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.

Book Club is an airy dinner conversation set before a spectacular, disposable backdrop, a sure-fire bet to be the breeziest two hours you spend in the theater this summer.

The script, by Lawrence Kasdan and his son Jonathan, is capable but unremarkable, as is Howard’s direction. But the cast...consistently elevates the material.

The film ends on a remarkably touching emotional note. Had it held to the strength of its convictions—and it is immensely obvious why it did not—it might have been the best ending of any superhero movie to date. (No, the bar’s not terribly high.) But it’s nonetheless awfully good, and we can still look forward to, mid-credits, the world’s best-ever Green Lantern joke.

While McCarthy does what she can with the material provided her, it’s not nearly enough to save the movie. As a result, Life of the Party doesn’t live up to either of the nouns in its title.

Swerving between thrill-a-minute action and intense, drawn-out suspense, Revenge has all the subtlety of a bazooka to the face, but it’s an arresting watch if you can stomach its most lurid moments of violence.

Let the Sunshine In is a unique, spellbinding work, worthy of comparison to Denis’s best films.

Much of what does work is owed to Theron and Davis’s incredible performances.

Disobedience finishes on an annoyingly vague note, almost as if Lelio and Lenkiewicz had stumbled on a more interesting, expansive narrative in the final act but didn’t quite know how to pursue it. The result is a film that, from beginning to end, feels as hopelessly lost as its characters do.

Never has the “Marvel Cinematic Universe” seemed like more of a universe, in ways both good and bad. Infinity War—the title is almost too apt—is a narrative juggling act the likes of which I’m not sure I’ve ever seen before. It is far from a perfect movie, but it is probably close to the best movie it could have been.