A.A. Dowd

Even when The Gorge disappears into generic run-and-shoot action, it benefits from the colorful confidence of Derrickson’s staging and a ’50s-inflected sci-fi score from Trent Reznor and Atticus Ross. At its worst, this solid genre exercise still looks worthy of the theatrical release Apple didn’t grant it.

A good cast and Collet-Serra’s energetic staging elevate the kind of straight-down-the-middle entertainment Hollywood has mostly, sadly stopped bankrolling. It’s not quite Die Hard, but close enough.

Smile 2 doesn’t quite match its sadistically effective predecessor in the scare department, because once you’ve seen one phantom doppelganger grinning like the Cheshire Cat, you’ve seen them all. But the movie works as a nasty portrait of the downside of music-biz fame, and it builds to an ending deserving of every crooked smile it earns.

Heretic’s slow-simmering first half is much better than its second, but the movie keeps you on your toes throughout. Most of its deranged charge comes from Grant, finding darkness under the pleasant hallmarks of his aging-star persona.

Saulnier savages the legal loopholes that allow police to exploit their community, all while offering the year’s most breathlessly suspenseful standoffs. It’s what a modern crowd-pleaser should be: smart, gripping, and about something.

It’s a good movie too chronically polite to achieve anything like greatness.

If the animation is nothing special, the script is better than what drives most animated movies aimed at a young audience. And you can certainly feel Kaufman’s neurotic touch on the material.

This grim, acclaimed Chilean Western will dazzle your eyes, even as it crushes your spirit with its true story of genocide.

As a historical epic, Napoleon is handsome but a little impersonal – you can really feel the absence of texture lost in getting it down under three hours. But between the textbook bullet points, a very funny anti-Great Man biopic peeks through, thanks largely to Joaquin Phoenix’s performance as a Bonaparte who’s more boy than man.

Eli Roth finally adapts his fake trailer into a real slasher movie – and it’s not without its nasty charms

Godzilla and Rogue One director Gareth Edwards returns with an original (albeit derivative) science fiction vision: the story of a future war between man and machine, as told through the bond that develops between, well, a man and a child-sized machine. As pure spectacle, The Creator is often jaw-dropping in its imagery, its relatively frugal special effects, and the detailed depth of its futuristic design. It's shakier as drama and sci-fi – and in its sentimental depiction of synthetic humans just trying to live their synthetic lives, a bit out of step with the anxieties of our increasingly AI-dominated age.

Still, the film sustains its seductive atmosphere—its hushed pop-noir cool—even as the story fizzles into a string of reveals and a curiously perfunctory climax.

Playground smartly complicates the situation by showing how Nora juggles her desperate concern for her brother with a fear that his plummeting social stock might drag her into the same boat. It’s hard to watch, but Wandel doesn’t blink.

For all of Trier’s stylistic flair, the best scenes in The Worst Person In The World are unadorned conversations, little pockets of chemistry or conflict. The film peaks with a self-contained romantic episode, beautifully written and performed

Suffice to say, No Way Home hits its hoot-and-holler beats about as skillfully as Endgame did. There are moments here that will probably inspire comparable choruses of applause; by opening a wormhole into the multiverse of past Spider-Man movies, Marvel and Sony have made something like an all-purpose Spider-Man sequel, shrewdly designed to hit a whole range of nostalgia centers.

Rex is a revelation here, a star reborn. He shrewdly conceals the depths of Mikey’s bone-deep selfishness under a lot of guileless blather, a hapless fool routine. The movie only works if our dawning awareness of his rottenness collides with what a hoot he can be, in all his calculated boylike scampishness.

Of course, the real star here is the staging, a balm for an age of lead-footed Broadway translations.

The Humans holds a smudged mirror up to any unsuspecting viewers who might enter its cramped Chinatown abode in search of distraction from the unresolved resentments of their own clan. It looms large in the small canon of Thanksgiving cinema, a quintessential stomachache of a movie.

Licorice Pizza is a woozy time-warp shuffle of a comedy: a California daydream of infatuation, aspiration, and protracted adolescence that seems to propel its celebrated writer-director, Paul Thomas Anderson, forward and backward at once.

Part of the movie’s brilliance is in how it questions the very concept of a good deed.

The film’s aspirations to prestige smother its immediacy, the thrills of the genre it’s supposedly occupying. Antlers fancies itself a message movie, but on that front it’s muddled at best.

The storytelling is as paramount–and often as dizzyingly entertaining—as the stories themselves.

The setting may be the 14th century, but this is very much a historical drama of modern concerns. Damningly, it suggests that yesterday’s injustices remain very much today’s.

File 94 somewhere between the inspired, crowd-pleasing bloodshed of the second film and the series-low ineptitude of the third, V/H/S Viral.

This is, perhaps, a movie easy to oversell. It earns a lot of goodwill simply by never devolving into a dumber version of itself, into what you might expect from a film featuring Dan Stevens as a sexy robot. But I’m Your Man’s charms are real, and steeped in a lightly inquisitive, even philosophical engagement with the meatier matters of smart science fiction and smart relationship drama.

For most of its brisk 90 minutes, The Guilty is just Gyllenhaal, in tight close-up, constructing a movie out of sweat and tears alone: a glorified radio play of a thriller whose thrills are generated almost entirely through his reactions.

Regardless of one’s math on the ratio of fun to dumb in Aquaman, there’s no way to watch this deranged follow-up and not conclude that Wan’s back where he belongs. Still, a little of that time in the superhero trenches seems to have crept into his supernatural comeback.

The pleasures are of a borrowed nature, the stuff of third-, fourth-, maybe fifth-generation noir homage, just gussied up in sci-fi formal wear: all archetypes spouting purple verbiage while navigating a twisty missing-person mystery that pulls together, in the classic private-dick tradition, seemingly unrelated cases.

John And The Hole comes on like a spooky portrait of budding teenage sociopathy, but it resists diagnostic shortcuts.

Here, the Texas writer-director revels in the opportunity to create image after image worthy of immortalization: The Green Knight is his most purely striking achievement, offering sprawling forests bathed in ghostly orange light and overhead shots that suggest the surveying eye of a curious god.

The film has flashes of clumsiness that should be familiar to those who have stepped before into the Twilight Zone of its maker’s imagination. But Old is also, in its most intense moments, one of his most genuinely disturbing visions: a horror movie about that most universal of horrors, inescapable mortality.

For all the work this spinoff puts into generating a traumatic origin story for its moonlighting superhero, it would be a stretch to say that either Johansson or the filmmakers finally find the real Romanoff—or even that they much deepen the various versions of her we’ve met already.

At least Ruben maintains his comic instincts and crack timing throughout. The film possesses a strong touch of Edgar Wright in how it manages both the humor and horror of its conceit.

The generous read on Luca is that it has the sweet simplicity of a fairy tale, something that tired kids and the exhausted parents reading to them could follow even while on the verge of slumber. Less euphemistically, this is an exceptionally mild addition to the Pixar canon, pleasant but nearly as shallow as a bathtub.

The Amusement Park passes in a deranged blur; it’s a glorified PSA made with the means (and in the spirit of) antagonistic outsider art.

At just 97 minutes (only a hair longer than the first Quiet Place), his sequel feels pared down to a fault, with no room to further flesh out this world or its occupants. As a piece of storytelling, it’s skimpy and vaguely unsatisfying. As a series of fight, flight, or bite-your-tongue set pieces, it delivers.

Agreeably straightforward, Those Who Wish Me Dead is also thin as kindling: It threatens to disperse into embers as you watch it. And there are limits to its ruthless economy. For as unsentimental as Sheridan’s approach looks from a distance, everything with Jolie’s anguished Hannah feels hoary and even a touch maudlin.

In a way, this B-movie on an A budget gets closer to the values of George Romero, the godfather of zombie cinema, than Snyder’s actual, hyper-adrenalized remake of Romero’s masterpiece.

It’s an ode to the way that even impermanent relationships can be profoundly meaningful.

Maybe the film’s escalating conflict would be more exciting if the characters themselves (played by the likes of Tye Sheridan and Lily-Rose Depp, among an ensemble of fellow twentysomething model types) weren’t such blank-eyed nothings.

Make no mistake, this is pure caveman bullshit. Yet it’s caveman bullshit made with style and wit, qualities that extend from its screenplay to its performances to its staging.

As the film begins to reveal its easily guessed secrets, it also doubles as a resonant tale of misogyny in the face of exposure: an allegory about how male rage grows directly out of male insecurity and is fortified by religious zealotry. Miss those themes announced like thoughts put into words, and there’s still the way Liman and his writers play their Philip K. Dick-worthy concept for screwball comedy and suspense.

A Glitch In The Matrix unfolds as a flood of exposition and conjecture, accompanied by a gaudy infotainment montage of video-game footage, movie excerpts, and computer-animated recreations.

To enjoy the film on its own cookie-cutter terms depends on finding pleasure, guilty or otherwise, in tropes recycled with total straight-faced conviction. Or maybe to crave comfort food of a variety Hollywood doesn’t churn out quite as frequently as it used to.

It’s sweet and involving and occasionally even moving, but also, in its selective dramatization, a lot easier. Which is to say, it approaches the story itself rather euphemistically, handling the audience with kid gloves by eliding the most unpleasant truths of the family’s experience.

Some Kind Of Heaven contrasts the dissatisfaction of its subjects with the sunniness of their surroundings, the better to stress the wide gap separating how they feel and how they’re expected to feel in a community one talking head refers to, un-ironically, as “nirvana.”

It’s a true star vehicle, practically a tribute to his enduring appeal. Yet for as comforting as Hanks is in the role, and for as much as he sells the poignancy of the film’s bittersweet final stretch, the film feels almost too built around his signature nobility to ever gain much in the way of actual drama.

Another Round doesn’t quite come across like a cautionary tale, and that’s because Vinterberg takes a refreshingly, well, sober stance on the entwined pleasures and pitfalls of drinking. He’s made the rare movie about getting shitfaced that’s somehow neither a wallow in the gutter nor a fantasy of life without hangovers.

It’s overflowing, like a bright portal into a new reality, with gorgeous details. So what if they don’t quite add up to a deeper whole?

There are no sentimental easy answers or shortcuts to uplift in this unusually prickly buddy comedy. Like Kyle and Mike, it just keeps peddling forward, in the hope that some kind of clarity might materialize at the top of the hill.

Writer-director Jacob Chase, making his feature debut, expanded Come Play from an inventive short film. The result is involving, but a little pat as drama; you see the strings, even when it’s successfully pulling the ones attached to your heart. As a horror movie, though, it’s often diabolical fun: a PG-13 funhouse ride of peekaboo jolts.

Nocturne, like its brittle protagonist, is good enough at what it does to make you wish it were a little better.

Black Box is no Memento. It’s more like a solid episode of Black Mirror, with some ideas and imagery pilfered from one of Blumhouse’s biggest hits, Get Out.

Red, White And Blue is stark and straightforward, further proof that McQueen has distinguished each entry in his bold foray into small-screen storytelling.

If Mangrove is contrived in the way lots of legal procedurals are, it also tackles its conventions with a conviction that makes you believe in them all over again.

Bradley, who’s worked mainly in narrative cinema, lends a sharp eye for composition and a poet’s sensibility. This is a beautifully shot film that’s as interested in studying the changing faces of its subjects as laying out their struggle from end to end.

For all the minor creepiness Undine pulls from its inspiration (including some striking underwater shots), it also inherits a certain simplicity of plotting and one-note characterization. Yet I still wouldn’t hesitate for a second to recommend the film, because it’s been made with the superb economy of pacing, shot selection, and editing that’s become a Petzold specialty, nay a trademark.

The Woman Who Ran is ultimately a minor doodle, even by Hong’s standards; it lacks the games of nonlinear structure, cognitive dissonance, or lightly surrealist Groundhog Day cycles that mark his best work. But the film has its moments, too, most of them concerned with the way social propriety affects communication.

To watch Days in the context of this long-running creative partnership is to bring memories of the men, all more similar than not, that Lee has played before for Tsai; his weariness here carries the weight of a lifetime of relevant roles, almost a franchise arc of alienation and regret.

In the end, Possessor privileges the visceral over the cerebral. Which is not to deny that it lands somewhere rather provocative as a character study.

There’s something a little tidy about the resolution, closing a movie of messy emotional confusion on a note of affirmation and maybe even a kind of surrender. But On The Rocks shines brighter in the context of a career, especially in indirect dialogue with Lost In Translation.

You won’t learn much from Gunda. It’s an arty pastoral mood piece, not an educational tool. Which is not to imply it lacks a philosophy.

The Calming ultimately might have benefitted from an animating tension—from something beyond its sustained mood of lovely but unvaried serenity.

As always, Wiseman’s approach guarantees memorable encounters.

At times, we might be watching a deadpan workplace comedy; that it’s possible to laugh at this subject matter at all is a testament to its matter-of-fact presentation and maybe also to the extent that this virus has completely seeped into every corner of life.

McQueen has zoomed in on a very specific milieu, but he’s also tapped into the universal and suddenly inaccessible joy of an endless night of music and dance, a house party for the ages. You don’t have to know your reggae or have been born 40 years ago to long for the ache of communal fun on which Lovers Rock waxes nostalgic.

Hopkins methodically strips away every quality we’ve come to expect from him—the refinement, the silver tongue, the imposing intensity he lent Lecter and Nixon and Titus—until there’s nothing left but frailty and distress. In doing so, he helps convey the full tragedy and horror of dementia: the way it can make someone almost unrecognizable to themselves and their loved ones.

It’s a useful reminder not just that this American hero was a widely vilified figure during his lifetime but also that he accomplished everything he did despite nonstop resistance from intelligence agencies, the media, and the public alike.

The Truffle Hunters is more eccentric and lyrical than its logline might suggest.

The film may upset and incense multiple sides of the political spectrum: those who see protestors as dangerous chaos agents and those who might be offended by a depiction of them that risks reflecting those fears. Ambivalence aside, it works as a kind of gripping apocalyptic horror movie. There are no zombies, but the rich get eaten.

While there’s little disputing Sharrock’s empathy for his dislocated, stranded characters . . . there’s something rather limited about his alteration of dry fish-out-of-water gags and scenes of people staring forlornly into the barren middle distance.

The droll Twilight Zone absurdism is not without its pleasures, many of them comic.

As this flinty, self-sufficient, and geographically unmoored woman, McDormand provides a blend of toughness and vulnerability that’s a perfect fit for the material.

For all the fascinating insight the film provides into a musical subculture passing slowly into the archives of history, its melancholy is more universal: Anyone who’s ever devoted themselves fully to a passion, only to discover that the rest of the world barely gives a shit, will smile sadly with recognition.

The film has its own celebratory, eccentric identity.

By the end of this strange movie — possibly his most uncompromising and discombobulating, which is really saying something — we have no guarantee that the world it depicts exists outside of someone’s head. The question may just be whose?

When the movie does turn to the predatory behavior, it mostly feels like an aside; one gets the distinct impression that the filmmakers had to scramble to insert some uncomfortable new material into their otherwise completed documentary.

This is something different: an acknowledgement that, for many young women in Iran, prison may offer an escape from everyday horrors, to say nothing of the paradoxical freedom it affords them.

The kind of dread-infused slow burn that’s very much in vogue at the moment, Relic is so entirely, transparently, even explicitly about the horror of dementia and losing a loved one to it that the more traditional genre elements—like a potential supernatural presence in the house—feel rather redundant, maybe even unnecessary.

A potboiler that doesn’t break any molds or reinvent any wheels. Still, there’s something to be said for setting modest goals and achieving them; if this really was some lost relic of the VHS era, it’d pass the blind rental test: There is a witch, and she’s as creepy as the box art would surely promise.

It’s well-acted and reasonably intelligent, but also derivative enough to compare unfavorably to plenty of stone-cold classics.

Set in some indeterminate time and place rarely betrayed by modern technology or dress, The Other Lamb mostly operates in the realm of allegory.

Just don’t mistake the lightness of step for a softness of philosophy. There’s a political dimension to all of Reichardt’s films, which almost invariably follow characters muscled to the margins of society.

Watching Onward, it’s hard to shake the feeling that maybe Pixar has overplayed the mundane half of its winning equation. They’ve made a movie about looking for misplaced magic in the modern world that, well, kind of misplaces the magic.

Beanpole is grim, but it’s too superbly crafted, and too alive with human spirit, to be a truly grueling experience.

It turns out to be something kind of special in its own right: a modern rom-com that’s funny and inventive and sweet and totally mainstream and a little deranged all at once.

By its nature, the film is uneven—Estrada shares screenwriting duty with a whopping 25 poets, and as with any poetry slam, some performances are better than others, both in terms of the words themselves and in the highly variable acting abilities of these mostly first-time stars.

Black Bear is the movie that proves, beyond any lingering doubt, that Aubrey Plaza has much more to offer than the best eye-roll in the business. Maybe that was clear already.

Fennell complicates matters throughout, toying with our identification by pushing Cassie’s tactics into some uncomfortably nasty places, even as she slowly reveals her motives.

The performances are a hoot . . . . But the film has perspective problems that extend beyond the slightly queasy, half-comic depiction of sex work.

Hittman isn’t really a polemicist. She expresses her empathy and political conscience through a refined version of what’s become her signature style, zeroing in on details of place and behavior, both magnified by the reliably involving scenario of two kids from the sticks navigating the hustle, bustle, and bright lights of the city. And moments of startling, unaffected tenderness peak through the grimness of the circumstances.

The Assistant is more of a spartan procedural, its narrative a methodical accounting of one day—typical in incident, atypical in dawning realization—for an entry-level employee at the New York production house of a Weinstein-like figure.

The impression is of a provocative logline that Simien never quite figured out how to expand into a satisfying movie; once you get the thrust of the story, it’s mostly repetitions on a theme.

By the end, 1917 has positioned itself as a salute to the sacrifices of those who died for their country. Mostly, though, it comes across as a monument to itself.

Frozen II is just an echo, drawing prospective fans in without finding many new notes to hit.

Where it fumbles is in the framing device.

The Irishman is the director’s longest drama, but it never drags. The 200-plus minutes pass in a blur of dark humor and characteristically gripping incident . . . But it’s in the final act, when Scorsese slows things down to a purposeful crawl, that the film accumulates its full power.

Waves felt to me like a bitching soundtrack in search of a movie. Maybe I’ll find one on rewatch.