David Sims

If the sequels keep coming, the John Wick story may one day collapse on itself. For now, the series remains the most reliable purveyor of high-stakes, onscreen combat around, a franchise that hasn’t yet been tarnished by its ongoing success.

Its advertising promises goofy hijinks amid an enclave of diverse species whose ecosystem is threatened by humans. The movie, in actuality, is refreshingly mordant about what might really happen if prey and predators were to try banding together: Their efforts would immediately devolve into a despairing, even political quagmire.

Clooney’s a strong-enough star to sell Jay’s achy heart, even amid the glitz and glamour. Baumbach’s odyssey into more treacly territory is an attention-worthy gambit, though one hopes he doesn’t lock the grouchiness away forever.

Although The Killer is a crisply told piece of pulpy neo-noir, it also has an element of self-parody to it, laying out a consummate professional’s precise process and then dashing it into chaos at every chance.

The Square is darkly amusing, but it’s also bracingly honest in its absurdity, and that’s what kept me coming back to each one of its wonderfully knotty scenarios even months after seeing it.

As a piece of pure exposition, Dark Waters is interesting enough. But around the hard work and do-goodery, Haynes also provides a sense of crushing dread—the kind of unsolvable paranoia these procedure-bound movies usually work to counter.

CODA is insightful and moving enough to be worth all the fuss.

So many rom-coms rely on tiresome plot twists to keep their characters apart before getting them together, but all of the ups and downs in Bros’ romance feel emotionally necessary.

All the Money in the World is watchable and at times quite gripping, but it’s little more than a middling entry in Scott’s long career.

I’m happy to see a major-studio teen film wrestle with homosexuality and life in the closet as more than a comical subplot, even though I wish there had been a more engaging character to build that progress around.

Yes, Gerard Johnstone’s M3GAN is pulled from January’s bucket of mostly low-budget pablum, but it’s cheeky and knowing enough to stand out from the slop.

Weathering With You sticks to its guns all the way to the finale. It’s a story of Japan’s younger generation figuring out its future, and of a repudiation of the past that goes hand in hand with hope.

Luce spends too much time presenting a puzzle for viewers to solve and, in doing so, neglects the human drama underneath.

The film deploys its extreme imagery for a reason, interrogating notions of selfhood and agency through a plot where nefarious agents can tap directly into someone’s brain.

By the end of this new Candyman, little personal investment remains for the audience, just a miasma of provocative thoughts failing to cohere into something greater. The film has enough visual panache to make it an involving watch, but it struggles to live up to the audaciousness of its deeper ideas.

This is a movie that deserves to be seen—it’s a work of maturity and confidence from one of the indie world’s best young directors.

The action in Honor Among Thieves is well choreographed. Anyone who enjoyed Goldstein and Daley’s last cinematic directorial effort, the comedy thriller Game Night, knows that they approach spatial geography with more care than do many blockbuster filmmakers. But I was really kicking my feet with glee during the film’s flights of storytelling fancy (its 20-sided die rolls for intelligence rather than strength, if you will).

Whether Midsommar works for you depends on whether Dani’s arc lands with the emotional heft Aster desires; certainly do not go into the film expecting any high-octane kills or gorily creative set pieces.

The Suicide Squad is very funny, bleakly self-aware, and shockingly violent—a refreshing mix of familiar conventions and gory satire.

Though Whannell started out as a writer, it’s clear that stylish direction is where his strengths truly lie. Luckily, The Invisible Man has more than enough of that to hold the viewer’s attention.

It is, in short, a film to scowl to. But if you can lock into that moodiness, it’s also quite enthralling.

Above all else, it lodges itself into one’s brain and seems primed to reward repeat viewings. The biggest compliment I can give Guadagnino is that he’s made a Suspiria that appears destined for the long-lasting cult status already enjoyed by the original.

Searching is a clever update on a housebound Hitchcock thriller like Rear Window, one that can make a series of Google searches play out like a high-wire action scene.

The Menu is unique, because it casts Slowik as both hero and villain. He’s not wrong to simmer with hatred for his elitist customers, but he’s also seething at the fact that he has, in fact, become one of them, propped up by the very system they created.

Spider-Man: No Way Home unfolds as though it were written by a room full of children who had just eaten a whole bag of sugar; it’s a hectic series of plot twists and deus ex machinas that overturns an entire bucket of action figures and smashes them all together with delight. The film might be a new nadir of cinema—but it’s also an undeniably watchable good time.

Amazingly enough, the result is a witty, visually inventive, and fittingly sober story about the perils of the internet, told through the eyes of a video-game avatar with unusually large forearms.

In its quieter moments, Wonderstruck occasionally approaches the transcendent, sublime quality Haynes is aiming for—but those times are frustratingly few and far between.

Don’t call Gemini a neo-noir—call it a neon-noir, a moody little slice of pulp fiction that ends up satisfying the eyes more than the mind.

The most crucial aspect of the role-playing game is community—the fact that it’s played with friends and relies on teamwork. The writer-director Dan Scanlon’s clear grasp of that makes for a warm, gentle film that doesn’t try to merely dazzle the audience with wild fantasy visuals.

The narrative thrust of The Hidden World sputters any time humans are involved. Much of the plot exists only to stall the characters until the film winds its way to a touching conclusion.

De Wilde and the screenwriter Eleanor Catton do not rush to a conclusion—and even though every frame of the film is as pretty as possible, they don’t spare the emotional wounds along the way.

Even if Molly’s Game is a tad too long and a mite too exposition-heavy, its star alone is worth the price of admission.

Chadha is showing how art, be it familiar or far from one’s comfort zone, can inspire a sense of freedom. Blinded by the Light does that wonderfully, in a jubilant story that’s told with grounded honesty.

This is the rare comic-book movie that actually seems geared toward families, mixing adolescent humor with sincere sweetness that doesn’t cloy.

Companion is at best a mean little confection, no matter how much you know going into it: amusing, occasionally thrilling, but not something with the capability to linger.

It has plenty of breezy fun probing the dilemmas of modern media, without abandoning the glitz that made the original so enduring.

Ant-Man and the Wasp bets on everything that worked about the first movie—it’s a light and sunny entry in the ongoing Marvel canon that gets by on the cast’s easygoing chemistry. And, of course, on all the shrinking and growing.

There are moments in Hold the Dark, none of them directly related to the plot, that are just as unsettling and searing as the best moments of Blue Ruin and Green Room. Still, the film never coheres outside of those flashes, ultimately delivering a disappointing, confusing, but undeniably fascinating experience.

Nightmare Alley is quite handsomely mounted and thematically resonant material for del Toro, but for a thriller to connect, it needs to deliver some real thrills along the way.

Men would likely drown in its own weirdness were it not for its dynamic leads.

It’s wiser, and it has the looser silliness that comes with middle age—but it’s looking up at those imposing father figures, tycoons or no, with awe and fear all the same.

This is a film about Cameron’s core personhood, and how it stands up to concentrated efforts to transform it, and it’s told with quiet steeliness and grace.

It touches on all the usual clichés of this cinematic subgenre. It just manages to do so in the most fizzy, fun fashion, powered by an energetic lead performance from Taron Egerton that goes beyond mimicry.

Yes, visual-effects technology is up to the task of re-creating a cartoon on a larger scale and dotted with real actors, and yes, these redos tend to turn a profit for their makers. These shouldn’t be the only reasons for art to exist.

Blockers ends up being a mirror-image coming-of-age film, where the kids have to help the adults make some grand realizations.

Based on Garrard Conley’s 2016 memoir, Boy Erased is a methodical work that tries to account for the horrors of religious conversion camps as soberly as possible—but unfortunately to the point where soberness edges into blandness.

It’s breathtaking to watch the director work on such a grand scale, but the humans within his film do sometimes get lost. For all Nolan’s metaphysical mastery, there’s an undeniable coldness to his twilight world.

Spider-Man: Far From Home is a bouncy addition to a bulging franchise, with just enough fringe zaniness to help it stand out from the pack.

It’s a disjointed, occasionally powerful, often grating grab bag of recent political events, a mess that’s forgivable only because it does reflect the messy state of the world.

Sheer force of personality is the main ingredient of any great sports movie, and Pugh has enough of it to pull the story along. But this is a star performance that deserved an equally dazzling script.

The movie’s best moments are the fully scripted ones between Borat and Tutar, who have a genuinely sweet bond forged mostly through crude humor. Cohen seems to understand that the film’s shock value is automatically lower because of how deadened audiences have grown to political satire, so he relies more heavily on sitcom jokes to compensate and largely succeeds.

Mostly, Thunderbolts* is just a fun action movie about found family among a bunch of hard-bitten mercenaries. It may not be the most original idea; the first Avengers entry could be boiled down in the same way. But I’ll take an iteration done this competently over a new adventure featuring the Red Hulk.

Like any Park film, it’s pretty charming, the kind of kids movie that finds the right mix of slapstick humor and intelligent storytelling to keep everyone in the audience happy.

There are no quick cuts here, no goofy ways of hiding gore from the audience: Nash wants the viewer to engage with the pure terror of what’s going on just as much as he wants them to sit in the tedium of it.

Deep Water is still a robust, well-acted thriller that lands most of its major twists gracefully; for that, all lesser sins can be forgiven.

The real star of Professor Marston and the Wonder Women is Rebecca Hall, who’s an absolute dynamo as Elizabeth Holloway Marston.

To Eastwood, Jewell is a hero not just because he saved people’s lives, but also because he was an ordinary and imperfect man who rose to the occasion when the moment demanded it. That’s the story Richard Jewell should be telling, and it succeeds when it sticks to that path.

It’s a film that tosses questions at the viewer with no interest in answering them, one that can’t decide if it feels for its subjects or just wants to mock their incompetence.

Sonny’s quest to prove his doubters wrong resembles the arc of many a sports drama. But Kosinski elevates that journey by capturing racing in all of its gorgeous, peculiar glory—there’s never been a portrait of Formula One quite like it.

It’s filled with colorful characters, innovative creature design, and some of the most spectacular sets in Laika’s history.

The Boy Who Harnessed the Wind could’ve been a conventional narrative of despair and redemption; in Ejiofor’s hands, it builds realism and context into both sides of that story and manages to be a winning adaptation as a result.

It’s ambitious, sprawling, and sometimes shockingly counter to tradition for the series. But it’s also hugely effective: In offering real closure for the first time, No Time to Die sheds Bond’s mystique. It cements Craig’s legacy of playing Bond not just as a reliable institution, but also as a flawed human.

Feige’s mainstream instincts are easy to detect here. The prior Deadpool films were scuzzy and cobbled together, even as the budget grew; the cameos from other Marvel characters felt half-hearted and perfunctory, inclusions for Deadpool to roll his eyes at, not for fans to cheer over. Deadpool & Wolverine, on the other hand, has that bland MCU sheen that makes all of its movies look expensive but nonthreatening, happily accepting of mediocrity rather than attempting something artsy or daring.

It’s a remarkable story, but a cinematically limited one, constantly in danger of seeming more like a news summary than a narrative work.

For as expensive and action-packed as it is, this Superman is also stuffed with whimsical concepts and ridiculous side characters.

The final battles in The Way of Water are rousing, but they’re also feats of geography, astonishing in how they manage to keep the audience focused on a huge ensemble of characters who are jumping between various locations.

Boiled down to its core, the 1978 Halloween was about the chilling permeability of the suburbs and the ease with which American domesticity could be disrupted. Green’s new movie sticks to that theme, and does it well, but the film only shows hints of being something more interesting until its excellent final act.

The entire film has the sense of something being profoundly, and mercifully, upended; the result is engrossing, satisfying, and more than a little heartbreaking.

Scott has long made movies about how systems of power exist to serve only the powerful, from the faceless corporations of Alien to the indifferent cops of Thelma and Louise. As The Last Duel rumbles to its bloody conclusion and its two leading men clash, it’s clear that the filmmaker’s allegiance lies elsewhere.

The movie is weird and wrenching, asking the viewer to find humanity within the unreal tale of a puppet child’s rise to fame.

It’s a film looking to challenge America’s gauzy perception of the country’s most famous political family, loaded with all the bleakness that task requires.

Apatow’s greatest skill is at dissecting relationships, and that should’ve made up most of The King of Staten Island’s running time. Yes, the film is a tale of a young man facing his demons, but it works best as the story of a ruptured family finally learning how to put things back together.

Anytime Quantumania allows itself to get a little silly, it’s in much better shape.

In the end, Long Shot is too fixated on the supposed absurdity of its romantic pair to spend much time considering them as people. Which is a shame, because the human moments are the only parts where the film really shines.

Freaky knows it’s a farce and winks at the silliest of slasher tropes, but that satirical edge doesn’t keep it from being one of the most purely enjoyable horror works I’ve seen in a long time.

It’s a remarkable, lore-filled pivot from what we’d been made to believe about our hero for the past two decades. Over time, he’s gone from cipher to human being, from an excellent showman in the art of espionage to a model of the ideal man. This sense of self-importance, however, is one that the series can’t quite sustain.

Although the sequel’s running time is more sprawling and its narrative goals more diffuse than its predecessor’s, it shares the same strengths. Wakanda Forever is fueled by intricate world-building, stunningly designed sets and costumes, and an interest in the geopolitical implications of superheroism that’s far more nuanced than most Marvel movies allow.

The action is also visually clean and easy to follow, and the film takes its time to showcase the ancient CGI-generated beasts in their environment. But my praise ends there: This is otherwise a plodding, disenchanting experience that adds some more roaring dinosaurs in exchange for any memorable characters or narrative stakes. It has little reason to exist, beyond cashing in at the summer box office.

Watching the bureaucracy shift from a source of frustration to comfort gives the film its arresting tension.

Mulan delivers a straightforwardly heroic narrative of a capable woman battling her way to respect. It just doesn’t have much else to add.

The landscape of cinema doesn’t have enough maximalist costumed epics, and I’ll always applaud Wright’s ambition even when he doesn’t pull off his entire vision.

The film hums with energy anytime Merlin is on-screen, but even when it’s in the hands of its very sweet preteen ensemble, it’s a lively watch.

Wonka is saccharine, yes, but if you’re going to indulge, it’s better to be in the hands of a master confectioner.

Baumbach does his best to infuse his film with mundane dread, but for the viewer, existential horror can be easily confused with a lack of energy.