Ann Hornaday

Did you find “The Favourite” just too weird, too raunchy, too . . . too? Perhaps Mary Queen of Scots will be more your cup.

Roma, a masterful drama by Alfonso Cuarón, is many things at once: epic and intimate, mythic and mundane.

A deliciously diabolical comedy of ill manners and outré palace intrigue.

Creed II is a respectable if not revelatory sequel to the sequel, even if it lacks its predecessor’s grace and narrative texture.

Most confoundingly, it sheds no light on Hart himself: a man who steadfastly insisted on maintaining his privacy, whose impressive intellect was couched within an aloof, withholding persona, remains a cipher, the missing core of a movie that’s nominally about him, but can’t seem to get a bead on its own protagonist.

Most winningly, Green Book puts two of the finest screen actors working today in a sexy turquoise Cadillac, letting them loose on a funny, swiftly-moving chamber piece bursting with heart, art and soul.

It proves how smarts and style can elevate even the pulpiest material into something shrewd, socially attuned and bracingly observant. Rarely has a movie been so illuminated by a single character simply breaking into a smile, and rarely has a smile been so unequivocally earned.

Finally, one of our finest actresses has been given material that calls on her to utterly transform herself — vocally, physically, seemingly existentially — and prove how gifted she’s been all along.

The result is a classic on a par with “Winesburg, Ohio” and “Our Town,” a narrow slice of contemporary American life that manages to be both admiring, yet capable of polite skepticism.

In this immersive, often deliciously sensuous documentary portrait of the late opera star Maria Callas, viewers are treated to another rise-and-fall story of a great but tortured artist, this one punctuated by the occasional real-life bed of roses and pleasure cruise.

Winds up being giddily entertaining, first as an exercise in so-bad-it’s-funny kitsch, and ultimately as something far more meaningful and thrilling. Every now and then, a film comes along that defies the demands of taste, formal sophistication, even artistic honesty to succeed simply on the level of pure, inexplicable pleasure. Bohemian Rhapsody is just that cinematic unicorn: the bad movie that works, even when it shouldn’t.

Mid90s” is often painful to watch as Stevie puts himself through the punishing rituals of proving his street bona fides. But Hill takes even the most treacherous dangers in stride, suffusing his story with as much tenderness as stark terror.

You’ve never seen Melissa McCarthy like this. And she’s not even the best thing about her new movie.

The result, Bisbee ’17, is a fascinating exercise in nonfiction filmmaking as a performative, interdisciplinary, collective act, as well as a provocative inquiry into how selective memory, ideology, shame and unspeakable trauma shape what we come to accept as official history.

As the chief avatar for parental distress, Carell is sympathetic if not always entirely convincing: The toughest moments of Beautiful Boy simply seem out of his range as an actor, especially when he takes reportorial zeal one step too far by trying hard drugs himself.

Like its protagonist, First Man doesn’t go in for theatrics or gratuitous emotion, however justified. It gets the job done, with professionalism, immersive authenticity and unadorned feeling, of which Armstrong himself might just have approved, however apprehensively.

The pure athletics of Free Solo, which chronicles Honnold’s months-long training regimen as well as his subsequent attempts, would be spectacle enough to create an entertaining film.

The Old Man and the Gun ambles along with such unhurried, folksy ease that it’s easy to overlook the people — mostly women — Tucker leaves in his wake, victims who may not be physically scarred, but often look as if they will bear unseen injuries into the future nonetheless.

This is Audiard’s first English-language film, and he evinces sure instincts with both the visual and spoken vernaculars. The Sisters Brothers looks terrific and, propelled by Desplat’s beautiful music, ambles along with pleasing, if routinely episodic, ease until its unexpectedly touching conclusion.

A well-seasoned, handsomely cured slab of showbiz schmaltz that hits all the right pleasure centers. With equal parts glitz and grit, Cooper has successfully navigated the most perilous shoals of making a classic narrative his own, managing to create one of its best iterations to date.

Accompanied, appropriately enough, by Bach piano pieces, The Children Act is an unmitigated pleasure to watch and listen to, primarily as a showcase for Thompson’s incomparable gifts as an actress.

An absorbing, illuminating film.

A film that feels like something conjured out of memory and magic, a poetic, often ecstatic re-creation of childhood that captures its ungovernable pleasures as vividly as its most threatening terrors.

A handsome production that delicately skewers literary-world pretensions and Great Man mythmaking. But primarily, The Wife offers viewers a chance to observe one of the finest — and most criminally underpraised — actresses of her generation working at the very top of her shrewd, subtle, superbly self-controlled game.

The result is a movie that feels both hard-edged and dreamy; punk-rock and lyrical; wised-up and unbearably tender.

If Bowers’s present-day life has slowed down considerably, his memories haven’t, and the subject of Scotty and the Secret History of Hollywood exerts his luridly voyeuristic pull, as he shares name after name of his most shocking exploits.

Like the finest forebears of the rom-com genre — including its urtext, “Four Weddings and a Funeral” — Crazy Rich Asians indulges in the escapist pleasures of aspirational wealth, obscene consumerism and invidious judge-iness.

Accompanied by an expressively lush jazz-blues score by Lee’s regular composer Terence Blanchard, BlacKkKlansman announces from the jump that viewers are in for a lush, sensory treat as Lee plays with the film vernacular he’s manipulated so adroitly and expressively for three decades.