While Palm Springs is a fun rom-com, it’s a story haunted by the idea that we’d secretly be tempted by a world where nothing really matters, to absolve ourselves of responsibility.

Like learning how to cook a meal you grew up eating, Mucho Mucho Amor connected me with my past. It’s like the way air smells different and your heart feels a little bit bigger when you’re home with people you love and miss.

She Dies Tomorrow is a house of mirrors, a film much more interested in the reflections it offers you than in conjuring anything overly specific for you to ruminate.

While it’s not big on declarations of love, comic misunderstandings, or many of the genre trappings, it understands that the best romantic comedies are ones where the two leads are always talking, with each other, at each other, or past each other, constantly trying to sort out their relationship, despite whatever chaos is around them.

The horror of The Invisible Man comes from the knowledge that not only would Griffin’s schemes work should such a technology exist, but also from knowing that they already do.

Calling Crip Camp a feel-good movie feels contrary to its purpose, even as it is tremendously inspiring. It’s more of a reminder that something that seems impossible can be done; it just takes an immense, downright unfair amount of work to will it into existence and support from others who may not be impacted but benefit from a more equitable society because everyone does.

Tesla has oddball panache and is probably more compelling than a conventional period piece would be.

Bad Boys for Life is admirable in its lack of ambition. It’s here to serve action and comedy in roughly proportionate amounts, with big set pieces that are just thrilling enough to hook you and jokes that are just funny enough for you to hope no one dies.

While the film doesn’t disguise its origin as a Twitter thread, it generally doesn’t treat it as a gimmick, either — because in 2020, the internet is just where people share the weirdest, funniest, and most frightening moments of their lives.

Many documentaries become less interesting the more you already know about the subject. But Feels Good Man presents a heavily covered story in a thoughtful and vivid way. Even its standard talking-head segments are peppered with compelling absurdities.

The best part of Shirley is Elisabeth Moss as a sharp-tongued and gloriously frumpy agent of chaos.

It’s fine. A perfectly watchable film that could have been great if it, like its protagonist, remembered that the secret to magic is really believing in the wild thing you’re about to do.

The conversations in Portrait of a Lady on Fire are among the most memorable people have had on a screen in some time, with each line a stanza in a poem, a reversal, a shift in perspective. With every exchange, the relationship between Marianne and Héloïse changes subtly.

Sonic the Hedgehog could have gone from a good to a great movie not by bringing Sonic into the human world, but by bringing audiences into his. Maybe we should just be thankful that the movie was watchable at all. Sonic’s success hinges on the character being likable, and the redesigned Sonic is easy to love.

Anything can happen, and Birds of Prey relishes in the havoc that implies. That manic energy is all that’s holding Birds of Prey together at times, and the fact that all of its characters seem to thrive in it makes it all the more disappointing that the movie doesn’t really take any time to get to know them better. It’s almost enough to derail the movie, but at a brisk hour and 47 minutes of genuinely fun spectacle, it’s hard to hold too much against it.

For people who specifically prize meticulous story-craft and the ability to dodge broad genre clichés, I See You is a rare gift.

One of Marriage Story’s biggest successes lies in its straightforwardness. It’s not a story out to change how you think of relationships or marriage. It strives for honesty, even if it’s cliché.

Uncut Gems is about the thrill of the gambit, the jolt of glee and terror in watching someone pursue the next shiny thing.

The Next Level thinks the milk-bland personalities of its central teenagers and a couple of cranky old people count as a rooting interest to ground the hijinks. Black, Hart, and Awkwafina could be a comedy dream team; instead, they’re stuck hustling around a bunch of video game battles.

It’s bizarre and often delightful. Paradise Hills captures a futuristic fantasy aesthetic that feels familiar in video games, but fresh in movies.

Even if The Current War is soft around the edges and a little soggy in the middle, there’s still something appreciably sparky at its core. As overstuffed and frenetic as the film is, in its best moments, The Current War manages to make an everyday utility seem just as magical as it did 120 years ago.

After a run of live-action Disney remakes that mostly play things safe, Maleficent: Mistress of Evil is a much needed swing-for-the-fences dose of originality. It doesn’t always hit it out of the park, but it’s wickedly fun to watch it try.

Paul already has a pile of awards acknowledging his acting talents, but his work in El Camino is staggering, given the high difficulty factor that comes with having to play so many variations of this character.

It’s hypnotic just how horrifying Arthur’s existence is, just as Phoenix’s performance is hypnotic as he spirals from fragile hope into increasingly outsized and confident acts of destruction.

In many ways, this is an Old Man movie — a slower late-period work by a filmmaker ruminating on his advancing age, and on the beloved classics he made as a younger guy. But it’s Scorsese’s version: pulsing with more life than most younger filmmakers, before giving way to stark, chilling regret.

First Love is the kind of film that’s designed for seen-it-all genre fans who know these tropes (the scheming criminal, the dewy ingenues, the cold-hearted lady assassin, and so on) and appreciate seeing them tweaked in new directions, and treated with an air of fond familiarity rather than dour airlessness.

Between Two Ferns: The Movie is too much Between Two Ferns to fit into an episode but not enough movie for a sit-down-in-the-theater experience. Still, it’s companionable in the lowered-stakes world of Netflix films where pleasantness and a handful of highlights seem to matter as much as excellence.

It doesn’t have enough substance to fill its runtime, but it explores some intriguingly thorny ideas along the way.

Ad Astra is poised to kick-start the most passionate style-vs.-substance debate cinephiles have had in years. Individual viewers will probably find that where they fall on that well-worn cinematic divide will determine how much they appreciate this visually breathtaking, emotionally inert drama.

It lacks Hitchcockian tension or Christie-level dignity, but it’s funny, surprising, and intriguing in the way it flips the usual murder-mystery script.

It’s an appreciably less-engaging film in every way, suffering from lurching storytelling, wild vacillations in tone (even within scenes), and a strong cast that never fully gels as a group.

It’s visceral in its grim realism, yet it’s also poignant and cathartic in its use of the fantastical. Above all, it’s a reminder of how genre storytelling can provide real-world social commentary, not just breezy escapism.

Øvredal is to be commended for simultaneously staying true to a beloved franchise and twisting its head around to face in an unexpected direction. Thanks to him, the film isn’t just a collection of scary stories. It’s a meditation on why the stories we tell ourselves shape us and why that’s the scary bit.

Hobbs & Shaw proves they work well together, stretching out the sparky dynamic of their previous appearances together to feature length.

There’s a lot going on in Tarantino’s latest film, including an exploration of the delicacy of a moment in time and how easily an era can be swept away.

Hit-and-miss horror auteur Alexandre Aja knows how to deliver lean, mean horror action. Crawl is far less tongue-in-cheek than his Piranha remake, but it doesn’t build to a fever pitch or deliver dynamite setpieces.

Jawline is a nuanced exploration of digital celebrity and the gap between “real” and online lives, issues that are particularly relevant during a mass reevaluation of social media. But it’s also a timeless, bittersweet film about a teenager with ambitious dreams and few opportunities to realize them.

It’s an out-and-out triumph, an adrenaline blast of pure action and emotion that lives up to its predecessors and ably forwards the MCU story in memorable and even touching ways.

While it falls short of its predecessors, the film is generally more confident and inventive than any of the non-Toy Story Pixar sequels.

It’s rare that a blockbuster movie feels this competently, serenely middle-of-the-road, but maybe being this safe in an era of easy outrage is its own form of mild, moderate, entirely bland achievement.

Wilde’s film gets a lot of comic mileage from its lead actors’ ability to create a funny, believable relationship. Feldstein and Dever are both terrific in it.

See You Yesterday is a compelling blend of nuanced drama, teenage adventure-comedy, and thought experiment. Its protagonists make a great duo, alternating between sophisticated genre-savvy observations and adolescent vulnerability.

Even without its distinctive look, Shadow would be memorable, an accomplished fusion of what Zhang does well, but the visuals take it to another plane. It becomes a kind of dark dream of the past, with unmistakable reflections of the present.

Detective Pikachu is a fever dream — a product of night time car rides with a Game Boy, staring up at the street lamps that pass you by, painting the darkened sky with wild imaginations of what a world full of Pokémon might feel like. Detective Pikachu is a silly, almost hallucinogenic ride.

Endgame was never designed to stand on its own as a single well-crafted movie, and it was never designed to follow the MCU formula. It was designed to cap a decade of buildup around a single gigantic story.... In that sense, it’s certainly a triumph: it’s ambitious, towering, and above all, daring in its difference.

Claire Denis’ grotesque, mesmerizing, one-of-a-kind new science fiction movie.

Captain Marvel (or Shazam, or Thundercrack, or whatever you call him) might be one of the simplest superheroes ever created, but Shazam! both gets what makes that simplicity so appealing, and understands the complications stirred by the common wish to grow up too fast and assume powers you don’t know how to control.

Peele directs Us with a masterful collection of horror-movie tricks — jump scares that actually pay off, a cat-and-mouse game in an isolated place filled with bright lights and deep pools of impenetrable shadow, a throat-closing Michael Abels score full of intense drumming and choral chanting that elevates the action to operatic levels of drama. But his greatest asset is the performances, which turn an already creepy premise into something endlessly inhuman and unnerving.

It rises to the occasion with strong performances and with its directors’ willingness to slow down and take their story seriously, balancing humor, action, and exposition in a carefully calibrated package.

The film’s eye-candy is endlessly impressive and a worthy reason to see the film in a theater, but it’s never as memorable as authentic, unique story moments like Hiccup’s first connection with Toothless in the series’s first installment.

The sharp editing turns the film into a comedy about how wickedly successful the Temple’s trolling is, and how humorless and easily riled their opponents are.

No matter how familiar the plot beats feel, that level of attention not just to functional special effects, but to outright beauty, makes The Wandering Earth memorable.

Happy Death Day 2U pulls off a trick that isn’t especially easy for original movies, let alone direct sequels: it makes all the laborious world-building and storytelling effort feel like fun.

Regardless of how the film looks, Soderbergh’s pacing and gift for editing are what keep the action tight, while McCraney’s crisp dialogue livens up potentially mundane, exposition-heavy exchanges. His script lets the cast — especially Sohn, Beetz, and Holland — tear into one memorable exchange after another.

The sequel actually slows down the story a bit, with a lower jokes-per-second rate and a little more time for contemplation. But instead of making the new film smaller or duller, it leaves room for a little more sophistication. The sequel’s best gag isn’t a one-liner or a one-off, it’s subtly and fundamentally built into the story.

I Am Mother doesn’t plumb the potential weirdness of [its] premise, and it’s working in a well-worn genre without breaking much new ground. But it effectively dramatizes our perennial love-hate relationship with artificial intelligence.

Velvet Buzzsaw is a messy movie, and not just in the sense that Gilroy ends up painting a room with blood at one point.

It’s a shame that the film doesn’t stand on its own, with a story as creative and engaging as its setting.

The film isn’t just about black horror films, it’s about the way the horror genre reflects and connects with African-American history. The result is a thoughtful, exhilarating watch, which finds hope in even the bloodiest maw.

It isn’t a flawless movie, and it nearly descends into self-parody at times, but after a decade of Bay’s rock-’em sock-’em battles, Bumblebee nevertheless comes across like a mini-revelation: Transformers movies don’t need to be terrible.

There’s a level of self-awareness in Aquaman’s more grandiose images and plot movements that’s certainly been missing from previous DC movies. The story is so deliberately corny that it’s never really moving, no matter how much it reaches in the direction of emotion.

Cam focuses less on the real ways technology can be weaponized, and more on how vulnerable people can feel when their online identities are ripped away from them.

Spider-Man: Into the Spider-Verse is a raucous, smart, self-referential adventure. The comics-inspired visuals are stunning, and the emotional coming-of-age story is relevant and inspiring, even as it acknowledges the many Spider-Man movies that have come before it.

The film hinges on Sophie Thatcher’s performance as Cee. In her feature-film debut, she brings a combination of determination and youthful naïveté to her performance that is essential to the entire movie working.

It’s big, nerve-wracking, and utterly ridiculous at times — but it is a hell of a lot of fun along the way.

Where the original film poked fun at games, this time, the subject of critique is the company’s own legacy. And it’s a smarter, more entertaining film for it.

For the serious fans who this series is meant for, the promise of at least six more hours of Fantastic Beasts action likely means a lot more thrilling beasts, barriers, and beats to explore. Everyone else may find that all the little personal bits of character business and frantic complications aren’t much of a substitute for a clear and compelling plot with a single meaningful protagonist.

The result is unlikely to be as influential as Argento’s movie, and it will test some viewers’ patience, but it’s still a bold, hypnotic work, an example of the richness that today’s generation of filmmakers are bringing to the horror genre.

Christopher Robin doesn’t just use nostalgia as a salve; it uses it as a way to mourn things that we’ve lost in our lives and as a way to unpack how our actions can hurt those around us. It’s a feel-good movie that really doesn’t think there’s a whole lot to feel good about much of the time.

Where Stranger Things goes for subtle, Summer goes for on-the-nose. Where the Netflix show offers nuanced, empathetic characters, this film gives us cardboard cutouts with performances to match.

The 2018 Halloween isn’t an entirely successful film, and it won’t provide an easy template for a new generation of revitalized slasher flicks. But it does serve as a fitting coda to a story that began 40 years ago.

It’s a strong film, directed with confidence and a trust that the audience will be able to keep up, no matter how convoluted the narrative becomes.

It’s a breathtaking piece of filmmaking that’s filled with some of the most intense portrayals of spaceflight ever put on-screen. But for all its technical wonder, First Man’s focus on Armstrong’s relentless stoicism ends up feeling more like a hindrance than a revelation. It’s an epic, ambitious film, but it ends just shy of true greatness.

Cooper’s A Star is Born is unquestionably a film born out of our current era and modern struggles with addiction. In that way, it serves as a potent reminder that even the most familiar stories can be used to examine the issues and concerns of a given moment.

The siblings address their family through a Wes Anderson lens, with a tone so playful and visually poetic that it drops into surrealism. It feels like a fresh new approach to an old genre — a willingness to not just embrace the subjectivity of family documentaries, but to charge into it full-bore.

This is a film about the wilds — internal and external — and Saulnier shoots both the natural and the human side of the story with his usual sharp instincts for startling and engaging images.

In a world packed with information, it’s outright exciting to know so little about where a story is going, or how far it’s willing to go to get there.

Outlaw King has plenty of the right pieces in play to make this kind of personally enriched story possible, but compared to Mackenzie’s best work, it’s plodding and artless.

The film makes a strong argument for the value of artistry in horror. Stark colors and an active camera, chasing or leading the characters, give the whole film a sense of intensity and dynamism.

While several of the characters seem to be making obvious choices for obvious reasons, as the story unfolds, the script gets progressively deeper into their psyches.

Age of Rage is most effective not at “explaining” the alt-right, but at providing a snapshot of it, alongside its anti-fascist opposition.

Mission: Impossible - Fallout merges the franchise’s big-budget spectacle with an utterly ferocious style of action filmmaking that far surpasses what McQuarrie executed in either Rogue Nation or Jack Reacher.

Given how much of the film is spent on watching tiny items grow to improbable size, and huge objects shrink down to the scale of toys, it seems only appropriate that Ant-Man and the Wasp neatly balances its big, serious concerns with its little petty ones. It’s a movie that understands all the variances of scale, and takes the audience along for the ride as they constantly change.

Incredibles 2 is a lighter and more incident-packed adventure. The same characters are running through some of the same emotions but with much less of a sense of weight and impact.

Solo is a swashbuckling success, a space adventure that pays homage to the DNA of the original films while carving out its own unique space in the canon. It’s a sheer delight, but it also has the courage to explore the darker aspects of a character who could have all too easily been polished to an inoffensive, family-friendly Disney sheen.

The result isn't as novel as the original, or as effortlessly kinetic, but it is nevertheless a joke-packed action film that continues to deliver on the character's potential, while opening up the door to an even bigger series of sarcastic superhero adventures.

Given how many zombie stories are basically elaborate wish-fulfillment video games, about blowing away targets, hoarding supplies, and finding a safe spot, Cargo’s quiet acknowledgement that suicide might be a kind option for the infected feels revelatory and even dangerous.

In the end, it doesn’t feel like Jonathan fully commits to its own premise.

After years of movies where even the most mediocre heroes appeared to be invulnerable and indomitable, it’s an arresting jolt — and exactly the film the franchise needed.

Too many films that rely on secrets stop being compelling once those secrets emerge. Marrowbone just becomes more compelling. It’s one of the year’s most immaculately crafted movies, and it’s the kind of story that keeps dodging convention right up to the final shot. It fits neatly into the Gothic genre, but it innovates within it at the same time.

The filmmakers try to innovate largely by making the movie as toothless and easily digestable as possible. Nothing in the film is real enough to care about past the moment, or serious enough to trouble audience’s sleep. Maybe in a world that’s already full of real-life disasters, it’s innovative enough to make monumental destruction this much dumb, lightweight fun.

The Endless rapidly develops from a mysterious, elliptical story about cult survivors and strained relationships into a much larger and stranger movie, essentially the Aliens to Resolution’s original Alien.

For viewers who are still impressed by CGI destruction and thrilled by the sight of realistic mechas in action, Uprising is yet another escalation in scale, staged creatively and with apparent love for the old-school kaiju genre.

The sheer dynamism and energy of the movie are compelling, even when the character drama isn’t.

The film hits all the necessary beats for a straightforward horror film in an eerie post-apocalyptic setting. But it’s more effective as a portrait of four people who have constructed a deceptively peaceful life under the constant, inescapable threat of death.

Annihilation is a portentous movie, and a cerebral one. It’s gorgeous and immersive, but distancing. It’s exciting more in its sheer ambition and its distinctiveness than in its actual action.

Hereditary is a hell of an intense ride, made for a crowd that enjoys heart-clutching adrenaline spikes. The cast is unerringly terrific.

It’s gripping, funny, and full of spectacle, but it also feels like a turning point, one where the studio has finally recognized that its movies can be about more than just selling the next installment. In the process, the studio has ended up with one of the most enthralling entries in its entire universe.