David Sims

It’s a sweet and engaging movie, but one that sacrifices some profundity in order to faithfully capture the world through a boy’s eyes.

As with all of his movies, Garland doesn’t provide easy answers. Though Civil War is told with blockbuster oomph, it often feels as frustratingly elliptical as a much smaller movie. Even so, I left the theater quite exhilarated.

Blindspotting has enough verve, humor, and passion to recommend it—even as it overplays its hand in its final minutes.

For those seeking a wickedly dark little confection, Thoroughbreds should prove a diverting watch; but those looking for anything deeper will find a lot left to be desired.

Bring Her Back is far more confident in its portrayal of Laura’s own story, building to a devastating and intense conclusion about the extent of her loss and her inability to deal with it. Hawkins is up to the challenge, and the rest of the ensemble is strong enough to keep pace. But many of those story beats feel perfunctory; the film comes to life in the nastier, grislier set pieces.

Ducournau challenges viewers to find the humanity in a character who seems intent on rejecting her own, all while provoking as many laughs as gasps.

Perhaps this really is the last Jackass; regardless, the series has survived so long not just because of the extravagance it conjures, but because of the camaraderie it inspires.

Even with the gore and the gorgeous visuals that typically accompany a Guadagnino project, Bones and All too often feels frustratingly tame.

Ferguson is the star of the show, imperious one moment and fragile the next, torn between nurturing her son’s purpose and protecting him from becoming a monster.

Disobedience finishes on an annoyingly vague note, almost as if Lelio and Lenkiewicz had stumbled on a more interesting, expansive narrative in the final act but didn’t quite know how to pursue it. The result is a film that, from beginning to end, feels as hopelessly lost as its characters do.

Though Crazy Rich Asians is rightly being lauded for its groundbreaking nature (as the first studio film with an Asian cast set in the present day since 1993’s The Joy Luck Club), it’s also a charming throwback to the kind of story Hollywood doesn’t tell much anymore: the high-society comedy, rife with family drama, acidic one-liners, and indomitable female characters.

Dream Scenario morphs from a Charlie Kaufman–esque cringe comedy into a simmering nightmare thriller, staging some genuinely unsettling hallucinations but failing to knit them into any larger narrative.

It’s a movie that gleefully kicks its characters out of their comfy environs to plunge them into New York’s rattling, noisy crowds—and it’s worth watching with the biggest audience you can find.

With Tick, Tick … Boom, Miranda celebrates the power and the pressure of the world he loves most, and he’s picked a subject who encapsulates those warring dynamics perfectly.

This film is the slightest story Coppola has ever produced; it only brushes up against deeper insights during its brief running time. But the movie offers such a rush of unintentional catharsis and pure diversion that its flaws are easy to forgive.

It’s rich with feeling, shrouded in darkness, but not despairing as it digs into the trials the Von Erichs faced, without merely dismissing the family as cursed.

Although it’s often charming and relatable, it’s a letdown when you consider the heights such a project could reach.

With the inventiveness of Creed III, an old franchise suddenly feels fresh.

With his latest movie, Lanthimos has made a tense, heart-wrenching tale with an admirably askance view of humanity that’s a worthy successor to his prior works.

Air is a great return to Affleck’s original impulses as a director: It’s a fun, well-made film for grown-ups that gives its actors room to flesh out their characters and, most important, doesn’t rely on Affleck’s star persona.

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.