Movies Now

Movie recommendations from critics Justin Chang and Kenneth Turan.

Ant-Man and the Wasp A bright, cheery distraction from darker, heavier Marvel Studios outings, this Peyton Reed-directed sequel to 2015's "Ant-Man" reunites Paul Rudd and Evangeline Lilly in a superhero caper of deliberately low stakes and enormous charm.

Aretha Franklin, the Queen of Soul, who died Thursday, had a vast reach that stretched well beyond popular music and onto the silver screen.

Her songs have appeared in more than 200 films and TV shows, often making them that much better.

Here are nine movies that feature Franklin’s scene-stealing vocals, including one especially essential on-screen appearance.

The German animated film “Luis and the Aliens,” dubbed into English for its U.S. release, is a standard-issue kid-friendly adventure with a surprisingly sorrowful center.

A darkly intriguing take on the creative process, Manuel Martín Cuenca’s “The Motive” poetically weaves a devious web around the writer’s greatest nemesis, better known as the blank page.

A young person on a skateboard becomes a precious, fleeting image of liberation in Crystal Moselle’s “Skate Kitchen” and Bing Liu’s “Minding the Gap.”

One of the first things we see in “Madeline’s Madeline,” a feverish and mercurial brainstorm of a movie, is the hazy figure of a nurse, or perhaps a woman pretending to be a nurse. (Either way, she is played by the actress Okwui Okpokwasili.) She smiles down at the camera and announces, “What you are experiencing is just a metaphor. The emotions you are having are not your own.”