Angelica Jade Bastien

While the press tour for the film has highlighted the rapport between its attractive and game stars, that doesn’t reflect the chemistry between them onscreen. There isn’t a flicker of heat between any of them. But the bigger issue is that each character is more of a threadbare idea improperly stitched together than a person.

The way the film swims through the contradictions, considerations, and cultural reverie of the rural South is genuinely enlivening. Sinners, festooned with intriguing ideas and even more beguiling characters, grabs the hem of greatness even if it never takes hold, hobbled as it is by a desire to hold more than it can properly contain in its over-two-hour run time, leading to a story that feels misshapen after the setup.

Black Bag is a tremendous example that a film need not be making an explicit political point or obsessed with the political dimensions of its narrative to be worthwhile cinema. A work can rise to this present moment by offering us rapture. This, too, is what movies are meant to accomplish.

The problem is that The Monkey has a hole at its center. It isn’t comedic enough to distract from the fact that the film traffics in rote archetypes, and it doesn’t quite pluck the heartstrings of its audience over the ragged inheritance from fathers to their sons either.

The film adopts a visual slickness that renders it anonymous. You don’t have to squint hard to recognize how the writers and the director are cribbing from other science-fiction franchises in an attempt to refresh Star Trek — though all that accomplishes is giving the franchise a center of gravity that isn’t its own.

Mountains is a film smart enough to forgo simplistic melodrama or narrative neatness. It’s the kind that dares us to look back and consider what it means to create a home away from the shores where you were born, in a country hostile not just to your betterment but to your very survival.

Unfortunately, Kravitz has neither the vision nor the range to deftly skewer the heinous foibles of wealthy men, let alone disrupt Tatum’s onscreen reputation.

Like the film Challengers itself, Zendaya is a star who still operates on the surface of things.

Poor Things is ultimately ugly — spiritually and narratively, which curdles even its aesthetic splendor.

There is no star of such magnitude who more cunningly positions themselves as apolitical than Beyoncé. Her performance as an icon is meant to connect with the broadest number of people possible. To do that, her refusal to stand for anything specific beyond the watered-down treatises on Black excellence must be maintained.

The film is remarkably banal. It’s a deteriorating rest stop on the road to nowhere.

Bailey is, unfortunately, completely failed by the dull, misguided production around her. As the studio has done with other live-action remakes, Disney betrays its own lack of imagination and an essential misreading of what made its original children’s fare such a joy to audiences in the first place.

Chapter 4 is blissfully entertaining, full of pratfalls and acting turns that lead to the audience swelling with oohs, aahs, and yelps.

Freddie is a live wire given form, flesh, sinew. She’s a woman defined by what she refuses to be, and Chou appropriately refuses to offer any heartwarming, simple resolutions to the dilemmas marking her life.

Babylon is a film too busy writing an elegy for the still-breathing body of film as a medium to capture the true beauty and complications of being alive.

To say the film is overtaxed is an understatement. Regrettably, Black Panther: Wakanda Forever tries to do so many things that it comes across as threadbare and pallid — less a failure of imagination and more of circumstance, time, and narrative constraints.

Despite all the broken bones, the graphic deaths, and the copious amounts of blood, the driving idea behind Men is not bold enough to feel frightening. Instead, it’s remarkably tepid.

Doctor Strange in the Multiverse of Madness is trying for a blend of horror and humor, something close to the heart and terror that Raimi was able to bring to bear throughout his career. But here, his craft has been hemmed in, gamified, leeched of color and vivacity.

Ambulance, the latest from director Michael Bay, is a film powered by the jittery force of will and blissful confidence that comes with doing cocaine. Lots of cocaine.

The Lost City isn’t terrible, just aggressively mediocre. It is the kind of movie you put on in the background after coming across it on TBS while you fold laundry on a Sunday afternoon. If anything, The Lost City makes evident not a lack of stars, but a persistent inability on the part of contemporary Hollywood to know what to do with them.

The Worst Person in the World acts as a forceful reminder that the entanglements between women and the love interests dancing in and out of their lives matter less than the lifelong relationship we must maintain with ourselves.

The Matrix Resurrections might lack the ground-shaking originality of its 1999 predecessor, but it manages to chart a stunning, divergent path, philosophically and cinematically.

The film finds a raw beauty in the wonders and heartbreaks of everyday life. It’s a humble portrait of a family’s deepening connections supported by a number of cinematic pleasures — expert sound design and cinematography; touching performances by Norman and Hoffman; and a tremendous showing from Joaquin Phoenix, operating at a register he’s rarely found before. It’s a career best for him — lovely, empathetic, humane.

With Eternals, Marvel proves itself to be nothing more than a staid, lumbering black hole.

In trying to reckon with the contradictions of the ’92 film, as well as carve out their own work, DaCosta and her collaborators have created a misfire that can’t make its tangle of politics — about gentrification, the Black body (horror), racism, white desire — feel either relevant or provocative. When Blackness is whittled down, this is the kind of poor cultural product we are sold.

The film’s humorlessness is off-putting; it is slick to the point of lacking texture. But the underlying problem is more fundamental. Gunpowder Milkshake is led by someone without the star power to carry it, surrounded as she might be by actresses far more interesting.

Cruella takes one of the richest narrative archetypes — the madwoman — and whittles her down into a glossy, hollow, capitalism-approved monster fueled by girl-boss politics. It has nothing to say about how women move through the world.

The neo-Western inflected work is a lean, engrossing, action-packed shot of adrenaline that is striking in its aesthetic decisions and boasts some exceedingly fun turns from its actors. Most important, it proves once more why Jolie is a star.

Ma Rainey postures toward being an actor’s showcase, but its storytelling — and its actorly pitfalls — prohibit that from being the reality.

Sadly, all that glittered in the franchise’s first outing is gone in Wonder Woman 1984. The disappointing sequel highlights not only the dire state of the live-action superhero genre in film, but the dire state of Hollywood filmmaking as a whole.

But the reason it all works so effectively is that Marcantonio trusts his audience. His direction is perhaps the film’s greatest strength, demonstrating a striking sense of tone and mood amounting to a destabilizing effect.

Bad Hair surprised me, ranking as the most stunning floundering of filmmaking in 2020 — a failure of empathy, intellect, and morality that I haven’t been able to shake.

The leads set the tone for this unfortunate waste of time, heralding a series of issues that reflect poorly not only on this ugly retread but on much of Hollywood’s recent output as a whole.

Antebellum is ultimately a travesty of craft and filmmaking with a perspective that hollows out the Black experience in favor of wan horror.

What makes this movie so frustrating is that it ends on an intriguing message about what we inherit, what we’re bound to through our families. But without the heft of sincere horror behind it, Relic falls short of its potential and we’re left wondering how terrifying this message actually is.

Miss Juneteenth is a film defined by its gentle beauty and simplicity.

While Ross lacks the bite and Johnson lacks the depth, Kelvin Harrison Jr. feels like a revelation. He’s bristling with warmth, intrigue, and mystery.

In concert, they paint an intricate portrait of women forced to navigate the whims of men in a patriarchal culture that refuses to listen, let alone believe the voices of survivors — most pointedly, of black survivors, the documentary reminds us. In that vein, despite its faults, On the Record is a necessary social document.

This is a film designed to be watched while performing a menial task — folding the laundry or washing dishes. Even during a pandemic, or perhaps especially so, we have more pressing things to do with our time than drain it away watching mediocre Netflix comedies.

At this point, what could have been a passably entertaining diversion, the kind of film best enjoyed overcoming a hangover or while folding laundry, falls flat on Diesel’s lips. He lacks the gravitas of delivery, disinterested in his lines even before he finishes saying them.

Unfortunately, The Photograph doesn’t quite deliver on the promise of its premise.

Above all else, Clemency is a supreme actors’ showcase, backed by a director of fine-tuned emotional intelligence and a cinematographer who understands the depth and beauty of black skin tones.

If the righteous retelling ever feels heavy-handed, it’s Poots’s command of her role and the cast’s electric chemistry that make this a reckoning fit for our fantasies.

Queen & Slim does a disservice to both the themes of love and anger by never giving the latter the depth it deserves, leaving the film a beautiful object to behold but a hollow narrative to consider.

A score by the Newton Brothers thumps like an errant heartbeat. The actors sparkle with chemistry. At times, its aesthetic and thematic pursuits click into place and the film sings at a mournful register as it charts the generational trauma and addiction of Dan Torrance (Ewan McGregor). But Doctor Sleep proves stronger in parts than as a whole.

Harriet only highlights how this genre can fail despite the so-called important nature of the picture and a talented black director at the helm.

But a star — even a great star — can only do so much when the film around her is a haphazard mess on nearly every level, only able to work in fits and starts.

But days later, I keep coming back to Jennifer Lopez’s performance. With a wave of her hand or a dip in her hips, light seems to change and move with her. Lopez has always been charming — even great — in films like "Out of Sight" (1998). But here she’s doing the best work of her career, weaponizing an undeniable charisma and turning it into something hard, pointed, righteous, even angry.

It Chapter Two moves with an almost too swift purpose, never feeling the weight of its nearly three-hour runtime; although it is long, the film feels frustratingly thin. Meanwhile, the film is aggressively sentimental, and moments of emotional catharsis or terror don’t often hit the way they need to. When they do, it is because of the dedication of the acting.

Don’t Let Go is a slog. I wish it loosened up, better balanced the potential fear, joy, wonder, and delight spooling out of its premise to yield a more adventurous result. Instead, it carries itself with dread and stilted seriousness, alleviated only by noteworthy performances from Reid and Oyelowo.

At its best, the movie is a vicious, richly funny, and artfully brutal tale that places Weaving’s performance as its gravitational center. She lends Grace a scrappy, sharp energy that beguiles.

The Kitchen is one of the most frustrating films in recent memory owing to how it squanders the mammoth potential baked into its dramatic genre — and its cast.

Ultimately, Skin — despite its artful compositions and meditative editing choices — devolves into a reductive redemption fable that doesn’t fully wrestle with the racism or politics governing Babs’s decisions.

Crawl is a great example of a simple story exceedingly well-told. It’s a bloody adventure full of teeth-gnawing turns of fortune, mordant wit, vicious gator kills, and surprising tenderness — that clocks in at a blessedly fleet 87 minutes. It’s a perfect horror film for the summer, as much an ode to the cataclysmic, humbling aspects of Mother Nature as it is a love letter to father-daughter relationships.

Unfortunately, Child’s Play is undone by a lack of tension even its best performances can’t conjure, and a familiar story that only skips lightly along the surface of gnarly ideas.

Even the film’s most charming character work is undone by the stale jokes that populate its script.

Ultimately, to borrow a phrase from writer Michele Wallace, Ma is too wistfully hegemonic to truly work.

Unfortunately, instead of coming across as a warm throwback, Nappily Ever After is a romantic comedy saddled with a reductive understanding of black womanhood without enough cast chemistry or beauty to distract us.

Detroit was directed, written, produced, shot, and edited by white creatives who do not understand the weight of the images they hone in on with an unflinching gaze.

Violence in The Bad Batch has neither artistic nor narrative purpose.

Jenkins and her collaborators have done what I thought was previously impossible: created a Wonder Woman film that is inspiring, blistering, and compassionate, in ways that honor what has made this character an icon.

Ends up being an emotionally empty, thematically ill-defined, and listless affair. It is never able to communicate the complexity of the woman at its center.

Despite the care put into the story and its heavy themes, Live Cargo has no emotional impact.

Full of dazzling images that suggest a rich, profound narrative the film is never able to achieve.

A more audacious film, bolder and more violent than its predecessor. It’s also surprisingly hilarious, wringing humor from physical pratfalls and dry wit in unexpected moments.

For all of its wondrous world-building and trippy effects, Doctor Strange isn’t the evolutionary step forward for Marvel that it needs to be storytelling-wise. Underneath all of its improvements, the core narrative is something we’ve seen countless times.

The acting starts off capable even if it reflects the same lifelessness of the film itself, but as the story continues the performances only magnify script issues that become unbearable.

X-Men: Apocalypse is a confused, bloated mess of a film.

Keanu, directed by Peter Atencio, only provides you exactly what you expect and nothing more. In many ways, it plays like a less subversive sketch from the duos magnificent, defunct show “Key and Peele," been ballooned to 98 minutes — the film’s greatest problem.

Miles Ahead is a film of ugly, bold bravado.