Rather than trying to undo or edit the history of how her story has been told, Tina makes fans and observers another offering: Experience the full range—musical, emotional, and spiritual—of a rock-and-roll legend. You won’t regret it.

The film is a winning reminder of the pleasures of the midrange movie, one stylish enough to feel distinct but not too caught up in an effort to sell some startling, singular vision. It’s proudly genre and fills its allotted space with humor and detail.

Blackness isn’t a fixed identity or static community—it’s ever shifting, retracting, then proliferating, coming in and out of communion with itself. The Black radical tradition, specifically, says that by bridging past and present, such chaos can organize and revolutionize itself. The Inheritance stages an encouraging attempt at re-invention.

The Human Voice’s images tend to call out in vain; not an utterance is heard. They are symbols suspended in time and space, indicators of something that doesn’t seem to matter very much.

Watching Snyder’s intermittently rewarding epic—if nothing else a spectacle of completed vision—stirred up surprising emotions. Not about what happens to the people (and aliens) in the film, but about what happened to its maker, and to the course of human events while Justice League 2.0 wrestled its way into being.

It’s a fun movie, packed with escapades and just-shy-of-cloying cutesy humor, but there is a resonant depth, too.

In Day’s magnetism, the film does enough justice to Holiday’s memory that its shagginess is almost forgiven. The rest of the orchestra could use a tune up, but Day, at least, makes for an exciting solo act.

The film offers a small bit of emotional rescue at its very end—a graceful tribute to the escapes of memory and fantasy—but by then the dourness of its conclusions has blotted out any rounder sense of meaning.

As it unspools, Minari becomes a study in sober compassion. Chung has worked through the conflicts of his upbringing—his father’s stubbornness, the family’s rural isolation—and arrived at the grace of understanding, and all the forgiveness, regret, and affection that comes with that.

There’s a sort of bell curve of tolerance; the film begins loud and over-egged, gradually settles into a sad and gnarly bildungsroman, and then burns itself out with an operatic finale. It’s an exhausting experience, which I realize may be the point.

Pike has been nominated for a Golden Globe for the performance, but don’t let that turn you off. She is, once again, a stealthy marvel in this movie, cruel and clever. The rest of the film might not meet the heights of its star, but it is still a sleek and compelling standout in an erratic season, anchored by one of the great performances of the year (so far, anyway).

Ziegler has been handed a cursed, impossible task, forced to act so far outside of herself—with seemingly little of the right guidance coming from the grownups in the room—that Music becomes something ghastly. It often feels like a movie made decades ago, one of those smarmily well-intentioned Hollywood exercises in issue-peddling that demands the gratitude of an entire community of people.

The Map of Tiny Perfect Things knows its limits. It’s careful about when to be twee, when to strive for profundity, and when to hold back. The film has an agreeably modest scale, despite its lofty considerations of physics and the makeup of existence.

It’s easy to mistake Strawberry Mansion for a simple parable about advertising and the federal government. But ultimately, it’s a strange film about art and its conditions.

Judas and the Black Messiah is missing that deeper personal aspect, some sense of the emotional force yoking O’Neal and Hampton together, dragging them toward ruin. The film is resonant regardless. Still, there’s such an opportunity presented here—to see these two sterling actors really working in harmony—that goes frustratingly unseized. As is, Judas and the Black Messiah is richer and more engaging than a standard biopic, but is not quite the Shakespearean tragedy of double allegiances and backstabbing that it could have been.

Writer/director Sian Heder, with her exceptional cast, remains in full control of the tone even as the story follows every predictable beat. You’ve seen versions of this story before, sure—but this one’s worthy of another spin.

The film doesn’t actually show character growth so much as it tells you it’s happening.

Supernova, despite a title that suggests a bright and glorious burst of energy, is a ponderous movie, a story about the end of life so determined to be taken gravely that it doesn’t let anything actually live. It’s abstractly tragic, about a vague idea of something rather than anything or anyone specific. Dementia is scary and sad. That’s about as particular as Supernova gets.

The Little Things is somehow both lazy and overly adorned, a lugubrious movie that spends all its indulgence on the easiest, most obvious of tropes.

King clearly has the chops, and hopefully, with future films, she’ll be more adventurous. Still, as it stands, One Night in Miami is fitting fare for our present conditions. By placing some of the 20th century’s boldest Black male figures in one shining frame, simply talking, we are asked to consider Black lives as both public and private creations. It’s a great theme, which the film falls just short of embodying.

Locked Down is a grating yank into a nasty headspace, a pompous sort of fury. There is no empathy for the common cause of quarantine in the film, only spittle and outrage and corny existential angst.

The ending of the film stuck with me for days, pushing me into a kind of melancholy existential funk that proved distressingly hard to shake.

The film’s inarguable high point is its a bravura opening sequence, which relies on Kirby to bring everything to the surface— a (seemingly) single-take, 23-minute childbirth scene, which ends in devastation. It’s a bold statement of purpose for a film that doesn’t quite know where to go from there, but for Kirby it’s merely the beginning of yet another career-defining performance, and probably only the second of many.

Despite some distraction and not quite enough music, Soul manages to tap into deep emotion as its characters explore the limits of mortality and what it means to be passionate about life.

The pleasure of Let Them All Talk is in how it expands on the premise of an older lady hang movie, burrowing into darker corners and pausing to consider the ambient hum of life tumbling along. It’s a fun movie. It may also be profound.

In its best stretches—the first hour of the film, let’s say—WW84 sweetly revels in its old-school trappings, its hokey mystery, its goofy villain, its resourceful hero. The film is light on its feet, colorful and playful in a way not seen elsewhere in the DC Universe.

It won't disappoint viewers who want to see Hanks play a nerdy cowboy, or who want to revel in wide shots of American west. But for a film with so many thorny contradictions encased within it, News of the World has surprisingly few hooks.

Lovers Rock is a love letter to the joy of being alive, and young, and at least momentarily, free.