Alison Willmore

Like most of West’s films, X is not particularly ambitious in its psychology or storytelling. It’s his technique that makes his work feel like it has one foot in the arthouse, with its elegant compositions and the way the camera moves as though daring us to see something the characters have yet to spot.

For all Eichner’s intentions to make history with the movie, it’s at its best when it frees itself from representing anything more than two characters falling in love. That gives us more space to laud its pioneering work in putting awkward foursomes onscreen, anyway.

The result is scruffily endearing, though it teeters on the verge of collapse at times, as the pretense that what’s unfolding onscreen is all a serendipitous journey gets stretched to the breaking point.

Kendrick and Lively have an undeniable chemistry that allows you to buy that these two characters really do like one another, despite the circumstances. But that only matters when those circumstances mean something, and by the end of Another Simple Favor, they don’t — nothing matters at all.

We love charismatic murders and compelling monsters, but it’s always a little more comfortable to love them when they appear to be acting for good. The best thing about Don’t Breathe 2 is the way it constantly undermines that comfort, as though demanding we question the desire to assign hero and villain roles at all.

A debut as packed with promise as with underdeveloped ideas.

Saltburn’s seductive imagery outweighs its obvious attempts at provocation. And while it does end up making being rich look pretty sweet, that’s not exactly a revelation worth hanging a whole movie on.

You’re Cordially Invited might have been better off ditching the rom of it all entirely, but Stoller is good enough at this that even if the rest of his movie consists of two slightly discordant halves, both are pretty solid.

The new movie leans into comedy in ways that veer toward the cutesy — Chris at a speed dating event, Chris at a line-dancing night — but the scenes of the brothers together are great, providing glimpses of the co-dependent boys they were before they grew into trauma-stunted men who regularly commit acts of bloodshed.

The sympathy Roofman extends toward the break room of its big-box stores and the low-ceilinged place of worship where Leigh sings in the choir every Sunday is more moving than its treatment of its protagonist, offering an appreciation that these places could be anywhere and at the same time are highly specific.

Heart Eyes is strong enough that the shortcomings that keep it in the realm of the passable instead of the actually good are maddening.

They’re stories you can find in the book, accompanied by ones from a multitude of other contributors, including Schellenbach, who gets to give her own account of what happened. So why not just read that?

The Invisible Man is not as smart as it could have been, but the concept is ingenious even if the execution gets slapdash. And with Moss at the center, it doesn’t matter all that much — she sells what’s approached as B-movie material with the unwavering dedication of someone starring in a prestige biopic.

Brie and Franco, in providing nuance and texture to Millie and Tim, may actually have worked against a film that would be better off allowing its characters to be in an unhealthy relationship from the beginning — a choice that would make the ending feel more unsetting rather than just a flubbed allegory.

Ammonite is Winslet’s movie to shoulder, and she carries it as far as she can.

Watching the film is a reminder that the most boundary-pushing comedy isn’t about risqué content but a willingness to get uncomfortable and the confidence to assume audiences will join along in that journey. Joy Ride instead seeks out the warm fuzzies in a way that feels like a surrender.

For all that it has been positioned as the comeback of the rom-com queen, Marry Me isn’t really a return to form for the genre. Instead, it aims to have things both ways, to have the glamour and the buoyant fantasy and to also be more textured in its treatment of its characters and their relationship.

Selah and the Spades ends just as it feels like it’s really picking up momentum, which is the major frustration of the film and also, likely, part of the reason it was picked up by Amazon both as a release and the basis for a possible series adaptation.

Seydoux may exude voluptuous sensuality, and Stewart may be performing a whispery, dystopian take on a sultry librarian, but the film itself has an aloof, clinical quality. What interests it is not the potential of our physical forms for pleasure and revulsion, but their inevitable failure.

One senses this is a mundane story that’s trying to be something stranger and more buoyant — the film’s off-kilter sensibility keeps threatening to fade away, like it’s stuck at the tail end of a high.

It’s a film about language in ways that are promising but more often exasperating.

No genre really makes more sense for this moment than horror — except, maybe, for black comedy, and Aster’s bracingly nasty but centerless new film offers plenty of both.

Wright’s movie, aside from its mess of an ending, is a propulsive and generally fun affair that sends Powell careering around the Eastern Seaboard like the Tom Cruise successor he’s so determined to become, even if he’s not entirely plausible as a guy who’s volcanic with anger.

The stylistic choices Guadagnino makes throughout Queer are invariably more engaging than the central story itself, no matter what the filmmaker tries unsuccessfully to will it into.

I cried at the end of Babes, despite thinking that it wasn’t working all that well for most of its run time. Movies can be funny that way, leaving you indifferent for long stretches and then walloping you with an emotional moment that’s even more effective for how you didn’t see it coming.

Pearson, as happy-go-lucky charmer, also brings a burst of much-needed vitality to this droll but overly thought-through film.

Dicks: The Musical is never as outrageous as it clearly would like to be . . . But its determination to avoid any trace of self-importance or greater meaning is admirable in its own right — embracing the freedom to just be ridiculous.

It’s a performance that suggests the most interesting stretch of Affleck’s career as an actor is still to come.

The Beekeeper takes a Mad Libs approach to moviemaking.

The best parts of What Happens Later are when it lets its characters just be people who still want to find love and find some of its warmth in the embers of this long-ago relationship. It’s too bad there aren’t more of those moments.

The film also comes across like a rough cut that was never looked at as a coherent whole, and some segments that start off as promising become interminable while others feel entirely unnecessary. There's no pressure on or expectation for Tarantino to please anyone other than himself, and the film feels overstuffed with ideas that should have been pruned.

It’s the worst movie McQueen’s made, which by wider standards means that it’s still not bad. But Blitz’s admirable intentions consistently outstrip its execution, which is clunky and full of narrative artifices required to keep its angel-faced lead on the run from danger and from the authorities who intend to send him back to the train station.

Even at a generous running time that matches this season's other giant award candidates, Les Misérables seems like it's in a hurry, skittering from one number to the next without interlude. After Hathaway's early high point, it starts to feel numbing, an unending barrage of musical emoting carrying us through Valjean's adopting of Cosette, the latter's first encounter with Marius, the battle at the barricade and a last hour that can feel like it's a non-stop series of death arias.

Last Rites comes from Michael Chaves, the same director as that last film, but returns the series to what it does best, which is dealing with a supernaturally infested home.

There’s a streak of defensiveness to Barbie, as though it’s trying to anticipate and acknowledge any critiques lodged against it before they’re made, which renders it emotionally inert despite the efforts at wackiness.

The sheer joy of watching characters in full bridal splendor preparing to plunge into combat can’t be underestimated, but it’s never as satisfying as it should be.

It’s a movie that makes you long to be able to freeze frames in order to appreciate the loveliness and wit of its details, while at the same time giving you little reason to want to revisit the thing as a whole.

That it feels like it’s half at war with its title character, bringing her firmly to Earth (until she, like Bond in Moonraker, has to make her way to a high-altitude villain’s lair) and insisting on emotional coherence from her personal history, is its most interesting quality, though it’s maybe not as revolutionary as it first seems.

By the time the final act rolls around, Lamb approaches the idea that there’s a price that must be paid with a shrugging diffidence rather than impending doom. It’s such an underwhelming conclusion to a film with such a compelling start.

M3gan’s reach is never in danger of exceeding its grasp. It wants only to provide a diverting 100-odd minutes of horror comedy, with a heavy emphasis on the comedy.

There was something undeniably valiant about the way the first one tried, however imperfectly, to bend that long Mouse House tradition of human-acting animals into a means for an examination of racial bias. But in repeating that approach for a story about the banishing of reptiles from the city and the strategic destruction of neighborhoods, Zootopia 2 sets up parallels that strain even more at the seams.

The best parts of Problemista, which is a charming film without ever becoming more than semi-successful, bend the world through his perspective with the help of some Michel Gondry–esque DIY Surrealism.

Naishuller doesn’t bring the elegant coherence that Leitch and Stahelski do to their fight sequences or manage the same touch of absurdity to lighten up the brutal excesses. What he does have is Bob Odenkirk, and watching Odenkirk join the middle-aged action hero fold is pleasurable enough to make Nobody worth the while, even if it’s an obvious echo of other, better recent films.

It has the air of a television-show fragment, and not just because its initial entanglement feels like the stuff of a pilot, something that has to be gotten out of the way to reach the actual premise. It’s also because it introduces characters who feel like they have storylines in the wings.

By framing Mamie’s story entirely in the context of her son’s death, Till keeps us on the outside of her transformation from a woman focused on her own life to one who believes, as she says in a speech at the end, that “what happens to any of us anywhere in the world had better be the business of us all.”

This is Pitt’s movie, and like its star, it never opens itself up enough to truly take off.

Late in The Iron Claw comes a sequence that departs from everything that’s come before and drops us unabashedly into Kevin’s mind at a time of intense grief. It’s earnest, and corny, and utterly devastating, and it makes you yearn for a film that wasn’t so intent on holding its tragic subjects at a brawny arm’s length.

The Woman King is strongest when it immerses itself in the dynamics and the personalities of the Agojie.

Frankie is a messy movie that spreads itself too thin over this sprawling cast of characters.

As a thriller, The Burnt Orange Heresy is entirely underwhelming, but that doesn’t mean it isn’t worth watching.

It’s warm and inveigling, but what it could use is a little more emotional ugliness.

Luca is so intent on meaning something that it only ever halfway inhabits the delightfully colorful world it lays out. We never get a deeper understanding of the history between the sea monsters and the humans beyond some hints that there has been far more interaction than Luca was raised to believe.

Reminiscence is the damnedest thing — a movie filled with promising concepts it doesn’t get around to exploring, because it’s dedicated to a romantic mystery that’s never very romantic or mysterious

Ella McCay is gas-leak cinema at its finest, which is to say that there is a naïve purity to its unhinged qualities that is almost charming.

The dissonance between that meditative quality and a premise as goofy as Happy Gilmore’s is jarring, though it’s hard to blame Sandler for taking the time to look back, no matter the context.

Master Gardener plays less like a thematic finale and more like the director is trying to exorcise himself of his perpetual idée fixe.

The film plays more like it was made by an AI versed in the existing movies but not quite up to spitting out something coherent itself.

More than anything, The Instigators is ethnic comedy if being a white guy from Boston counts as its own ethnicity, an argument that Damon and the Afflecks have spent a good portion of their careers making. Those local specifics and in-jokes may not amount to much, but they are what distinguishes this film from other half-baked crime movies.

The result is an underwhelming addiction story that feels not just familiar, but more focused on the bad-boy swagger of its main character than his actual recovery.

There is a maddeningly unconsidered quality to Boogie’s emotions about Asian American masculinity, and never more so than in the film’s fraught relationship with Blackness.

Elio . . . plays like something that was imperfectly assembled from its component parts, as though its creative team couldn’t figure out a way to align its visions of candy-colored intergalactic diplomacy with its emotional themes of empathy and learning to think about what’s going on inside those around us.

The film’s litany of details about growing up in the Houston area in the ’60s isn’t enveloping — instead, in its drone of vintage sitcom titles and reminiscences about fecklessly riding in the back of a pickup on the freeway to the beach, it feels, for the first time from Linklater, like a lecture about how things were better back then.

It begins as a comedy, takes a turn toward the earnest, and ends with a sort of genial blasphemy. There’s definitely nothing else like it out there, for better and worse, and even if it doesn’t work, there’s something admirable about how at ease the film is with its own erratic rhythms.

Deep Water, which was written by Zach Helm (of Mr. Magorium’s Wonder Emporium) and Euphoria Svengali Sam Levinson, never creates any sense of internal coherence in its toxic main pair.

Thyberg clearly set out to create a hysteria-free look at the industry, taking on the challenge of critiquing structural issues without casting judgments on the idea of having sex on camera. Pleasure succeeds at this, though not without a cost. It’s a clear-eyed treatment of porn wedded to a character study that never comes to life.

Malek keeps trying to find the emotional center and dignity of a character who’s pure pulp, and while it’s an admirable effort, it’s also jarringly unsuited to the movie.

The Hunt isn’t a total mishap, not with Gilpin being as good as she is and with Zobel’s gleeful aptitude for violence, but that’s what’s so exasperating about it. It has a habit of getting in its own way with trollish tendencies whenever it starts to build momentum.

What his vampire drama is missing is precisely the quality that’s given Eggers’ earlier work its unsettling energy, which is that he’s able to render the past as an alien landscape whose inhabitants don’t just look different, but conceive of the universe in ways very different than we might.

The appeal of the cast can’t change the fact that its members are playing incredibly soft targets instead of real characters.

The frustrating thing about Fingernails, which is directed by Christos Nikou from a script he wrote with Stavros Raptis and Sam Steiner, is that it’s so disconnected from the physical side of romance even as it has an intensely anatomical phenomenon at its center.

Like a lot of movies these days, Fresh feels like it was conceived through its themes first and then written to bolster those ideas, rather than from the perspective of character or story.

It packs the screen with witty details, features some brilliantly directed sequences, sets up downright baroque punchlines, and is anchored by an incredibly game performance by Phoenix. But ditching the genre framework doesn’t make it feel more honest — its self-deflating comedy is, ironically, that of someone afraid of being taken seriously.

Mulan is a dour drag as a work of art and entertainment, an empty if occasionally impressive-looking spectacle propped up by some incredibly clunky writing.