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.

The result is an embittered look at our world through the eyes of someone who’s increasingly horrified to be a part of it, and a film that’s one of the most searing cinema experiences of the year.