A good-looking, engrossing, true tale, superficially much like 1981 best-picture winner "Chariots of Fire," but without that Olympic drama's themes of antisemitism and faith. If The Boys in the Boat is missing something, it's substance.

Despite its sometimes overwrought mystery-tale gambits, however, Monster ultimately shifts from a saga of fateful misunderstanding to one of mutual comprehension.

Here, Willy's pure spun sugar, with none of the complex ingredients that make a movie soar: relatability, humanity, foibles.

A film that is by turns darkly comic and disturbing, both sensations brought into vivid, caustic relief by the film's mesmerizing star.

Fallen Leaves casts an irresistible spell, one that’s as playful as it is full of longing and pathos.

Because McNamara wrote the script, Poor Things brims with his signature polished, sophisticated humor; because Lanthimos directed, it’s full of envelope-pushing zaniness and self-amusement, especially when it comes to Bella’s increasingly uninhibited sexual appetites.

This is not a happy-go-lucky story, but an old-school fairy tale meant to frighten, confuse and excite.

While there are no salacious details or plot-moving drama about what makes Queen Bey tick — and there shouldn’t be — Renaissance reveals something else, showcasing the joy to be found in cultural touchstones like the tour and the community built around it.

Top Gun: Maverick showed us there’s still an audience for movies that combine concise and creative action with emotionally resonant characters. Godzilla Minus One is another reminder — and quite possibly the better movie of the two.

Wiseman's approach is to drop you blindly into the middle of the Troisgros milieu and allow details to emerge scene by scene, frame by frame, as if you're watching a photograph come into clear, four-color focus over several hours.

It's a love story as unruly, passionate and expansive as the flawed and fascinating people at its center. Bravi.

As regrettable as Hite's fate was, The Disappearance of Shere Hite goes a long way toward rectifying the wrongs done to her, whether in the name of erasure, ridicule, or willful misunderstanding.

If Fennell doesn't quite stick the landing -- if her story of striving, sexual obsession, class resentment and revenge ultimately feels puny and predictable -- she certainly has fun getting there.

We don't need another hero, but when it comes to the man at its center, Napoleon could have used a lot more oomph.

A satisfyingly suspenseful apocalyptic thriller with almost enough visual effects to give "The Day After Tomorrow" and "Deep Impact" a run for their money.

At times, the film feels less like an homage to a beloved legacy than a 1 1/2-hour piece of advertainment.

The shaggy but ultimately satisfying installment, set six decades before the four movies starring Jennifer Lawrence, carves out its own identity by leaning into its subtitle. If music is food for the soul, “Songbirds & Snakes” serves its tunes with a heaping side of venom.

Nicolas Cage goes delightfully, derangedly meta in Dream Scenario, a smart, dizzyingly entertaining horror-comedy that morphs into scathing social satire.

At times, May December feels like an interrogation of the elusive nature of truth.

Trolls Band Together is a glitter-encrusted variety pack of a movie. Packed with millennial boy-band humor, sibling love and snippets of pop songs, the third film in the Trolls franchise is an explosion of color tailored to a new generation of parents and their Gen Alpha kids.

Ultimately, Next Goal Wins isn’t really a sports movie at all, but one whose deceptively simple mantras — “Be happy” and “There’s more to life than soccer” — are the most subversive (and winning) things about it.

What’s extraordinary about To Kill a Tiger is Kiran and Ranjit’s determination, and the possible changes for good that may result from it.

All Dirt Roads Taste of Salt doesn’t just announce a promising new talent in Jackson. It serves as a shimmering, dreamlike reminder that movies are as good for poetry as for prose.

This interpretation is overly reductive, I’ll admit. But once the thought had implanted itself in my brain, I could not shake it: These ladies are going to war over a couple of bangles (Kamala’s word, not mine). There’s a lot of fighting, and the fate of the world is said to hang in the balance. But when you look at the screen, all you see is a bunch of people trying to grab some shiny things from one another.

The film’s execution isn’t entirely convincing. It’s not the actors’ fault.

For all its feminist pretense as a parable of empowerment, Priscilla’s still caught in a trap, even when the heroine can — and does — walk out.

It’s not the familiarity of this setup that irks, but its silliness.

Filmed in subdued tones of burnished browns, The Holdovers might best be described as the movie version of that favorite pair of corduroys that miraculously still fit: stylish, if a little worn in places, softened by time and made more generous by the life lived inside them.