A.A. Dowd

Benicio del Toro's understated performance as a soft-spoken detective is about the only interesting thing about this new Netflix thriller, which drowns a thin murder mystery in lots of ominous atmosphere.

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.

Hardcore genre fans might appreciate a few of the gorier moments, but they also might agree that a movie called Beaten to Death should not be as drearily maudlin as this.

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.

This time around, Leatherface is just a run-of-the-mill bogeyman, slaughtering a new generation of lambs for the sins of our age. It’s a sequel as pretentious as its chainsaw fodder: an act of genre gentrification.

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.

Death On The Nile feels chintzier in every respect, with a much lower-wattage cast of potential murderers and a digitally summoned exotic locale about as immersive as a screensaver. If a viewer didn’t know better, they might assume they were seeing the fourth or fifth entry in a sputtering franchise, not the direct follow-up to a global box-office hit.

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

Redeeming Love is a kinky power fantasy in the halfway convincing disguise of wholesome faith-based entertainment.

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.

This may, in content, be the most “personal” film in the up-and-down career of the classically trained stage and screen veteran. But however autobiographical the material, Branagh approaches it from a curious remove: He’s made a memoir that’s tenderly nostalgic in the broad strokes without ever locking the audience into an emotional perspective.

Stewart never seems to find an emotional reality for the icon she’s playing; the resonance begins and ends with the stunt casting of one hounded target of the bursting flashbulbs as another.

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.

Eternals proves, maybe once and for all, that who’s behind the camera of these quality-controlled blockbusters may not matter so much. What’s the difference in shooting a real landscape and just generating one on a laptop if it’s going to serve as wallpaper for another round of visually undistinguished comic-book combat?

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.

No Time To Die is forgettable in all the places that usually count—it’s a Bond movie with little excitement or panache.

Chase, who co-wrote the script with an alum of his writers’ room, Lawrence Konner, flattens the world of The Sopranos into a generic, vaguely Scorsesian crime epic. At times, the film suggests the shapelessness of a biopic, as though it were beholden to some historical record of facts and figures.

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.