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

Doctor Strange is at its most entertaining when it’s unapologetically different from anything Marvel has done before.

Much like its eponymous plaything of the future, M3gan packs a surprisingly potent punch that takes a handful of narrative bugs and turns them into a delightfully comedic horror feature.

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

It’s at turns terrifying, hilarious, and uneven, but succeeds in doing its most important job: showing off a range of distinct directorial voices.

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.

From a technical and filmmaking standpoint, nothing about Joshua: Teenager vs. Superpower stands out.... It’s as dry and straightforward as a reputable news report. But from a content standpoint, the film is riveting.

Birth Of A Nation is powerful and effective, but it's spectacle that can't humanize or define its subject.

Favreau and Marks’ version is surprisingly daring in its use of violence, and its physical and emotional darkness. It’s also creative, occasionally in bizarre and colorful ways.

Comedy is rarely sympathetic to its victims, but by letting all the major characters serve as each other's karma engines, Stoller and the other writers create a hilarious world where everyone can be equally awful, and equally heroic, and equally ridiculous.

Assassin’s Creed’s creators have the courage to always take themselves seriously, even when they’re working with material that sounds fundamentally silly. There’s no great leap of faith in Assassin’s Creed, but a surprising amount of the time, it at least finds steady footing.

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.

Waltz is the perfect villain in this setting: He's played this exact role before, as the smug, drawling, creepy aesthete who rarely stops smiling. But he's also capable of pivoting on a dime between real menace and garish, performative evil, between playing a subdued charmer, and the kind of movie-serial baddie who ties women to railroad tracks.

Star Trek: Beyond does have a strength that its two reboot predecessors lacked: it puts the focus squarely on the larger Trek ensemble, rather than solely on Kirk and his relationships.

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.

Nicolas Pesce’s gory writing and directing debut Eyes of My Mother goes all-in on the idea of a remote location where horrible things can happen, and no one will ever know. But Pesce does a lot more with the idea of isolation — emotional, physical, and even moral.

It’s fun and mostly inoffensive, never taking itself too seriously while it rewards its inexplicable fans. Better still, it makes every effort to borrow from the Fast series’ latter-day push for more diverse heroes, something the action genre needs right now.

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.

It’s frustratingly good at first, and then just frustrating, because it veers away from the things that make it unique, intelligent, and exciting.

Brühlmann’s ambiguous, evocative images document rather than judge. The precocious teen parties and wild shoplifting trips are never deemed terrible, although for these characters, sex feels meaningless, and mental agony is nearly too overwhelming to face.

There’s a lot of fantasy in the usual end-of-the-world scenarios, but there’s a lot of horror there as well. Bokeh asks which of those reactions is more appropriate, and how they both play out. It’s a gentle story, as apocalypses go, but even without monsters, it becomes a painful, emotional question of strength and survival.

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

Linklater is in many ways a kind of movie secret agent, making films that are unconventional in form and function, but so effortlessly entertaining that the audience may not ever realize that’s what they’re seeing. Everybody Wants Some!! still pulls that trick off, but despite its laughs and moments of fun it can’t help but feel like a step back.

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.

Gray’s prosaic style robs Fate of the Furious of any real sense of self-awareness or humor, which could never be said about Lin or Wan’s installments.

There’s no question that Deepwater Horizon delivers thrills, but you may feel awfully empty afterward.

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.