Someone Great is fizzy, frivolous, and probably easily forgotten, but for a weekend-friendly jolt of entertainment, rom-com fans could do far worse.

The creative journey, and the magical bond between artist and subject, are what ignite Gilliam’s passion here. Unfortunately, the themes of The Man Who Killed Don Quixote are more compelling than the set pieces themselves.

A gorgeous and impossible puzzle of a movie.

It’s filled with colorful characters, innovative creature design, and some of the most spectacular sets in Laika’s history.

In trying to set itself apart, this film ends up perfectly laying out the case against its own existence.

For all its body horrors and apocalyptic conclusions, High Life is one of Denis’s most loving and tender creations.

This is the rare comic-book movie that actually seems geared toward families, mixing adolescent humor with sincere sweetness that doesn’t cloy.

The most shocking thing about the film is its unabashed cheerfulness. For all Korine’s trademark provocation, The Beach Bum somehow manages to be an upbeat, triumphant tale of creativity and free-spiritedness.

The film is just different enough to stick out amid the studio’s backwards-looking slate, and Burton, for the first time in years, shows he hasn’t lost his love for the idiosyncratic.

Despite the grand scale, like all of Jia’s works, Ash Is Purest White leaves questions of good and evil to the viewer—this isn’t a philosophical story, but a personal one.

Us is a thrill ride, a somber parable, and a potential first chapter in a vast, encyclopedic sci-fi story; talented as ever, Peele has found a way to cram all of that into a gleeful blast of a film.

The script, by Joe Shrapnel and Anna Waterhouse, conveys little beyond the fact that Stephen and Rachael are both sad, nice to each other, and very attractive.

Given its similarity to the original, Gloria Bell could have just been a curiosity—but the hilarious performances by Moore, Cera, and Turturro make Lelio’s return to his own material more than worth it.

The 21st entry in Marvel’s galactic film empire, and the first focused on a female superhero (played by Brie Larson), is a perfectly fun time at the movies that deftly lays out the stakes of its new character for many future appearances. But more often than not, it feels a little routine.

As it is, Greta is more of a Terminator movie, with everyone doing their best to get out of Huppert’s way for 98 enjoyable minutes—though that’s still worth a recommendation in my book.

The Boy Who Harnessed the Wind could’ve been a conventional narrative of despair and redemption; in Ejiofor’s hands, it builds realism and context into both sides of that story and manages to be a winning adaptation as a result.

Sheer force of personality is the main ingredient of any great sports movie, and Pugh has enough of it to pull the story along. But this is a star performance that deserved an equally dazzling script.

The narrative thrust of The Hidden World sputters any time humans are involved. Much of the plot exists only to stall the characters until the film winds its way to a touching conclusion.

It’s one thing to make fun of the repetitiveness of a second movie, but this one manages to do that while actually expanding its storytelling horizons.

True to its origins, Alita is a living cartoon of a film, which only makes its ridiculousness easier to absorb.

Soderbergh’s unorthodox film release and cheap, idiosyncratic shooting style are ideal fits for the director’s fascinating, speculative story about the future of the NBA.

The script has a wry sense of humor but is almost never laugh-out-loud funny, and the gory substance of the plot regularly overwhelms the delicate notes of parody.

This is a project that’s loaded with big ideas and worthy morals for its younger viewers, even if it has a little trouble streamlining them all into an easily digestible plot.

In the end, Velvet Buzzsaw is a pretty soulless piece of art about the soullessness of art; but that doesn’t mean it can’t have a little fun proving its point.

The film more than earns its commanding title: You will not want to look away.

With The Big Short, McKay threaded a needle by managing to be jokey while still serious, and angry while still entertaining. With Vice, he fails in both directions.

The film hums with energy anytime Merlin is on-screen, but even when it’s in the hands of its very sweet preteen ensemble, it’s a lively watch.

It’s one of those projects that initially seems hokey beyond repair but quickly evolves into something genuinely unique. Serenity may not make it onto many critics’ top-10 lists come the end of 2019. But it’s certain to be one of the more unforgettable viewing experiences of the year.

Fyre is primarily a journalistic exhumation of the Fyre Festival’s ridiculous excesses. But via interviews with both dissatisfied ticket-buyers and nervy ex-employees, the movie also scrapes away the sheen of the flamboyant “influencer” lifestyle that McFarland leveraged to sell tickets and hook investors.

It’s a film that sometimes plays more as a rambling TED Talk than as a straightforward thriller. But, in this case, I admired Shyamalan’s overreach, even as the auteur laid meta-textual twist atop twist in the movie’s giddily loopy ending.

It is not—if my description has somehow failed to make this clear—an easy film to watch. But it is a forceful and unsettling addition to the cinema of the Holocaust, a film that digs deeply into the gruesome workings of the death camps and ponders questions about duties to the living and duties to the dead.

This movie is as much a eulogy for a country that Eastwood sees as slowly crumbling as it is for the life Earl chose to lead.

Aquaman works because it isn’t laughing at itself—it’s both joyously whimsical and confident in its own seaworthiness.

Mary Poppins Returns is surely not a movie for everyone. But for those with a deep fondness for the original film, it is a worthy remix.

If Beale Street Could Talk is an impressive, mature, and determined work that ably reaches the great heights it sets for itself.

Despite its period setting, The Favourite just might be Lanthimos’s most trenchant and relevant work yet.

For all the time Serkis has had to tinker with it, the film feels painfully incomplete, from its frequently told story to its weak visuals.

The final act of Shoplifters, like all of Kore-eda’s best work, is devastating. After seeing the director tease out every strange bond in this makeshift group, investing his audience fully in their future, one finds it that much harder to watch when things fall apart.

This movie is little more than a vibrant-looking tableau, a two-dimensional take on an intricate piece of history. It’s a tale that’s been told better before, and Willimon’s modern updates are less enlightened than they initially seem.

The world doesn’t really need another Spider-Man movie, which is exactly what makes Spider-Man: Into the Spider-Verse such an unexpected delight: Here’s the latest entry in a fully saturated genre that somehow, through sheer creative gumption, does something new.

By its conclusion, Cuarón’s film proves itself both wonderful and fearsome. See it. You will never forget it.

Green Book may supply little in the way of meaningful commentary on racial dynamics either in the 1960s or today. But thanks to Mortensen and Ali, it’s a perfectly pleasant way to spend two hours.

Though this menu is clearly by design, the result is both a meal that feels less than the sum of its parts and individual courses that themselves feel somehow undercooked. I found myself simultaneously wanting both more and less.

Amazingly enough, the result is a witty, visually inventive, and fittingly sober story about the perils of the internet, told through the eyes of a video-game avatar with unusually large forearms.

McQueen has made a big, pulpy crowd-pleaser, but he uses it to tell a story with real meaning. Widows is methodical in its imagery and gracefully written; it’s also a suspenseful blast, best seen with the biggest, most animated audience possible.

This is a film that exists primarily to answer questions nobody would have ever thought to ask about a series of books that already told a very complete story.

Rest assured, in The Girl in the Spider’s Web, Lisbeth Salander saves the day, and she looks cool doing it. But this is a story so slick that she’d be rolling her eyes if she watched it.

The film may be too much of a bloody slog for some; others will be on board for every gruesome minute like I was.

So much of The Front Runner feels like stenography, giving audiences the basics and then letting Hart or Bradlee monologue to the camera about how the norms of yesteryear are slipping away, perhaps forever.

Based on Garrard Conley’s 2016 memoir, Boy Erased is a methodical work that tries to account for the horrors of religious conversion camps as soberly as possible—but unfortunately to the point where soberness edges into blandness.

In short, Bohemian Rhapsody isn’t just prone to music-biopic clichés—it’s practically a monument to them, a greatest-hits collection of every narrative shortcut one can possibly take in summarizing a legendary act’s rise to fame.

A meditative two-and-a-half-hour art film might not sound like a plausible candidate for the year’s best thriller, but Burning is exactly that—its story moves patiently, but engrossingly, before cresting with a shocking denouement that wouldn’t make sense were it not for Lee’s meticulous craft.

Above all else, it lodges itself into one’s brain and seems primed to reward repeat viewings. The biggest compliment I can give Guadagnino is that he’s made a Suspiria that appears destined for the long-lasting cult status already enjoyed by the original.

Can You Ever Forgive Me? may be a muted story, but it is a profoundly memorable one.

Boiled down to its core, the 1978 Halloween was about the chilling permeability of the suburbs and the ease with which American domesticity could be disrupted. Green’s new movie sticks to that theme, and does it well, but the film only shows hints of being something more interesting until its excellent final act.

In its quietest scenes, Mid90s feels a little more authentic, and Hill may well turn out to have a growing talent for directing. But he needs to match his subtler insights to a script that feels less derivative.

Van Groeningen isn’t too curious about what got Nic into drugs, nor how he finally pulled out of the spiral. Beautiful Boy largely exists in between those two stories and ends up feeling like a limited, grueling experience.

I have to applaud Goddard’s ambition, even when it overreaches. Yes, Bad Times at the El Royale is bloated and might’ve functioned better as a punchy bit of neo-noir. But it’s rare for a genre film to feel so sweeping and inventive.

First Man is about Armstrong’s landmark achievement, but it’s just as much about a country’s grinding, maniacal fixation on getting him there.

Venom is, at its heart, a will-they-won’t-they story—a grisly meet-cute between a down-on-his-luck reporter and a grumpy, gloppy little extra-terrestrial with a really big appetite. That’s good, because the movie is barely competent as an action flick.

Jenkins uses her gift for capturing intimacy as a weapon, telling a story that’s sometimes brutal, other times acidly funny, but always honest.

Cooper’s biggest innovation in this remake, which he wrote with Eric Roth and Will Fetters, is his emphasis on partnership. He interweaves Jackson and Ally’s relationship with the music they create together, so the audience’s investment in both is palpable.

The result is a documentary that’s fascinated with its subject without being reverent, one that’s beautifully photographed (the way that Vasarhelyi and Chin capture the scale of Honnold’s climb is stunning) without ignoring the horrifying consequences lurking if he fails.

There are moments in Hold the Dark, none of them directly related to the plot, that are just as unsettling and searing as the best moments of Blue Ruin and Green Room. Still, the film never coheres outside of those flashes, ultimately delivering a disappointing, confusing, but undeniably fascinating experience.

Lowery’s film is an easy-breezy celebration of Redford’s charisma and a fitting swan song given that it might be his final on-camera role.

The Sisters Brothers feels special. It has the painterly visuals of a classic film, but its lead characters are black-hatted villains whose road to redemption is mostly motivated by exhaustion rather than guilt. The story is grim and violent, but the brothers’ relationship is shot through with ramshackle humor, and the men they’re ultimately tasked with pursuing are portrayed as loving and idealistic—an utter rarity for this kind of story.

It’s a disjointed, occasionally powerful, often grating grab bag of recent political events, a mess that’s forgivable only because it does reflect the messy state of the world.

In Life Itself, everyone’s fate is in the hands of Fogelman, and he wields that power with terrible cruelty.

The Predator is a confused, sloppy mess of a film, overstuffed with zingy one-liners and lacking in coherence.

The entire film has the sense of something being profoundly, and mercifully, upended; the result is engrossing, satisfying, and more than a little heartbreaking.

The film is a diverting watch, anchored with enough of Weitz’s intriguing personal touches to keep it from feeling like a glorified History Channel special.

Searching is a clever update on a housebound Hitchcock thriller like Rear Window, one that can make a series of Google searches play out like a high-wire action scene.

It’s difficult to make a work that confronts, or even acknowledges, the rusting but seemingly immovable structures of institutional sexism. It’s even harder to do that and address how race and class are inextricably bound up in those oppressive systems, and it’s even harder still to accomplish that without delivering a hectoring lecture to the audience. Support the Girls somehow manages to do it all, and in the form of a breezy, heartwarming workplace comedy to boot.

Liu’s intimacy with his subjects becomes contagious, to the point where their small victories are thrilling and their failures feel devastating.

Though Crazy Rich Asians is rightly being lauded for its groundbreaking nature (as the first studio film with an Asian cast set in the present day since 1993’s The Joy Luck Club), it’s also a charming throwback to the kind of story Hollywood doesn’t tell much anymore: the high-society comedy, rife with family drama, acidic one-liners, and indomitable female characters.

A tense, loopy look at acting and writing, the movie is at times deliberately off-putting. But it’s anchored by a star-making turn from Helena Howard, who plays the fascinating, inscrutable figure at the story’s center.

This is a film loaded with broad comedy, bold speechifying, blunt depictions of racism, and astonishing visual flair; it is a Spike Lee movie, made with the kind of artistic and political verve that recalls his best work.

Christopher Robin is the kind of uncanny experiment that only gets to happen in children’s films once every few years.

Puzzle is often too prosaic for its own good.

This is a film about Cameron’s core personhood, and how it stands up to concentrated efforts to transform it, and it’s told with quiet steeliness and grace.

As these films have gone on, they’ve become more and more fascinated with Hunt’s essential ludicrousness. Mission: Impossible – Fallout decrees him elemental—a crucial, indefinable component keeping the very fabric of humanity knitted together. The film is so dizzyingly fun that, at least while you’re watching, it seems like a sound conclusion.

Blindspotting has enough verve, humor, and passion to recommend it—even as it overplays its hand in its final minutes.

Here We Go Again is a viewing experience best described as a long nap on the beach while staying at a chain resort. It’s extremely pleasant, if a little lacking in imagination, and every so often, a waiter comes by to refill your drink.

What most stunned me about Eighth Grade was how well directed it is. It’s rare that teen movies have the kind of visual acuity and verve that Burnham achieves here.

The story’s heightened reality works best when it’s barely distinguishable from our own—though it starts to lose steam the more it drifts into fantasy. The movie is at times a mess, but a compelling one, and this debut from Boots Riley should herald a fascinating filmmaking career.

Ant-Man and the Wasp bets on everything that worked about the first movie—it’s a light and sunny entry in the ongoing Marvel canon that gets by on the cast’s easygoing chemistry. And, of course, on all the shrinking and growing.

Granik’s ability to convey so much about how a community works without didacticism is part of what made Winter’s Bone (which was set in the Ozarks) such a thrill to watch. While Leave No Trace is a more muted drama, it has a similarly firm grasp on its characters and the places they comes across.

The jokes could be dirtier, the plot looser, the basketball action more gleefully ludicrous. Instead, everything feels very competent but safe.

The joy of the romantic comedy lies less in its mise en scène, and more in its witty repartee and character chemistry, which Set It Up is loaded with. The will-they-won’t-they tension is enough for the movie to power through the silliest moments.

Bayona, the Spanish director who first emerged with his terrific horror film The Orphanage, does his best to inject some more intimate action into a series that usually operates on an epic scale, but he’s working with too absurd a plot for his craft to really matter.

A punk-rock-meets-aliens story of young romance, it finds itself uncomfortably on the spectrum somewhere between Earth Girls Are Easy and Liquid Sky: neither good enough to be a conventional success nor weird enough to be a cult hit.

Hathaway delivers a sharp, witty dissection of female celebrity, at once impenetrably vain and entitled, yet also riven with self-doubt. It is both the most pointed and most amusing way in which the movie toys with gender expectations.

As a studio comedy, Tag is just about diverting enough to avoid total disaster, but it lacks the self-awareness and depth that might’ve turned it into a genre classic.

While it takes time to build up steam and set up its plot mechanics, once everyone is in costume and letting loose, it’s an exhilarating ride.

The film is touching, sometimes saccharine, and other times bluntly honest, but it works best as a fascinating reminder that Rogers was trying to be more than a mascot of American politeness.

Hereditary is a great scare-fest and a middling domestic saga, one that probably needed to be either 90 minutes long and brimming with terror, or three hours long and suffused with glacial, Bergman-esque dread. Aster has charted a middle path, and for a first film, it’s hard to fault the skill he’s shown in doing it.

It’s a film that tosses questions at the viewer with no interest in answering them, one that can’t decide if it feels for its subjects or just wants to mock their incompetence.

The Tale is above all a work of profound empathy, as a look inside someone’s psyche would have to be. Fox isn’t just excavating the abuse she suffered as a girl; she’s also engaging with and forgiving herself, reconciling with the damage that she had convinced herself to ignore for years.