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

76 Days is unvarnished and raw, a first draft of a history that’s still being written.

As a film that attempts to honor its victims while simultaneously offering graphic details, it both improves upon previous iterations of the material and exposes the limits of the story itself. The result is a movie that wrestles with its very existence—and, perhaps, the existence of based-on-a-true-disaster tales.

Pig is a blend of absurd cooking melodrama, jokey revenge thriller, and allegory, and Cage is the connective tissue holding all those ridiculous elements together. He may have abandoned the brightest spotlight, but he’s lost none of his edge.

The sparseness of the script matches the modesty of the staging. Because the film lacks lush period detail, or really any specific background visuals at all, the audience’s attention is thrown onto the performances, and the cast rises to the occasion magnificently.

As is typical of a Soderbergh production, The Christophers doesn’t waste an ounce of its limited resources; the director always knows exactly how to keep the viewer on the hook while allowing the story’s emotions room to breathe. The real heist of The Christophers is that Soderbergh snuck such a bittersweet tale into cinemas, dressed up as a silly caper.

It’s ambitious, sprawling, and sometimes shockingly counter to tradition for the series. But it’s also hugely effective: In offering real closure for the first time, No Time to Die sheds Bond’s mystique. It cements Craig’s legacy of playing Bond not just as a reliable institution, but also as a flawed human.

Guardians 3 is a cheerful goodbye to many of the studio’s best heroes, who somehow managed to get through an entire series without being ruined by the larger superhero universe they inhabit. For Marvel, that’s both a win and a problem.

It is, in short, a film to scowl to. But if you can lock into that moodiness, it’s also quite enthralling.

It’s a roller coaster that viewers can enjoy riding all the way up, but it’s not afraid to question its own climax the whole way down.

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

Kimi is yet another inventive blend of throwback suspense storytelling and current concerns; if Soderbergh wants to keep churning out one of these a year, he’s unlikely to run out of thematically ripe material.

The movie is weird and wrenching, asking the viewer to find humanity within the unreal tale of a puppet child’s rise to fame.

With Zola, however, the director Janicza Bravo has made a film that contends with the uneasy interplay between characters’ online and offline selves. And it posits that we use the internet to fool ourselves as much as to fool others.

A gorgeous and impossible puzzle of a movie.

With the inventiveness of Creed III, an old franchise suddenly feels fresh.

Unsane is a great worst-nightmare movie from Soderbergh, a tense piece of low-budget auteurship that plops the viewer into an absurd scenario and then ratchets up the tension for the next 90 minutes.

If the sequels keep coming, the John Wick story may one day collapse on itself. For now, the series remains the most reliable purveyor of high-stakes, onscreen combat around, a franchise that hasn’t yet been tarnished by its ongoing success.

A Fantastic Woman, nominated in the Best Foreign Language Film category at this year’s Academy Awards, is a tremendous portrait of grief and prejudice. It’s also an incredible showcase for Vega, who excels in a role that’s unfortunately rare in film—as a trans character who’s more than the butt of a joke or an exoticized other.

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.

Fennell has streamlined the book’s narrative, yes, but not its white-hot melodramatic core—and she understands it well enough to create a worthy swoon-fest for the ages.

Spielberg is in complete control of the material and even manages to tamp down his customary treacle until the movie’s almost over. It’s a fine, enjoyable ride, even if the ultimate destination is never the slightest bit in doubt.

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.

That unsettling feeling is communicated by Torres’s devastating, genuine performance.

Babylon is the kind of grandiose folly that at least gives the viewer a big old mess to chew on.

Roofman deftly blends genres to create a low-key crowd-pleaser—one that avoids merely reveling in what made Manchester notorious in the first place.

It fearlessly—and wackily—reckons with how confounding people can be in their bid for one another’s approval: at work, at home, at their new friend’s house while dressed in their finest Ocean View Dining clothing.

Zhao's delicate examination of her characters outshines Eternals' duller and more convoluted moments.