Brian Formo

It’s exploitative and empathetic. That’s why it feels like it spits you out in an alley to pick yourself back up. Blonde is an alienating movie. To me, that makes it a disarming and effective experience.

Don’t Worry Darling is best as a surface-level matinée thriller with a few follow-up ahas. But it doesn’t sting like it should in the end.

It is inorganic, gimmicky, manipulative, and its lessons are simplistic.

Like the sparse land of its setting, Inisherin is a film that reveals multitudes through observation and reflection. While I’m writing mostly of its emotional seriousness, it is also compassionate and humorous.

Vampire movies, which often incorporate a love story, are usually driven by the threat of discovery. The absence of that in Bones and All, despite leaving evidence all over the Great Plains, makes it a beautiful-looking movie that becomes too devoted to repeating the same note. There is no “all,” just bones.

Iñárritu has always been heavy-handed but his attempt to be airier creates more areas to bloat. And it gets incredibly unwieldy at points.

The remarkable details in how information is revealed entirely through a central performance is the reason TÁR excites. Not what it has to say, but how it tells us the story through a dual execution of performance and writing preparation.

Satire is one of the trickiest things to translate from page to screen and White Noise never really cuts as deep as it should because the communication of the jokes is so rushed — via DeLillo’s style that’s quicker to process on the page than it is to export to the screen.