David Sims

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.

Although Soderbergh’s approach has an artfulness to it; he’s telling a sweeping story while keeping the excitement mostly confined. The result, while self-contained, is gripping, quietly sexy, and robustly acted.

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.

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.

Mother Mary takes a story that could be ripped from the gossip pages and transmutes it into a spooky campfire tale. It’s the furthest thing from the kind of mainstream-pop fame Mary seems to represent, but that dissonance is what makes Lowery’s storytelling so unique.

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.

In reality, Skinamarink is just a 100-minute symphony of the vibes being very, very off, a crescendo of creeping dread that eventually overwhelms the viewer.

It’s a perfect bit of shlock.

How Scott is able to pump out these grandiose set pieces with such practiced ease (and a little CGI embellishment) is beyond me; he remains one of Hollywood’s finest craftsmen of action sequences, and I’ll miss him when he’s gone.

It would have been easy to inflate Last Breath’s action stakes to make them fun and absurd, but Parkinson’s nonfiction instincts as a filmmaker won’t really allow for that. I’m thankful for the meticulous realism that follows instead.

It’s a diverting, high-energy romp, packed with a charming ensemble and armed with an unsubtle disdain for the one percent.

Hereditary is a great scare-fest and a middling domestic saga, one that probably needed to be either 90 minutes long and brimming with terror, or three hours long and suffused with glacial, Bergman-esque dread. Aster has charted a middle path, and for a first film, it’s hard to fault the skill he’s shown in doing it.

The film is not gritty, unvarnished, or hard to watch; it’s an easygoing, charming work, buoyed by Blank’s excellent lead performance and suffused with snappy jokes and sparkling supporting turns.

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

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.

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.

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.

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

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

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

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.

Nouvelle Vague is a fairly straightforward making-of story—funny, considering how form-breaking Breathless was. But Linklater understands that his movie’s appeal lies in character-based humor.

Other films have skewered an industry that’s intent on bludgeoning audiences with their own fading memories, but only Chip ’n Dale actually gives those memories a new life.

Mudbound is beautifully shot, well-acted, and surprisingly sweeping for a movie with a relatively small budget of $10 million; if it’s guilty of anything, it’s perhaps trying to do too much at once, which is understandable given its novelistic scope.

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.

It’s almost charming watching the film find various ways to use the limited confines of a suburban commuter train in service of a nervy action thriller.

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.

Affleck communicates all of the movie’s emotional breakthroughs via little choices—an angry swipe at an empty beer can when he’s being pressed on his drinking, or slowly curling into a ball when he admits the extent of his problem. It’s the kind of subtlety I’ve never seen Affleck demonstrate as a performer. The fact that he brings his real-life battles to the movie may be uncomfortable for some viewers, but the actor insists he approached the role carefully.