"Deadpool 2" is just like "Deadpool" only more so. It's actually a fair bit better -- funnier, more inventive than the 2016 smash, and more consistent in its chosen tone and style: ultraviolent screwball comedy. The movie offers a bracing corrective to the Marvel traffic management smash of the moment, "Avengers: Infinity War," which has sent millions of preteens into a collective, low-grade cloud of fatalism while proving to kids and adults, once again, that a superhero movie doesn't need rhythm or even interesting action scenes to fulfill its corporate directive. "Deadpool 2" isn't for your kids, at least those under 14 or 15. It's for the jaded, arrested-development adolescent lurking inside your adult self. 1:59. 3 stars. -- M.P.
FIRST REFORMED. "A life without despair is a life without hope," says the man at the center of Paul Schrader's "First Reformed." That paradox embraces the world as it is, and suggests a better world for the making. The movie it belongs to is an act of spiritual inquiry, a coolly assured example of cinematic scholarship in subtly deployed motion and one of the strongest pictures of 2018. You may not appreciate the direction it goes, ultimately, or make the leap alongside the story's protagonist, played by Ethan Hawke, at the unnerving close of a carefully calibrated crisis of faith. But it's a beautiful crisis to witness, and to argue with internally. 1:53. 3 1/2 stars. -- M.P.
