With his fifth movie as 007, Craig is so extraordinary he leaves only scorched earth behind. There will be other Bonds for those who want them. For everyone else, there’s Craig.

I’m Your Man is funny in such a gentle way that you may not realize how piercing it is until after the credits have rolled.

This is a movie that repeatedly calls out a dead kid just to make its points. If that’s your idea of entertainment—or even just adequate message-based filmmaking—run, don’t walk, to see Dear Evan Hansen.

This is potentially moving dramatic stuff—or at least bracing melodramatic stuff—but Showalter’s dramatization has a glazed, glassy-eyed surface, like a Pee-wee Herman movie without any of Paul Rubens’ surreptitiously sophisticated kindergarten wit.

The story is almost embarrassingly simple. But the picture slides by pleasantly enough like a stream in a Budd Boetticher movie, a calm place to take off your boots and set a spell as you reflect on the true meaning of manhood, the necessity of overcoming hidden heartache and the pleasures of finally, in your sunset years, succumbing to the love of a good woman.

To call The Lost Daughter an assured debut is to do it a slight disservice—assurance suggests that a filmmaker knows everything going in. What we see in The Lost Daughter is something greater: the act of discovery—of the gifts actors can bring to a story, of how to hold a complex narrative together—in progress.

Villeneuve lays it out before us without smirking or winking; his go-for-broke earnestness feels honest and clean. And the effects, while lavish, also have a tasteful, polished quality.

Stewart gives her all, as she always does. But she plays Diana as a mannered doe—all wrong, given that does are the most unmannered creatures on Earth. Her performance is clearly stylized, but it’s also packed with calculation and guile. Larraín turns this Diana into exactly the thing the royal family accused the real-life Diana of being, a willful and pouty constant complainer.

Last Night in Soho soars at the beginning, only to crash in the end. It’s a broken promise.

The Card Counter, with Isaac’s superb performance at its heart, might be the movie you didn’t know you were wishing for, coming at a time when wishing for life to restart has become a consuming preoccupation.

This is a movie as big as the open sky, but one where human emotions are still distinctly visible, as fine and sharp as a blade of grass.

Parallel Mothers is a movie of infinite tenderness, that rare ode to motherhood that acknowledges mothers as women first and mothers second.

Candyman is a work held together by thoughtful choices, and it has a lot to say. Genre conventions are themselves like urban legends, a framework that each new generation adds to and builds upon. Candyman is just one reason we continue to believe in them.

Hall strives to carry The Night House on her more-than-capable shoulders, but she can’t quite compensate for the moments when the movie is outright silly or, worse, boring.

There is no sadder genre than the tedious thriller, a movie that works hard to entice us with suspense, rough and tumble action, maybe even alluring locales, only to fizzle out far from the finish line.

Free Guy is a little like Ready Player One jumbled with The Truman Show, with some Sleeping Beauty and The Velveteen Rabbit mixed in. It is, admittedly, a lot of movie, probably too much. But Reynolds makes the most of Guy’s elation at finally busting out.

Respect honors the utilitarian nature of songwriting, and of making art in general. But the movie honors subtler elements of Franklin’s nature, too—as much as we can know of it—most notably her guardedness, born of necessity.

Annette is an extravagant-looking and often inventive film, but it’s not a great one.

The story becomes unpleasantly bitter and asks us to buy certain behaviors that don’t make much sense, and that we’re not quite sure a character would be capable of. Yet even after the movie makes that sharp zigzag, its one constant is Damon, who’s turning out to be one of those great, casual American actors we didn’t know we had anymore.

Lowery (A Ghost Story, The Old Man & the Gun), in addition to fleshing out the story, puts his stamp all over it so confidently that the results could be annoying, if they weren’t so enchanting.

Val is a portrait of an actor who poured his all into his work. Only now can he see what it amounts to, and find some vindication in the truth that it was worth defending all along.

Even when the story falters, or becomes astonishingly silly, there’s still plenty to keep you gazing at the surface.

The possibilities are rich. But Old is just dumb.

Roadrunner is lively, comprehensive, moving and troubling, as well as suitably joyous, capturing everything about why viewers loved Bourdain, while also reminding us that even those very close to him couldn’t always fully understand him.

This is primo Nicolas Cage dialogue, inquisitive and soul-deep, the kind of stuff he was born to say. To hear and watch him in this movie is like greeting an old friend. Pig seems to have come out of nowhere, but we’re lucky to have it.

Even if you don’t care much about whales, or don’t think you do, Joshua Zeman’s enthusiastic documentary The Loneliest Whale: The Search for 52 might make you care about people who care about whales.

If Black Widow follows the standard Marvel template in some basic ways, it deviates enough to make its own mark. It’s blissfully free of that “Avengers working together” baloney, and all the smirky-cute bickering that comes with it.

No Sudden Move riffs on stereotypes of the 1950s, even as it suggests we haven’t come as far as we might think.