Mostly, though, it’s an enjoyable portrait of a prickly friendship between two men of vastly different temperaments.

Queen & Slim is a movie made of equal parts sorrow and glamour, all tempered by the grim reality that during the course of their odyssey Queen and Slim do some things they’re not proud of.

This is a movie in which expertise and good sense win the day; no one is rewarded for stupidity or cruelty. And in that sense, Knives Out isn’t just a beautifully made diversion. It’s also a utopian vision.

This is a movie that’s both entertainment and spiritual toolkit — take from it what you need.

A shaggy, listless action movie that’s too messy to be fun.

Ford v Ferrari is a little too long; some scenes leave unnecessary skidmark trails. But the movie still has amiable style and energy to spare. It’s fast but never furious.

It’s LaBeouf’s performance as his father that haunts the movie. He’s hateful, but even within the context of this upbringing-as-horror-show, LaBeouf locates crystalline reflections of the better man his father might have been. His performance both exorcises a demon and makes peace with it, which may be a better gift than his father deserves. But then, it’s the giving that counts.

Lemmons – who has directed some splendid pictures over the years, among them "Eve’s Bayou" and "The Caveman’s Valentine" – is fully alive to both the danger and beauty of the landscape of the American South – even the shape of a tree, craggy and twisted or lush with leaves, could be either a warning or a welcome. Erivo shines through it all, giving us a glimpse into the mind of a steadfast woman of purpose.

It’s Waititi’s ability to balance unassailably goofy moments with an acknowledgment of real-life horrors that makes the movie exceptional.

See it for the inventive, elaborate costumes (designed by Ellen Mirojnick), for the tiny — albeit slightly creepy — mushroom people and the miniature fairies wearing dandelion tutus, and for Jolie.

It’s a true movie, with the taut pacing, satisfying conclusion and grand visual scale that distinction implies.

Parasite won the top prize at Cannes, and it’s South Korea’s entry for the Best International Feature Film Oscar. There are good reasons why it’s poised to resonate worldwide. It tells a story you could probably follow without subtitles, or any dialogue at all: the faces of these actors show with piercing clarity how it feels to be outsiders in a world of wealth and privilege.

It’s also hugely entertaining and joyously profane, a movie whose spirit is so big the screen can barely contain it.

The Harder They Come is always exuberant, and sometimes strong, as casually surprising and effortlessly sinister as the blade sliding out of a gravity knife.

For the first two and a half hours of its three-and-a-half-hour runtime, The Irishman is clever and entertaining, to the point where you may think that’s all it’s going to be. But its last half-hour is deeply moving in a way that creeps up on you, and it’s then that you see what Scorsese was working toward all along.

This is less a straight-up biopic than a meditation on the texture of one vibrant but troubled life; Zellweger goes just far enough into Garland’s pathology of suffering without fetishizing it.

As a one-off, it’s a featherweight delight, like the prettiest pink-and-white cake on the tea tray.

The Goldfinch, director John Crowley’s prestige adaptation of Donna Tartt’s beautifully detailed novel, isn’t a great movie; it’s hardly even an OK one. Yet there’s something wistfully unfortunate about it. From its casting to its structure to its layering of visual textures, you can almost see how every good intention and carefully considered judgment call has somehow gone wrong.

As an actor and overall performer, Jennifer Lopez has always been charming. In Hustlers, she’s also great — as if two translucent hues spontaneously overlapped to make a new color.

The King, written by Michôd and Edgerton, zips along—it never feels like a slog, though it still has a satisfyingly hefty dramatic weight.

Much of the movie is bitterly funny; some of it just amusingly droll. But the finale, a rallying cry that’s both galvanizing and wistful, is a wrap-up worth waiting for.

Phoenix is acting so hard you can feel the desperation throbbing in his veins. He leaves you wanting to start him a GoFundMe, so he won’t have to pour so much sweat into his job again. But the aggressive terribleness of his performance isn’t completely his fault.

The picture is potent and engaging; even its fictionalized elements ring with the spirit of truth. And Stewart is off the charts, though that’s hardly a surprise.

Even if Ad Astra doesn’t have the mystical power of Gray’s last film, the magisterial "Lost City of Z" (based on David Grann’s book of the same name), it has enough magnetic pull to keep us close.

Driver ferries Baumbauch’s super-cerebral script — Baumbach could never not be cerebral — to a place beyond thinking, where raw emotion becomes an entropic, hurricane swirl.

There are no noisy meltdowns or hyper-dramatic revelations in Brittany Runs a Marathon; even the lines that sting have some buoyancy. Brittany has a tough outer shell — you need it in New York, and you need it just being a woman. But Bell makes that shell translucent; her character’s vulnerability shimmers through it, in a gorgeous everyday way.

Mostly, with the exception of a tiresome, protracted gag involving a parental stash of sex toys, it’s more funny and charming than it is raunchy. If these boys are the men of the future, their parents have done something right.

Joyous and funny even as it strikes the occasional melancholy chord, Blinded by the Light is a testament to the small miracle of how the right music manages to find us at just the right time, even when it has to travel from New Jersey all the way to that four-letter word, Luton.