David Fear

It’s a moving-picturebook, drifting from hazy barrooms to muddy-track brawls to working-class homes and haunts, and with an eye on the cumulative effect of so much vintage cool on display.

All Holland asks here is that viewers contemplate this headline-generating tragedy happening “over there” from the point of view of those within it. After you’ve sat through this devastating film, it’s impossible not to.

You won’t see the title character engage in Krav Maga with a gang of thugs or sprint across rooftops in Marrakesh (we’re assuming they’re saving that for the sequel). But you will witness Squibb step into the spotlight of leading what is technically an action movie and totally own it.

This sequel knows that when you leave childish things behind, you risk leaving key parts of the child’s personality and personal growth as well. It also recognizes that young adulthood is a different game altogether.

Tuesday makes a strong case for death as a natural, if not the most natural part of life. It makes an even stronger case, however, for Julia Louis-Dreyfus being one of the greatest actors working today.

If you know the book, you know the answers regarding the who, what, where and why behind its secrets. If not, know that all will be revealed and, past an investment in Fanning’s character (and an admiration for how she does more with less in terms of a low-key acting style within high-voltage scenes), little will hold your interest.

Like the other Bad Boys movies, this is the cinematic equivalent of exquisitely prepared fast food, empty-calorie entertainment that people love to eat because it tastes good going down.

Your suspension of disbelief may get tested more than a few times as Linklater’s crime comedy shuffles to its ironic happily-ever-afters — ditto your tolerance for self-consciously jaunty scores — yet your faith in Powell as a real-deal leading man who can work miracles is never shaken.

The fact that In a Violent Nature sets up a storytelling style that utilizes highbrow aesthetics while still keeping one foot firmly planted in the genre gutter is what makes this feel like a once-in-generation slasher flick.

To call it the best animated film of the last few years is to undervalue it. Berger’s take on this graphic novel is both a high point of the medium and a reminder of why we go to the movies in the first place. It’s a film lover’s dream come true.

Abbasi isn’t a subtle filmmaker, and his need to provoke sometimes undermines his points; his previous movie, the serial-killer thriller Holy Spider (2022), was a commentary on social misogyny that inadvertently courted the very thing it was trying to criticize. Here, the blunt force works in his film’s favor.

It’s not cynicism but a chuckling curiosity that fuels this sideways parable, which aligns it with Lanthimos’ past work in the most perfect of ways. You can’t say that it’s a movie for everybody. But it takes all kinds.

The result is both exhilarating and exasperating, swinging so wildly all over the map that you may want to pre-emptively wear a neckbrace before viewing.

Say what you will about this grand gesture at filtering Edward Gibbon’s history lessons through a lens darkly, it is exactly the movie that Coppola set out to make — uncompromising, uniquely intellectual, unabashedly romantic (upper-case and lower-case R), broadly satirical yet remarkably sincere about wanting not just brave new worlds but better ones.

The movie may be so scared of being an Auto-Tuned biopic that it settles for simply being out of tune altogether.

Furiosa runs on a high-octane philosophical perspective that finds hope in a hopeless place. Also, a lot of cars go fast and sh*t blows up. It’s a win-win.

What instantly elevates Gasoline Rainbow to the canon of teen hangout movies, several notches below American Graffiti and Dazed and Confused but still trespassing its way into the Pantheon’s foyer, is how well the Ross brothers’ methodology captures the free-floating moment between dwindling childhood and dawning adulthood.

There will be fresh heroes to cheer, fresh villains to hiss at, fresh metaphors about power and corruption and history repeating itself to scratch your chin over. Yet a curious sense of staleness starts to set in even before the first act of director Wes Ball’s entry pits ape against ape.

The idea of doing The Right Stuff of food stuff and treating the rise and fall of empires over a breakfast treat as U.S. History 101 is, on paper, a well-balanced meal. Onscreen, it comes off as a lot of half-baked self-satisfaction that leaves you woozy from the sugar crash.

Congratulations, Gen-Z, you’ve just been handed your new midnight-movie obsession.

A chronicle of a media phenomenon, a reality-TV landmark and a psychological nightmare packaged as entertainment, The Contestant is the type of documentary where you’re aware that what you’re witnessing is 100-percent true, and you still can’t quite wrap your brain around what you’re seeing.

For a film so consumed with hitting something over a net, O’Connor’s work here is practically an ode to performing without the safety of one.

The movie starts off as yet another Kill Bill, et al. clone. Thanks to its star, it at least goes out as something closer to Kill, Bill, Kill!

Turn away from your screens. Go for a walk. Start your own wheat-threshing collective. Anything but suffer through this.

We’re sure this will inevitably be sequeled into oblivion. For now, however, it’s a welcome transfusion of fresh blood into a genre that could definitely use it.

A throwback WWII men-on-a-mission adventure marinated in modern bloodlust and movie references, this particularly pulpy take on a Dad Cinema staple couldn’t be more violent and more derivative of past works. It also couldn’t be more of a blast to watch if you enjoy a certain strain of carbon-dated derring-do mixed with cheeky carnage.

It works far better as a free-floating vibe than a movie, which can be read as a backhanded compliment or a sign of surrender.

Like the young women who we spend nearly two hours with, we also emerge feeling both tinges of empowerment and a palpable sense of deflation.