David Sims

To quote another of the Bard’s royal characters, it ends up feeling like a tale full of sound and fury, signifying nothing.

Jojo Rabbit’s script isn’t emotionally complex enough to address the cruel realism of its world, and as the bleakness continues, the jokes fall flatter and flatter.

This is a movie chock-full of heady imagery that it can’t get a handle on, and so the allegories at work don’t quite connect.

Few filmmakers can manage such a dizzying blend of tones, but for Bong, one of South Korea’s finest directors, it’s a trademark. With Parasite he’s crafted his best movie yet.

Lee is innovating and looking backwards at the same time, and the viewing experience is as bewildering as that sounds.

It’s most exciting to watch as a reminder of just how good Murphy can be when he’s committed to his material.

As Joker gets grimmer and descends further into bloody violence, it becomes little more than a horror show, bludgeoning its viewers out of any chance at insight.

Monos is an undeniable wonder, but one that enchants the most when its head is in the clouds.

The lesson of the film is a straightforward one—that in the future, people will still need to rely on each other—but Ad Astra communicates it with staggering profundity.

The film suffers from both an excessive faithfulness to its source and a general failure to translate that material into anything close to a gripping onscreen narrative.

Hustlers would work as a goofy comedy; it works even better as a thoughtful one, crammed with killer lines and supporting work from both acting veterans (Julia Stiles) and fresh faces (Cardi B). It’s a salute to extravagance that knows when to cut loose and when to hold on quiet, introspective beats.

The length of It Chapter Two is matched by the scale of Pennywise’s big scares, assisted by the slickest visual effects money can buy, but it means the story never manages to pick up any speed. This is a lumbering brute of a film, a creaky rollercoaster that inches a little too slowly toward every drop.

The real fun in Ready or Not comes from the ways it subverts its time-tested story, balancing wry commentary and straightforward horror in its portrait of fumbling arrogance and curdled privilege.

The cast is stacked, but the story is messy, and the pathos driving Bernadette’s disappearance (which, again, is easily solved) is underwritten.

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.

Had the film not taken an introspective turn, I still would have appreciated its skill with generating easy laughs. Happily, Good Boys has a little more to recommend it than gross gags.

The Kitchen is an unsalvageable mess.

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

The Nightingale isn’t an easy cinematic experience, but if you can handle it, it’s an unforgettable one.

This is a film with genuinely compelling leads, each of whom could support a solo movie, and yet they all seem on autopilot here, dispensing swift kicks and crude bon mots with bored efficiency.

A sensitivity to both petty human concerns and striking natural beauty is what makes Honeyland a particularly enthralling documentary.

The result is a surprisingly funny and extremely melancholy hangout film, an elegy for a bygone era that reflects on how all art eventually loses its edge.

Eisenberg, Nivola, and a hilariously brusque Imogen Poots (as Sensei’s only female student) are more than up to the task of finding the comedy in scenes of nasty violence or brooding anxiety. Stearns, however, is less interested in balancing those tones than he is in exploiting their uneasy tension.

If you’re looking for a throwback to simpler, sillier times (with a dash of self-awareness about the state of toxic masculinity in 2019), it should just about satisfy.

Wang, who has made only one prior feature (the little-seen 2014 comedy Posthumous), distinguishes herself as a thrilling new voice in filmmaking by crafting one of the most sensitively told stories of the year.

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.

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.

This is a film that could have been triumphantly weird, or soaringly corny; it tries to split the difference and ends up merely forgettable.

While the film tries to be a shocking window into another world, it plays more like an agog piece of tourism.

That Rose-Lynn is an onstage force is easy to tell from the second she picks up a microphone, but Taylor makes this film less about her gift than about the maturity she needs to take it beyond the local Glasgow pubs. As a result, the film’s melancholy but uplifting closing notes land that much more powerfully.

The Dead Don’t Die is the first horror film I’ve seen that seemed as likely to lull me to sleep as to give me nightmares.

I’m all for the studio exploring new concepts and original characters going forward, and setting aside the endless anthologizing of its biggest hits for a good long while. But if I had to get another Toy Story, this is about as strange and beguiling an entry as I could have hoped for.

This sequel-slash-spinoff comes across as a lifeless piece of content, bearing a brand name and a glossy look but little else to remember it by.

The Last Black Man in San Francisco works best as a mood piece, and as its final act swung back toward heavy plotting, it mostly lost me, getting bogged down in thinly sketched interpersonal dynamics.

The overqualified cast do their best to inject some passion into the proceedings—Fassbender, in particular, is incapable of phoning it in—but the momentum drained out of these X-Men movies long ago. Dark Phoenix should serve as a fittingly perfunctory farewell.

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.

The film is simply intent on capturing the energy of that special “us against the world” connection that can exist only in high school and unleashing it onto the screen.

It’s a garish, special-effects-laden extravaganza that still manages to feel tossed-off and half-hearted. The film is entirely devoted to the property it’s adapting, but its mimicry underlines just how pale an imitation it is.

Hogg is not a sensationalistic filmmaker, but rather someone who can convey tremendous amounts of emotion through total tranquility on-screen.

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.

This is a biopic so fearful that audiences won’t get the connections it’s drawing that it depicts a CGI dragon stalking the battlefields of the Somme. The result doesn’t rise above the insight of a Wikipedia page.

No doubt most Hollywood executives are as baffled as I am that Detective Pikachu made it to the big screen. But even more baffling, and heartening, is how well it all works.

Berlinger’s latest film attempts to reckon with the legacy of a brutal murderer who cynically cultivated his public image to make himself seem more alluring, but the story fails to dig in to the horrifying implications of how Bundy was able to succeed.

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.

The film earns its length not by overstuffing the frame with opulent action, but by slowing things down and basking in the charisma of its ensemble.

Someone Great is fizzy, frivolous, and probably easily forgotten, but for a weekend-friendly jolt of entertainment, rom-com fans could do far worse.

The creative journey, and the magical bond between artist and subject, are what ignite Gilliam’s passion here. Unfortunately, the themes of The Man Who Killed Don Quixote are more compelling than the set pieces themselves.

A gorgeous and impossible puzzle of a movie.

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

In trying to set itself apart, this film ends up perfectly laying out the case against its own existence.

For all its body horrors and apocalyptic conclusions, High Life is one of Denis’s most loving and tender creations.

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

The most shocking thing about the film is its unabashed cheerfulness. For all Korine’s trademark provocation, The Beach Bum somehow manages to be an upbeat, triumphant tale of creativity and free-spiritedness.

The film is just different enough to stick out amid the studio’s backwards-looking slate, and Burton, for the first time in years, shows he hasn’t lost his love for the idiosyncratic.

Despite the grand scale, like all of Jia’s works, Ash Is Purest White leaves questions of good and evil to the viewer—this isn’t a philosophical story, but a personal one.

Us is a thrill ride, a somber parable, and a potential first chapter in a vast, encyclopedic sci-fi story; talented as ever, Peele has found a way to cram all of that into a gleeful blast of a film.

The script, by Joe Shrapnel and Anna Waterhouse, conveys little beyond the fact that Stephen and Rachael are both sad, nice to each other, and very attractive.

Given its similarity to the original, Gloria Bell could have just been a curiosity—but the hilarious performances by Moore, Cera, and Turturro make Lelio’s return to his own material more than worth it.

The 21st entry in Marvel’s galactic film empire, and the first focused on a female superhero (played by Brie Larson), is a perfectly fun time at the movies that deftly lays out the stakes of its new character for many future appearances. But more often than not, it feels a little routine.

As it is, Greta is more of a Terminator movie, with everyone doing their best to get out of Huppert’s way for 98 enjoyable minutes—though that’s still worth a recommendation in my book.

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.

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 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.

It’s one thing to make fun of the repetitiveness of a second movie, but this one manages to do that while actually expanding its storytelling horizons.

True to its origins, Alita is a living cartoon of a film, which only makes its ridiculousness easier to absorb.

Soderbergh’s unorthodox film release and cheap, idiosyncratic shooting style are ideal fits for the director’s fascinating, speculative story about the future of the NBA.

The script has a wry sense of humor but is almost never laugh-out-loud funny, and the gory substance of the plot regularly overwhelms the delicate notes of parody.

This is a project that’s loaded with big ideas and worthy morals for its younger viewers, even if it has a little trouble streamlining them all into an easily digestible plot.

In the end, Velvet Buzzsaw is a pretty soulless piece of art about the soullessness of art; but that doesn’t mean it can’t have a little fun proving its point.

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.

It’s one of those projects that initially seems hokey beyond repair but quickly evolves into something genuinely unique. Serenity may not make it onto many critics’ top-10 lists come the end of 2019. But it’s certain to be one of the more unforgettable viewing experiences of the year.

Fyre is primarily a journalistic exhumation of the Fyre Festival’s ridiculous excesses. But via interviews with both dissatisfied ticket-buyers and nervy ex-employees, the movie also scrapes away the sheen of the flamboyant “influencer” lifestyle that McFarland leveraged to sell tickets and hook investors.

It’s a film that sometimes plays more as a rambling TED Talk than as a straightforward thriller. But, in this case, I admired Shyamalan’s overreach, even as the auteur laid meta-textual twist atop twist in the movie’s giddily loopy ending.

This movie is as much a eulogy for a country that Eastwood sees as slowly crumbling as it is for the life Earl chose to lead.

Aquaman works because it isn’t laughing at itself—it’s both joyously whimsical and confident in its own seaworthiness.

If Beale Street Could Talk is an impressive, mature, and determined work that ably reaches the great heights it sets for itself.

Despite its period setting, The Favourite just might be Lanthimos’s most trenchant and relevant work yet.

For all the time Serkis has had to tinker with it, the film feels painfully incomplete, from its frequently told story to its weak visuals.

The final act of Shoplifters, like all of Kore-eda’s best work, is devastating. After seeing the director tease out every strange bond in this makeshift group, investing his audience fully in their future, one finds it that much harder to watch when things fall apart.

This movie is little more than a vibrant-looking tableau, a two-dimensional take on an intricate piece of history. It’s a tale that’s been told better before, and Willimon’s modern updates are less enlightened than they initially seem.

The world doesn’t really need another Spider-Man movie, which is exactly what makes Spider-Man: Into the Spider-Verse such an unexpected delight: Here’s the latest entry in a fully saturated genre that somehow, through sheer creative gumption, does something new.

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.

McQueen has made a big, pulpy crowd-pleaser, but he uses it to tell a story with real meaning. Widows is methodical in its imagery and gracefully written; it’s also a suspenseful blast, best seen with the biggest, most animated audience possible.

This is a film that exists primarily to answer questions nobody would have ever thought to ask about a series of books that already told a very complete story.

Rest assured, in The Girl in the Spider’s Web, Lisbeth Salander saves the day, and she looks cool doing it. But this is a story so slick that she’d be rolling her eyes if she watched it.

The film may be too much of a bloody slog for some; others will be on board for every gruesome minute like I was.

So much of The Front Runner feels like stenography, giving audiences the basics and then letting Hart or Bradlee monologue to the camera about how the norms of yesteryear are slipping away, perhaps forever.

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.

In short, Bohemian Rhapsody isn’t just prone to music-biopic clichés—it’s practically a monument to them, a greatest-hits collection of every narrative shortcut one can possibly take in summarizing a legendary act’s rise to fame.

A meditative two-and-a-half-hour art film might not sound like a plausible candidate for the year’s best thriller, but Burning is exactly that—its story moves patiently, but engrossingly, before cresting with a shocking denouement that wouldn’t make sense were it not for Lee’s meticulous craft.

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.

Can You Ever Forgive Me? may be a muted story, but it is a profoundly memorable one.

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.

In its quietest scenes, Mid90s feels a little more authentic, and Hill may well turn out to have a growing talent for directing. But he needs to match his subtler insights to a script that feels less derivative.

Van Groeningen isn’t too curious about what got Nic into drugs, nor how he finally pulled out of the spiral. Beautiful Boy largely exists in between those two stories and ends up feeling like a limited, grueling experience.

I have to applaud Goddard’s ambition, even when it overreaches. Yes, Bad Times at the El Royale is bloated and might’ve functioned better as a punchy bit of neo-noir. But it’s rare for a genre film to feel so sweeping and inventive.

First Man is about Armstrong’s landmark achievement, but it’s just as much about a country’s grinding, maniacal fixation on getting him there.

Venom is, at its heart, a will-they-won’t-they story—a grisly meet-cute between a down-on-his-luck reporter and a grumpy, gloppy little extra-terrestrial with a really big appetite. That’s good, because the movie is barely competent as an action flick.