David Ehrlich

Lightyear is the first movie that Pixar has released in theaters since the start of the pandemic, a return to normal that would probably feel more exciting if Lightyear wasn’t also the first Pixar movie since the start of the pandemic that feels like it only belongs on Disney Plus.

For a movie so preoccupied with the choices that people can make, Spiderhead invariably makes the least interesting ones available to it, which is a serious problem for a movie streaming on a platform whose subscribers are never far removed from the choice to be watching something else instead.

It’s enough that this heartfelt delight makes par on its premise; there’s a birdie here and a bogey there, but director Craig Roberts (“Eternal Beauty”) keeps a firm grip on the film’s whimsical tone from start to finish, the former “Red Oaks” star finding a way to have fun with his shots without risking his straightforward approach to the pin.

Hustle may not be the greatest redemption story ever told about second chances, third careers, and the hard work of triumphing over your worst tendencies, but the film holds fast enough to the courage of its convictions to feel like it’s got skin in the game.

Fringed with an even greater degree of futility than any of the duo’s previous work, Tori and Lokita doesn’t harbor any delusions that shining a harsh light on such awful stories will ever be enough to make the world a better place, and yet — in the least uncertain terms imaginable — it leaves us with an indelible glimpse into the darkness that surrounds them.

As with Lizzy’s sculptures, which go into the kiln all mottled and damp but come out glistening with new layers of color, Showing Up is transformed by its finishing touches.

Beautiful as Dhont’s eye for detail can be, and vital as his willingness to explore the unbearably tender pockets of adolescence often proves here, Close still finds its sensitive — if sometimes borderline sadistic — young filmmaker defaulting to universal pain whenever he fears that more personal feelings may be too poignantly ethereal to see on camera.

An energetic yet hopelessly convoluted espionage thriller that doesn’t tell a story so much as it chronically bumps into one. ... Lee’s debut is little more than a chattering Pez dispenser full of plot twists.

If the first half of the film shies away from the cheap thrills of its serial killer story, the pointed banality of its final chapters proves as horrifying this genre ever gets.

Denis, Andrew Litvack, and Léa Mysius’ dialogue is only strengthened by its occasional awkwardness, as it subsumes Trish and Daniel into the same disordered humidity that swamps the film around them. The frequent sex scenes become a dialogue of their own — the lovers feeling each other out in search of something they can actually trust.

It’s hard to find even ironic enjoyment in something this high on its own supply; something much less interested in how its namesake broke the rules than it is in how its director does, and something tirelessly incapable of finding any meaningful overlap between the two.

Park’s funny, playful, and increasingly poignant crime thriller is less interested in what Hae-joon (Park Hae-il) knows about his suspect than in how he feels about her

Crimes of the Future is Cronenberg to the core, complete with its fair share of authorial flourishes (the moaning organic bed that its characters sleep in is a five-alarm nightmare unto itself) and slogans (“surgery is the new sex”). At the same time, however, this hazy and weirdly hopeful meditation on the macro-relationship between organic life and synthetic matter ties into his more wholly satisfying gross-out classics because of how it pushes beyond them.

Pulling harder and harder at the tension between complex socioeconomic forces and the simple human emotions they inspire, R.M.N. masterfully spins an all too familiar migration narrative into an atavistic passion play about the antagonistic effects of globalization on the European Union.

Hansen-Løve has traced her own paternal grief into an illuminatingly honest sketch about how loss is necessary for rebirth, guilt inextricable from self-fulfillment, and the present worth savoring for its role in bringing the past and the future together — rather than as a buffer for keeping them apart.

The only thing Östlund’s po-faced characters can’t afford is to recognize the absurdity inherent to their lives, and so the movie keeps our response muted to a low chuckle, as if anything louder might reach the people on screen and cause the whole charade to fall apart.

In fact, the two stars are so sweet and searching together — their characters’ respective power and mutual solitude pulling them together with practical magic — that some of the film’s more spectacular detours seem flimsy by contrast.

It’s hard to imagine that anyone could make another movie about 19th century Russian composer Pyotr Ilyich Tchaikovsky that’s as febrile and virtuosic as Ken Russell’s “The Music Lovers,” but dissident filmmaker Kirill Serebrennikov ... has risen to the challenge with his usual aplomb, orchestrating a historical melodrama that’s almost as feverish as last year’s “Petrov’s Flu.”

It’s a story about the invisible fault lines of inequality, the moral compromises demanded by the American Dream, and the very practical ways in which remembering the past can be the only legitimate defense against the social forces that keep trying to repackage it as a vision of the future.

Slack and shambling ... Often hectic and sometimes heartfelt but very seldom funny, “Final Cut” is disappointing because it lacks the boldness of the original, yet even more so because it abjectly foregoes the kind of “fuck it, we’ll do it live!” creative mania that it’s meant to embody. Some of the movie’s jokes are just too well-constructed to fail, but too few of them land hard enough for the movie itself to succeed.

When Operation Mincemeat slows down enough to see into those shadows — when the film slows down enough to leverage the fictions its characters invent for the Nazis against the ones they invent for themselves — it finds a hidden war that’s worth fighting to the end.

Stainless where the original was musty, neutered where the original was soft-core (there isn’t a single gratuitous shower scene in this sequel, let alone three of them), and structured like an immaculate pop song where the original moved like freeform jazz, “Maverick” sounds like a major regression from an age where summer movies didn’t always play safe. But let’s not forget that Cruise is the only guy whose summer movies still vehemently refuse to do that.

For all of its singularly bizarre thrills, all of which reaffirm Garland as a vital interpreter for a world that’s coming apart at the seems, Men is the first of his films that makes life feel simpler than it really is.

In a Netflix movie that’s so breezy and enjoyable because of its complete lack of stakes, Leterrier’s approach gets the job done. In the penultimate installment of a gazillion-dollar franchise whose fans have come to expect vehicular mayhem on an interstellar scale, it probably won’t be enough to avert a slow-motion car crash.

Raimi succeeds with “Multiverse of Madness” because he fights the battles he can win, and he does so in a way that feels instructional for his characters — all of whom are struggling to make peace with what they’ve lost.

Trocker’s second feature (following 2016’s “The Eremites”) never quite manages to make good on its gamesmanship and only allows itself to have any fun once it’s sure that nobody else is.

Anaïs isn’t so different in the wonderfully surprising last shot than she is in the first, but at last we can see that she’s having the time of her life.

Everyone in Campbell’s movie — from the director all the way down to his supporting cast — deserves better than this.

Cooper’s film does no independent research of its own, and therefore can’t possibly offer any tidbits that weren’t first reported in the pages of “Goddess.”

Ludicrous and dramatically unsatisfying as Pompo the Cinephile might be, its kid-friendly portrait of life on a movie set captures the same electric crackle that make far better films like “Day for Night” and “Irma Vep” such irresistible ads for joining the circus.

Anyone expecting a three-course meal as rich and nuanced as Ryusuke Hamaguchi’s “Wheel of Fortune and Fantasy” (or even a single dish as sumptuous as Juzo Itami’s “Tampopo”) might find themselves disappointed by a quick and dirty film that only aspires to offer the satisfaction of a light dessert, but Yoshida’s giddy fetishism makes for its own simple fun.

If Stanleyville initially assumes the posture of an Off-Off-Broadway adaptation of “Dogtooth” — one happy to revel in half-baked ideas and hand-me-down humor — its commitment to entropy randomness gradually coheres into an identity of its own.

Cathartic and outrageous as it can be to hear the juicy — but wildly unsurprising — details of how Abercrombie operated behind the scenes, Klayman’s film doesn’t ground them in any greater sociopolitical context.

Metal Lords may never find the rhythm a movie like this needs in order to stay in the sweet spot between goofy and charming, but there’s a stubborn kernel of truth to how casually its young characters learn to hear themselves by listening to Judas Priest.

As a critic who’s professionally obligated to reckon with the latest trends in Christian cinema, I have to admit that Wahlberg’s R-rated conception of godly entertainment seems almost divine when compared to the culture war militance of “God’s Not Dead” or the Sunday school hokeyness of “I Still Believe.”

It’s not like this movie is a punishing chore; it’s not like Eggers doesn’t want multiplex audiences to like it. And they will. Because this is the kind of filmmaking that rips you out of your body so hard that you’re liable to forget what year it is.

The film’s scattershot focus — in stark contrast to the breathless immediacy of “The Rescue” — and advertorial tone diminish the sheer thrill of watching the company land an orbital class rocket for the first time.

Apatow gets a lot of shit for making scattershot comedies that run the length of David Lean epics, but the patchwork of scenes that comprise his latest have less in common with “Funny People” than they do “Movie 43,” and might just be aimless enough to make the director’s critics appreciate the flow of his earlier work.

At heart, it’s a story you’ve seen countless times before — often told on a much larger scale. And yet it’s amazing how far you can go on the strength of some evocative production design, a few clever dashes of sci-fi world-building, and a goofy script that isn’t afraid to err closer to “Pillow Talk” than to “Before Sunrise.”

In the end, Jones’ performance is even more lifelike than I feared — a tortured and astonishingly nuanced rendering of a childlike creature whose id could only be tempered by love for so long before it chose violence instead. And it should go without saying that Kurzel’s fatalistic storytelling so pungently exhumes the pain that led up to that awful day in April 1996 that you can smell the death coming several hours in advance.

Zero Fucks Given is refreshingly unwilling to be prescriptive or teach Cassandre any moral lessons, but it often struggles to crystallize how she finds the strength to seize control over her own flightplan.

Despite the refreshingly experiential flavor of Szumowska’s approach, her film is handcuffed by the facts of its true story, and Pam remains at such a pronounced emotional remove that it sometimes feels as if she’s only hiking up that mountain because the facts of the matter demand that she must.

Inspired by a rush of paranoia that Stourton once experienced at a wedding where he felt unwelcome, All My Friends Hate Me effectively splits the difference between Ruben Östlund and Ben Wheatley as it pinballs between squirmy laughs and sly horrors.

For many of the extremely online people born after the year 2000, “Under the Influence” offers a closer look at the cultural history that’s already close to their hearts, less valuable for Neistat’s insight than for his access ... For the rest of us ... this film provides a bone-chilling biopsy of the malignant narcissism that’s quietly metastasized across Gen Z’s celebrity-industrial complex, more valuable for Neistat’s perspective than for any of his characters.

"To Leslie" doesn’t always make things easy, but it’s deeply touching to watch the film’s characters learn how to share their mutual good fortune.

While the filmmaker’s craft has never been shakier than it is in this stilted and wildly uneven tale about the twisted strings that tie some couples together, it’s also never been clearer that said filmmaker is Adrian Lyne. Not only does this delirious movie find him swan-diving back into the same fetid lap pool of envy, lust, and psychosexual control where he used to swim laps every morning, it finds that he’s basically got an entire lane to himself.

It may not resonate as anything deeper than a modern satire of the idea that father knows best, but it leans into its high-wire act with the fearlessness of a movie that knows just how fraught it can be to connect with anyone these days.

This semi-autobiographical sketch isn’t really a story at all so much as a sweetly effervescent string of Kodachrome memories from the filmmaker’s own childhood — the childhood of someone who was born in a place without any sense of yesterday, and came of age at a time that was obsessed with tomorrow.

Here is an orgiastic work of slaphappy genius that doesn’t operate like a narrative film so much as a particle accelerator — or maybe a cosmic washing machine — that two psychotic 12-year-olds designed in the hopes of reconciling the anxiety of what our lives could be with the beauty of what they are.

It’s a fitting third act for an overly safe film that only feigns at its ambition, and it leaves “The Adam Project” seeming less like a natural fit for Reynolds’ talents than an ill-fitting star vehicle for someone who’s never been less interested in stretching his limits.

If Great Freedom is a subdued film more interested in studying old scar tissue than licking up fresh wounds, the rare instances when it draws blood . . . are all the more bruising as a result.

The gags in Mother Schmuckers are consistently more gross than funny, and the movie lacks the visual wit or malformed heart required to keep blood pumping as it runs itself ragged from one joke to the next.

Forget “The Terror,” here comes “The Tedium.”

By far the most nuanced relationship here is that between Batman and Riddler.

Brian Petsos’ interminable Big Gold Brick may be a film absent even the faintest trace of purpose or momentum — its endless parade of energy-less moments connected only by the lack of life shared between them, like a daisy chain of skeletons who are all holding hands — but the writer-director sincerely deserves credit for willing his feature debut into existence.

It’s a buzzing and vibrant ensemble drama whose unruly cast pulls our focus in a dozen different directions at once, but also one that always returns our attention to the earth shifting under their feet, and in turn to the question of who they will become once they’re forced away from it.

At heart, this is a film that just wants some good pats, and it’s willing to do whatever it takes to get them.

The warts-and-all honesty that Baker brings to the table doesn’t prevent Sutton from repackaging his story as a simple cautionary tale about an industry — and a society — that will fatten people up just to eat them alive. At least it’s a tale that Baker lived to tell, and refused to let anyone else tell for him.

As is often the case with Denis’ films, Fire grows more illuminating as it gets hotter; what starts like a constrained and unusually jagged French drama is eventually forged into an incendiary portrait of three people who — to varying degrees — all delude themselves into thinking that the past is possible to quarantine away from the present.

Perhaps the film’s Walmart approach to its action would’ve been more forgivable if the Uncharted games weren’t so frequently suffused with Spielbergian flair, just as the film’s archetypal characters may have been less underwhelming had the games not managed to establish 10 times the pathos with none of the same flesh and blood.

As usual, Strickland has made a sumptuous meal out of social impropriety — a strange cinematic delicacy about the discomforts that need to be shared so that others don’t have to be stomached.

Save for dashes of Jeunet’s bespoke visual flair and an enthusiastic cast of actors whose go-for-broke performances scream for stronger material, Bigbug doesn’t resemble a late-career misstep from a beloved auteur so much as it does the product of a neural network that was simultaneously forced to binge-watch “The Terminator” and “The Dinner Game” until it spat out a shooting script.

The sheer banality of Angela’s cat-and-mouse game against the corporate assassins on her trail is chilling enough to compensate for the movie’s limited scope, and Soderbergh creates such a vivid sense of plein air claustrophobia — of being caught in a net as wide as a wifi signal — that he can stage an intense action set piece in a public/private space as small as the back seat of a van.

Expensive but never fancy, and solid enough to emit a faint whiff of sophistication, this entire project is powered by the same eccentric confidence that allows Branagh to play Hercule Poirot like a neutered Pepé le Pew.

A blockbuster as big and hollow as the Moon itself; one small step for bland, one giant leap for bland-kind.