The great French director Claire Denis’ newest film, High Life, opens with us alone on a small spaceship with Robert Pattinson and a young child. The girl is presumably his own, though we don’t know who they are, or why they’re there, so we can’t be sure. A fair stretch of the first part of the movie shows Pattinson living on this ship, tending to its lush garden, keeping the ship operating, and, most importantly, taking care of the toddler, revealing an unusual, but touching, representation of

There’s never really been anything like the Marvel Cinematic Universe, with 22 movies since 2008, dozens of characters jumping across multiple films, and narrative arcs that weave through all of it. It’s all led, so far, to the last two movies, Avengers: Infinity War , and the latest, Avengers: Endgame .

For the most part, a movie has to run at least 70-or-so minutes to play in theaters, preferably longer.

In Missing Link , the new children’s film from the animation studio Laika, we open in 19 th -century London, where Sir Lionel Frost fancies himself a great adventurer, but isn’t taken seriously by his peers. Frost determines that to gain their acceptance he must find incontrovertible evidence of some mythological animal, and heads off in search of the elusive sasquatch. And find the sasquatch he does, though it’s hardly the “beast” he expects.

Two things I don’t really know anything about are horses and prison. So I can’t speak to the level of realism in The Mustang , the feature directing debut from French actress Laure de Clermont-Tonnerre. But I can speak to the emotional resonance of the movie, and there, it’s kind of a knockout.

Director Harmony Korine’s movies have never been for me, including his highly praised James Franco-laced fever dream Spring Breakers from 2013. I do appreciate that he has a very specific point of view and he makes movies certainly no one else is making. But his aesthetic and the way he treats his characters have never sat well with me.

We can probably all agree that looking at your phone or talking during a movie is rude. But something we don’t really think about and ought to recognize is that these are anxiety-reducing activities. That’s not an excuse, you still shouldn’t do it, but knowing this kept me from being surprised to see so many little screens lighting up and a group of people talking throughout a recent showing of Jordan Peele’s horror-thriller Us . I do NOT blame these people for needing to reduce their anxiety.

As you may very well know, this year marks the 50th anniversary of the first Apollo moon landing. As such, director Todd Douglas Miller has made Apollo 11 , which is almost certainly the closest we’ll get to even remotely approaching the astronauts’ actual experience.

Studios used to open their major blockbusters after Memorial Day. Over time, that release date crept earlier and earlier, and now we have Captain Marvel , which just had one of the greatest box office openings ever, and it’s not even spring yet.

When the credits finished rolling on Vox Lux , the first thing I said was this: Vox Lux is a lot of movie. It describes itself as “a 21 st century portrait,” and it seems to be both a portrait of a person in the 21 st century, and a portrait of the 21 st century itself.