscure governmental decisions.

Christmas on the Square is pure, studio-lot fantasy and not really trying to be anything else.

Marder, who wrote the screenplay with his brother, Abraham Marder, takes far too long to get to his points in a sluggish middle but has crafted a quite lyrical tale of a man trying to find his way when everything he knows is taken away.

Utterly original and utterly excellent, the modern bromance The Climb is a thrilling ride, an unconventional and idiosyncratic American film that acts like a old-school arty European one.

This Hillbilly Elegy has stripped away the most sermonizing, debatable parts of the book, but it’s also denuded it of any deeper purpose, leaving us with a cosplay shell of A-list actors chewing rural scenery.

A film like this should give life to its characters and reveal essential truths beyond the book-report versions of their existence. But Ammonite keeps you at a distance on a rather vacant, but beautiful, journey.

The story itself is unremarkable, even thin — there are no surprising twists or turns, no big lessons in the script by Nicolaas Zwart — but the relationship at its core is hugely entertaining to watch.

It’s simply telling a story about a man behind so many of our movie memories and making a new one in the process. And it is, without a doubt one, of the year’s very best.

Both Lane and Costner, direct and earthy performers from the start, have only added depth with age. As long-married Montana ranchers in Let Him Go (in theaters Friday), they’re basically the platonic ideal of an old-fashioned, homespun Americana. They could sell you a mountain of jeans if they wanted to.

This very American fable has been blessed with three remarkable performances.

The best thing that Holidate has going for it is that Roberts and Bracey do have great chemistry, but they just don’t have a story or a script that can do it justice.

By bringing the migrant crisis into a horror-film realm, His House has forcefully captured the traumas of the refugee experience. The grounded performances and pained faces of Dìrísù and Mosaku offer no easy answers.

As it races to its cool supernatural climax — and then a coda that connects it to the first film — “The Craft: Legacy” is firing on all cylinders, looking back respectfully but also showing how the same story in different hands can soar.

A work of fierce interiority has been turned into a hollow exercise in exteriority.