With its risky visual storytelling and tender script, Into the Spider-Verse earns the greatest honor that one can bestow on a Spider-Man movie: It somehow makes you want to see more Spider-Man movies. Including at least a few more for Miles Morales alone.

Cam is a sympathetic, saucy thriller, by turns lush and lurid, that pulls us down the web’s darker corridors — to question what lurks there, sure, but also to remind us that we’ve all spent time in those darker corners and there’s a reason we like them.

Elegiac and lovingly wrought, If Beale Street Could Talk is darkness laced with light, a story that has not stopped being true in the years since it first was told.

There’s no denying that Widows is entertaining. Partly familiar and partly something all its own, the film still stumbles at times. But when it works, it’s enthralling.

It’s a mesmerizing, fascinating story that also feels like an attempt, on Tan’s part, to reclaim the film from Cardona, putting it back in the hands of its rightful owners: herself and her friends. In that way, the new Shirkers is a kind of punk feminist project — a deeply personal, fabulously engrossing, visually assured bit of first-person creative nonfiction filmmaking.

The Ballad of Buster Scruggs is a tall tale about death, a murder ballad about us, trapped in a universe that is mostly unreasonable and nonsensical. And at the end of the journey we’re left laughing through the lump in our throat.

By its enigmatic end, Suspiria is troubling and grim and yet strangely mirthful, having opened wounds without much interest in closing them. This is not a film you untangle; it’s a movie you feel. That will drive some mad. For others, it will feel something like ecstasy.

Beautiful Boy is a beautifully made and complex rendering of a father and son’s relationship that ends with too little hope to fit into people’s “inspirational movie” box. But at its best, it’s a strong rendering of both that horror and the frayed rays of hope that sometimes break through. It’s not easy to watch, but it is, in its own way, still beautiful.

Part metaphorical (which it jokes about halfway through), part homage to old Hollywood, part whodunit, and part social commentary on an America reeling from mid-century chaos, it’s overstuffed but still feels controlled.

The worst thing about Life Itself is how it can’t realize that it’s limited by its own point-of-view. It harps on the idea of unreliable narrators in literature, without seeming to understand either how the device is used or how it works or how literary critics have approached that idea throughout time.

The Old Man & the Gun — which, like Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid, is based on real characters — is a natural fit for both star and director, and in Lowery’s hands, it feels like both an homage to the past and a gentle step toward the future.

The movie works best, above all, as a melodrama about the limits and possibilities of love, and how love can make us into the best and worst versions of ourselves in the very same moment.

Throughout, The Predator feels like it’s been cut to the bone, in a way that ultimately requires viewers to make tiny little leaps to keep up, and all those tiny little leaps eventually add up to a big, big gap between viewer and film.

Morris’s film is less a takedown of its subject, and more a Rorschach test for its viewers. What you’ll see is precisely what you’re primed to see — and that, not Bannon’s ideas themselves, is the point.

The movie sees Armstrong’s reserve as both a blessing and a curse, a gift and a problem, but it’s unequivocal in its admiration of his humility. And in this way, it feels less like it’s forcing a myth onto the man who made it clear to his biographer that he wasn’t seeking renown — and more like a statement of gratitude.

It strikes a perfect balance between being a coming-of-age story nestled in a family narrative on the one hand, and a social drama on the other. And in never sacrificing either of those two interests, it becomes a strong example of both.

Moore still suffers from bouts of self-aggrandizement and snide generalization. But they feel jarringly out of place, and in a good way. That’s because, for a great deal of the film, Moore cedes the floor to people whose voices are not as easily heard, or who have had to fight to have a voice at all.

Sierra Burgess is a paint-by-numbers teen movie whose admirable sincerity fails to make up for the clumsiness of its craftsmanship, and whose compelling teen girl friendship is marred by the creepiness of its love story.

It’s a slow-burn horror film, one that has all the sudden scares and moments of pristine fear present in any good movie of its ilk. But in the hands of Lenny Abrahamson (Room), The Little Stranger is elevated by measured pacing that also makes the larger house-based metaphor clear — and the result is both elegiac and frightening.

Bisbee ’17 is a fierce, lyrical probe into the soul of a town haunted by a history it would rather forget. It’s also an unsettling cipher for America, in a year when the ghosts of our past revealed themselves in frightening ways.

Like all ghastly failures, The Happytime Murders is not “so bad it’s good.” It’s just bad: a boring flop, an unfunny comedy where nothing’s at stake.

Alpha is definitely sentimental, even pandering at times. But its unexpected setting, images, set pieces, and even language balance out the sentimentality with a strangely raw and cinematically adventurous aesthetic that’s uncommon for a film of its sort.

Crazy Rich Asians is fun, funny, gorgeous, and swoon-worthy. It’s got a terrific cast, glamorous locations, witty jokes, and a story with a lot of heart. And on top of all that, it may actually succeed in proving to Hollywood that both Asian-centered stories and romantic comedies deserve much more attention.

In the hands of Jon Turteltaub (National Treasure), it’s just a shark movie, and a kind of inert one at that.

Its kid-friendly, free-for-all spirit rides atop an undercurrent of pointed commentary about the state of the superhero industry (and the entertainment industry more broadly) that will give those parental guides something to hold on to amid the candy-colored cacophony. Or they could just surrender and enjoy the butt jokes. They’re pretty good butt jokes!

The result is sublimely ridiculous, or perhaps ridiculously sublime: the very definition of frothy summer entertainment, moderately (if unevenly) well-directed by Ol Parker, that works best if you just suspend your need for it all to make sense.

The appeal of the Equalizer series is in watching the everyday — including Washington himself — turn deadly. And like its hero, The Equalizer 2 still has it where it counts.

The film is a confident debut from two writers and a director with no shortage of things to say and a strong voice to say them in.