Chris Nashawaty

It’s easily the director’s best movie since 2002’s "25th Hour."

It is ridiculous, cheesy popcorn fun. And Statham, God bless him, knows exactly what kind of guilty pleasure he’s signed on for — Sharknado with a bigger budget and a much bigger monster.

The two leads have chemistry and a rebellious sort of charisma. Too bad they’re given such wheezy clichés to work with.

He’s not just a name-dropper, but a master storyteller. Whether you believe every spicy morsel that drops from his lips is entirely up to you.

The new comedy, The Spy Who Dumped Me, is a mirthless, dead-on-arrival dud.

All of the families in Far From the Tree are compelling — their trials unimaginable and their spirits indomitable.

Over 95 minutes, Blindspotting builds tension like a simmering cauldron on the verge of boiling over. Its themes of racial prejudice, class conflict, friendship and loyalty find a voice that’s both disarmingly funny and heartbreakingly tragic.

Apart from the film’s occasional spasms of rousing, lightning-choreographed ultraviolence (a confrontation with an apartment full of date-raping finance bros is particularly great), the film is too enamored with its own morose righteousness to be very engaging.

It’s the kind of pure, straight-no-chaser pop fun that not only keeps taking your breath away over and over again, it restores your occasionally shaky faith in summer blockbusters.

Eighth Grade is an absolute delight that stings with truth. It’s heartbreaking, heartwarming, and a total charmer.

The harmless high jinks all go down easily enough without being particularly memorable or pushing the art form past the expected.

No one churns out big-budget action mediocrity these days as regularly as Dwayne Johnson. So now, just three months after his giant gorilla-a-go-go Rampage, we have Skyscraper — a film that suggests what would happen if you took The Towering Inferno and Die Hard and stripped them of the qualities that made both work.

After about 10 minutes, The Legacy of a Whitetail Deer Hunter feels borderline promising. After 80, it feels like a blown opportunity.

Exploding with infectious originality, Boots Riley’s Sorry to Bother You may be the most wonderfully bizarre film of 2018.

The best documentaries reveal the ways in which truth can be stranger (and wilder and weirder) than fiction. And director Tim Wardle’s stunning and tragic Sundance sensation, Three Identical Strangers, is stranger (and wilder and weirder) than most.

You more or less know what this soft-drink-sponsored movie is going to be as soon as the lights start to dim. What makes it worth recommending is that it ends up being just slightly more than that by the time the lights come back on.

It’s a slower (at times probably too slow) and more contemplative movie than its predecessor, but it’s no less haunting, thanks to unshakable performances from Ben Foster and Thomasin McKenzie.

Sadly, it isn’t a great movie. It’s a disappointingly mild period thriller that’s light on thrills. Even Paul Rudd, one of the most likable actors in Hollywood, can’t rescue it.

The problem with the film’s buckshot “this-happened-and-then-that-happened” storyline is that Connolly keeps hurtling ahead from scene to scene trying to touch every base in Gotti’s life of crime without every letting any one moment breathe long enough for it to resonate.

It’s a ridiculously raunchy and very, very sweet comedy about staying connected to the most important people in your life.

Neither as satisfying as the remake of "Shaft" nor as objectionable as the remake of "Death Wish," the second coming of Superfly wants to tap into that same ’70s grindhouse allure and put a similarly slick modern gloss on it. The results are pretty mixed.

Hereditary doesn’t reinvent horror cinema so much as polish the cobwebs off of its classics, strip them for parts, and refashion them into something that feels terrifyingly fresh and new.

It’s like a security blanket for our troubled times.

Howard, thankfully, gets more to do than the last go round (and in combat boots, no less!), Pratt busts out his Indiana Jones cocktail of can-do heroism and deadpan jokiness, and Bayona and his screenwriters (Trevorrow and Derek Connolly) test the laws of incredulity with varying degrees of success. At least, until the final half hour when forehead-slapping absurdity finally win out. Up until then, Fallen Kingdom is exactly the kind of escapist summer behemoth you want it to be.

Even the stunts – the whole raison d’etre of a movie like this – seem tame and staged. It cheaps out on the good stuff. And for a movie with so little going for it besides the threat of danger, there’s no excuse for Action Point to play it this safe.

It’s all done expertly and with an unexpectedly deft sleight-of-hand twist in the homestretch that proves once again that Kormakur is the kind of overachieving director that one pigeonholes at their own risk. He has a knack for making the familiar feel more surprising than it is.

More than anything, the film feels a bit like a trial balloon for the relative star power of Jacobs, who’s been promoted from best friend to headliner here.

First Reformed is a bleak, punishing movie and the furthest thing imaginable from an easy crowdpleaser. But Hawke juices it with an austere sense of grace.

Whether he’s washing the feet of prisoners in America, visiting sick children in Africa, or praying with hurricane victims in Asia, Pope Francis doesn’t merely preach empathy, responsibility, and accountability, he lives it.

Speaking of Glover, it’s no spoiler to say that the Atlanta star is easily the best thing in this good-not-great movie.

Pearce takes his time laying out his sleeping-with-the-enemy tale, but his stinginess with plot lends the film an vice-tightening air of mystery that suits it.

This stylish-but-grating pastiche of far better crime flicks is as soft-boiled as they come.

Still, there are enough glimpses of the old master peeking through that it’s hard not to have a bit of a good time. It turns out that even second-rate (okay, third-rate) Woo has its moments.

It feels like Smigel and Sandler just shot the first draft of their script without fine-tuning or polishing any of the jokes.

What saves Infinity War from being just another bloated supergroup tour – and what will end up being the thing that blows fans’ minds to dust – is the film’s final stretch.

Michel Hazanavicius’ new film, Godard Mon Amour, tackles that period in Godard’s life on and off the screen — and does it in a dismissively light-hearted way that I’m sure the auteur himself loathes.

Isn’t aggressively terrible or outrageously offensive. It’s just harmless, pointless, and meh. You’d think with 17 years at their disposal these guys would be able to come up with some jokes that weren’t so half-baked and dumb. Alas, this is low-hanging fruit all the way.

Pretty light on scares and only hangs together with the thinnest (and hokiest) of narrative threads.

Tully feels like the work of a writer who’s matured and lived and become less superficial without giving up any of her natural gift for finding humor in the absurd.

The dialogue mixes Sunday school and the streets, and it’s funny, profane, and occasionally poignant when it’s not a bit too on the nose.

Whatever the case, you’re better off rewatching the fake Linda Blair movie.

Of the film’s two stars, it’s LaBeouf who seems especially well cast here. Until now, the actor has never seemed to measure up to the potential that he promised early on in his career. But there’s something about playing McEnroe that brings out the sort of unpredictable subtlety he’s always been capable of.

It never makes up its mind whether it wants to be a what-hath-science-wrought disaster movie like those old John Sayles cheapie classics Piranha and Alligator, or just a big, dumb, and loud tongue-in-cheek action comedy. It’s a movie that’s afraid to pick a lane.

Sure, showing that girls can be as horny and impulsive and raunchy as guys isn’t exactly the most radical statement. But when it’s done this well, it certainly is a welcome change-up.

Shelton may not be as prolific as the Duplasses (I’m not sure anyone could be – they seem to churn out movies in their sleep), but her work has steadily gotten more assured and quietly powerful. Her continued partnership with the brothers is a tonic for anyone who cares about keeping the Sundance-of-the-‘90s spirit alive.

Never mind the director’s still-prodigious work ethic, the big-screen adaptation of Ernest Cline’s giddily overstuffed, ’80s-saturated best-seller is, in a way, a movie that couldn’t be more bespoke to Spielberg. After all, so many of that decade’s most indelible touchstones poured directly from his brain. It’s the perfect marriage of fabulist and fable.

If you enjoyed 2013’s Pacific Rim but secretly wished it was more like a vapid Transformers sequel, then you’ll love Pacific Rim Uprising. Everyone else can give this heavy-metal howler a hard pass.

The film comes to crackling life during the planning and climactic execution of the raid. And Padilha, the Brazilian director behind 2007’s "Elite Squad," knows how to stage these white-knuckle sequences, especially when he cuts back and forth between the on-the-ground tactical assault and a modern dance performance featuring one of the commando’s girlfriends.

When a sunset romance does come along, you can’t help but root for it. Which is why it gives me no joy to report that The Leisure Seeker is pretty disappointing.

While the fish-out-of-water caper is stuffed with whiplash turns and colorfully eccentric lowlife characters, it never adds up to much. It’s so busy you might think there’s more to it than they’re really is.

Eli Roth’s Death Wish isn’t a bad movie as far as super-violent exploitation flicks go. But it is a deeply problematic one. And that problem boils down to this: It’s the absolute wrong movie at the absolute wrong time.

The one thing Mute has going for it is Jones’ vividly imaginative sense of world-building. Like Ridley Scott with "Blade Runner," he fills every corner of the screen with something cool to look at.

Like some nefarious KGB amnesia serum, Red Sparrow mostly evaporates from your memory five minutes after you walk out of the theater.

What comedy there is comes from Tom Hiddleston’s Lord Nooth — a miser with a head like a soft-boiled egg. But the laughs are mild at best. At least there’s director Nick Park’s playful Silly Putty visual imagination to take your mind off just how thin the story is.

It’s basically a Murderer’s Row of indie pros who play off one another like they’ve been performing this particular toxic soiree on a West End stage for years.

The kind of deliriously trashy psychosexual thriller that only the French seem to be able to pull off with a straight face. It’s like "Dead Ringers" meets "Body Double" with a kinky, winking full-frontal Gallic twist.

Strip the pleasure away from a guilty pleasure and what are you left with exactly? Fifty Shades Freed, the third and final cinematic installment in E.L. James’ trashy S&M trilogy, answers that question with every ludicrous plot twist, stilted line delivery, and too-laughable-to-be-hot sex scene.

For a movie produced by red-meat action maestro Jerry Bruckheimer and starring Thor himself as the face of camo-clad vengeance, 12 Strong somewhat surprisingly manages to fall (just barely) on the nuanced side of the scale. Even if you can feel the film’s director, Nicolai Fuglsig, battling with himself to get it there.

Peppered with implausibilities and foul-smelling red herrings, The Commuter downshifts from a solid cat-and-mouse joyride to a ridiculous howler, insulting its audience’s patience and intelligence at every turn.

An ethically thorny morality play that thoughtfully transcends borders, cultures, and religious beliefs.

Aside from one gag in particular, the scares lack any real mechanical knack. The one thing the otherwise forgettable film has going for it is Shaye, who over the course of the Insidious quadrilogy has miraculously created a real flesh-and-blood character with Elise.

Molly’s Game is a cool, crackling, confident film that appeals to your intelligence instead of insulting it. At the movies, it may be the closest we’ll get to a Christmas miracle.

Westerns can be a tough nut to crack, but Hostiles may be the finest example of the genre since "Unforgiven."

The film simply drags too much in the middle. Somewhere in the film’s 152-minute running time is an amazing 90-minute movie.

Welcome to the Jungle isn’t a bad movie. It’s a diverting, mildly amusing, competent bit of big-budget studio product. And maybe those are the stakes we’re now playing for these days.

Like all of Anderson’s films (the best of which remain Boogie Nights and Magnolia), Phantom Thread is meticulously crafted, visually sumptuous, impeccably acted, and very, very directorly. But until the final act, this straight-jacketed character study is also pretty tame stuff — emotionally remote, a bit too studied, and far easier to admire than surrender to and swoon over.

If you look at The Post next to something like All the President’s Men, you see the difference between having a story passively explained to you and actively helping to untangle it. That’s a small quibble with an urgent and impeccably acted film. But it’s also the difference between a very good movie and a great one.

It's both weird and wonderful.

It’s undercooked even by the filmmaker’s own late-career standards. Yes, Coney Island has never looked more gorgeously golden-hued (thanks to cinematographer Vittorio Storaro), but Allen has seldom been less sharp.

I don’t think we’ll ever see anyone else do Churchill this well again unless the man himself comes back from the dead.

Roman J. Israel, Esq. doesn’t quite have the same frayed-wire electricity as "Nightcrawler," but what it does have on its side is Denzel Washington.

I’m not quite sure how Rees (2011’s Pariah) has done it, exactly, but the depth of heartbreak and humanity in this — just her second feature film — is remarkable.

First, the good news. Justice League is better than its joylessly somber dress rehearsal, Batman v Superman: Dawn of Justice. Now the “but”…you knew there was a “but” coming, right? But it also marks a pretty steep comedown from the giddy highs of Wonder Woman.

Of course, there’s a sort of comfort in familiarity, especially around the traditions of the holidays. But Daddy’s Home 2 never manages to really catch you off guard and crack you up the way the best comedies should.

Farrell delivers his lines with the same replicant monotone he used in The Lobster. And Kidman, the only cast member who expresses recognizably human emotions, extends her recent hot streak. But even she’s not enough to give this head-scratcher any real life.

Only half of these setups go anywhere very interesting. The rest just feel like button-pushing stunts that, like so much of the merry-prankster conceptual art Christian champions, zero in on your intellect rather than your gut. Or, better yet, your heart

Ragnarok is basically a Joke Delivery System — and on that score, it works. The movie is fun.

It’s smart, relatable, laughter-through-psychic pain entertainment that happens to be elevated by a handful of wonderful performances even if it, at times, feels like a lesser version of "The Royal Tenenbaums."

In 1960 this was a shocking, sexually charged symphony of taboo-smashing terror. And thanks to the artistry of Alfred Hitchcock, it remains one today.

Super Dark Times perfectly nails the minute details of adolescence—a minefield of confusion about right and wrong that leads to all kinds of impulsive bad decisions.

Directed by another great character actor, John Carroll Lynch (Zodiac, American Horror Story), Lucky is an elegiac and ultimately affirming meditation on mortality, regret, and smiling through hardship. You couldn’t ask for a more poignant swan song from a more singular artist.

The movie spins like a top for two hours. With his pearly shark’s grin, always-underestimated comic timing, and macho daredevil streak, Cruise rips into the role and summons a side of himself that he rarely lets his guard down enough to reveal.

If the first Kingsman, at its best, felt like a dry martini of a joke, then this one is more Jack and Mountain Dew — unsubtle, unrefreshing, and unnecessary.

The title isn’t the only thing about the film that has an exclamation point; every scene comes with one – and also seems to be in blaring, buzzing neon. The movie doesn’t know when to stop.

It is essentially two movies. The better by far (and it’s very good) is the one that feels like a darker Stand by Me — a nostalgic coming-of-age story about seven likable outcasts riding around on their bikes and facing their fears together... Less successful are the sections that trot out Pennywise. The more we see of him, the less scary he becomes.

The whole thing feels like the pilot episode of a third-rate comic-book vigilante TV show.

A fizzy, twisty Southern-fried heist flick that’s more enjoyable the less you try to dissect it.

It’s festooned with so many triumph-of-the-underdog clichés (including a climax you can see driving down the Garden State Parkway from a mile away), it’s like déja-vu with a breakbeat. The most remarkable thing about the film is how little you’ll actually mind by the end.

Annabelle: Creation isn’t a terrible film. Not exactly. The set-up is promising, and it offers some decent early jump scares. But eventually the thinness of the material becomes overwhelmingly obvious.

The whole thing feels a bit like an Arabic riff on "Chinatown" or "L.A. Confidential" — a neonoir with a tawdry edge where our imperfect hero will eventually be doomed. It’s not a question of if, only when he will lose.

How many times can you watch two middle-aged men impersonate Michael Caine? Your answer to that question will determine whether you should tag along with Steve Coogan and Rob Brydon on their third and latest fictionalized (and largely improvised) eating tour of Europe.

His video essays may have hinted at an artist with a gifted eye, but Columbus is proof that Kogonada also possesses heart and soul as well.

The pounding ’80s soundtrack (New Order, Depeche Mode, Ministry) couldn’t be cooler, the ultraviolence is relentlessly brutal, and Theron’s guns-and-garters wardrobe is sexy as hell. So it’s a shame that apart from the gender flip, the plot is so derivative.

The result is a slight, handcrafted indie that’s sweet, skewed, and feels a bit like a skit stretched out to feature length.

This is visceral, big-budget filmmaking that can be called Art. It’s also, hands down, the best motion picture of the year so far.

There’s a provocative idea at the center of Oldroyd’s beautifully photographed film — repression exploding into madness and violence. But as the body count rises, Lady Macbeth loses its secret weapon: sympathy.

During the film’s intoxicating first 30 minutes, for example, I couldn’t decide whether what I was watching was brilliantly bonkers or total folly. Then, as the story went on, it came into sharper and sharper focus: Valerian is an epic mess.

City of Ghosts shows us what journalism can do in the face of evil. Its message is haunting, humane, and ultimately hopeful.