David Fear

Director David Frankel understands that familiarity may breed contempt in other areas of life, but sequels, especially long-awaited ones to fan favorites, thrive on a light rinse and repeat.

Whoever enlisted Jorma Taccone to direct this deserves a raise, given that the charter member of the Lonely Island understands how to consistently ramp things up to levels of high ridiculousness.

This isn’t really a biopic. This is the Passion of St. Michael, rendered with great fidelity to and emphasis on both Jackson’s undeniable suffering and equally undeniable talent.

Erupcja knows what’s it’s working with, and how to tap into something bigger than itself.

A certain leap of faith is required. But for those believe that movies can get into your head and under your skin in ways that sometimes defy description, and tap into the same transcendent state that great pop music does — that sensation of temporarily floating into some other dizzying realm — this is for you. It isn’t the movie you think you’re walking into. Amen for that.

You enter this unlikely, but undeniably extraordinary take on a video game ready to be spooked. You exit it with the sensation that you’ve just witnessed a waking nightmare perfect for Tokyo commuters and Brooklyn sad dads alike.

Had The Christophers just been a cross-generational punch-up, the sort of flinty showdown designed to throw off pleasurable sparks, you’d still walk away content. It remains a conduit for two of the best performances you’ll see all year. But Soderbergh and his two stars want to concentrate on the embers, what fans them and what keeps them burning.

There’s a sense of sniggering that lurks behind all of the provocation, which thankfully never crosses the line into full 4chan territory. But the fact that so much hinges on the poking of a wound doesn’t automatically make it audacious in a way that’s taboo-breaking. It’s the sort of too-edgy-for-the-mainstream movie that’s not nearly as edgy as it thinks it is.

Yes is easily the most controversial film to hit theaters this year so far. It’s also, for all of the intoxicating rush of Lapid’s excessive style and cup-spilleth-over storytelling, one of the more sobering and vital ones as well.

It’s just that the delivery system designed to get you from one showstopping mano a mano to the next begins to feel so derivative that not even the pulp pleasures of Beetz kicking mondo ass can keep this from feeling like a reheated fast-food binge.

This film isn’t for everyone’s tastes. Then again, neither was Sorry to Bother You‘s mix of critical commentary and absurdist comedy; and, like that film, I Love Boosters takes a wilder, big-picture swerve in its third act. Still, you have to admire the fact that Riley is weaponizing his humor and using it to brusquely jostle your brain by any means necessary.

The film’s title doubles as its own description. And the fact that they damn near pull it off is enough to make you feel you’ve also been awakened from a long, deep sleep in which you were forced to settle for large, loud, cine-extravaganzas that forgot there’s supposed to be a human factor in any of it. Rise and shine, folks. You’ve got something to actually see here.

It’s a devastating look at paternal love and resilience, which respectfully follows this grieving father (and several others like him) as he refuses to give up.

You can’t say that Gyllenhaal hasn’t gone for broke with The Bride!, and the more you watch the actors give life to the central idea of a meeting of scarred bodies and equal minds, the more you feel like you’re watching something not just perversely over-the-top but personal.

This seventh chapter just seems to be exploiting our affection for the Scream team’s history and thinking die-hards will simply go see anything with the name slapped on it.

If nothing else, How to Make a Killing is an abject lesson in how to hire the right person to salvage your movie.

There are better adaptations of Wuthering Heights, and there are far, far worse adaptations of Wuthering Heights. Yet you will certainly not find a hornier version of this material than Fennell’s fast-and-loose spin on the torrid tale of Heathcliff and Catherine, childhood pals turned paramours who can never truly be together and genuinely can’t keep their hands off each other. It may in fact be the horniest literary adaptation ever made.

Anyone who’s ever wondered what a rom-com collab between Nora Ephron and Tom of Finland might look like now has a definitive answer to that question.

It’s moments of blunt, borderline-brutal honesty coming directly from the source that make this whole endeavor such a necessary counterpoint to all of the mythology that’s sprung up around Love ... [But t]here are a number of questionable choices that the doc makes in terms of aesthetics.

No tears go by on Marianne’s part as she reminisces, though you’re a stronger person than we are if you don’t choke up at the documentary’s closing number.

Seeds is, at the abundant heart of it all, a work of protest art and political activism through sheer poetry. Attention must be paid.

New director Nia DaCosta — the sort of filmmaker who can handle both a continuation of the racially charged Candyman mythology and a radical take on Henrik Ibsen’s Hedda Gabler — brings pints of fresh blood to the proceedings, as well as a keen eye for compositions and an inherent sense of how to sustain tension.

The movie isn’t just a paean to a pioneer spirit. It’s equally a testament to the actor playing her.

All of this is presented with Director Park’s usual eye for extraordinary compositions and the occasional baroque flourish — dig that shot from the bottom of a boilermaker, as it’s being consumed! — but rest assured his tongue is resting comfortably in his cheek.

Alex is neither an excuse for Arnett to crack jokes at will nor part of a tradition of funny people bending themselves into Bikram Yoga positions to be taken seriously. It’s merely a portrait of a guy trying to find his way back, one confessional free-form monologue at a time, to who he is after being adrift in a sea of existential ennui.

You may feel, with its immersive 3D set pieces and screensaver imagery blown up to IMAX proportions, that you’re entering a bold new world. But transportive is not the same as transcendent. The piles of ash here looks and sounds phenomenal. What you would not give to feel some actual fire burning behind all of this.

It’s the sort of performance that feels like early Pacino or Dustin Hoffman, all twitches and vibrations and seeming like he’s in a constant state of motion even when standing still. And it fuses so well with what we, the viewer, think we know about Chalamet that it begins to blur the boundary in the best possible way.

What initially seems like a series of cryptic aside soon turns into a bigger-picture revelation about what Filho has been chasing all along: the passage of time, and how it never really heals all wounds. That’s not really a secret. But it is a point that bears repeating, especially when its echoed in a movie as graceful and gratifying as this one.

Hard to ding something for wanting to be a cult rom-com so badly, especially when it’s so well-acted.

Zodiac Killer Project starts as an autopsy of a fail, and ends up dismantling the subgenre via a sort of cinematic jujitsu. You leave happy that Shackleton’s project ended up crashing and burning.

There are a few decent numbers left. Erivo still makes you feel like she owns this role. But for better or worse, For Good mostly feels like a mere reprise of the first film’s candy-colored cacophony, only with the volume slightly turned down.

Sirāt...is not for everyone. But it is the sort of overwhelming cinematic experience and undeniable work of sound and vision that could be life-changing for those ready to receive it.

You spend a good deal of Keeper forming theories about what’s going on, keenly sifting through clues in the hopes of possible answers. Once everything is revealed, however, you wish you’d gone back that previous ignorance that now seems like a state of bliss. To say that Tatiana Maslany is a saving grace here is obvious, given that she’s rescued a few projects from utter disaster.

While it has its share of highlights...there’s a lot of celebrity malaise and hot air masquerading as insight here.

It’s a tribute to everyday people of another era that walks its own poetic path, content in the knowledge that one unremarkable person’s journey is remarkable enough to deserve such cinematic treatment.

For all of the multiplex-friendly fun Wright’s conjuring with this over-the-top spin on dystopian sci-fi blockbusters, the prevailing feeling here is dread. Most filmmakers would have diluted the grit and genuine sense of moral free-fall. Wright doubles the dosage. Every adrenaline rush comes with a chaser of low rage and simmering despair.

What makes Trier’s movies so rich, so exhilarating, so vital, is the way he and his longtime screenwriter Eskil Vogt pitch these stories somewhere between a saga and an anecdote, fit-to-burst with lifelike textures, details and detours.

Even those who think Die My Love courts indulgence and incoherence to its own detriment — there are times when the movie itself threatens to fall apart and blow up the devices projecting it as collateral damage — will gape in awe at how Lawrence makes them feel this person coming apart at the seams. This mother makes what the star did in the equally provocative Mother seem like child’s play. She’s completely unhinged and loving it.

It’s really a comedic road movie at heart, with as much yuks over a mismatched pair trying to get along as yucks involving the goopy innards of cosmic mastodons. Finally, the Predator cinematic-universe remake of Midnight Run that no one knew they, er, needed?

Nouvelle Vague is as much a testament to being young, idealistic and a cinephile — full of opinions, drunk on your own taste, and madly in love with the movies — as it is a making-of recounting.

The question posed by this impressive, if somewhat overheated take on a theater-canon staple is not, in the end, “What curse is it that makes everything I touch turn ludicrous and mean?” It’s more like: Why kill when you can overkill?

What starts off as a tribute turns into an autopsy of a long marriage as seen by the kids who witnessed the best and worst of it, done with humor, anger, hindsight, and empathy. Then it makes a hard left and examines the way that legacies, even ones with the best intentions, have a way of shaping us and sometimes setting us back and always, always leaving us with lessons to repeat or refute.

Even before an ending designed to avoid resolution and cause moviegoers to stifle screams of “Wait, seriously?” this well-intentioned look at how close we are to the brink of extinction is the cinematic equivalent of an unexploded ordnance. For something so blessed with timeliness and talent, it leaves you feeling like you’re buried in a hovel of disappointment.

You’re never sure which truth is out there, exactly, in Lanthimos’ caustic, chilling, and occasionally chuckle-inducing poke in the eye. You just acknowledge that no one seems to find one we can all agree on.

What Cooper has given audiences here is way more compelling than a live-action greatest-hits compilation.

There’s a whole other movie happening within Good Fortune‘s attempt to Aesop-fable its way to some moral about a modest life being a more fulfilling one even if you’re forced to live in your car. And when Reeves gives you a glimpse of that story, in which someone truly learns that humanity is both painful and blissful in equal measures, and anchors it all with a truly divine turn, well — you feel fortunate that get to witness that.

It’s during this last act that It Was Just an Accident becomes a truly remarkable parable about empathy, mercy, righteousness, regret, and unfulfilled rage.

Portraits of great men given the movie-star treatment usually accentuate the positive. Linklater finds it more interesting to look at a self-sabotaging artist’s greatest misses. It’s a tribute that’s really a cautionary tale.

Ballad of a Small Player truly puts all of it chips on its lead, and while that faith doesn’t make up for a lot of the ridiculous twists and overplayed hands leading up to a climactic streak, it’s still a smart bet.

Some might qualify If I Had Legs I’d Kick You as a comedy, albeit one brimming with barely contained rage, while others might describe as a horror movie. Either way, it’s the kind of film that makes you want to call your own mother and apologize.

It takes a lot of hard work and the perfect alignment of movie stars to make something this god-awful.

It’s a movie that stumbles every so often, overplays its hand numerous time, and relies on an oddball true-story premise and 1000-watt star power to pave over some of the rougher spots. It would also give you its coat if you needed it without asking, and the big takeaway from Roofman, we’d argue, is its emphasis not on sympathy for the “devil” here but a palpable sense of empathy for everyone involved. Given the scarcity of this particular quality today, that’s no small feat.

Look, it’s not like Tron: Ares, the third entry in this film series that now spans four decades, doesn’t have a few things going for it.

As [Murphy] proved in Oppenheimer, his silences can speak volumes, and some of Steve‘s best moments simply involve you watching him think.

Peck has long cratfed impeccable, politically charged fictions, docs, and docudramas, whether it’s his 2000 biopic on Patrice Lumumba or his peerless portrait of James Baldwin (the aforementioned I Am Not a Negro). With this latest magnum opus, the Haitian filmmaker has given us not just an invaluable, iris-out look at our present moment but the scariest movie of 2025 by a wide margin.

It’s the work of a young filmmaker. But it’s also very much the work of a genuine filmmaker, bursting with creativity and refining their vision in real time. To quote another member of this cineaste’s clan: Attention must be paid.

The less enamored of Eleanor the Great you become, however, the more and more thankful you are for the presence of June the Magnificent. There’s a lot of joie de vivre she injects into even the most morose moments, and Squibb knows exactly how to use spoonfuls of sugar to help the regret, the side-eye snark, and the heartache go down. The film’s just good enough. She’s great.

At one point, a character is forced to stand in front of an automatic football launcher and take a series of pigskins to the cranium, each of which is shot at him with increasing speed. And by the end of this mess, you’re left thinking: I now know exactly how that guy felt.

There are many reasons that 1999 is considered a banner year for American cinema. This attempt to revisit the type of fanciful, footloose and fancy-twee storytelling that helped characterize that cultural moment is a big swing, and an even bigger miss.

In its sprawling attempt to partially wrap its arms around the Great-Step-Backward Age we find ourselves in, One Battle After Another shares a slight kinship with another shoot-the-moon auteur work of recent vintage: Eddington. Ari Aster’s film stared directly into the abyss and, shuddering, worried about how we could or should fight back. Anderson’s humanistic masterpiece of a movie says: You fight it with love. That’s the end game. That’s how you retain your decency and sanity. That’s the only way you protect the future, and change it. That’s how you live to battle another day.

Spinal Tap II: The End Continues is the sequel that many of us have waited for, if not exactly the sequel we wanted. It’s amusing rather than hilarious, gently ribbing rather than gutbusting.

Despite the mix of succession-focused handwringing and a lot people busily running around, extremely little actually happens in Downton Abbey: The Grand Finale — certainly not enough to justify a third feature.

It’s neither del Toro’s best nor his worst, but this feels like the movie he was born to make, and the one he would have died trying to get done.

Christy is a decent movie, and a way better proof-of-concept regarding Sweeney’s willingness to go the distance for a project.

Everyone seems to be having a blast, and the filmmaker knows how to take both the ensemble he’s assembled and his congregation of Knives Out fans — call us Blanc-heads — to church, literally and figuratively.

Hamnet has managed to make the lines “goodnight, sweet prince” somehow sting more than ever, but it leaves you in a state of emotional bliss.

Is this moving-picture love letter overly sentimental, sloppy to a fault, and slightly more affectionate toward its posthumous subject than a basket of puppies high on laughing gas? Yes. Does that mean that, in its own way, it perfectly mirrors Candy’s own tendency to overdo it and still make you like him, really, really like him? Also yes.

Any argument that one doesn’t need a new spin on the Douglas-Turner black comedy is rendered more or less moot by the way [McNamara] sets up Cumberbatch and Colman with such gleefully profane, razor-sharp barbs.

Caught Stealing is a decent wild ride through the past, filled with enough memory-bank fodder and hairpin turns to keep anyone engaged.

A portrait of a sycophant as a pure, unbridled sociopath, Lurker understands the relationship between fame and fandom all too well.

You’ll still spend close to two hours wondering whether Splitsville wants you to walk away thinking that you’ve seen something semi-sweet or almost irredeemably sour. The key is recognizing how satisfying things feel when they somehow manage to split the difference.

The way that Qualley brings her star presence and her chops to Honey O’Donoghue, however, feels unique. You’re used to seeing people in neo-noirs do their variations on Humphrey Bogart and Lauren Bacall’s line readings; no one has managed to fuse those icons’ respective personae into one role and make it feel completely their own. It’s truly a great sync-up of performer and part.

It’s one of the best films of the year, full stop. But now it’s both invaluable and something of a warning for many of us on the shape of things to come.

The universal rule of sequels dictates that you give viewers another helping of the same thing yet somehow make it different, the sort of koan that only makes sense to lifelong Zen masters and studio suits. Yet, against the odds, the creators of this continuation have managed to do more than just produce a carbon copy with a new number after the title.

Fixed should have been, by any measure, the fix we needed in terms of balls-out hilarity about neurotic, sex-crazed creatures, or even just a parable from an animation godhead about humans being just as beholden to animal instincts as our four-legged friends. Instead, we get a wildly uneven, totally obvious, and often painfully unfunny 80 minutes.

This War of the Worlds isn’t bad or even so-bad-it’s-good. It’s a secret third thing, a hodgepodge of shoddy CGI and dead-eyed reaction shots from Ice Cube that make you feel like you can identify individual brain cells mid-death cycle.

This is a tale that’s carefully crafted as much as told, with hints hiding in plain sight and surreal touches that add more to the vibe than the momentum. But you never feel like you’re in the hands of someone who doesn’t know exactly what he’s doing.

It’s bone-chilling romantic cringe-comedy, in the form of a public nightmare. And for a split second, a movie so dedicated to getting under horror fans’ skin truly succeeds in making you want to crawl out of yours.

For the first half hour, Neeson’s reboot of The Naked Gun series is easily one of the most hilarious things to hit theaters in ages.

The rule for sequels is: give them the same, only different. Happy Gilmore 2 adheres to this concept beautifully, along with doling out enough blatant fan service to choke a one-eyed alligator. (R.I.P., Morris.)

No one would consider Oh, Hi! a failure. But you’ll be tempted to say byyyyyeeeeee more than once before this couple’s final bow.

There’s undoubtedly better adventures on the way for the Four in future endeavors, and this should truly be viewed as a first step to making them a major deal in the MCU. But to say their introduction is fantastic would be pushing it.

It’s the sensation that you’re watching something that’s sloppy, overthought, undercooked and can’t decide whether it wants to honor the original (it fails), add to both the in-house lore and the longstanding genre tropes of the slasher canon (it does not), or some combo of both (two missed opportunities for the price of one).

It’s faint praise, even in the post-MCU era of the genre, to say that Superman is a solid superhero film; the caveat is hiding in plain sight. What Gunn has pulled off is something more complicated, more interesting, and far tougher: He’s given us a Superman movie that actually feels like a living, breathing comic book.

Deadwyler is what makes 40 Acres feel like there’s something special happening here. The script has brains. Her Hailey has heart and soul. She gives us the postapocalyptic hero we deserve.

It’s a new chapter in a saga, yet like its characters who’ve been practicing the art of war since Sun Tzu coined the term, the sequel somehow feels ancient and a little creaky.

So why the hell does this feel so generic, so by-the-numbers, so instantly forgettable? The whole thing resembles the blockbuster version of a readymade, assembled from various, recognizable spare parts and elevated only by virtue of its name.

Sorry, Baby is a movie with a trauma at its center, but it’s not a trauma drama. It’s about living with such things and still going on with your life. And the manner in which Victor presents this narrative, with such verve and confidence and tenderness and pitch-black humor, defies easy description. It’s simply an amazing display of someone knowing how to get their voice and vision across.

The overbaked, underwhelming, narratively restless movie itself is 0.0 percent watchable.

It’s Pixar’s E.T., played out in reverse.

Kelson ushers in a more meditative tone for this entry, which reveals that it is, among other things, a coming-of-age story. Yet this swerve into more emotional territory doesn’t dampen the tension or the terror that Boyle remains an expert at conjuring up; if anything, it acts as a countermelody to the genre aspects.

On the surface, this may sound like a nice, trashy little diversion. We can confirm the “trashy” part, and you know that any time you give Moore the chance to either weep, become enraged or, in a best case scenario, do both at once, it’s going to reap some sort of dividends.

Come for the most impressive, lustrous car that a gajillion-dollar budget can buy. The reason to stay, however, is the driver.

This may be the first film in which mutual attraction is commodified by cold, hard business talk.

Debate all you want about whether this movie actually teaches you how to train a dragon. What this movie is actually trying to accomplish, beyond a shadow of a doubt, is how to train their audiences to keep buying the same thing over, and over, and over again.

Hiddleston’s soft shoe gives you a glimpse of how the ordinary can become extraordinary. The movie surrounding it, however, seems determined to make the extraordinary seem as bumper-sticker simple and banal as humanly possible.

At its best, this tale of a young female assassin seeking vengeance and wreaking havoc is one more chance to see expertly choreographed mayhem. At its worst, it plays like a Wick-ipedia sub-entry ambitiously pumped up to main-event status. Let’s just say the balance tilts toward the latter more than you’d like.

Imagine a feature-length episode of Succession that treated the final season’s villain, GoJo CEO Lukas Matsson, as its main character and then multiplied him by four, and you’d have something like Mountainhead, Jesse Armstrong‘s caustic, corrosive satire of Silicon Valley mega-royalty run amuck.

The filmmakers want to jolt folks, for sure. But they also want to bring you to a place where the emotional after effects of that juddering linger long after the jump scares have faded away.

Hardcore fans may get their kicks from seeing Macchio and Chan together. Everyone else will just feel like tempted to sweep the legs of everyone trying to cash in on a recently revived franchise and wring it dry.

You leave impressed that Anderson can still manage to do what his does best without succumbing to self-parody here. The blueprint may be familiar. But it’s still a pretty foolproof plan.

The impression is that you’ve just seen a great New York movie, with a great star turn at the core of it, and yet still feels like something’s missing. It’s ultimately an excuse to watch Washington go HAM.

If there is personal expression abound in Stewart’s debut, there’s also precious little ego. Nor are the tics that too often prick or sink the work of actors feeling out what it’s like to call the shots.

The overall lack of subtlety suits the age Aster is taking to task, though it also makes everything feel slightly wobbly on its feet. The viewpoint is both-sides misanthropy. Jonathan Swift has some notes.

Mission: Impossible — Final Reckoning feels like a conclusion to 30 years worth of proving that yes, you still can conjure up a certain vintage strain of Hollywood magic. It also feels like the end of an era.

On paper, the endeavor sounds like the equivalent of a B-sides and rarities compilation. On screen, it plays like a sucker-punch masterpiece.

The whole of Friendship isn’t as attractive as the sum of its disparate parts, and you wonder if a more concise, focused version of this look at the self-consciousness of dudes trying desperately to bond wouldn’t have hit better.

There’s a true-crime aura that hangs over every scene like a shroud — an unshakable sense that you’re not watching a Western so much as a ghost story.

The primary goal of this entry is to establish a new team of heroes. The secondary aim is to stop what’s undeniably been a downward spiral. It succeeds in that respect at the very least. Don’t call it a return to form so much as a much-needed, extremely welcome return to a winning formula.

The Shrouds is, for all of its hallucinatory imagery and airport-read twists and turns, a blatantly personal film — arguably Cronenberg’s most personal since 1986’s The Fly.

Only a hair overlong at two hours, this is the kind of disposable airport spy thriller that Hollywood rarely makes anymore, and which generally plays fine, maybe best, on cable over a lazy Saturday afternoon.

As with Landon’s equally ludicrous Happy Death Day 2U (2019), the fun comes from seeing exactly how deftly and stylishly the director can pull these things off; it’s like watching a magician successfully perform a trick that you know isn’t a real illusion so much as an act of misdirection, extreme co-ordination and a specific set of well-honed skills.

The only agenda in Warfare, in other words, is to give you a sense of not just what happened but how everything felt while it was happening. A tall order, to be sure, but one that Garland, Mendoza, their cast and the crew pull off shockingly well.

Regardless of whether you’ve ever played Minecraft or not, you’ll recognize the kind of endless ribbing, nudging, winking knowingness on display here; this is steeped in the self-aware absurdism of, say, those Old Spice commercials that aim to confuse and confound in the name of moving products off store shelves. A Minecraft Movie is essentially a 101-minute version of that.

Like a particularly concise, purposefully elliptical short story, The Woman in the Yard quickly milks this beguiling, WTF-is-going-on-here? scenario for all the dread it’s worth, while not necessarily being in a hurry to fill folks in on the full 411 regarding this sticky situation.

It has homicidal fantasy critters, lots of sharp and pointy horns, and absolutely no teeth.

[Siegel and McGehee] get that this isn’t just a story about a woman bonding with a dog — it’s a tale of loss and sorrow that inherently knows such heavy feelings aren’t confined to a single species.

It still feels like you’ve wandered into a Mob-themed animatronic presentation at some amusement park — the Disney Hall of Famous Mafia Bosses — and dutifully watch as landmark moments in crime history are checked off and re-enacted. Take away the De Niro Con: The Movie bona fides, and you’ve got nothing but a fancy Discovery special.

This Snow White may not be the worst live-action adaptation of an animated touchstone, though it’s a strong contender for its blandest. The movie does earn points as a bedtime story, however, because it will definitely put you to sleep.

It’s a bad movie, full stop. Which is a pity, because the pedigree looks great on paper.

It’s a great espionage thriller, and an even better scenes-from-a-marriage drama. Ian Fleming would love this. So would Ingmar Bergman.

There are surreal and absurdist touches throughout Nyoni’s second feature, and like the Zambian filmmaker’s awe-inspiring debut, I Am Not a Witch (2017), it proves she has a perfect sense of how to blend no-nonsense realism with its more magical counterpart.

Bong is a consummate cinematic craftsman, virtually incapable of creating a dull frame. What’s happening within those impeccable compositions, however, feels like its suffering from an overabundance of business and undernourished storytelling.

The dramatized version simply floats, roils and plods forward as if being tugged dutifully along, ticking off checkpoints along the way. That IRL ending still reads as miraculous. Yet the whole thing feels still feels starved for creative oxygen.

It’s content to be just one long, sick joke without a punchline, designed to occasionally punctuate a stylishly nihilistic P.O.V. with a lot of OMG moments. You may love it or hate it.

There is no single category that you can slot Rankin’s mix of a wink, a nudge and an embrace into, so we guess “lo-fi masterpiece” will have to do until a better option comes along.

An extended rom-com meet-cute that just happens to have monsters lurking about, The Gorge works best when its just the two leads staring at each through binoculars, bantering via sketch-pad scrawlings and letting their flirtations organically morph something more intimate.

It’s as if someone had gently ladled a teaspoon of artificial political-thriller flavor over a substandard Marvel movie, being oh-so-careful as to not upset corporate overlords or the status quo. A better title might have been Captain America: Business as Usual.

Paddington in Peru sticks to its franchise’s overarching script, delivering exactly the kind of affection, silliness and gentle heartstring-plucking you now expect from the series.

Parthenope wants to be a feminine epic. It’s really just an update of those Bardot arthouse skin flicks, Italian style. But it can take solace in easily being an early contender for the horniest movie of the year.

Love may hurt, sure. But it’s not nearly as painful as being forced to watch a great actor stuck in a bad movie.

It’s decent if often frustrating debut, buoyed by a star that’s shouldering a lot of the needlessly complicated narrative burden. We can’t wait to see what Tøndel’s fourth film looks like.

What gives this pulpy creation such a savory flavor and lasting bite isn’t just the puncturing of romantic clichés cemented 24 frames per second over decades, or the low-hanging-fruit pokes at society’s reliance on technology taken to extremes. It’s the way it makes you suddenly start questioning the whole notion of finding your soulmate if, given the opportunity, you can just purchase them and pay on installment.

Directed by Sundance veteran Ira Sachs, Peter Hujar’s Day takes an extended conversation between talented, creative friends and elevates it to the realm of both first-rate voyeurism and the second-hand high of reliving a lost era.

Buckley hasn’t had a million portraits sketched of him, much less to this degree. The singularity of It’s Never Over, along with the access and the candor, makes up for a lot here.

Unfortunately, Malkovich thrusting in a metallic space suit may indeed be the sole takeaway of this attempt at a social thriller.

It’s a music doc that takes its music-doc responsibilities seriously.

What’s remarkable is how [Torres] never overplays anything, or goes for easy histrionics and rending of garments even when the movie itself becomes heavy-handed in the back half.

What you’re ultimately left with is the typical catch-and-release horror template that occasionally sags under the weight of its own ambitions, as well as one that, having exhausted the idea’s potential early on, simply limps to the finish line.

Leigh and all of his cast are so on-point here, so dedicated to breathing life into these everyday people, that every time he cuts away from Pansy and allows us unfettered glimpses into their lives outside her sphere of influence, you want to follow them into their own two-hour movies.

This sequel tries to expand into tonier genre horizons and gin up a sort of Den-iverse mythology, yet simply ends up playing tourist in smaller, more previously colonized territory.

For a movie that continually asks its main character to recognize where dreams end and delusions begin, you wish it knew when to heed its own lessons.

It’s all a very by-the-books music biopic, which the sole exception of which species is singing about manufacturing miracles and angels contemplating his fate.

It’s not just that Kidman shows you this woman’s sexual fulfillment — it’s the way she gives you everything happening around it, in the most intimate and telling of ways. And that’s why this feels like the most naked performance this A-list star has ever given, with the physical exposure being the least vulnerable aspect of it all.

While there’s a fine line between loving a movie and being slavishly devoted to it, Eggers thankfully never crosses it. Rather, he molds the man-meets-vampire, things-go-awry story into his own rigorous type of horror filmmaking, and comes up with something stylish but not slick, feral but not overly fussy in its attempts to channel that old-fashioned folkloric feeling.

What the true legacy of Jenkins’ addition to the catalog may end up being, however, is a template for honoring the past while still managing to move things a few steps ahead. The circle of life, indeed.

What you’re left with is something that wants the brand-name recognition of being a Spider-Man project by proxy, but also wants to give you an overly violent, extremely gory vigilante movie that, despite featuring Kraven fighting a weak-tea CGI version of another well-known Marvel villain, has nothing to do with those films. Congratulations on failing twice, we guess?

What the filmmaker and his collaborators have given us is something truly special: a radical work of art that channels a tsunami of radical empathy. And it couldn’t feel more necessary or vital at this moment in time.

It’s not as gamechanging as that snare drum that opens “Like a Rolling Stone.” But it still feels damn near electric.

There is a sense that it could have gone farther out and pushed even more boundaries, especially before tying everything back up with a “happy” ending that feels mostly but not quite completely earned. But there’s still a bark and a bite here in the way that its allowing a specific strain of too-often stifled female rage to really bloom.

At it’s core, however, The Order is really a horror film, made all the more frightening because the monsters who live on these Everytown, USA, Maple Streets seem way too prevalent at the present moment.

Ultimately, The End is a cult movie that, until it eventually finds its cult, will be more admired than loved. It isn’t the last word on the pending apocalypse. It simply has the fortitude to go out singing.

No one wants to rock the camakau too much here, and the overall sentiment seems to be something like Sequel 101: You loved the first movie, so here’s a second movie that’s a lot like the first movie. This is the good news if that’s what you’re after. If not, well: It’s one hour and 40 minutes.

You will not necessarily be enlightened, empowered, or enthralled by all of Gladiator II. But you will almost assuredly be entertained.

Yes, The Piano Lesson hits a few bum notes. Its melody nonetheless remains intact.

For many of us staring down the next four years, the idea that a community can come together to take on the rising tides couldn’t be more welcome or needed.

Fans have been patiently waiting for the screen version of Wicked for decades now, and it’s safe to say that their faith will be rewarded. It’s also obvious that as much as this is still a tale of two witches, each blessed with equally beautiful voices, there’s a very clear standout here that’s lifting this occasionally leaden jazz-hands-extravaganza up to higher ground.

Kapadia, as masterful a filmmaker as they come, is happy to let viewers wonder where these stories will intersect, and how they’ll collide into or off of each other.

To say that this horror movie hits all of the marks it needs to hit would be just south of blasphemous. The manner in which Grant both grounds the material and lobs it into over-the-top territory, however, is simply divine.

Bird may be the most divisive movie of Andrea Arnold’s career, and we’re including the gloriously feral 2011 adaptation of Wuthering Heights. But like everything else she’s done to date, it’s also rewarding in unexpected ways — the sort of film that taps into endless reservoir of empathy as much as it shocks you with extremities.

It’s not Blitz’s sensory-overload sturm und drang that leaves you gasping for breath. It’s the sneak attack.

On the page, the limitations somehow feel groundbreaking and expansive. Onscreen, the film somehow reduces the same notion of one angle/one thousand different moments to little more than a blinkered gimmick.

As for whether this is the last film Eastwood gets the opportunity to make, the jury is still out on that. But you can’t accuse him of resting on his laurels. Artists half his age couldn’t come up with a cinéma du airport read this intriguing.

What Eisenberg accomplishes overall here, however, is beyond measure. It’s the real deal.

Easily one of the best and most modestly brilliant piece of nonfiction filmmaking you’ll see this year.

Do not come to Conclave in search of some divine messages about power, corruption and lies percolating within a sacred space. Just embrace it for being the type of gobsmacking, pope-up-the-jams entertainment that will have you genuflecting with gratitude over its over-the-top ridiculousness.

Why does this Last Dance feel so impersonal, so rote, so step-by-step predictable?

Please welcome to the stage Anne Kendrick, Genre Auteur!

What this sequel really seems to be suggesting is that there is nothing scarier than an unstable pop star in 2024, poised on the edge of a public meltdown captured by a million cellphones and consumed by scandal-hungry social-media addicts. When it comes to possessing your soul, a supernatural demon can’t hold a candle to show business.

The writer-director gives these unsung, oft-judged heroes of labor empowerment via empathy and representation.

We Live in Time is an actor’s movie, by necessity if not always by design. You know where the destination ends before the movie’s even begun. Pugh and Garfield make the endgame worth the journey, no matter where you place it.

As something that seeks to confuse and delight you in equal measures, this is seven courses of absurdity, served with a side of tongue in cheek from a trio who know what they’re doing, even if you’re not always sure what that is.

Sometimes all of these little plastic avatars are a needless distraction from what is a compelling origin story by any measure. Other times, the LEGO-ification of it all provides a welcome distraction from some fairly cut-and-dried Music Documentary 101 business, with Piece by Piece putting a formally unique spin on a very familiar, if slightly incomplete arc.

Ronan can’t save The Outrun from its limitations as a drama, or from its worst stack-the-deck instincts. But she does lift this film up and infuse the storytelling with a genuine sense of what it means to try living one day at a time for the rest of one’s life.

What do you get when you cross a discordant riff on a fan favorite with a failed prestige project? Twice as much deux-deux.

This tale of self-involved millennials, a mystery machine, and a whole mess of purposefully mistaken identities is the kind of mashup of high-concept horror and ham-fisted satire that mistakes complicated for complex and a pile-up of confusing plot twists for storytelling.

Elliott is a recognizable archetype. Thanks to Park’s writing and Stella’s ridiculously charismatic performance, she’s anything but a generic one.

What truly makes this a movie worth searching out is the way writer-director Bernardo Britto’s sideways take on carpe diem sets the stage for its lead to rage, and somehow never lets the high-concept premise eclipse the performance at the center of it.

It’s all at the service of the Clooney-Pitt Show, and credit Wolfs for reminding you how fun the sight of these two guys running around while shooting guns, looking late-middle-aged cool and cracking wise, remains. This used to be a typical Friday night at the movies, and now it’s a rarity.

The Substance won’t reset society’s fixation on youth or cure Hollywood’s sexist ills. It will, however, remind you that when you’re chasing your past by any means necessary, you are always your own worst enemy.

It truly is a solid match of moviemaker and source material. Yet none of this would work as well as it does without Craig.

It’s not just that they don’t make movies like this anymore — of course they don’t! — so much as no one bothers to tell these types of sprawling narratives with this level of storytelling, chops, nerve and verve.

Thanks to Jacobs’ extraordinary ear for how people use words to wound and mask, and a holy trinity that knows not only how to speak those words but how to complement one another’s disparate performing styles, His Three Daughters ends up being nothing less than the single best movie you’ll likely see this year.

Maybe our expectations were too high. Maybe we should have said his name — Burton Burton Burton — three times, and the filmmaker who did that beloved original would reappear, grinning maniacally and giving us something a bit less undead and a bit more alive.

It’s all admittedly funny and nerve-jangling, with the comedians mugging and the pressure mounting and the chances of Michaels’ dream of a show “made for the generation who grew up on TV, by the generation who grew up on TV” actually airing slipping away minute by ticked-off minute.

You don’t have to know about Erice’s own backstory to appreciate this mournful, seeking work about life, art, loss, and the space where they all overlap.

There’s so many sharp jabs here, so much well-honed Hitchcockian 101 technique on display, that you can’t dismiss this exercise in horror as social-rage sugar pill.

It doesn’t take long to realize that what was meant to be a franchise-starter is, unlike its hero, permanently DOA.

Rather than telling you how young women are affected by this, Patton and Rae show you. And to watch one of the interviewees go for being a joyous, giddy, chatty child to being a slightly older, more distant and jaded tween is heartbreaking.

Does it tick off the boxes of what we’ve come to expect from this series? Yes. Does it add up to more than The Chris Farley Show of Alien movies? Well … let’s just say no one may be able to hear you scream in space, but they will assuredly hear your resigned sighs in a theater.

Look at it through the lens of a dual star vehicle that isn’t afraid to sacrifice coherence in the name of cheap thrills, and this bird only slightly sings off-key.

Good One is, among its infinite attributes, an ode to a style of filmmaking that appears to be humble, yet still manages to be devastating and humanistic to its very core. Mostly, it’s just a great f*cking movie, full stop.

Trap is… well, you wouldn’t say it’s good...It is undeniably camp, however, and we look forward to attending one of those midnight reclamation-revival screenings à la Showgirls, where everyone screams the dialogue and dresses like Hartnett’s normcore Norman Bates, a decade from now.

War Game concentrates a lot on the “how to” part. But it also says a lot about how eerily easy and how horrifyingly relatable the “why” of it all is.

If nothing else, Damon and Affleck’s Beacon Street Wild Ride reminds you that movie stars plus car crashes, divided by gunshots and laughs, was part of a regular, balanced American-cinema breakfast.

In a genre that runs the gamut from A Hard Day’s Night to Can’t Stop the Music, filmmaker Rich Peppiatt’s gonzo take on the band’s story — titled, simply, Kneecap — falls somewhere between those two markers of quality; the group may be groundbreaking, but this recounting of their struggle to achieve fame, glory, and inhuman levels of intoxication sticks to an extremely familiar template.

You can add Sean Wang’s Dìdi to the short list of films that fine-tune the personal into the universal, and turn a magic-mirror reflection of its creator into a shared wavelength.

The Deadpool movies were once a much-needed counterpoint to all those dead-serious MCU sagas. They still act like the foul-mouthed class clown in the back row, but now it’s just more white noise dressed in red, yellow and black.

Be warned that it is a gateway drug. It’s also the sort of movie that makes you understand why people fall in love with movies in the first place.

Unlike most revisits of previous box-office hits, it doesn’t rely on nostalgia for the original. It does, however, display a serious soft spot for a bygone era of moviegoing, when two photogenic stars, a simple high-concept premise and the promise of digitally rendered chaos was enough to put millions of asses in seats.

A prison drama less interested in crime and punishment than in catharsis and the creative power of theater, director Greg Kwedar’s chronicle of how the Rehabilitation Through the Arts program affects its participants wants you to focus on the humanity on display over everything else.

It’s an unabashedly style-over-substance take on a particular type of modern horror story. This is less a serial-killer thriller than a feature-length nightmare vibe.

Given the talent involved, Fly Me to the Moon should be the stratospheric answer to our summer-movie prayers. Instead, it can barely get off the ground.

While there’s nothing on the level of Pearl‘s climactic monologue or credit-roll close-up, Goth still turns this revenge-of-the-final-girl parable into superior flashback pulp.

This is a movie that doesn’t just heart the Eighties. It actually wishes it still were the Eighties, casting a fond glance to a simpler, more star-driven blockbuster era. Two hours later, however, and the thrill of getting this particular banana in your tailpipe feels like the most distant of memories.

You can’t say it’s unambitious, any more than you could call it coherent, and the result is less Dances With Wolves Redux and more Palms on Faces.

You can’t accuse Day One of playing its safe by regurgitating the same ol’ shocks and ahhs. And while it may not fully satisfy that primal urge that drives us to summer movies in the first place, it’s still breathes fresh air into a series in danger of becoming rote and stale.

It’s tough to shake the feeling that you are watching human mouthpieces lob rhetorical talking points in the name of achieving some sort of profound insight and, more often than not, failing to hit their targets.

It’s the kind of minimalist, yet emotionally rich memory piece that’s so quietly attuned to people, place and the passing of time that, ironically, it makes you want to shout hosannahs from a mountaintop until you’re hoarse.

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.

Seen more as a complement to that actual interview than a forensic breakdown of the story behind it, the movie succeeds in showing viewers that, even in this age of clickbait and quick hits, the slow and steady professionalism of real journalists attempting the Quixotic quest of practicing real journalism can still bring down a giant.

Housekeeping for Beginners will not tell you much about keeping order amidst domestic chaos, per se. It is a primer, however, for turning a house into a home.

Even while the director is displaying her knack for cine-magic tricks and formalist gestures, she’s also well aware that she blessed with someone at the center of this carousel who needs no illusionist’s help.

What this feels like is a second-generation copy of a copy, and one that suffers from the typical franchise law of diminishing returns. No one expects the reinvention of the MonsterVerse wheel, but it’d be nice to have something that isn’t more of the same and less than the sum of its I.P. parts.

Wicked may take great pains to recreate the musty Britain of the 1920s, but don’t be fooled by the cloche hats and frilly frocks. The female rage that powers every frame of this comedy didn’t go away when that decade ended. It’s regrettably more recognizable and still more righteous today one century later.

Do Not Expect builds on his previous film’s fractured style and broadens the range of his crosshairs, but the puckishness and past-the-boiling-point sense of wrath feels even sharper this time around.

The film may offer a Cliff Notes history lesson and a scrapbook take on a life, but it does make you wish Shirley was still around, talking truth to power right now and offering one more aspirational example for those who might step up and disrupt.

When continuity and plot logic are AWOL in your movie, who ya gonna call? Not these folks.

The only thing this second-rate scarefest truly succeeds in doing, however, is giving Sweeney a hell of a showcase.

Come for the way this film twists a disaster-movie premise into sociological commentary while still bringing the weirdness. Stay for how Kircher and Duris embed a father-son story into the fantastical elements, and transform a far-out tale of genetics run amuck into an elegy about the pain of letting go.

The premise is a perfect opportunity to take a cold, hard, genre-inflected look at the American experiment’s current slouching toward self-destruction — the only question is whether Garland’s wild potboiler wants to explore or exploit our state of the nation, and the jury’s still out on that.

The Fall Guy is at its delirious best not when it’s ginning up sound and fury and mayhem, but when it simply lets Gosling and Blunt trade screwball banter and give every scene they share a will-they-or-won’t-they tension.

Patel’s pet project is as much a mash note to a way of presenting bloody-knuckled spectacle as it is a standard thriller.

Both a great excuse to stage brutal fight scenes and relieve a more-ripped-than-usual Jake Gyllenhaal of his shirt, this modern take on yesteryear’s guilty pleasure is twice as goofy, three times as violent and a solid tribute to both its predecessor and the art of bodily harm.

Even more than the gloriously gross-out stuff, designed for big laughs and OMG body-horror reactions, it’s the blunt, unfiltered way they treat the ties that bind these two women that sticks with you. The humor is hormonal. Everything else is pure heart.

It’s a movie that works a lot better when it sticks to its star running, jumping, dodging, ducking and, eventually, fighting back. That’s more of a comfort zone for Spanish filmmaker Juan Carlos Fresnadillo, who specializes in horror films that involve pursuit and tight spots (28 Weeks Later, Intruders).

As a dig at generational dissatisfaction and/or a lament about the migrant’s blues, the film is good enough. As a portrait of a diva on the verge of a meltdown that could take out a metropolis, it’s a next-level nightmare.

You’re left enduring a bumpy ride on a road to nowhere, in other words, and neither the film’s wane familiarity nor its welcome, pro-smut good intentions can make the journey worthwhile.

The French-Canadian filmmaker has delivered an expansion and a deepening of the world built off of Herbert’s prose, a YA romance blown up to Biblical-epic proportions, a Shakespearean tragedy about power and corruption, and a visually sumptuous second act that makes its impressive, immersive predecessor look like a mere proof-of-concept. Villeneuve has outdone himself.

Erivo is not the only reason to see Drift. But the actor most certainly is the reason to see it ASAP.

A genuine Chernobyl-level disaster that seems to get exponentially more radioactive as it goes along, this detour to one of the dustier corners of Marvel’s content farm is a dead-end from start to finish.

As with other movies that capture the joys of cooking and the carnal thrill of eating, this French romantic drama is as much an ode to regional bonne bouches as it is an epic tale of two epicures.