David Fear

Come for the uplift of an underdog sports story centered around the guys who made you realize a shoe isn’t just a shoe, superstar foot or not. Stay for the film that Davis gives you when, standing unguarded, she’s suddenly passed the ball, effortlessly rolls it off her fingertips, and gets nothing but net.

Smoking Causes Coughing may or may not be designed as a straight parody of Power Rangers-style adventures and the sugar highs of such kid-friendly sci-fi/superhero entertainment. It most definitely is the sort of high-concept goof that, taken to such go-for-broke extremes, blurs the line between giggle-inducing absurdity and absolutely brilliant ridiculousness.

Enys Men is for us. It’s a cult classic that didn’t feel the need to kill time in order to be called cult or classic.

So much of this drama about interrupted lives, unexpected detours, and attempts at (re)connection requires a deep reading between the lines. That’s a big part of its power.

You don’t blame Braff for wanting to craft a movie around [Pugh]. But you can blame him for the movie itself that surrounds that performance, as well as a seriously ludicrous climax — one of several — set in a Williamsburg house party and a coda so self-aggrandizingly lachrymose that you’ll have to resist the urge to scream.

We came into this series tickled by the element of surprise. And we leave Chapter 4 with the distinct feeling of satisfaction.

It may hint that the bad guy at the center of if all wasn’t the primary villain. But the movie does prove, beyond a shadow of a doubt, that it is its own worst enemy.

Even an Oscar-nominated GOAT can’t escape something that seems so perfectly put together on the outside and is so flawed, easily trashed, and barely held together on the inside.

What Seligman, Sennott and Edebiri have given us is nothing less than a Heathers for this generation. It hits you, and it feels like a kiss.

Pine is the secret sauce that keeps this thing buoyant and fleet-footed, even when the plot turns start piling up. He’s the guy at the center of this ensemble who’s shining but not eclipsing everybody. More than the VFX and the grand-gesture spectacle, he’s the one making this movie fun. Like vintage summer-blockbuster kind of fun.

It’s not schlocky enough to be so-bad-it’s-good and nowhere near good enough to be taken even a tiny bit seriously.

The sixth time isn’t the charm here. And it’s certainly way, way less fun and clever than it thinks it is.

There are tiny glimpses of someone who has genuine chops behind the camera, almost but not quite enough to make you think that, given more time and focus, he could have made something out of these spare parts. Or maybe, just maybe, this whole botched Operation is designed to make his older, possibly lesser work look better.

The Quiet Girl is, quite simply, a genuine work of art by a genuinely empathetic artist, and one of the single most moving, heartfelt, and heartbreaking movies from any country in the last decade.

Chou has said that the film isn’t autobiographical — nor, despite the fact that Park herself was born in Korea and raised in France, is this her story. Yet the two of them have made something that feels so intensely personal and infuses so much life into this young woman’s trek toward self-discovery.

Until some sort of creative second wind blows in, casual moviegoers and deeply invested fanatics may have to simply keep enduring overly familiar, frustrating placeholders like this. Quantumania revolves around a powerful villain who wants to control time. The movie itself is merely killing time.

The fact that Shyamalan seems to be working out some issues onscreen doesn’t stop him from crafting a thriller, and one which goes about its job with steady determination in Cabin’s cryptic, superior first half.

You can’t say that Cat Person is shy about taking the medium to task for selling a romantic ideal that’s more than a little curdled. If only it was this rigorous and incisive about the source material itself.

Guggenheim and his subject also want to show what it’s like to be Michael J. Fox right now, and that’s really where this documentary, which premiered at Sundance today, turns into something else entirely — something beyond praise or tragedy.

So often, you can feel filmmakers straining themselves to come up with more extreme ways of shocking and awing you. With this writer-director, you get the sensation that such hallucinogenic, nerve-scrambling sensationalism comes naturally. You wouldn’t say that his agent provocateur touch is subtle. But it is expert.

Whether the ideas they’re toying with here offer a booster shot of relevance to a modern slasher story is, frankly, debatable. What we can say is: congratulations on being both first out of the gate and an instant subgenre footnote.

Plane is, in essence, the Frontier Airlines of action films: It’s cut-rate to a fault, makes you endure a lot of unpleasantness on the way to its final destination, and still leaves you with the distinct feeling that you didn’t even get what you paid for.

There’s a sensitivity in even the most grand-gesture flourishes Polley and her editors Christopher Donaldson and Roslyn Kalloo throw in, but you also know there’s a voice behind this camera. And it belongs to an artist who definitely has something to say.

It’s the star himself who, even more than the decor and the change of cultural scenery, lifts Living out of the realm of a remake and into something far more profound. It becomes another story of a man at long last learning how to embrace the world, yet one that is completely substantial and shattering and, yeah, even life-affirming on its own.

You leave feeling like you’ve just seen a truly extraordinary late work produced by one of the era’s greatest working auteurs, quickly followed by the sense of experiencing a sucker punch when you remember that the man driving away from the scene of the crime onscreen isn’t able to go anywhere once that screen fades to black.

There’s a constant feeling that a lot of hands were wrestling for the steering wheel of this biopic behind the scenes, with various parties pushing the story this way and that, even with the united goal of collectively crafting the greatest love letter of all. Yet Ackie just keeps her eyes on — and her energy directed toward — delivering a screen-worthy Whitney, scaling the heights and earning her Hall of Fame status.

It is a truth universally acknowledged that any movie starring Olivia Colman can’t be all bad, of course, and Empire of Light wisely knows how to play the ace tucked snugly up its sleeve.

The Whale knows it has a dynamo at its core, yet still keeps trying to prove to you it’s a substantial, significant statement. It can’t stop itself from being crushed under its own symbolic and sensationalist weight.

For those who only think of Robert Downey Sr. as the father of the guy from the Marvel movies, Sr. is happy to fill in some blanks from here to paternity. And for those of us who already worship of the altar of the elder Downey, this Netflix doc — it drops on the streaming service this weekend — is a chance to see a true indie-movie O.G. potentially get the credit he deserves.

This is the sort of lazy, slapdash, self-impressed excuse for “edgy” entertainment that makes you enraged. It’s not even so-bad-it’s-good; this is so bad you’re tempted to kick those responsible for it right in the jingle bells.

There’s a good deal of fun in Glass Onion too, along with some sharp throwaway lines and the joy of watching actors dig into parts in which the option of going over the top has already been built in.

A movie that starts off as a scalpel-sharp satire, casually slides into becoming a skin-of-your-teeth horror film and ends as a flamebroiled screed in more ways than one, director Mark Mylod’s Grand Guignol take on the master-and-servant relationship of hospitality industries will not suit everyone’s palettes.

This tender, gory trip through the guts of a nation is blessed with one of those magical instances of casting the right actor in the right part, and it’s impossible to think of someone else who could do justice to this young woman the way that Taylor Russell does.

She Said doesn’t pretend that wrongs have been righted once and for all. It just wants to pay tribute to two people stood up to a Goliath and took him down not with one good shot but a million tiny cuts and a lot of hard work.

No one would blame you if you prefer your gothic-lit tales straight with no meta-chaser. Yet, largely thanks to Pugh, Leilo’s semi-experimental attempt at blending an old-fashioned melodrama with Media Studies 101 commentary never makes you feel like you’re watching something created in a dorm-session smokeout.

A horror movie that hides its monsters in plain sight, Soft & Quiet is meant to disquiet you from the very beginning, forcing you to ride shotgun with these “jus’ folks” who mix matchmaking suggestions for single members with toxic comments about immigrants and minorities.

There is no all-caps ACTING here. Instead, Lawrence dials in to an uncomfortable numbness that tamps everything about Lynsey down, and thus keeps the performance at a recognizably human, rather than headline-friendly social-drama level.

Co-written by Selick and Peele, Wendell & Wild has a nagging tendency to throw a lot at you and simply cross its slender, skeleton-ish fingers that even a little of it coheres and sticks.

While Barbarian‘s unexpected popularity outside of die-hard genre circles can be attributed to old-fashioned, organic word of mouth, it’s also a first-rate horror movie, full stop.

McDonagh also wants to give his actors a hell of a showcase, too, and it’s the two stars butting brows at the center of The Banshees of Inisherin that make this a masterpiece of men behaving very feckin’ badly.

While no one could accuse Ticket to Paradise of being a “great” movie, or even a “very good” one, there’s something about watching Clooney and Roberts butt up against each other in front of a screen-saver background that scratches a long-dormant itch.

Viewed as a light star vehicle with a lot of VFX — a soft Rock movie — it’s simply ho-hum. The issue is with everything else happening onscreen around him. Even by the DCEU’s dodgy standards, it’s a mess in a cape.

We expect cinematic fireworks with a stylist like [Park]. It’s his sense of restraint and his substance, however, that makes what could have just been a clever check-out-these-moves exercise feel like a genuinely emotional showstopper.

Russell, to his everlasting credit, has made a film in which having cockeyed optimism, at this moment in the world, somehow feels like a radical act. For a movie that is all over the place, it’s determination to get back to a bygone moment isn’t just wishful thinking. It suggests, in own roundabout way, that a return to the past can also signal the beginning of a fresh start.

[Eichner] wanted to make a gay rom-com. It isn’t a huge leap, however, to say that he’s both entertaining a mass audience and leaving his own mark on a long, storied history of fighting to be seen and heard — to tell stories that have been dismissed or neglected or suppressed. Mission accomplished.

[Parker's] made a scary movie that balances psychological shock therapy with old-fashioned fright, shadowy dread with blunt splatterfest FX, an artsy-fartsy sense of stylistics slapped on to a twisty B-movie scenario. It may open with Paramount name slapped on the beginning, but this is textbook A24 horror by any other name.

So much of what makes Catherine Called Birdy sing comes down to Dunham and Ramsey working in conjunction to give you a portrait of a 13th-century teenager woman that feels thoroughly modern without being winky-nudgey, spiky and tender, oddly family-friendly while still being defiant.

It’s a delightful throwback to an age when a comic mystery fueled by someone with a screen-friendly persona and even screen-friendlier good looks weren’t an anomaly, and a perfect vehicle for Hamm. It’s right in the breezy, funny, irreverent sweet spot in which a filmmaker poised between journeyman and auteur like Greg Mottola works best.

An Afrocentric historical epic designed to be screened as big as possible, made by a Black female filmmaker, starring a Black woman of a certain age as an action hero, telling a story that’s left out of world-history books, vying for a mass audience in the age of I.P. imperialism — these are not just qualifiers for The Woman King. They are the sounds of ceilings being shattered and, hopefully, left to rot as piles of splintered glass on the ground.

It entered the festival circuit as a politically charged take on the standard there-goeth-the-great-artist story and exited it as a peerless act of personal reclamation. I can’t shake the feeling of being shook by it.

If the movie does adhere to his signature beats, and feature so many recognizable Spielbergisms, occasionally to its detriment, it’s still one of the most impressive, enlightening, vital things he’s ever done.

It’s not exactly the second coming of Walk Hard, though it’s the best Weird Al movie since UHF [cue laugh track and maybe a Whoppee Cushion sound effect] — and like Al himself, it still hits each beat with an infectiously goofy exuberance.

It’s a movie that utilizes every bit of Gavras’ abundant chops and marshals them to make a coherent statement, tapping brains and heart and spleen in the name of forcing you to recognize what he’s putting in front of you.

By the time Darling‘s revelations are supposed to double as a call to revolution, you’re left with the sense that you’ve just witnessed the most well-designed, aesthetically pleasing angry tweet ever penned.

If you’ve ever wanted to the man formerly known as Stringer Bell cold-cock the King of the Jungle, Beast is the movie of your dreams. Take that specific wish-fulfillment out of the equation, and what you’re left with is just a modern variation on a 1970s animal-slasher flick.

This is still star-driven, big-screen goofiness writ large, something to be consumed with popcorn and a crowd, and that fact its hitting U.S. screens during the summer dog days couldn’t be more welcome. You just might want to wear two masks in the theater.

Summering works better as a mood than it does a movie, succeeding in channeling a certain feeling of transition despite ambling, or occasionally stumbling though more traditional kids-flicks narrative beats.

Prey, director Dan Trachtenberg’s addition to the Predatorverse, isn’t just an intriguing expansion of the series or a cool intellectual-property detour; it’s something close to a B-movie masterpiece, a survivalist thriller-slash-proto-Western-slash-final-girl horror flick that, like both its iconic alien and its indigenous Ripley 2.0 heroine, is extremely good at what it sets out to do.

The amount of casual charisma and commitment Pitt is bringing to this is the one thing that actually differentiates this from being just another stylishly lit, stupid-hip snarkfest.

There’s a genuine sense of admiration for these two middle-aged characters emanating from behind the camera, and you get the feeling that Walker-Silverman, a young filmmaker with a handful of shorts to his name, isn’t that interested in too-cool-for-film-school showboating.

It’s a perfectly good rockumentary. It may be an even better group therapy session, led by one person’s unfiltered experience down in a hole yet resonating as deeply for anyone else still struggling to lift themselves up. Welcome to the club.

The Gray Man wants to remind you of what an old-school dopamine dump these types of entertainments are, and it has what seems to be the necessary ingredients to do it. Which, to be honest, only makes you wish this was tighter, tauter, tougher, better. It could be. It should be. The movie’s aims and instincts are killer. Its endgame has way too much filler.

while director Olivia Newman (First Match) and screenwriter Lucy Alibar (Beasts of the Southern Wild) retain the book’s breathless, beach-read momentum — sudden violence! love triangles! plot surprises! incredibly photorealistic sketches of shells! — there doesn’t seem to be much of a spark in the engine powering these narrative turns. Can a movie be both hyperventilating and lackluster at the same time?

The doc is a capsule history lesson on an eons-old natural phenomenon. But it’s also the greatest lava-fueled love story ever told, and the fact that those two elements remain as inseparable as the spouses at the center of it all is a testament to how sublime this stranger-than-fiction masterpiece really is.

For something so reliant on dramatic engagement in addition to spectacle and giggles, Love and Thunder feels oddly unengaging; even the love and death aspects often feel like cold transmissions from distant sources.

For all of the painstaking work that went into making this intricate animated feature feel not just handmade but heartfelt, Marcel is a wisp of a wistful film, whether it’s being existentially deep or essentially silly. Most of all, it just feels like a salve.

The movie would hit every bullseye it needed to even without her near-surgical deconstruction of the narcissistic monsters who scream “action” and “cut.” With Cruz’s take on artistic “genius,” however, this satire officially becomes a work of actual genius.

It’s a surprisingly good sports movie that wants little more than to be a surprisingly good sports movie, one that knows it’s working with creaky triumph-of-the-underdog clichés but is willing to do a full-court press to sell them.

It is, in essence, a light, breezy, better-than-average Disney movie that just happens to feature a most-valuable Pixar player, while barely feeling like a Pixar movie at all.

This is a movie that keeps going out of its way to be any kind of blockbuster except an actual Jurassic World movie.

It’s a valentine to a communal gay experience, penned in a way that’s uniquely both insular and inviting.

This is what the work of a visionary filmmaker looks like. Forget the new flesh. Long live the old Cronenberg.

The interactions between the people may seem small in comparison to the wide-open landscapes and rolling hills. In the hands of everyone involved with this moving drama, however, they echo long and loudly nonetheless.

It’s these life-or-death stakes that Happening puts front and center, as it forces viewers to not just confront the stigma associated with abortion — a word, by the way, that’s never uttered in the film — but to immerse themselves in the same dread and paranoia that Anne feels.

What Raimi has done with his contribution, however, is construct not another roller coaster but one hell of a haunted house, one fueled by an abundance of eccentric creativity, imagination, and finely honed chops. The methods he employs to his Madness are what makes this movie stick out, in this or any other universe.

Once you’ve seen this deft blend of genres and tones, all of the inspired laughter and the lumping of throats, you see exactly how Hit the Road fits all of its elements together with remarkable seamlessness.

You wish the movie wasn’t content to be a feature-length meme and truly deserved what Cage is doing with this long, hard look in the fun-house mirror. The Unbearable Weight of Massive Talent is not unbearable by any means. It just should have been so much better.

Sciamma is weaving a spell here, so pure in its emotional resonance that it breaks your heart even as it heals wounds.

Whatever cause you pick, the idea of representing or recreating sex as a narrative device now feels like a relic of the distant past. No one seems to have informed French director Jacques Audiard of this demise, however, and there are moments when you watch Paris, 13th District and wonder if he’s singlehandedly trying to resuscitate the concept of old-fashioned screen shtupping.

A moviegoer has to be a scholar in the now-convoluted cosmology that powers these Potterverse expansion-pack prequels or abandon all hope of understanding a fraction of what’s happening — and even a lot of die-hard Harryheads may find their hippocampus getting seriously taxed while trying to catch up.

While we do not condone the excessive consumption of alcohol, or sneaking spirits and other such beverages into a theater, or any display of public intoxication, we also do not think you should endure Ambulance while being sober.

If it’s not the worst of these films, it’s certainly the most anemic — and even die-hard fans are apt to feel completely drained by all of it.

Apollo 10 1/2 starts off as a fantasy, a family comedy and a loosey-goosey flashback. It exits as a tribute to imagination, which — like so many of Linklater’s best movies — uses something personal as a jumping-off point for something poignant, funny, expansive, and ultimately moving.

As is, The Lost City is less of a lost opportunity than something happy to stick to its middle lane and bide its time.

Come to West’s celebration of the movies’ darker underbelly for the adrenaline rush of sex and violence. Exit it having witnessed something that marks the spot where baser impulses meets artistry, in more ways than one.

The Outfit is a crime thriller made to order, and one that takes pride in how it looks, how things fit on it, the shape it cuts when it moves.

The movie starts out desperately wanting to be E.T. It ends by pretending it’s the second coming of Field of Dreams.

As you find yourself instinctively reviewing those own seemingly insignificant moments in your own life, the ones that you hold so dear, while following this cyber-compassionate movie to its conclusion, it’s almost impossible not to be moved by the long game that the film’s creator is playing.

At its best, The Batman is a helluva tough-guy yarn — an entertaining pulp-fiction epic under the guise of sure-thing blockbuster. At its worst, it’s the cinematic equivalent of a mixtape.

For some reason — maybe it’s because the seminal, ’74 original holds such a special place in so many die-hards’ hearts (this one included), and still feels like such a potent example of channeling primal fear — this latest ransacking of a landmark title feels less like just another killer-versus-final-girl rerun and more like the final straw.

Part intellectual-property barrel-scraping, part pumped-up star vehicle and part fumbling bid for Sony to cross media-revenue streams, Uncharted isn’t the worst attempt to bring a beloved video game to the screen — just the latest bit of evidence that these things are really a zero-sum game.

Death on the Nile has its joys and flaws apart from that Armie factor, but it’s almost like trying to assess whether the appetizer course could have been slightly undercooked while an elephant stampedes over the whole dinner table.

Recommending that someone actually subject themselves to Roland Emmerich’s sci-fi neo-disaster flick, however, is a little like shoving three-month old milk under an unsuspecting person’s nose and inquiring, Does this smell ok? You already know the answer; you just need to share the pain.

Forget the title: Jackass can’t go on forever. Just enjoy one last chance to see these beautiful f*ck-ups do what they do best before they limp and hobble off into the sunset.

For a long stretch, Italian Studies turns this trip down memory-loss lane into a low-wattage livewire, an unpredictable stroll into the unknown. Its hero will slowly, eventually come back around to remembering her life before the reset. The movie itself, however, is unforgettable from the jump.

Yet you have to applaud how boldly this fifth entry tries to flip the bird to the entire rinse-repeat-regurgitate idea of trapping film series in amber, while also delivering you the thrill of the familiar and those dopamine bumps that come with the pang of recognition.

There’s so much wasted potential here, so little sense of how to get across a notion of solidarity in the face of catastrophic danger, and sexism, not in that order.