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.