In the first live-action Pokémon adaptation, the Pokémon are just there—in the background, on the streets, on trains and in offices and in the air—just hanging around, biding their time, kind of like us as we watch.

“Endgame” is a watershed moment in movie history, the end not just of a franchise, but of an era in American cinema. It’s an important movie, and a miserable one.

The movie is full of strange moments and contradictions, and Claire Denis assembles these pieces into a nonlinear puzzle designed to show us what it looks like for people to regress to their most basic human instincts.

“Us” is a shapeshifter of a movie, its meaning dependent on whatever dissociations and self-contradictions a viewer brings to it. It will mean a hundred different things to a hundred different people.

The power of “Everybody Knows” lies in its simplicity. Every character’s motives are laid out early; Farhadi then takes his time unspooling each thread, one by one.

Robert Rodriguez has done painstaking work to craft a rich imaginary world, but that world remains largely unexplored at the film’s end.

“Vice” is overindulgent in just about every way, the sort of movie you get when every idea that comes up in the first brainstorming session makes it into the finished product.

Bringing together six different Spider-Men and -Women (including one pig), the movie feels less like an invitation for plot holes and more like a game where anything goes.

“Roma” reveals that Alfonso Cuarón is equally skilled with the slice-of-life drama as he is with the fantasy and sci-fi adventures that have made his name.

“The Favourite” feels subversive and new, but it’s also deeply unsatisfying, to the point of distraction. As engrossing as its two hours are, the movie feels unfinished.