David Fear

The only time sparks fly are when that restorative tanning bed crackles and sputters.

The fact that it adds an ode to intergenerational storytelling, a parody of time-travel narratives, some oddball left-turns, and a near-transcendent coda that feels very much in line with Kaufman’s body of work — all while still giving the kids what they want — makes this more than a cut above your average rainy-afternoon distraction. It’s really a low-key blast.

The Promised Land is, if nothing else, a nod to both its nation’s and the movies’ past. The feudal warring over unclaimed Jutland territory may be strictly Danish, but the excitement, romance, and awe-inspiring visual spectacle of this melodrama is vintage Hollywood.

There’s a deadening feeling you get watching all of this, as if Argylle’s real revelation is: We’ve cracked the code on how to take a handful of your favorite actors and a surefire ha-ha-bang-bang storyline and leech every single thing out that you usually like about these kinds of things.

That Walker knows how to handle such things without being sensationalistic, as well as tenderly sketching the tension and sensitivity that characterize female friendships at that age, is what keeps the film from being a boozy, sunburnt tragedy.

Tótem is one of those films about death that overflows with life, and it’s a testament to filmmaker Lila Avilés that this gentle drama never collapses under its own weight or lets sorrow fully take the wheel.

What Will & Harper is, at its heart, is a portrait of a friendship and how the fundamentals of a deep and lasting bond doesn’t change even when the people within it do. That alone makes it worth the trip.

It was a singular experience, impossible to replicate and uninterested in being definitive on anything, much the gent at the center of it all.

Kicking off with a barrage of kitschy imagery and an abundance of irony and ecstasy, Devo lets you know that it’s the definitive portrait of an art project by mimicking its subject’s Dada-meets-deadpan-humor aesthetic.

Love Lies Bleeding doesn’t have time for a slow burn. It’s a movie that comes in hot and leaves in a molten blaze of glory.

The first-person passion is genuine. The form its being presented in feels slightly secondhand.

While the dizzying, dazzling cinematography, self-shot under his usual D.P. pseudonym Peter Andrews, demands you pay attention to the technical virtuosity, that gambit (or gimmick — your call) is merely setting the table for something else.

This is a movie that pays tribute to searching for conclusions rather than finding them once and for all, for thinking outside of categories and boxes in search of something more profound.

Samuel has made a movie that imagines a good-hearted sinner slouching toward salvation one desperate measure at a time. But he’s also made a mirror designed to let folks see themselves in this scenario for once.

By the time a final showdown snaps your suspension of disbelief and suggests there are bigger hornet’s nests to kick, The Beekeeper has crept out of the realm of pulpy B-movie thrills and falls just short of being a Bee movie dabbling in deep-state paranoia-mongering.

Most of the student body quivers in Regina’s presence, and the movie seems to tremble in awe of Rapp’s ability to make you think she’s not a Queen Bee but the Queen Bee. Her limits don’t exist. You wish the rest of Mean Girls rose to meet her.

Even if you view this as just another superhero movie, it still feels like a litter’s runt. We’d have been fine if this kingdom stayed lost.

There’s not a bad performance among the central quartet here (Mescal once again proves that he’s a character actor stuck with a matinee idol’s square-jawed mug), but Scott is the one subtly shouldering the storytelling.

It’s a messy movie about messy lives, occasionally in ways you wish it wasn’t. But The Iron Claw is also a story of redemption that’s less about pinning down opponents and much more about breaking cycles.

It’s essentially the Snyder Cut of every science fiction and fantasy touchstone of the past 100 years — a jam-packed, ransacked greatest-hits reel posing as a saga.

It helps that American Fiction has, at its center, someone who gives Monk a keen intelligence, a razor-sharp wit, and a spiky exterior, as well as showing you the perpetually scratched romantic beneath the battle-tested cynic.

It’s all very exciting when it’s not completely exhausting. At least you can’t say Wonka is a generic legacy-property cash grab.

It’s a work that forces you to reexamine how we’ve processed this chapter of history and restores a proper sense of ungraspable horror.

The seeds of our destruction have already been planted by us; they simply need a little water and and sunlight to grow. And the more that Leave the World Behind pokes at that notion, the more you fear that this isn’t a thriller. It could be a documentary with movie stars.

Poor Things never gets dogmatically bogged down — it prefers a swifter, Swiftian attack on bygone mores regarding sex that still don’t feel bygone enough — but whether you dig the manner in which this pilgrim’s progress is presented may be a matter of taste.

What is certain is that Mossfegh’s exploration of secrets, lies and liberation plays well on the page, but works even better on the screen. Good luck in getting this movie out from under your skin.

Moore and Portman inject the movie with wattage, dramatic heft, and a push-pull dynamic associated with immovable objects and irresistible forces. Melton gives May December its slow-burn tragedy.

Yes, this look back at one extraordinary, joyous, painful year in the life is a music documentary. But American Symphony is also a love story, a look at the personal toll that illness takes on everyone involved (at one point, we ride shotgun during an uncomfortably intimate therapy session), a testament to leaps of faith, and a testimony to the idea that living isn’t a passive act even in the best of times, much less the worst.