Once you understand that Civil War isn’t about what you think, you can appreciate it for what it actually is: a searing meditation on what happens when political orders collapse and violence takes on a sinister logic of its own.

If anything, This Is Me… Now is a confirmation of the singer/actress’s elite showmanship and her ability to bounce back as a cultural figure and chronic divorcée. It’s exactly the sort of galaxy-brained project one makes when one has nothing to prove and $20 million to spend — and one is high on love.

If May December were less self-aware, it might belong in the category of camp or failed melodrama; if it were less earnest, it might earn the title of tongue-in-cheek satire. But ultimately, the movie’s discordant aesthetic isn’t coy. It’s about revealing the nightmarish circus that Joe has survived with quiet resilience.

The strongest parts of Ferrari are imbued with Mann’s dedication to proper filmmaking. It would certainly be easier to cheat and use CGI to make it seem like Enzo Ferrari’s cars are going fast. Having the skill and the wherewithal to show us the real thing is something only a director like Michael Mann is equipped to do.

The movie is bad, but the chemistry: It’s good.

Despite his grumpy contrarianism, Monk is an intensely lovable character. In part, that’s thanks to Wright’s gleeful, nuanced performance; in part, it’s because Jefferson shows us all of who Monk is.

Throughout Beyoncé’s career, it’s been made to appear that this woman is something closer to deity than one of us. She is the closest thing to perfection, a once-in-a-lifetime talent. But what’s made her so spectacular to us is, privately, exhausting. Renaissance is the merging of the two, showing us the sheer amount of determination and work it takes to produce a show like Renaissance, and the toll it takes on the very human woman behind it all.

It has plenty of the bizarre visual flair Lanthimos cut his teeth on, from his signature extreme wide angles up to and including a bulldog with the head of a duck frolicking through a grand living room. Yet Poor Things, based on a 1992 novel by Alasdair Gray, is joyous in its weirdness, joyous in its exploration and celebration of its strange, strange world. This movie is incredibly fun to watch.

Whether this is Hayao Miyazaki’s final film or not (my money’s on two more, which might be wishful thinking), The Boy and the Heron is a powerful, worthy, and perfectly scaled entry from one of the greatest to ever do it.

It’s a worthy bit of holiday entertainment, the kind of movie that hits just right in these winter months. It’s sweet but not too treacly, not quite as perfect as Paddington 2 (what is?) but it does the trick.

Glazer – whose previous film was the brilliantly unsettling Under the Skin – replicates the characters' internal distance through the movie's images and sounds. The result is unsettling in the extreme.

Emotional and lyrical, All of Us Strangers is a meditation on what it means to really be a human.

Esmail, who earned his chops as the showrunner of Mr. Robot, excels at drawing out his characters’ paranoia.

Roth (Hostel) always loves a good gorefest, and this one is no different — but he tends to hover just around the edges of social satire, which in this case seems to leave him unsure how seriously to take his own film.

Remarkably, Songbirds & Snakes has found a way to make the Hunger Games feel new and sharp.

Coppola’s talent is in taking this story — much harder-edged when translated to Versailles — and giving it the rosy sheen of a girl’s memory, of feeling the intensity of a star’s rays on her so keenly that there’s nothing to do but bask in it, at least for a while.

It’s not a perfect movie, but it certainly is good enough. Perhaps the most surprising thing about The Marvels is that it shows that the Marvel movie formula, an often-critiqued aspect of the studio, isn’t broken. In fact when it works, that formula is still capable of making magic.

The result of all this careful questioning is stunning. To say Scorsese has made a great movie is to announce that water is wet, but there’s a kind of unfolding grief to Killers’ tone, a steady feeling of dread and sorrow, that only works in the hands of a master. You aren’t told how to feel so much as you’re made to feel it and then, in the end, be walloped with indignance over what happened to the story of the murders and many stories like them.

As a film, it’s at best serviceable, stronger in its world-building than in its climactic exorcism and nowhere near as unnerving as the original. Yet Believer is a fascinating artifact of 2023. It highlights in myriad ways how much the world has changed since the original’s release. Hollywood isn’t the same, and neither is American religious culture.

What makes The Royal Hotel brilliant, besides its heart-pounding performances, is how it illuminates the many ways in which men acting in socially acceptable, ordinary ways — playful catcalling, persistent passes, flexing power to be impressive — forms its own kind of horror house of mirrors in which it’s impossible to tell what’s truly sinister and what’s just someone acting like a guy they saw once in a Western.

What Kendrick’s film smartly weaves into the narrative is the many ways in which women are conditioned to put up with men because, as the saying goes, they’re afraid of being killed.

I’ll be pondering I Love You, Daddy more; for now, though, I’m not convinced it’s thoughtful, and suspect it’s nothing more than clever and funny provocation for provocation’s sake.

What it does do, though, is remind us that bad men get away with bad things in part because we’re conditioned, over and over, to see them as normal and funny, permutations of “locker room talk” and “just making a joke.”

It’s a piercing look into a country that’s becoming less and less inhabitable for its older men and women, and more stingy about who gets to dream. And, fundamentally, it’s a poignant portrait of a broken heart.

Nolan’s Oppenheimer barely qualifies as a biopic, at least not the thudding Hollywood variety. Instead it’s a movie — a masterful one, among his best — investigating the nature of power: how it is created, how it is kept in balance, and how it leads people into murky quandaries that refuse simplistic answers.

Yes, there are tricks of the camera and computer going on. But Tom Cruise is actually driving a motorcycle off a cliff and then plummeting down. That’s real — real enough to gasp and hold your breath and get a little shaky. It’s as much a mainstay of the movie as the mask trickery, and that subtle play with what we’re seeing, with the real and the unreal, suggests the movies might be doing this very much on purpose.

The Flash existing as a completed movie is an achievement in and of itself. That it’s kinda good and has fun moments is a feat.

Elemental isn’t a full failure. It’s an original story, for one, and coming from Disney, that’s no small thing. The best thing about Elemental — and, since movies are a primarily visual medium, it’s a very good thing indeed — is that it looks incredible.