Alonso Duralde

The first movie, for all its fluff, gave Miranda that eminently quotable “cerulean sweater” monologue, but this follow-up has nothing as interesting to say about fashion, or journalism, or life as anyone leads it. It’s sending nostalgia down the runway and expecting us to wear it, when the perfectly comfortable original already fits just right.

Movies about artists, ideally, celebrate the art while also providing a glimpse into the blood, sweat, and tears behind its creation, but any exciting moments here can be found in their original, natural state on YouTube. Michael has no ambitions beyond being its own commemorative souvenir booklet.

While sitting through its interminable 133 minutes, I found myself parsing the difference between the unsettling and the merely unpleasant, and between the grotesque and the icky. In both cases, the former requires some engagement with human experience and consciousness while the latter — where this film permanently resides — merely relies upon witless bad taste and simple-minded gross-outs.

You, Me & Tuscany has all the heft of a squash blossom, and it’s similarly tasty without being filling. But sometimes, you just want one anyway.

Let’s give The Super Mario Galaxy Movie this: for a piece of intellectual-property exploitation, it’s created with far more craft and care than it had to be, with dazzlingly colorful backgrounds and action that’s constantly moving forward. At the same time, it never stops to explain the rules of the characters and their interactions for those of us not steeped in four decades of gameplay.

It’s a meaty premise, one that its talented cast digs into heartily, and the film succeeds at generating tensely uncomfortable comedy for most of its running time.

The film’s best moments are an outlandish pleasure, far outshining the highlights of the similarly-plotted and mostly by-the-numbers sequel Ready or Not 2: Here I Come. But the latter at least maintains a consistent level of energy from start to finish. The initial dynamism on display in They Will Kill You contracts and collapses. Death be not dull.

Tear-jerkers are valuable to cinema; they can provide emotional catharsis as satisfying as any other kind of popcorn entertainment. It’s hard to get misty-eyed, however, over a film that never stops reassuring you that everyone’s going to get a happy ending. Let the audience feel bad for a while, so they can feel good after; failing that leaves everyone feeling nothing.

Ultimately, the film’s breezy attitude and calculated audience-pleasing wins out. Project Hail Mary offers plenty of laughs alongside of a dollop of sentiment, and it centers science in a tale where the apocalypse isn’t necessarily inevitable; it celebrates both humanity’s ability to save itself, and the idea that humanity might be worth saving.

Veers off in so many exhausting directions that it ultimately amounts to little more than sound and fury. She’s alive, alive, but she can’t maintain this pace.

Hoppers tells an effective story with wit and ingenuity, not to mention distinctive character design for every corner of the animal kingdom, from a kind-hearted shark (Vanessa Bayer) to a bratty caterpillar (Dave Franco).

The Scream series has become a horror version of That’s Entertainment!, where 21st century fans of a 1990s movie that paid homage to 1980s horror can get the kind of squishy, splattery, shocking homicides that A24 just isn’t going to deliver.

I Can Only Imagine 2 is a Marvel movie for Evangelicals, but not in a good way: it rehashes the emotional beats of its predecessor to sell audiences an exercise in diminished results. With its reliance on familiar tropes and story clichés, it’s a movie that, even if you haven’t seen it yet, you can probably imagine.

There’s a lot more sex in this Wuthering Heights, but the characters are flatter, the story is duller, and by the film’s climax, any dramatic momentum has been swept away by the winds on the moors.

Obvious jokes, facile insights, and emotional Band-Aids are all that’s on the menu.

Send Help becomes its own unique, mischievous, horrifying creation, thanks to director Sam Raimi and his singular gift for eliciting laughter that turns into screaming (and vice versa).

While Pratt has become the most stultifying of screen presences — he was a lot more fun to watch back when Bekmambetov cast him in a small role in 2008’s Wanted — Ferguson and Reis are both as electrifying as the material allows them to be.

Juggling big ideas and white-knuckle scares has always been the currency of the 28 Days Later saga, and Nia DaCosta does right by the franchise’s legacy.

What’s surprising is that Waugh and his team shine in the quieter moments.

For sheer horror pleasure and monster-movie squirms, this silly monkey movie delivers the goods.

Is Song Sung Blue shamelessly manipulative in its assault on audiences’ tear ducts and heart strings? Absolutely. Will those qualities make it a whipping boy for contemporary reviews like this one while also turning it into a beloved classic in years to come? It’s entirely possible. Like those Neil Diamond songs, this movie might have a moment where it’s considered a joke or an embarrassment, but eventually, people will come clean about how much they love it.

Search for SquarePants comes down vigorously on the side of exuberance.

The entertaining and occasionally over-the-top The Housemaid returns Feig to A Simple Favor territory, serving up aspirational, glossy wealth-porn with one hand and the dark underbelly of the glamorous life with the other.

Director and co-writer James Cameron has a lot to say about colonization and guns and the environment and, while that messaging is noble and right-minded, it’s delivered with blunt force. The 3D here is stunning, but the metaphors come at your face with the same propulsion as the images.

Ultimately, Five Nights at Freddy’s 2 makes no effort to expand its appeal beyond its built-in audience of gamers.

Wherever it winds up going, the Judy-Nick friendship emerges as one of the more complex and satisfying bits of character interplay in contemporary Disney animation.

Any evolution should be appreciated, perhaps, as the story chugs its way to the finish line. Wicked fans can delight in one final visit to Oz, while those of us less enamored can hope that the yellow brick road ends here. For good.

For all the targets that director and co-writer Edgar Wright hits with the story’s political and media satire, he allows the pacing to go slack, turning what should feel like an escalating set of stakes into an episodic series of vignettes.

Sometimes silly but always propulsive, this franchise entry dares to give us an empathy-generating Predator, even if Elle Fanning’s robot steals the show.

It’s always applause-worthy when a biopic focuses on a few key years rather than try to tackle the span of a notable life, but Cooper never fully captures the mental anguish or the artistic glory tied up in Nebraska’s creation. It’s as spare as the album it chronicles, but never as subtle or satisfying.

Hawke remains delightfully disturbing, however, and some fans of the original may find the character’s return worthwhile, even if Black Phone 2 twists itself into narrative knots to make it happen.

TRON: Ares throws in a few half-baked ideas about ethics in the tech world, but its main agenda is to be big, loud, fast, and eye-popping, and on that level — and only that level — it’s a complete success.

It’s entirely possible that Benny Safdie was out to craft a different kind of underdog sports movie, one where the audience isn’t manipulated into raising a triumphant fist at the end. But surely the writer-director-editor hoped for more than a disinterested shrug.

Farce and tragedy, the personal and the political, revolutionaries and the establishment, the intimate and the epic, character study and zeitgeist metaphor — opposing forces clash thematically, aesthetically, and brilliantly in Paul Thomas Anderson’s ambitious and audacious One Battle After Another.

Spending its entire running time between quotation marks, this tedious exercise represents one of the most egregious wastes of talent in recent memory, from a talented cast (led by Margot Robbie and Colin Farrell) to legendary composer Joe Hisaishi to director Kogonada, whose previous films After Yang and Columbus conveyed emotional truths that exist beyond the understanding of this cutesy waste of energy.

This is gut-punch, feel-bad studio filmmaking, all the more notable for how rarely it happens.

This Finale is basically one giant victory lap that takes the Crawley family and their employees into 1930 and beyond — as Cole Porter once wrote, “it’s fun/it’s fresh/it’s post-/depresh.”

With The Conjuring: Last Rites, this venerable franchise finally (one hopes) gives up the ghost, not with a bang, but a whimper.

For most crime capers, shooting is funny but killing isn’t; the always-divisive Aronofsky obliterates the line between comedy and realism, and the result is a farce that’s both literally and figuratively explosive

The “be your true self” storyline has been a staple of animated features for decades, but it’s delivered with a real kick here.

Stripped of the twists and surprises that made the first one such a sleeper hit, this sequel nonetheless delivers breezy, bone-crushing entertainment for undemanding late-summer audiences.

Between Lohan’s impressive return to the movies and Curtis’ defiance of the Best Supporting Oscar curse, Freakier Friday represents an all-too-rare opportunity for talented women on both sides of the camera to demonstrate their chops at big-screen comedy. Long may they freak.

The Naked Gun comes in at a lean 85 minutes, but stay seated for the whole thing, as even the closing credits become a vehicle for jokes on top of jokes.

There’s a lot to like about the world of The Fantastic Four: First Steps, from the mid-century kitsch to the progressive social ethos to its generally upbeat demeanor, but the movie itself lacks the nerve to carve out a memorable personality. Bespoke costumes and vintage Lucky Charms boxes are the empty props of a timid movie.

Every few scenes, there’s a chuckle-worthy bon mot or sight gag, or the animation style will alter radically for some plot-driven reason, but there’s far too much downtime between Smurfs’ sporadic delights.

The miracle of Superman is that, in 2025, it’s a superhero movie that inspires genuine delight.

Jurassic World: Rebirth doesn’t go anywhere particularly unexpected — besides being a big-budget, corporate-backed franchise film advocating that medical advancements should go public rather than be patented by drug companies — but the cliffhangers are choice.

While this sassy cyborg with the deadpan baby voice remains a brilliant comic creation, the movie’s messaging is muddled. For all of the laughs and thrills, we’re left with a satire about technology that still wants to play nice with AI.

F1 doggedly follows the expected ups and downs of most sports-movie narratives, and it’s clearly more interested in recreating the experience of racing than telling a story or crafting a character piece.

As these two modern masters of genre subversion have matured, they've also figured out a way to check off the boxes of thrills and gore and suspense while also finding something real to say about perseverance, hope, and love.

While the adventure is suitably wild and the sidekicks are at least visually appealing, Elio never quite clicks in the way that viewers have come to expect from the people behind Toy Story 3 and Finding Nemo.

One imagines screenwriter Shay Hatten (Rebel Moon) spinning a big Wheel of Weapons that would land on “hand grenades” or “flame-thrower” or “dishware,” leading him to craft novel ways for de Armas to implement these deadly items. The fight scenes are all Ballerina has going for it, but they’re frequent, varied, and clever enough to make watching the film a worthy summer pastime.

The Phoenician Scheme sees Anderson indulging in all of his usual design fetishes (we don’t just get precisely-lettered labels on ornate boxes, we also get the yellowing cellophane tape affixed to those labels) without seeming to get around to a story or characters or themes.

Is Karate Kid: Legends corny and predictable? You bet your obi. But this too-familiar tale is told with such winning spirit and brio that it works all the same. It’s merely a building block in an IP renovation, but it’s remarkably sturdy.

This remake doesn’t desecrate the memory of that modern classic, but neither does it ever transcend it.

For those of us who come to these movies wondering what Tom Cruise will be climbing, clinging onto, or falling off of, this sequel delivers the goods.

Bloodlines reminds us of why these hilarious horrors have been such crowd-pleasers, and why their creators might never call it quits.

If you find yourself revolted by the low-budget slasher movies made by such recently-released-from-copyright characters as Winnie the Pooh, Popeye, and Mickey Mouse, apply some of that distaste to Juliet & Romeo, which turns Shakespeare’s work into quite the horror show.

That Thunderbolts* (and yes, the movie explains that asterisk) emerges as one of the MCU’s most successful team-up movies is its own victory, considering that the team in question is made up of a collection of sidekicks, oddballs, and losers, mostly culled from lesser-known Marvel movies and even TV shows.

As with so many of the ideas on display here, Snow White can’t have it both ways or even decide which way it wants.

Even with De Niro (and De Niro) in the leads, this is mob-movie cosplay, a hollow shadow of previous triumphs. As a mob lawyer might bellow, “Nothing to see here.”

At nearly every juncture, the filmmakers display a lack of nerve, exercising restraint precisely when restraint is anathema to their goals. They’re cautious rather than crazed.

Black Bag is a not-quite-quotidian spy movie. The stakes are the fate of a relationship, not the fate of the world, and all the pieces come together to make human drama even more interesting than potential apocalypse.

Last Breath was made by someone who clearly connects with this material, but somewhere between the non-fiction and fiction versions, the emotional impact has been rendered unfathomable.

As did King before him, Wilson revels in whimsy without drowning in it, and he finds the franchise’s sweet spot of cleverness, poignancy, elaborate physical comedy, witty wordplay, goofy musicality, and just the right amount of sentiment.

The MCU train is back up and running, but this latest entry sees it jerking in fits and starts as it leaves the station.

The barely-crafted romance between Marvin and Rose — for all the individual charisma of Quan and DeBose, there’s no sense that these two have ever experienced affection for the other — relies upon the screenplay telling us (via clumsy internal monologues) that they love each other rather than showing it, which is just one element of the bad writing on display here.

He makes his way to the big screen with silliness (and a love of tennis balls) intact, but Dog Man deserves a frenetic pace to match its barrage of absurd jokes and plot twists.

The brilliant camera work and editing (both by Soderbergh, under his usual pseudonyms) and Koepp’s tersely insightful writing ratchet up the tension, as the audience and, eventually, the characters figure out just what’s going on in this seemingly ideal house.

Even if it starts better than it ends, Wolf Man merits a look, not only for the craft on display but also for the powerful performances from Abbott and Garner, not to mention Jaeger and Firth in smaller roles. A cast this strong deserves a script with more to tear into.

To bring up an issue that arose when Joaquin Phoenix flaked on Todd Haynes’ latest project — is this any way to spend two years of an artist’s prime period?

Out-pacing most of 2024’s comedies on the laughs-per-minute scale — albeit unintentionally — Kraven the Hunter offers the spectacle of talented individuals on both sides of the camera trying to make chicken salad out of a nonsensical script.

And while it’s always commendable when a disaster movie establishes early on that any member of the cast can die at any moment, the film makes a fatal error in killing off the funniest of its teen characters, with only a bunch of earnest Breakfast Clubbers in their place.

Nosferatu offers all the atmospherics and the creeping dread that it should, but this version remains locked-in and static when it might have dared to explore new ground. Like its antagonist, it’s simultaneously living and dead.

Moana 2 is always a joy to look at, from its shimmering blue waters to its stunning seacraft to the engaging character design of the human characters, the animals, and even the sentient coconut pirates. (Yes, they’re back, too.) But this remains firmly the kind of sequel aimed solely at people who want to watch the same movie again, only with a number in the title.

This adaptation of the Broadway musical – the first half, anyway – offers a lot of craft but not enough magic.

Unfortunately, Scott has chosen not to fill every one of the 148 minutes of this sequel with wacky, quotable moments or with a strapping Paul Mescal taking on soldiers, sharks, or mad monkeys — rest assured, the Aftersun star does do all of those things — and when Gladiator II is being neither wild nor crazy, it’s all a little dull.

The challenge is to balance the mayhem with the holly-jolly, to blow stuff up while also allowing troubled characters to find the nice in themselves and in each other, and Red One fulfills both of those wish-list items with a cheeky finesse.

Director Dallas Jenkins comes from the world of faith-based media, and that world is not generally known for delicacy in its messaging, so it counts as a Christmas miracle that Best Christmas Pageant generally avoids heavy-handed sermonizing.

So confoundingly ridiculous that it takes mediocrity to another level; narrative cinema rarely cares this little about actual narrative, transforming what’s supposed to be the concluding chapter of an ongoing saga into little more than pure sensation — blobs of color, bursts of sound.

It’s an effect that gives viewers the feeling of being an audience member at a play or, more appropriately, at Disneyland’s old Carousel of Progress attraction, where a rotating stage showed tourists the same living room over the course of decades as fashions and technology evolved at each stop.

With so many potential crises underfoot, Saturday Night manages to pass the Apollo 13 sniff-test of historical dramas: we know everything’s going to come out all right, but the film nonetheless generates enough suspense to make us think that it might not.

The film’s intentions are unquestionably noble, but the execution falls wildly short, even with so many talented artists involved.

The Killer’s Game gets credit for letting Budapest be Budapest, rather than trying to pass it off as a featureless European metropolis, but that’s about the only way in which the movie avoids the generic.

It proves that this mechanized world and its inhabitants are better suited to cartoon form than the headache-inducing Michael Bay movies, but it’s ultimately another piece of elaborate fan service that will bore the uninitiated.

It’s a delicate piece of storytelling, one where the poignancy never feels forced and where the comedy springs from its characters rather than pop-culture references or lazy scatology.

The film ultimately exists as a delivery device for Clooney and Pitt to engage in prickly banter and deadpan wisecracking. Any ideas deeper than that are rejected like an unsuitable liver.

As a procedural, it’s by-the-numbers. If it’s supposed to be a character study, the characters are TV-familiar.

Babygirl is the rare adult drama that understands that complicated characters can be likable, even if their behavior is sometimes decidedly unlikable; it addresses power and gender dynamics in ways that avoid easy, post-#metoo buzzwords; and it’s going to lead to some really interesting post-screening date-night discussions.

Maria is most truly involved with its subject when it abandons any impulse to scale her down, to reduce a titan to life-size, and opts instead to remember the singer as grandiose, allowing her memory — and Jolie’s perfectly suited performance of that memory — to fill the biggest screen.

Perhaps most miraculously, it represents Tim Burton getting his groove back, successfully returning to the dark comedy and outrageous visuals that marked his extraordinary early work.

Blink Twice emerges as a true late-summer surprise, a witty genre film with more on its mind than surface excitement, that draws its sense of dread out of real-world pain without ever exploiting that pain, that serves as an evergreen reminder that if the party seems too good to be true, it is.

The slime and the shadows and the silences are back. Horror DNA is honored rather than pointlessly duplicated. This time, at least, IP familiarity breeds contentment.

Cuckoo would have benefited from explaining itself much less or much, much more; as it is, it lives in the atmospheric middle of the road, confused by itself.

Usually, the architecture of a thriller involves introducing a complicated scenario and then slowly but surely ratcheting up the tension; with Trap, Shyamalan has chosen to set it and forget it, spelling out the circumstances of the titular snare and then rarely bothering to introduce new elements or to elevate the suspense.

While Ryan Reynolds still seems to be having fun playing the cheeky mercenary, both the inside-baseball comedy and the cartoonishly bloody mayhem wear out their welcomes in the film’s final third.

Despicable Me 4 plays like an assemblage of note cards that have been stapled together in a rough approximation of a screenplay. There are about 20 different plot threads that aren’t woven together as much as they’re shoved into one ungainly knot.

The pleasurable jolt of a silent scare has given way to predictability.

Even if the only way to endow 1960s biker gangs with a sense of majesty and glory is to compare them to what would come later, Nichols captures those moments of fleeting greatness, allowing his lost men room to inhabit their own private inventions, to build their subculture and its mythologies, if only for a short time.

By necessity, Inside Out 2 goes to even more complicated places than its predecessor, but it does so with real understanding, illustrating the ways that leaving childhood behind and forming the earliest stages of what will become an adult identity can be both liberating and terrifying, exhilarating and mortifying.

The fourth film of a franchise that probably should have packed it in at least two movies ago, this by-the-numbers sequel offers absolutely nothing unexpected, starting with its opening beaches-and-bikinis montage to the climactic standoff with the villain.

Young Woman is a biopic with all sharp edges removed, the kind of non-threatening, inspirational Disney movie that teachers screen for fidgety students on the last day of fourth grade.

It’s an earnest attempt at a warm embrace that squeezes the life and charm out of itself.

We’ve truly been down this road before, and none of Miller’s many talents can overcome the sense of familiarity that he’s already done all of this, and better.

For all its craft, though, Kingdom of the Planet of the Apes never finds the “aha” moment that justifies returning to the well for reasons more pressing than branding and global markets.

At 126 minutes, The Fall Guy overstays its welcome for a bit, but the stunts, the comedy, and the spark between the film’s dynamic leads make the movie a delectable kick-off to the popcorn pleasures of the summer-movie season.

Ministry works best when it chucks history out the window and leans into cinematic silliness.

It’s a collective simmer of sight, sound, sweat, and sensation about fascinating, complex people pushed through their paces on and off the court.

Civil War ultimately risks nothing and subsequently says nothing; it’s a thrilling war picture cosplaying as an examination of the zeitgeist.

What Patel has crafted delivers both kinetic action and real-world relevance, an exceedingly rare combination.

If Hollywood insists on continuing its own separate monsterverse, it could do worse than GxK, a film where giant beasts wallop the tar out of each other with thrilling efficacy.

The new Spenglers have the potential to be as memorable as the original cadre of Ghostbusters, but between the cameos by the 1984 cast (whom the film uses more as goodwill ambassadors than like the talented comic actors they still are) and the callbacks to Slimer and the Stay-Puft Marshmallow Man, they tend to feel like afterthoughts.

Drive-Away Dolls is, at its core, a comedy about eccentric people contending with inept but still deadly criminals. But neither the eccentrics nor the criminals feel remotely like real people, and their hijinks never summon up much hilarity or suspense.

The second chapter of Denis Villeneuve’s epic adaptation delivers on the visual grandeur and political intrigue, even if the characters tend to be reduced to their plot function.

None of this would work without Johnson, whose gift for side-eye and deadpan line readings grounds what could be a very silly story into one with real human stakes (that do not, thankfully, involve the fate of the entire world).

Lisa Frankenstein is a deadly dull and stitched-together effort that doubtless worked better on paper than it does in execution

Director Matthew Vaughn, fresh off the success of his irritating Kingsman franchise, makes Argylle utterly weightless, both literally (the stuntwork all seems to be taking place in zero gravity) and figuratively (the barely-there characters never register).

The film doesn’t stop to give the six characters time for major exposition and backstory, which would only get in the way of the film’s B-movie sensibility, accentuating scalpel-edge thrills above all else.

Chirpy, as colorful as Skittles, and occasionally, appropriately, acrid, Mean Girls is a pleasantly bouncy reworking of the 2004 comedy of the same name.

Night Swim mostly delivers, veering from straightforward shocks to campy excess without ever hitting bottom.

The film commits a sin that is new to cinema: it’s a boring James Wan movie.

This new film resonates powerfully both as an emotional drama and as a welcome addition to the movie-musical canon.

If The Boy and the Heron does wind up being his farewell to cinema, Miyazaki will be leaving behind a beacon of encouragement, a guidepost to remind the world that even when all seems lost, courage and compassion can forge a new path.

Wonka stands as an effective reimagining of a beloved literary and cinematic character — so long as you don’t mind a little extra sweetness.

Even if the concert sequences don’t completely do justice to the thrill of seeing this show in person, this documentary offers an in-depth souvenir of both the show itself and of this particular chapter in the ongoing saga of one of popular culture’s most intriguing, unpredictable, and powerful creators.

Wish plays more like a collection of deleted tracks than greatest hits.

The film’s epic nature embraces not only size and scope but also the exquisite craftsmanship on display, from the detail work of Janty Yates and Dave Crossman’s costumes to cinematographer Dariusz Wolski’s ability to differentiate a successful battle from a disastrous one simply through his lighting choices.

It’s the absence of Lawrence — or at least of any young performer matching her charisma — that’s a key part of the problem here.

It’s an entertaining, if shambolic, 105 minutes, yet one can only imagine how much of a treat this film would have been if given permission to fully transcend business as usual.

Freddy’s is rarely frightening — a crowd-friendly PG-13 means fear and carnage are suggested but almost no blood is shown — and it doesn’t have much to say about its underlying subject matter besides, “Hey, wouldn’t it be weird if those musical pizza robots came to life and had sharp teeth?”

The Eras Tour spotlights Swift’s musicianship as well as her showmanship: the acoustic section, where she accompanies herself on guitar and piano, could have been the entire concert, if one could build a stadium tour out of such intimate moments, but the bigger-than-life stagecraft on display never overpowers the music.

Dowd and Burstyn’s performances will endure even as the rest of it fades into the memory hole of unnecessary sequels.

There’s a history of great directors going out on a lesser film, and unfortunately, Friedkin joins their ranks. He leaves behind an extraordinary filmography of groundbreaking work that will inspire generations to come, but The Caine Mutiny Court-Martial will exist, at best, as a footnote to this legendary career.

On a pure craft level, The Creator delivers as a sweeping, big-screen science-fiction experience. What dazzles the eye, unfortunately, fails to connect with either the head or the heart.

The idea behind the series has always had potential — round up some beloved action stars of yesteryear and give them one more chance to ply their trade — but the expected fun has never materialized, with this latest entry lacking any sense of urgency, wit, or grace.

Rian Johnson may remain the unchallenged modern master of the whodunnit, but with A Haunting in Venice, Branagh shows more affinity for the genre than ever before. Not since Dead Again has the director so successfully applied his flair for showmanship to the requirements of the murder mystery.

This isn’t a story of rock music and stage theatrics; it’s about the woman who waited, in a home she was forbidden to leave, for the musician to come and deliver the love he promised. And it’s about the day she decided to stop waiting for it.

For all the inherent familiarity of the hit-man genre, Fincher and Walker have nonetheless crafted an absorbing tale; what it has to offer that’s any different from countless similar tales lies in the minutiae rather than the mayhem.

There are dazzling, funny, heartbreaking sequences throughout this examination of the music legend and his complicated personal life, but they are undercut by aspects that might have benefited from more attention or deeper thought.

As with Lanthimos’ previous films, Poor Things never allows viewers to get too comfortable or too acclimated to their surroundings; it’s a film that’s constantly throwing set pieces and absurdist humor and over-the-top outfits at the audience, but the effect is exhilarating rather than enervating.

An adaptation of the Roald Dahl story, The Wonderful Story of Henry Sugar is as much about the director’s love of arch humor, fourth-wall shattering, and aggressive art direction as it a redemption saga about a rich man who finds purpose in his life.

Ferrari emerges as that rarest of films: the complex, complicated biopic. Like his subject, Mann appreciates beauty and power while never forgetting that beauty can wither and power can destroy; within that matrix of messy contradictions, he creates haunting drama.

It’s no easy thing to mine humor out of historical tragedy, but El Conde finds a zone that allows for rueful chuckles over humanity’s cruelty without ever being glib about Chile’s dark past.

Seligman and Sennott, reteaming after Shiva Baby, clearly know the beats and tropes of the teen comedy while taking every opportunity to subvert the formula. Bottoms always opts for the weirdest choices and least expected outcomes.

Blue Beetle is so singularly fresh and fun that Jaime Reyes and his family deserve to be front and center of whatever comes next.

Gran Turismo is a piece of salesmanship that never stops selling — the movie constantly reminds us how much the real races resemble the accurate simulation of the game, and even the Sony Walkman gets a fair amount of screen time — but the vroom-vroom of it all delivers enough adrenaline and character-building to make this a solidly entertaining piece of late-summer cinema.

Whether the eventual people-eating of the film’s final act merits enduring the turgid early portions of Meg 2: The Trench is, of course, a matter of opinion, but viewers might be well advised to wait until they can see the movie in a medium that involves a fast-forward button.

With all of its quick cuts and time-hopping, Oppenheimer behaves like a film that’s worried that it won’t have the space to fit everything it wants to say and do into three hours. Then it exhausts its welcome in the service of reiterating points. Then it delivers lectures in case you missed the earlier rounds. It knows how to blow up the world, but it doesn’t know when to quit.

Gerwig and Baumbach come out on the side of the power of the imagination but never discount the criticisms of this iconic American object. What the film does best, perhaps, is to understand and explain why people make up worlds, be they real systems of oppression or imaginary playsets.

A throwback to an era when “summer movies” represented something distinct from what studios produced for the other nine months of the year, Dead Reckoning offers 163 minutes’ worth of adrenaline and excitement that never overstays its welcome.

For all its potential, Ruby Gillman: Teenage Kraken remains stuck in the shallow end.

If contemporary American cinema insists on having its cake and eating it when it comes to mixing the sour and the sweet, at least a film like No Hard Feelings spotlights the ability of an actor like Lawrence to deliver both with complete sincerity.

One of the film’s best features is that it does a minimum of seeding the ground for the next five MCU sequels; one of its worst is that it generates little enthusiasm for ever seeing these characters again.

The wisecracks could be wiser, admittedly, but there’s nothing terribly wrong with this airy, utterly innocuous, still charming Mother’s Day treat.

What we’re left with is an unromantic romance that’s as generic and forgettable as its title.

If you’re still on board for what these movies have to offer — and the global box office indicates that quite a few people are — Fast X deliriously overdelivers its delights.

While it’s still an exercise in re-branding and revenue, the results at least provide some dazzle, some romance, and a handful of pretty good new songs with lyrics by Lin-Manuel Miranda.

Across the Spider-Verse is a breathtaking whirligig of a superhero saga, spanning multiple realities without ever losing its emotional tether.

If The Flash proves anything, it’s that the fans won, and that’s a loss for everyone else.

Transformers: Rise of the Beasts defibrillates a moribund franchise; the patient may not quite be up and running, but it’s standing more solidly than it did before.

Visual delights, a sweet love story, and that potent Pixar sentimentality carry this animated feature past a periodic table's worth of script flaws.

Cocaine Bear is a thrilling binge of adrenaline that you won’t regret in the morning.

The writer-director is aided immeasurably by lead actor Emma Mackey (“Death on the Nile”), whose wide eyes and expressive features convey a torment and vivacity being held in constant check by a repressive society.

There are few surprises or misdirects or red herrings involved with this all-too-solvable mystery, let alone subtext or commentary. With Marlowe, a very talented cast of actors and a legendary filmmaker have assembled to make a Philip Marlowe movie you can fold laundry to.

"Quantumania” may not swing for the fences as ambitiously as recent entries like “Wakanda Forever” or “Doctor Strange in the Multiverse of Madness,” but it does take the wildly disparate tones and plot threads that are seemingly endemic to this series and turn them into an entertainingly cohesive whole. To be continued, obviously.

Formally speaking, Dionne Warwick: Don’t Make Me Over isn’t nearly as much of a groundbreaker as its subject, but that subject has lived such a rich life — and recorded so many unforgettable songs — that the film is, ultimately, as pleasurable as hearing a vintage Warwick hit on the radio.

It’s a hyped-up cocaine conversation of a movie, throwing out lots of ideas and images and mammoth set pieces without ever amounting to anything.

Much like the UCLA interviews that inspired it, Framing Agnes is a vital part of the historical record, addressing trans life as we know it right now and providing deeper understanding for current and future viewers.

Violent Night is one of the Yuletide season’s most delightful surprises, not just for what it gets right but also for the many ways the whole production could have gone very, very wrong.

While it spends perhaps too much of its running time either recreating or directly quoting moments from its 1983 predecessor, it still manages to land some new and original gags of its own.

The teaming of Will Ferrell (making his return to Christmas movies nearly two decades after “Elf”) and Ryan Reynolds delivers the banter you’d expect and the singing and dancing you might not, and their energetic interplay goes a long way to making Spirited a movie that might become a holiday go-to in certain households.

There’s a great deal to enjoy here, and fans of “Black Panther” won’t necessarily leave feeling disappointed, but there’s a sense of strong elements not quite coming together.

Most disappointing of all, Black Adam is one of the most visually confounding of the major-studio superhero sagas, between CG that’s assaultively unappealing and rapid-fire editing that sucks the exhilaration right out of every fight scene.

Star and co-writer Billy Eichner spins a lot of plates here, crafting a hilarious and heartfelt film that also acknowledges the challenging and often hidden history of queer people in American society.

So much of the film’s brutality has been removed in favor of melodrama and CGI fake-outs that it doesn’t matter that the cast is bringing their A-game. The game has already been called due to lack of interest.

All Bullet Train had to be was high-gloss, all-star, late-summer nonsense, but instead it gives high-gloss, all-star, late-summer nonsense a bad name.

While not as anarchic or outrageously hilarious as “Teen Titans GO! to the Movies,” this latest all-ages animated adventure from DC Comics and Warner Bros. nonetheless has — and offers — lots of fun with the four-legged counterparts of a Justice League that’s more “Super Friends” than Snyder Cut.

This ultimately feels like four very promising movies mashed together, with spectacular highlights bumping into each other in a way that’s ultimately lacking, even as they all demonstrate the prowess and bravado of the filmmaker.

If this latest one was aiming to mix it up by giving equal weight to the masks of comedy and tragedy, it’s an effort that falls short.

Rather than play like a significant departure from the “Toy Story” films that spawned it, Lightyear instead emerges as a disappointing runner-up, capturing but a fraction of the comedy, thrills and poignancy of its predecessors.

The other generous read, although it’s damning with faint praise, is to call this the best “Jurassic” movie since the original in 1993, but that doesn’t mean this one’s not, much like its predecessors, a hot mess. It’s just a hot mess with some effectively scary bits, a cool car chase and Laura Dern.

The act of writing has tended to be flagrantly non-cinematic, but with these last two films, Davies proves that the internal life of the mind can indeed be explored and portrayed in a visual medium. With every scene a stanza, Benediction is a lyrical triumph.

At his most memorable, Cronenberg creates viscerally unforgettable images that horrify, yes, but they also provoke with big, shocking ideas about our very selves – the monstrousness of disease, the perhaps inevitable hybrid of the corporeal and the mechanical, the determination of the self. With Crimes of the Future, we’re left with a remove from the material, where no matter what happens, it’s all just performance art.

Even with its raunchier aspects, the film’s devotion to plotting the course of true love would probably meet with Miss Austen’s approval.

It’s a tricky balance to build a world where characters are both absurd and believable — and on top of that, exist in a world where musical numbers can break out at any time (even the Wonder Wharf carnies get a song) — but Bouchard pulls it off.

In the end, Top Gun: Maverick counts as a worthy sequel in that it succeeds and fails in many of the same ways as the original. It’s another cornball male weepie and military recruitment ad that feels like every WWII movie got fed into an algorithm, and the flying sequences are breathtaking enough to make you forget that these guys and gals are engaging in the kind of combat scenarios that start wars.

The follow-up to 2016’s “Doctor Strange” hits the ooh-and-aah marks we expect from a well-crafted Marvel adventure, but even with Sam Raimi at the helm, this entry goes heavy on the spectacle but light on the humanity.

Memory often feels more like a direct-to-video threequel than an actual movie.

The Northman is gory, muddy, hallucinatory — and intensely entertaining. An examination of the way that violence begets violence, and a study of how a life devoted to single-minded hatred and vengeance can lead to uncomfortable truths, this is a movie that lives up to every saga comic books and metal bands ever spun about the brutal conquerors of yore.

It fills up the uncharted territory between parody and pure fan service with a guileless weirdness that the biopic genre never knew it could accommodate but, in a post–“Walk Hard” world, could stand to emulate.

We can confirm that Morbius is, really and truly, a movie. Granted, it’s not much of a movie, but it’s a movie nonetheless.

Deep Water offers so many tawdry delights along the way that its flaws aren’t dealbreakers. Affleck and de Armas might not have lasted as a couple off-camera, but as co-stars, they’re a potent combo.

Unlike the “memberberries” school of nostalgia that can reduce itself to “I had that lunch box!” Linklater gets granular and specific (and thus universal) about his memories and his perceptions of the world at that time.

It’s a film as cuddly as Meimei’s panda form, but it’s also a perceptive examination of how one person’s coming-of-age has a ripple effect on those closest to them.

Whether playing off his returning company of co-stars or swapping barbs with fellow drag comic O’Carroll, Perry’s giving one of his best self-directed performances.

It’s a film that hits some narrative bumps along the way without diminishing its tougher observations about race, the police, and the treatment of veterans.

The 355 is the kind of star-packed, glossy adventure that wants to be the launching pad for a franchise; instead, it’s going to be one of the films most mentioned in future discussions regarding January as a studio dumping-ground for misbegotten movies.

The most superheroic feat on display might be the film’s ability to keep human-sized emotions and relationships front and center even as the very fabric of time and space twists itself into knots.

A film with all the right things to say about how government, the media, and corporations ignore the emerging disaster of climate change, but couched within a satire so lumbering that it’s enough to turn a tree hugger into a pro-fracker.

Spielberg and Kushner clearly revere that history, but they’re also not intimidated by it; there are any number of instances where viewers can point to this song placement or that bit of character backstory as a new idea that the two have brought to the property, but this is a take on “West Side Story” that’s both reverent and exciting.

From a rain-soaked carnival midway to a glossy, Art Deco therapist’s office, everything in Guillermo del Toro’s Nightmare Alley looks gorgeous. There just doesn’t seem to be a lot going on under the art direction.

This true-crime saga of the Gucci family losing control of their own fashion empire could have been a full-blown camp classic were it not so frequently dull and tentative.

The film rides upon the shoulders of first-timers Haim (Anderson has directed several of her band’s videos) and Hoffman (son of frequent Anderson collaborator, the late Philip Seymour Hoffman), and they’re both thoroughly engaging.

Red Notice plays like a parody of itself — a star-studded, globe-trotting heist caper replete with MacGuffins, twists, and double-crosses. And for much of its overstuffed two-hour runtime, it gets away with it.

Apart from the pleasurable specifics of Hanks’ and Landry Jones’ performances (to say nothing of Seamus, the film’s scene-stealing canine co-star), you’ve seen all this before.

Fever Dream delivers its jolts with a whisper and not a scream, and its enigmatic final shot vibrates with a deep sense of dread, one that won’t leave after the lights come up.

The rom-com veneer acts as the sugar that lets the film’s more serious medicine go down, and Schrader understands this territory well.

It’s all too rare that audiences are treated to a big-screen examination of a woman’s inner turmoil, let alone a woman in the grandmotherly phase of her life; this one pops with both acrid wit and meaningful drama.

What some might find dramatically unsatisfying about the film’s climax directly comments on the inequities of the era and the limited options offered to women, and there’s no shortage of rich storytelling, acting, and visual potency leading up to it.

There are, of course, countless prisms through which to examine the events of 9/11 and their lingering impact, but Come From Away offers one that is stirring and funny, moving but never mawkish. It’s a story that provides hope without turning its eyes from despair.

While it might not be as revolutionary as its subject, Julia celebrates not only the woman but also her joy and passion for the creation and consumption of delicious food. Just be warned: It’s not a film to watch on an empty stomach.

The Suicide Squad is by no means perfect, but like the “Deadpool” movies, it’s a showcase for what can happen when a superhero movie is allowed to be sprightly, self-aware, and sardonic while also indulging in hard-R violence, gore, and language. Gunn’ latest creation is not without moments that drag, but when it pops, it pops brilliantly.

Viewers who, for whatever reason, love the first “Space Jam” may well find themselves delighted all over again, but as a once-in-a-lifetime opportunity to plunge a beloved sports figure into a century’s worth of pop culture iconography, “A New Legacy” is a big fat airball.

Black Widow reminds us of the pleasure that can be offered by an MCU movie that isn’t having to do the legwork of setting up the next five chapters.

The Ice Road is so often inept and heavy-handed that not even the reliable presence of Liam Neeson can rescue it.

If a movie’s going to take us to “Chinatown,” it needs to come up with a new and different path to get there. Instead, the film revels in its genre trappings, only to grab at gravitas in the last ten minutes with the sudden introduction of historical iniquities into the story.

Luca is sweet and affecting, capturing the bond that strangers can build over a summer, and how that friendship can endure. And like its shape-shifting protagonists, it’s got plenty going on beneath the surface.

The Hitman’s Wife Bodyguard is a comedy with not one legitimate laugh, and an action movie where cars keep blowing up while the A-listers yell at each other, as though that were inherently amusing or entertaining.

Purists may balk, but viewers who think of this less as a reboot of Dodie Harris’ memorable monster and more as a Disney spin on Derek Jarman’s “Jubilee” for gay 8-year-olds will find Cruella to be flashy fun, even at a slightly bloated two-hours-plus running time.

Even people who felt nervous about stepping into a bathtub after “Jaws” might find themselves giving these denizens of the deep the benefit of the doubt, thanks both to Taylor’s decades of advocacy and Aitken’s moving portrait of grace and compassion in and out of the water.

This time, the goals and stakes are more direct, and the overall lean storytelling works in the film’s favor, with each step from every character becoming an occasion for viewers to hold their breath in suspense.

For audiences who want their 2021 return to the multiplex to deliver big, loud, exciting action, F9 makes the cars go fast, jump high, and generally do the impossible. It’s exhilaratingly ridiculous, yes, but it’s also ridiculously exhilarating.

The stakes are high and the danger is always imminent in this straightforward thriller; it never bends the rules of the genre, but it certainly delivers on what it promises.

There’s enough gore, mayhem, and decay in Army of the Dead to make for a satisfying zombie-movie experience, and while it’s the best film Snyder has made since his last “of the Dead,” it’s also one that continually hints at the more satisfying work it might have been.

Amid the excitement — those bugs, a pack of wild horses, a looming forest fire — the film finds room to explore bigger issues, like living life to the fullest even when death is inevitable, and the fact that the toughest-acting kids are often the most vulnerable.

Ritchie’s reunion with leading man Jason Statham delivers the scheming, the shooting, and the swearing that the director’s fans have come to expect, by the bucketload.

Here Today tries hard to be warm and witty and ultimately devastating and poignant, but it remains firmly in the mushy middle of sitcom sentiment, with lessons learned and hugs exchanged and an “aww” from the studio audience.

It handles real-life issues from a place of real compassion and understanding without reducing its characters to mere metaphor.

It’s a stolidly 80s action movie, from its Russian villains to its third-act plot twist that can be seen from space, but it’s lucky to have Michael B. Jordan giving an actual performance in what could have been an even more generic shoot-em-up.

Viewers interested in martial-arts action are bound to find the combat-with-a-C to be lackluster in that way that hand-to-hand fighting tends to be when it gets drowned out by digital effects. More likely to have fun with this latest Mortal Kombat are Sam Raimi enthusiasts who can appreciate the comedy in over-the-top geysers of fake blood, which the film unleashes with increasing regularity as the fights get more serious.

These performances are about more than just literal nudity, of course; both leads strip away the surface layers of the characters — her brisk efficiency, his good-time party vibes — to get at the vulnerability and the complex neuroses of each.

This shaggy superhero spoof doesn’t consistently live up to its best moments, but at least those moments are there, with most of them stemming from the hilarious interplay between McCarthy and Octavia Spencer.

Voyagers is a smart and effective little sci-fi thriller about the best-laid plans of scientists crumbling in the face of teenage hormones and human frailty.

Sam Raimi is a producer here, and it’s hard not to think about how he might have mined this material both for provocation and for fright; his “Drag Me to Hell” remains the gold standard of how to scare the heck out of an audience within the restrictions of PG-13. What we get instead here is a tepid little chiller with an overqualified cast.

Yes, obviously, no one goes to these movies for the deep human characters or for plot machinations or even for the metaphors about the environment and industrialization. Here’s the thing, though — they come in handy to fill in the gaps between the monster battles, and you miss them when they’re not there. And since even those battles are somewhat perfunctory, what are we even doing here?

There are certainly far more despicable franchises in the world of children’s entertainment than the “Peter Rabbit” series, but there are few this negligible, particularly considering the talent involved. Just because you don’t have to aim higher doesn’t mean you shouldn’t try.

Nobody is more violent lark than probing satire, but between Bob Odenkirk’s smartly underplayed performance, the surprises in the screenplay by Derek Kolstad (the “John Wick” series) and the puckishly brutal direction of Ilya Naishuller (“Hardcore Henry”), it’s a wonderfully paced and consistently clever action movie that ups the ante of a genre that’s been dominated by Liam Neeson clones.

Zack Snyder superhero movies are the black licorice of cinema: Those who like the taste can’t understand why everyone doesn’t, and those who don’t like the taste grimace at the thought. And now the streaming wars and online clamor have brought us Zack Snyder’s Justice League. It’s four hours of black licorice.

If you ever wondered what Richard Linklater’s “Before” trilogy would be like without the insightful writing, sharp directing and intuitive performances, Long Weekend will pretty much fill the bill.

Even with the re-enactments, this is a pretty straightforward documentary. It’s nonetheless valuable for the way that it takes a complicated story and breaks it down into understandable pieces.

It’s particularly resonant, packed with emotion and insight that will move the director’s admirers (who should consider watching it alongside their own children) and probably garner her some new ones.

This feels less like a movie and more like one of those reunion specials where the cast of a beloved old TV show returns to play their characters again, recreating their pratfalls and repeating their catchphrases.

It’s only in assuming that we care more about Boogie’s athletic journey than his interpersonal relationships that the film falls short.

There’s no shortage of imaginative sci-fi details or of talented actors on-hand, but the film boils down to characters we barely get to know chasing each other and yelling. That it hardly matters who’s being chased or what, exactly, is being yelled — mostly “Stop her!” and “AAAUUUGGGHHH!” — is just part of the trouble here.

It’s a film with a lot on its mind and plenty of plot and character plates to spin, but the results are both impressive and exciting.

This time around, writer-director Tim Hill steps in, and he’s managed to take the goofy denizens of Bikini Bottom on a road trip that is visually dazzling and almost consistently hilarious, mixing verbal and physical humor, as well as some perfectly chosen cameos, both in-person and among the voice cast.

The Father is an unsettling film, but it’s also a compassionate one; family members of those suffering with dementia can turn to it for an empathetic portrait of how that disorientation must feel on the inside. It’s one of the most disturbing films in recent memory, but it’s both understanding and unforgettable.

From its facile depiction of the role of incarceration in the rehab process — addiction is a health issue that we keep mistakenly treating as a criminal issue — to the under-writing of the characters, what should be a harrowing drama instead comes off as an anti-drug pamphlet.

Biggie: I Got a Story to Tell celebrates an influential musical legacy as well as a complicated life story, with a potent mix of sentiment and aesthetic appreciation.

The United States vs. Billie Holiday never completely works as a drama, but it does ultimately succeed in two important ways: The film provides a launchpad for Andra Day’s exceptional acting talents as well as her gifts as a singer, and enriches the public understanding of Holiday’s persecution, funded by taxpayer dollars, for daring to speak truth to power through her art.

All comedy is subjective, of course, and Barb & Star Go to Vista Del Mar is aggressive in being true to itself and its own vision. Those not on board will roll their eyes and wonder what the fuss is about, while fans will watch it repeatedly, quote it forever, and dress as the characters for Halloween.

Tweens who are less familiar with temporal-anomaly cinema and TV will no doubt be entranced by this concept and by the talented cast that brings it to fruition. More seasoned viewers who have seen this kind of thing before have seen this kind of thing before, have seen this kind of thing before.

It’s not an exposé on what pornography does to women as much as a harrowing examination of what the workplace expects and allows from women and men.

It’s bright and witty and packed with laughs, but those laughs stem from real empathy and understanding of its characters.

While the film far outshines most of Cage’s recent efforts (he was direct-to-VOD when direct-to-VOD wasn’t cool) in terms of art direction and fearlessly madcap storytelling, the results are nonetheless muddled and messy.

One of the best things that can be said about On the Count of Three is that it forces viewers to dispel any certainty that its protagonists won’t wind up dead at the end, which provides the film with both integrity and unpredictability.

Actor-turned-filmmaker Fran Kranz’s choice of subject matter for his feature debut is certainly timely and provocative, but the emotions are too big and too messily human to fit into the tight box he has constructed to contain them.

This time out, the writer-director (in collaboration with animation director Jane Samborski) is even more assured as both a storyteller and as a crafter of images, be they outrageous or gorgeous, haunting or hilarious.

If the script undercuts the enormity of what their characters are enduring, the two lead actors rescue the film from utter negligibility.

Overall, The Little Things — which is how Deke refers to the details that lead to killers being caught — isn’t much of anything.

This is the kind of screenplay that offers juicy opportunities for actors, and Zendaya and Washington leave nothing on the floor.

MLK/FBI demonstrates documentary film’s ability to assemble and contextualize historical facts in a provocative and insightful way, and it’s a perfect launching pad for further exploration of the government’s assault on dissent and civil rights, not to mention the news and entertainment media’s acquiescence in being used as a propaganda arm.

It’s a daring mix of genres, but it works, as though Noah Baumbach had been called in to do a rewrite on “How to Steal a Million.” Steven Knight wrote and directed one of the best (“Locke”) and worst (“Serenity”) films of the last decade, but when he is good, he is very, very good, and his skillful handing of relationships and claustrophobia and corporate-speak is matched by Liman’s ability to bring all of this to fruition.

Perhaps the biggest issue for The Mauritanian is that the screenplay by M.B Traven and Rory Haines and Sohrab Noshirvani tries to accommodate too many protagonists.

Neeson has certainly starred in worse action vehicles than The Marksman, but rarely have they been more forgettable.

The White Tiger illustrates the extremes to which the poor are driven to violate the rigid class structure of India, with the implication that our hero and his methodology is perhaps the face of post-superpower capitalism itself.

Shadow in the Cloud has that boisterous B-movie energy, and it’s a reminder that narrative shamelessness is permissible, even welcome, in the hands of an assured storyteller.

Between the scorching chemistry of leads Tessa Thompson and Nnamdi Asomugha and the glorious mid-century outfits, hair, décor and cars on display, Sylvie’s Love is a delectable valentine.