Andrew Crump

There’s a good movie baked into Being the Ricardos’ 131 minutes. It’s about 90 minutes long, maybe a little less. The remaining 41 minutes comprise an Aaron Sorkin movie, and like too much cream in a beautifully fried donut, they weigh down the total package with needless fat: Talking heads, flashbacks and archival footage.

It’s a really well-made genre movie, the product of a smart, obviously skilled filmmaker with a good sense of economy.

It’s an odd sort of travelogue Leon and Kirby curate here, but Italian Studies’ drifting, artsy peculiarities make 70 minutes fly by with a palliative affection—for Alina, for New York and for all the intersecting stories contained within its bounds.

It’s an endurance test where viewers pit their tolerance for naked displays of ugly masculinity against Bravo’s assured directorial chops. It’s also the best, or maybe most vital, presentation of whiteness in theaters in 2017, or for that matter the last half decade or so of pop culture.

There’s solace to take in the realization that in another director’s hands, The Silent Twins would have been completely standardized, absent the redeeming artistic value invested in the film by Smoczynska’s presence. But the film doesn’t capitalize on her vision.

The worst choice Mary Harron makes in Dalíland is relying on convention to make an end-stage portrait of an unconventional figure.

If Elfman’s destination is grim, the journey she takes to get there is palliative.

Happily, the narrative moves ahead quickly, the better to demonstrate new, inventive methods of reducing murder-happy billionaires to sloppy carcasses in between beats where Weaving and Newton get to play off of one another.

As an exercise in suspense and genre mimesis, Burial is exceptional. But Parker slacks on the details that function as musculature for the film’s core entertainment.

As Wildling’s center, Powley keeps our attention in her orbit, and Böhm constructs a universe around her that’s worthy of her talent (if at times too murkily filmed for its own good). But the movie loses its thread 15 minutes or so into its running time.

Ruskin’s examination of the social and political elements that enabled the Strangler, and which held people like McLaughlin in contempt for attempting to serve the public good, is bold. In his next film, he should apply that same boldness toward an aesthetic purpose, too.

Gilroy isn’t a drudge, of course, and Washington is Washington. If nothing else, the film rides on his mesmerizing performance and on Gilroy’s talent for character study. But after Nightcrawler, seeing Roman J. Israel, Esq. coast on craft rather than on transgression is nothing short of a letdown.

The film’s cute, zingy, candy-coated tone is seductive enough, and both Hildebrand and Shipp are compelling in their roles. You will, in short, be entertained. But if Tragedy Girls’ subject matter is odious, its tacit, but perhaps accidental, endorsement of the very thing it means to send up is jaw-dropping.

First-time feature helmer Grabinski firmly steers his script away from sticking in one mode or another: It’s neither purely scary, nor purely tense, nor purely hilarious, but instead most or all of these at once, producing a uniquely unnerving tone where shortness of breath in one moment instantaneously gives way to cackles in the next.

It’s missing bite, but you’ll appreciate its tender humors all the same.

The pleasures found in The High Note are many and often minor; Ganatra builds the film on casual chemistry between Johnson and Ross, with Harrison Jr., fresh off of his 2019 one-two punch of “Luce” and “Waves,” popping up as Johnson’s alternative foil.

Life for today’s young’uns is frankly terrifying, even if they aren’t literally living inside a horror film, with overarching threats to their future dotted by day-to-day micro-threats. In its unassuming way as real-world fantasy, Weston Razooli’s Riddle of Fire is sensitive to these plights, and casually rejects didactic allegory about them.

Happy Death Day 2U makes deliberate moves away from horror, adding both science fiction and comedy to muddle the original mixture for better and also worse. For better: The film is even more of a gas than its predecessor. For worse: It’s not as much of a horror movie.

Wannabe shock comedies toe boundaries of decorum but don’t have the stones to cross them, which in a way is more off-putting than the alternative. For Hvam, Christensen, and Klown Forever, boundaries aren’t a problem, only substance, but if you’re looking for a moral or a message, then you’re looking at the wrong film.

As is, the film balances its talkative side with its gory side nicely. Wanting more isn’t the worst feeling a film can leave you with.

As delightful as relentless CGI monster mayhem is—and there’s plenty to go round as The House with a Clock in Its Walls rolls through its final act—it’s the lovely character work that makes the story memorable. Roth and his cast pack a surplus of exuberance into a children’s fantasy mold that’s by now grown musty.

It’s more that the specific combination of jidaigeki period piece, highland character study, and frontier justice that’s new, making Tornado a harrowing, blustery, violent amalgamation of an idiosyncratic spirit.

The problem dogging the film from the start is the absence of insight. Nothing that Wein and Lister-Jones have to say about facing the past, making peace with yourself and with the people who psychologically and emotionally scarred you over the course of your life, or even their most central concern, death, turns out to be worth hearing.

The Strange Ones is a solid movie on first watch that becomes a seriously good movie on second watch. Maybe that’s a poor framework for an endorsement, but the film is more than the shock of its climax.

The Commuter isn’t a tough puzzle to solve, and it veers closely to being obvious at times. But easy, unsubtle, unabashedly masculine action films don’t need nuance as long as they’re this much of a goofy pleasure to watch.

Mosquito State is a profoundly annoying film. Believe it or not, this is meant as the highest compliment.

Healy’s good; Schilling’s superb. Together, they make a hell of a team, he the wide-eyed schlemiel, she the hysterical but thoroughly capable victim who would naturally rather not be a victim in the first place.

Arterton’s at a peak in her career here, repurposing bits and pieces of her work in Their Finest for a film with much more intentional sentiment.