Dana Stevens

As for The Drama, it runs out of big ideas—and, seemingly, compassion for its characters—before the audience has had a chance to develop our own rooting interest in, well, the drama.

For better or worse, it’s a Brontë adaptation for the era of Instagram and TikTok, second screens and viral memes.

A sensitive adaptation full of beautifully judged performances that nonetheless fails to maintain the essential appeal of its own source material: the quietly feminist retelling of one of the most retold lives in history from the perspective of a woman who was central to that life, while figuring almost nowhere in the record of it.

The resolution of these characters’ arcs, and of For Good’s several other subplots, feels unsatisfying, rushed through and at the same time too fussed over. But any sense of disappointment that Wicked: For Good doesn’t quite live up to the first movie pops like a big pink bubble the moment Erivo and Grande unite one last time to sing the showstopping duet “For Good.”

Bronstein expertly infuses the audience with Linda’s negative emotions, as if we were the ones hooked up to a feeding tube. But as I wrote just last week in a review of Benny Safdie’s first solo-directed feature The Smashing Machine, I’m not sure that simply being drawn into a troubled protagonist’s frenetic mental state constitutes the highest aim of cinema.

Benny Safdie’s first solo film, to its credit, explores different psychological territory. Rather than entrapping us in Mark’s roiling brain, he seems to be purposely walling us off from both the character’s and the actor’s interiority.

Though The Fantastic Four: First Steps has all the elements in place to make it the keystone of a new Marvel era, the script (by Josh Friedman, Jeff Kaplan, Eric Pearson, and Ian Springer) never loses a vague, hand-waving quality that leaves its central characters as indistinctly drawn as the moral conflict they ultimately face.

For all its exquisite boxes-within-boxes compositions and cleverly designed sets (the production design is by longtime collaborator Adam Stockhausen, who won an Oscar for his work on The Grand Budapest Hotel), this whole movie unfolded for me as if behind a thick pane of emotion-proof glass.

I couldn’t tear my eyes away from the screen during Warfare, even if they were sometimes half-covered during those many cutaways to lacerated flesh. But leaving the movie, my main sensation was relief that that brutal viewing experience was over, rather than reflection on the meaning of the Iraq War, on the experience of war itself, or on the success or failure of this particular attempt to represent it.

If the latest escapade is not quite as sparkling as its predecessors—in 2021, the second entry briefly surpassed Citizen Kane as one of the highest-rated movies on Rotten Tomatoes—it retains their warmhearted and cheekily funny spirit.

Sadly, You’re Cordially Invited eventually founders on the same rocky shores as many recent attempts to revive the rom-com.

Scene by scene, there’s nothing not to enjoy about this lushly animated ode to exploration, teamwork, and pluck, especially if you’re a parent of small kids on the hunt for a fun family outing. But for all its verve and polish, Moana 2 seems more like a consumer product, in some subtle but unmistakable way, than the first film did.

Gladiator 2 (or as it’s spelled in the opening title, GladIIator) sadly comes off as less a reinvention of the original than a curiously literal retread of its plot beats, characters, and themes.

McQueen clearly wants to broaden the archetype of stiff-upper-lip Englishness into something more inclusive. It’s a worthy message, but one that sometimes seems to take precedence over the characters and story rather than emerging organically from them.

Fly Me to the Moon’s foundational silliness could have been compensated for, and maybe even turned into the premise for a lightweight but charming romance, if not for two things: the failure to grapple with the larger historical implications of the fake-moon-landing subplot, and the fatal miscasting of Johansson and Tatum as oil-and-water opposites.

Despite its impressive attention to craft—including exquisite motion-capture work by the groundbreaking digital-design studio WETA—Kingdom of the Planet of the Apes never fully establishes its reason for being.

As it is now, Napoleon plays more like a hastily compiled highlight reel of a life than the full-fledged historical epic its director seems to have intended.

If Asteroid City had kept its focus more tightly on these two troubled families, it might have turned into the most emotionally truthful movie Anderson has yet made. Instead the story widens out to include a sprawling cast of less complex, if often amusing, secondary characters.

To the film’s credit, nothing in Paint comes off as mean-spirited or patronizing, including the treatment of the town’s many less-than-sophisticated consumers of televised artmaking. But by the last half, the ambient niceness felt so pervasive and the film’s ultimate purpose so vague that, even when the performances and much of the dialogue remained sharp and funny, the movie around them seemed to dissolve into one of those happy little clouds.

To the disappointment of this once-enthusiastic ogler, Magic Mike’s Last Dance fails to capture the eponymous magic of the first two very different but both delightful movies.

Babylon is a defecating elephant of a movie: gigantic, often repulsive, but hard to look away from.

His passion is infectious and his enthusiasm for environmental causes commendable, but the movie’s metaphysical and sociological aspirations sometimes come off as cringe-inducingly similar to those that might be expressed by a white lady running a healing-crystal shop in a seaside town.

Fraser’s all-in commitment to playing Charlie—300-pound fatsuit and all—put me in mind of Joaquin Phoenix’s performance in Joker, an act of faith so complete it managed to be the only transcendent element of a thuddingly bad movie. But Fraser’s beautifully judged performance isn’t enough to save this abject wallow through a mire of maudlin clichés about trauma and redemption.

While it’s frequently moving and occasionally thrilling, the gears sometimes grind audibly on the shift in between.

Though it wears out its welcome in one dreary stretch midway through, Weird: The Al Yankovic Story (which premieres on the free, ad-supported streaming service the Roku Channel on Friday) is an appropriately goofy tribute to its subject and co-creator: a movie parody about the life of a parodist.

Once again, in trying to find our way past the icon to the woman underneath, we have only pushed Norma Jeane further away.

For the most part, Three Thousand Years of Longing reads not as an unintended allegory of contemporary race relations but as a thoughtful, melancholy, and sometimes mordantly funny celebration of the time-and-space-collapsing power of storytelling.

It’s Pitt’s wry presence, and his playful relationship to his own movie-star persona, that provides a still center amidst the CGI-smeared chaos and keeps this train from (metaphorically at least) going off the rails.

Sharp Stick is less a movie than a symptom, a tangle of would-be feminist ideas that, let us hope, needed to be gotten out of its creator’s system so she could get back to making something good

If this particular franchise’s material feels at times a bit thin to be spun out even to two hours, it may be simply that three solo movies per Avenger is more than enough. But this weekend, if the lure of an air-conditioned summer blockbuster summons you like a sacred Asgardian hammer, you could do worse than this Easter egg–colored, classic rock–scored frolic.

There’s a rueful irony to the fact that it’s this supposedly human inspiration for the beloved toy who feels more like a plastic action figure.

At 137 minutes, The Northman can feel ponderously crammed with both mystic visions (however hauntingly rendered) and Mel Gibson–grade sadistic gore. Somewhere around the two-hour point, the endless bone-crunching battle scenes—while impeccably choreographed and breathtakingly shot in fluid long takes—start to become existentially wearying and even morally suspect.

The fact that Marry Me contains anything so formulaic as a third-act separation montage should spell out clearly what you’re getting in for.

I Want You Back is a sometimes underwhelming vehicle for Day and Slate’s considerable comic talents, but it’s a pleasure to spend two hours in their company.

In a late scene in House of Gucci, one character labels another “a triumph of mediocrity.” That paradox and others like it might be applied to the movie itself: It is a glamorous slog, a fabulous bore, a pointlessly bespoke bit of silliness.

The film, scripted by Zhao, Patrick Burleigh, and Ryan and Kaz Firpo, weaves plenty of jokes in with long stretches of intergalactic hocus pocus and equally long action set pieces. But the parts only sporadically cohere into anything like a whole.

This film is a curiously paradoxical achievement: a visual and aural marvel that is also a crashing bore.

If Affleck and Driver at times appear to be on loan from a different, dopier movie, possibly one involving Monty Python, they both have such a cape-swooshing, mustache-twirling good time that it’s hard to blame them for going all in on their characters’ villainy.

The movie seems to love its main character without bothering to understand her.

The first hour of Candyman does a bang-up job of mixing such audience-teasing popcorn thrills with trenchant, if sometimes too flatly stated, social critique. But by the last half-hour, there are so many themes, plotlines, and flashbacks in play that the movie’s message becomes muddled, and the forward momentum slows.

Especially if you’re watching with children, you could spend a perfectly lovely afternoon diving into Luca’s refreshing blue-green waters. But unlike the two fish-kid buddies at the movie’s center, you may not emerge from the experience transformed.

Hathaway and Ejiofor seem excited to play edgier, less nice people than they often get the chance to, and the early scenes of them locking horns in their claustrophobic (if posh) flat generate enough energy to carry the movie almost all the way over the finish line.

There’s something to admire in the pedal-to-the-metal commitment of their project, and certainly Uncut Gems is the product of an uncompromising vision. But I found the result to be claustrophobic and, finally, dull, with scene after scene that hammers home the same point we understood from the very beginning: that Howard is a lost soul, fated to run both his business and personal life into the ground.

Whatever beliefs they may hold about other people’s humanity, I’m glad these women finally received justice from the network that wronged them. I’m just not sure that translates into wanting to spend two hours in their company.

Speaking for myself, I’m fine with the concept of terminating The Terminator — and there’s no need to blue-orb back any more augmented hitmen or - women to do it.

It’s fine to walk out of this movie not quite sure what Tarantino was using his story’s proximity to this real-life tragedy to say; that’s part of the ambiguity inherent in making art. But it’s dispiriting to suspect that part of why he wanted to stage a Manson-adjacent story was because the accoutrements — the period cars and costumes and neon signs, the glowering barefoot hippie girls, the acid-laced cigarettes and glowing movie marquees — were just so cool.

Uncanny singing animals aside, a secondary effect of the film’s commitment to zoological verisimilitude is to place the voice actors in a relatively powerless position. It’s a strange choice to assemble an all-star cast from various walks of celebrity—actors, pop singers, rappers, comedians—and then make their only contribution a verbal one.

Captain Marvel sometimes resembles the kind of low-budget sci-fi that might have played on kids’ TV on a Saturday afternoon in the era when this movie is set.

I spent much of Vice trying to work out why the same narrative strategies that worked so well in the raucously entertaining "The Big Short" suddenly felt smug and even propagandistic.

What was it trying to do? Did it succeed on its own terms? Why did I find myself admiring nearly every external element of the film — performances, lighting, editing, costuming — and yet find Guadagnino’s extremely aesthetically pleasing assemblage of these same elements into a whole somehow drab?

Mamma Mia! is in essence celebrity karaoke night.

The particular kind of “fun” to be found in a slick and shallow spy fantasy like Atomic Blonde feels peculiarly arid in a moment as desperate for substance and meaning as our own.

If you see Okja, and I hope you do, stay for the final credits. It’s not often that a stinger scene pops up at the end of a movie, not to pre-sell the inevitable sequel, but to leave you with something to think, wonder, and worry about.

From an aesthetic and technical perspective, her achievement is laudable, but there’s something underfurnished about this movie, a lack of historical, intellectual, and thematic richness. For all its elaborate design and carefully calibrated mood, it comes down to the tale of a randy fox in an impeccably preserved Greek Revival henhouse.

Through two viewings of Jackie, I was never able to pin down whether it was Portman’s performance or Larraín’s way of framing it that left me emotionally shut out.

Still, the movie’s mores can feel cluelessly retro as the ever-dithering Bridget lurches between one man and another.

Sully can feel like a dutiful, hagiographic slog, even though its actual running time barely tops 90 minutes and both Hanks and Eckhart give warm, understated, funny performances in the only two roles developed enough to qualify as real characters.

Cianfrance’s gift for allowing his actors to create relationships — with one another, with the camera, and with the stark landscape that surrounds them — makes The Light Between Oceans an unusually captivating romantic drama, at least until that last-act slide into self-sabotaging bathos.

The dad minds behind Bad Moms don’t seem to understand, or be terribly curious about, the minds of mothers.

In short, The BFG seems perfectly self-sufficient in its bookness, in no need of the lavishly cinematic bear hug Steven Spielberg bestows upon it here.

The disaster sequences themselves — of which there are many, placed at regular intervals but disconnected from the story, like operatic arias — have a dreamlike and weirdly exhilarating quality that’s quite different from the plodding wham-bam destruction of the average action blockbuster.

The Hateful Eight is bold, gorgeous, verbally clever, morally repellent, and, in some way I am still struggling to put my finger on, possibly somehow evil. Any movie that inspires mixed feelings that intense can, I suppose, be said to have done its work on the viewer. But I’m not sure the work The Hateful Eight performed on me was what the filmmaker intended or that it’s an operation I would consent to again.

Joy the movie never cohered, for me, into a story with forward motion. The minute the film begins to find its footing in one tonal register, it switches to another.

The screenplay doesn't lack for memorable zingers, and thanks to Cody's script and Streep's performance, Ricki emerges as a complex, self-contradictory person (even if most of the supporting characters don't).

Tomorrowland is a highly original, occasionally even visionary piece of sci-fi filmmaking, but that doesn't necessarily make it a good movie.

Age of Ultron, then, shows what happens when an unstoppable force (Joss Whedon’s imagination) meets an immovable object (the Disney/Marvel behemoth). And the result is, indeed, paradoxical: a crashy, overlong, FX-driven blockbuster that’s capable of morphing, Hulk-to-Banner style, into a loose-limbed ensemble comedy about collaboration, flirtation, and friendship.

When every character is always operating at maximum loathsomeness, it can be difficult to recalibrate your disgust-o-meter. I suspect this sense of moral vertigo, and the resulting nausea, is part of what Cronenberg is after, but his skill at evoking those states in the viewer doesn’t make the experience of watching Maps to the Stars any less sour.

A most curious movie, one with nearly all the elements of a classic crime-family saga and yet somehow lacking the moral complexity and emotional heft of the films to which it pays fastidious aesthetic homage: the New York–set urban thrillers of Sidney Lumet (Serpico, Prince of the City) and Coppola’s Godfather series.

The tedium of Into the Woods’ second half has less to do with the downbeat subject matter than Marshall’s clumsy direction.

It boasts (nearly) all the elements of a perfectly fine, even very good, movie, without ever quite becoming a movie at all.

What ultimately brings down The Boxtrolls isn’t the film’s willingness to wade into grimmer, more gruesome waters than your average kids’ animated adventure. It’s the failure to anchor its often misanthropic story in a character or relationship strong enough to offer a glimpse of redemption—a place of respite in an ugly, cheese-obsessed world.

Especially when Baymax is onscreen doing his adorable-puffy-robot thing, Big Hero 6 qualifies as a better-than-average kids’ movie with enough cross-generational appeal to make it a fine choice for a family weekend matinee. But I couldn’t shake the feeling that this film was designed to function as a starter kit for future Marvel aficionados.

Throughout The Imitation Game, there’s a sense the filmmaker is trying to shield viewers from the story’s most difficult parts — whether it’s the horrors of war, the technical complexity of the Enigma code and its solution, or the bleakness of Alan Turing’s final fate. I wish Tyldum had trusted the audience enough to let us in on the worst. It would have made his movie so much better.

Though at times Rosewater is clearly the work of a first-timer still finding his voice, Stewart is indisputably a real filmmaker.

Nightcrawler, like its entrepreneurial-to-a-fault protagonist, is ambitious but ultimately hollow, eager to dazzle and shock us but reluctant to let us inside.

An entertainment choice I wouldn’t recommend, but one you might not regret if you dial your expectations down (or your drug intake up).

Sex Tape, conversely, is as timid, bland, and predictable as romantic comedies come — though it’s a hard movie to hate entirely.

This rough-edged parody feels both distinctive and handmade, and for those reasons alone it’s a hard movie to hate, even when it temporarily loses its comic footing. Anyway, as romantic comedies down the ages have taught us, hatred is just a latent form of love.

For all the film’s best intentions — and a finely tuned performance from the ever-better Woodley — for me The Fault in Our Stars never entirely found its way out of Sparks territory.

Transcendence is nowhere near as elegant, witty, or insightful as "Her." Pfister and the screenwriter, Jack Paglen, grapple ponderously, sometimes oafishly, with the ethical and philosophical issues at stake in the film’s premise.

The most memorable element of The Winter Soldier, besides Redford, is probably Scarlett Johansson, whose dryly funny Natasha at times comes perilously close to being … a well-developed female character?

There’s something sour and strained about this movie that’s at odds with the usual Muppet ethos of game, let’s-put-on-a-show cheer. Maybe that’s because of the inordinate amount of screen time spent on the rivalry between two villains who are as uninteresting as they are unpleasant.

Occasionally, real dramatic scenes will spring from the loamy soil of von Trier’s free-wandering fantasy. But they’re isolated sketches, little one-act plays in the theater of degradation.

Neither Alex Murphy’s internal moral conflict nor the larger, vaguely satiric portrait of a global culture dependent on high-tech law enforcement seem to be the main point of this Robocop remake, which raises the question of what is meant to be the point.

A sluggish romantic drama

August: Osage County is a mess, an overcooked movie-star stew that never quite coheres into a movie.

Epic in size but claustrophobically narrow in scope, The Wolf of Wall Street maintains a near-exclusive focus on the greed and self-indulgence of its proudly rapacious hero.

I can understand wanting to skip Ender’s Game as a matter of moral principle, but you can also feel free to blow it off just because it’s not that good.

For all its tasteful spareness and eerie, diaphanous mood, Blue Caprice feels, in the end, insubstantial. It’s a true-crime story that illustrates little about the crime in question and a character study whose characters, even when haunting, remain stubbornly opaque.

This thin, floppy comedy never quite became the high-spirited summer sex romp it clearly set out to be. I haven’t quite figured out yet why The To Do List doesn’t work, when so many elements within it seem to.

Jasmine attains the paradoxical state of being fascinatingly tiresome. The same pair of words might be used to describe Blue Jasmine, which, whether you like it or not, surely counts as one of Allen’s more unexpected films of the past decade

Nevertheless, I’m So Excited (in Spanish, the title is Los amantes pasajeros, meaning both “the fleeting lovers” and “the passenger lovers”) looks fabulous, talks dirty, and sometimes makes you laugh, which is really all you can ask of a fleeting lover.

Even as the story accrues preposterousness, the action moves along crisply, and Tatum and Foxx hit a nice buddy-movie vibe.

If this version of Superman is to have a future — as Warner Brothers seems convinced he will, having already green-lit the sequel — I hope Snyder will dial back both the casualty count and the Krypton mythmaking and instead focus on establishing a fictional Earth that’s rich enough to be worth saving.

In his defense, the kid is saddled with a task that even a more experienced actor might have trouble pulling off: He must carry an entire action movie on his slender shoulders, given little more to act opposite than a succession of green-screen predators. Even with his charismatic dad in his earpiece calling the shots, Jaden can’t turn himself into a movie star by sheer force of Will.

Frances Ha feels like a collaboration between two people in love, and not always in the best way. There are too many scenes in a row that make the same point.

Unfortunately, that sharp-eyed domestic comedy is dwarfed by the far less well-written supervillain crime plot that surrounds it.

A day and half after walking out with a sensation, primarily, of physical relief—at two hours and nine minutes, Pain & Gain makes for a long, loud, relentlessly assaultive sit—I find that my thumb is wavering at half-mast. I’m still not sure whether to mildly like or mildly hate this movie.