This is gut-punch, feel-bad studio filmmaking, all the more notable for how rarely it happens.

Sometimes silly but always propulsive, this franchise entry dares to give us an empathy-generating Predator, even if Elle Fanning’s robot steals the show.

There’s a history of great directors going out on a lesser film, and unfortunately, Friedkin joins their ranks. He leaves behind an extraordinary filmography of groundbreaking work that will inspire generations to come, but The Caine Mutiny Court-Martial will exist, at best, as a footnote to this legendary career.

As ever with Almodóvar, the healing balms of beauty, art, friendship, love and sex offer some consolation in the darkness, including a small but obligatory queer subplot.

Even if the only way to endow 1960s biker gangs with a sense of majesty and glory is to compare them to what would come later, Nichols captures those moments of fleeting greatness, allowing his lost men room to inhabit their own private inventions, to build their subculture and its mythologies, if only for a short time.

The cumulative effect of all this talent is a life-affirming blood-and-guts carnival of a movie that ranks highly among Audiard’s best, and boldest, work.

What Patel has crafted delivers both kinetic action and real-world relevance, an exceedingly rare combination.

The Phoenician Scheme sees Anderson indulging in all of his usual design fetishes (we don’t just get precisely-lettered labels on ornate boxes, we also get the yellowing cellophane tape affixed to those labels) without seeming to get around to a story or characters or themes.

The clever and effective Late Shift depicts nursing as a permanent emergency that finds its equivalent in a breathless, anxious rhythm designed to jangle the staunchest nerves. For audiences who are into job-horror with a stranglehold, it qualifies as one of the most engrossing films in the festival.

That Thunderbolts* (and yes, the movie explains that asterisk) emerges as one of the MCU’s most successful team-up movies is its own victory, considering that the team in question is made up of a collection of sidekicks, oddballs, and losers, mostly culled from lesser-known Marvel movies and even TV shows.

The plot of Everybody Loves Touda is sensually expressed in Erradi’s whirling, energetic performance, and visually told by the brilliant, soft camerawork of Virginie Surdej, expressing the character’s ups and downs.

Fortunately, Harvest recounts this pre-historical fall from grace not as dry socio-economic history, but as a sort of universal myth.

Maybe the center of the drama is the obsession — love? passion? — Mathias has with Claude, and their rendezvous plays out in a rather melodramatic way. But the music imposes its presence. Strangely enough, Claude does not seem interested in music or the pianist´s career. And the film limits itself to offering a compromise in this impossible love.

F1 doggedly follows the expected ups and downs of most sports-movie narratives, and it’s clearly more interested in recreating the experience of racing than telling a story or crafting a character piece.

The pleasurable jolt of a silent scare has given way to predictability.

The miracle of Superman is that, in 2025, it’s a superhero movie that inspires genuine delight.

For those of us who come to these movies wondering what Tom Cruise will be climbing, clinging onto, or falling off of, this sequel delivers the goods.

Despite a few bumpy moments, actor-director Noémie Merlant's gory feminist horror comedy paints a rowdy, richly imagined portrait of three ladies on fire.

Blink Twice emerges as a true late-summer surprise, a witty genre film with more on its mind than surface excitement, that draws its sense of dread out of real-world pain without ever exploiting that pain, that serves as an evergreen reminder that if the party seems too good to be true, it is.

Boasting a barnstorming performance from Yuumi Kawai (Plan 75), Desert of Namibia takes a seemingly banal love-triangle premise and runs with it in the most surprising, gripping and anarchic fashion possible.

Wonka stands as an effective reimagining of a beloved literary and cinematic character — so long as you don’t mind a little extra sweetness.

For all its craft, though, Kingdom of the Planet of the Apes never finds the “aha” moment that justifies returning to the well for reasons more pressing than branding and global markets.

While the adventure is suitably wild and the sidekicks are at least visually appealing, Elio never quite clicks in the way that viewers have come to expect from the people behind Toy Story 3 and Finding Nemo.

He makes his way to the big screen with silliness (and a love of tennis balls) intact, but Dog Man deserves a frenetic pace to match its barrage of absurd jokes and plot twists.

This Finale is basically one giant victory lap that takes the Crawley family and their employees into 1930 and beyond — as Cole Porter once wrote, “it’s fun/it’s fresh/it’s post-/depresh.”

Search for SquarePants comes down vigorously on the side of exuberance.

As did King before him, Wilson revels in whimsy without drowning in it, and he finds the franchise’s sweet spot of cleverness, poignancy, elaborate physical comedy, witty wordplay, goofy musicality, and just the right amount of sentiment.

This ebullient equestrian comedy thriller is effortlessly enjoyable as camp spectacle, with shades of Almodovar in the mix, even if its twist-heady screwball plot ultimately delivers more style than substance.