Amy Nicholson

Ari Aster’s Eddington is such a superb social satire about contemporary America that I want to bury it in the desert for 20 years. More distance will make it easier to laugh.

The pull of the film lies in how Davidtz allows Bobo to bob on the surface of things while we feel the dark undertow

This isn’t quite the heart-soaring “Superman” I wanted. But these adventures wise him up enough that I’m curious to explore where the saga takes him next.

Thorne has made a resolute portrait of a woman who can’t break free of generational trauma.

Jurassic World Rebirth is a straight monster movie with zero awe or prestige. It’s incurious about its stomping creatures and barely invested in the humans either, tasking Johansson and most of the cast to play fairly similar shades of hardy and determined.

It’s a magpie movie that’s happy to give audiences the tinselly things they want — i.e., two robots clobbering the Wi-Fi out of each other. But Johnstone creates openings for his own shaggy sense of humor. I’m excited to keep tabs on the promising New Zealander.

The pleasures of “F1” are engineered to bypass the brain. It’s muscular and thrilling and zippy, even though at over two-and-a-half hours long, it has a toy dump truck’s worth of plot.

Tonally, it’s an ungainly creature. From scene to scene, it lurches like the brain doesn’t know what the body is doing. Garland and Boyle don’t want the audience to know either, at least not yet.

It’s refreshing to see a romp this spry. Elio isn’t trying to reinvent the spaceship — it’s after the puppyish charm of sticking your head out the window as marvels whiz past.

Tilt “Materialists” at an angle and it’s the same film as “Past Lives,” only bolder and funnier. Really, Song wants to know whether a sensible girl can justify shackling herself to a broke creative.

But having stuck the landing once (and a few more times), DeBlois doesn’t leave himself much runway to do something new and improved. This “How to Train Your Dragon” is merely longer.

If you started the movie at the end, you wouldn’t be champing to find out what happens next. But the apocalyptic opening act is pretty great.

The Oscar nominee gives her physical all to the movie and, as a thank you, Ballerina lets her stay mostly silent so its leaden lines don’t weigh down her performance. Fortunately, De Armas has expressive eyes.

The script is lean enough that there really isn’t room for narrative flubs besides one breakdown that’s a bit too convenient. Hawkins lets herself get vulnerable, too, and the film never fakes a punch by pretending she’s anything more than a small, desperate and bedraggled woman with eyes that look like a bottomless well of need.

[Anderson's] managed to build yet another dazzler, a shrine to his own ambition and craft. And while it sometimes feels a bit drafty in the corners, the accomplishment itself is plenty.

Cruise is reason audiences will, and should, see Final Reckoning on a large and loud screen.

Rudd and Robinson’s scenes together are great.

Every scene has a delight.

The grief in this film is relatable to anyone who’s realized how hard it is to go home again, whether that means a newly gentrified neighborhood or simply the security of what a middle-class wage used to afford.

It’s mostly Pugh’s tale, a smart move as she delivers one of the better performances I’ve seen in a super suit.

This go-round, everything’s louder and more banal.

The four leads are yanked not by their heart strings but by the machinations of a plot that steers them from one contrived scene to another, just so it can point to the skid marks and call them a sketch of the new American family.

Sinners works more like a pop song than a grand statement, the kind of deceptively simple high-level craft that few people can pull off.

Warfare is strictly the facts, and those alone are terrible, brave, intense, random, tedious and captivating.

So far I’ve yet to see any movie figure out how to integrate the dull activity of staring at a small black rectangle into something worthy of the screen. Landon’s approach looks a bit too much like a billboard or a meme, but I think he’s on the right track to be trying something expressionistic that circles back around to silent-movie aesthetics.

It’s rousing stuff and a bit glib.

Half the time, Black’s dialogue is just announcing what we’re looking at, from diamond swords to flying hot air balloons that look like goth squids. But it’s the gleam in his eyes, the gusto in his delivery, that makes every line zing.

This downbeat drama is as overwrought as Killian’s muscles — it’s a steroidal portrait of a man in distress.