Clint Worthington

Murray and Wever are as attuned to their roles as Smith is awkward and miscast in his. But perhaps that’s an appropriate fit for Harron and Turner’s divisive-yet-gripping take on this story: at the end of the day, the Manson women are deeper, more fascinating, and more worthy of exploration than the insecure man that connected them.

Extremely Wicked is let down by a shaky mixture of tones, and a fairly hokey presentation of its time period.

In an age where “so bad it’s good” has lost much of its meaning in a sea of calculated camp, The Intruder may be one of the few films of recent vintage that truly qualifies.

It’s certainly the most youth-friendly and playful blockbuster superhero flick to come along in some time, a saccharine but winsome lark that also works in some heartwarming messages about the need to accept love from other people. Also, Zachary Levi flosses in a superhero costume, so that’s fun too.

While treating entrepreneurism like a classic Greek tragedy isn’t a bad idea in theory, Nguyen’s script is more than a little clunky, and the imagery nakedly self-serving. It’s a film about two people digging a hole so they can make ten more dollars per transaction, no matter how handsomely it’s presented.

After similarly sumptuous but somewhat tragic films like A Fantastic Woman and Disobedience, Gloria Bell feels more life-affirming, more explicitly comic. In many respects it’s a beat-for-beat remake of Gloria, with only a few cultural details swapped out, but the tale translates quite well.

Despite existing within the auspices of a predictable subgenre of indie film, Paddleton manages to affect and delight in surprising ways.

As a teller of tense, personal stories about communities in crisis, Farhadi is an absolute master; but with Everybody Knows, he falls just a bit short of the greatness people have come to expect of him.

It’s a pleasure to report that Happy Death Day‘s unexpected delights were in no way a fluke, and Happy Death Day 2U builds on its off-the-wall concept to even greater effect.

With High Flying Bird, Soderbergh may well have crafted the most direct distillation of his own philosophy of filmmaking to date: idiosyncratic, confident, and endlessly disruptive.

The Second Part is a film almost wholly redeemed by its climax, a culmination of unexpected plot threads and surprisingly sweet character development that ends up making the whole more valuable in hindsight.

Every second grates and confuses in equal measure, with nary a thrill of inventive, exciting action filmmaking to break up the monotony.

It’s a gripping, fascinating watch, an elegantly assembled portrait of the end result of influencer culture and late-stage capitalism – the blind leading the blind into an empty, insubstantial image of success and luxury that turns out to be nothing but smoke.

It doesn’t reinvent the wheel, but Bumblebee feels revolutionary within the confines of a long-running franchise like Transformers.

Once Upon a Deadpool doesn’t offer nearly enough new gags to justify its cheeky family-cut re-release. Sure, the bits they add are great – Fred Savage’s hostage situation with Deadpool should have been a cool third of the film – but in the end, it’s a retread as limp as one of Wade Wilson’s re-growing limbs.

Aquaman is a pure piece of bright, ridiculous spectacle, hammering its Saturday morning cartoon sensibilities down its audience’s throat with a huge, cheesy grin on its face.

The Christmas Chronicles is a passable enough lark, and may well be on the upper end of the spectrum when it comes to modern cinematic Christmas fare.

The uneven quality of the vignettes aside, The Ballad of Buster Scruggs is still a suitably Coenesque jaunt through the merciless trails of the American West.

Carell, Chalamet and their supporting players can only spit-shine a relatively rote addiction story so much; by the time the thrill of their work passes, it’s easy to find oneself waiting for more.

The film is filled with sensitive performances that help to upend the fantasy of the nuclear family as the cure for society’s ills. It’s a sparse but stunning mood piece, and a wonderful showcase for Dano as a uniquely family-driven auteur.

Gyllenhaal gives one of the most staggering performances of her career, and Colangelo’s deft command of tone keeps the lengths to which Lisa will go to stay close to Jimmy’s perceived greatness close to the chest right up to the end.

The Thanksgiving table is a perfect battleground for these heavily entrenched political lines, with Barinholtz’s smart, nuanced script pulling no punches. While the satire definitely loses some of its bite in its wild, unpredictable closer, the film still takes Barinholtz and Haddish to fascinating places as performers – neither of them have been as intense or vulnerable onscreen to date.

To be honest, Venom’s almost worth watching for Hardy’s bizarre accent and whirling-dervish mania alone, but it’s a shame he’s not surrounded by a better, more exciting film.

Lowery is content to live with these characters and show them to his audiences in hopes that they, too, will fall in love with them, and he succeeds mightily.

Whether the result of the film’s brisk 90-minute runtime, or a lack of desire to investigate some of its subject’s greater desires and fears, Love, Gilda feels breezy to a fault.

It becomes clear all too quickly that “puppets say swears” is all the film has to offer, so it’s a slog to sit through the remaining seventy minutes of that same joke, repeated ad nauseam.

A perversely fascinating mess from start to finish, Mile 22 is Berg’s most baffling attempt yet to make art out of the most virulent post-9/11 fears about terrorism and international espionage.

While the focus occasionally gets lost in the filmmaker’s personal inquisition, it remains a thought-provoking, challenging cap to Greenfield’s life-long body of work.