Derek Smith

If the film’s breathless pacing and rapid-fire jokes run out of steam just a tad as SpongeBob’s stay in the underworld extends, Search for SquarePants is still charming, spirited, and ludicrous enough to prove that it’s not quite time to tell this series to walk the plank.

The film’s improvisational feel helps to ground a fable-esque narrative in a discernible reality.

Encanto doesn’t steer away from the inevitable happy ending one expects from most animated films geared toward children, but it subverts expectations by bringing humanity to even its most flawed characters.

Rarely have Michael Bay’s frenzied stylistic tics been so effectively intertwined with the substance of one of his films.

The film plays like a mixtape of various sensibilities, partly beholden to the self-contained form of the bildungsroman; surely it’s no coincidence that a James Joyce poster hangs in the background of one scene.

The film is at its best when it’s focused on the euphoria and tribulations of its central couple's love affair.

The film is a bit too muddled to bring its main character fully into focus, despite Hélène Vincent’s best efforts to do so.

Thanks to Aunjanue Ellis-Taylor’s unflappable performance, the theories that Isabel Wilkerson laid out in her book emerge with an emotional clarity that can be forceful, but the film’s often inelegant, choppy structure also works against that clarity.

The film more or less keeps things efficiently moving, wringing white-knuckle tension less through jump scares than from the darkness of a seemingly infinite void.

A taut genre exercise that delivers enough surprises and cleverly timed bits of humor for its sometimes familiar, uneven narrative beats to play an original tune.

Gilbert exposes a wealth of unsuspected pain and tenderness beneath Gottfried's often thorny exterior.

Ghost Elephants shows that Werner Herzog is fiercely determined to explore new frontiers while they still exist and capture the poetic phenomena of nature and the unshakeable dreams it continues to instill in mankind.

Edoardo de Angelis's coming-of-age portrait is poignant when fixated on the intricacies of a complicated sisterhood.

The film is suitably direct, clear-eyed, and exhaustive in documenting the massive impacts that gerrymandering has, particularly on communities of color.

The film flirts with miserablism, but it counterbalances the direness of its main character's situation with moments of levity.

Though Duke’s film lacks the warmth and humanism of Something Wild, it’s possessed of a similarly idiosyncratic edginess.

Endless Poetry eventually, like young Alejandro, opens itself up to the world in all of its beauty and complexities.

Fernando Guzzoni's Jesus is at its best when it steers clear of pat moralizing and simply yokes its moody sense of atmosphere to the aimlessness of the story’s young characters.

Watcher gives a feminist twist to a throwback genre, but never does its topicality dilute its gripping suspense.

In Marlo, Diablo Cody has created her most complicated character to date. Would that her writing displayed similar richness and empathy in painting the film's supporting characters.

There’s enough sardonic humor to keep the proceedings edgy enough, but it’s hard not to wish that the filmmakers would’ve taken a cue from their eponymous villain and really pushed things past the boundaries of good taste.

As nimble as Aneesh Chaganty is in presenting his main character's multi-faceted interaction with technology in the first hour, the film suddenly morphs into a generic and manipulative missing-person thriller.

The film meticulously yet concisely probes how, why, and when our understanding of the greenhouse effect went from a scientific certainty to it being up for debate.

Because of Chinonye Chukwu’s willingness to let small-scale, ancillary scenes play out unhurried and at length, Till taps into to a deeper well of emotions than most biopics.

Ed Helms and Patti Harrison’s wonderful rapport helps to keep the film grounded in the recognizably real.

The film speaks unflinchingly to the unique anxieties and frustrations of early teenhood.

The film is ultimately too tidy to embrace anything truly startling or unexpected, either stylistically or narratively.

The film paints a vivid portrait of what life was like for Black South Africans under apartheid.

The film is at its best when its focus remains on Ivins’s fierce commitment to her ideals and willingness to speak her mind.

The film begins as a cheeky retro chamber drama before morphing into an often expectation-busting blend of noir and pitch-black comedy.

The film is less hagiographic than most documentaries of its kind, which isn't to say that Tom Volf's adoration of his subject is ever in doubt.

The film has a raw immediacy that can only be achieved when most cinematic excesses have been eliminated.

To Ritchie’s credit, he keeps his film moving along at a consistently brisk clip, but that breeziness is also the cause of its weightlessness, rendering its vision of historical events as outright cartoonish, down to the often clownish portrayals of Nazis and the flawless execution of nearly every element of March-Phillips’s plans.

The film is elevated by funny, cleverly staged sequences, but it too often hammers the notion that fame destroys authenticity.

It’s far too scattershot, bouncing from one topic to the next with the carelessness of someone flipping through a book and reading from a random page.

Ultimately, The Boogeyman is like so many other modern horror films that prioritize mood above all else.

Song Sung Blue is content to pendulum-swing from triumph to tragedy and back again with all the self-control of a drunk driver.

The film feels like sitting through extended acting exercises where everyone is giving it 110% every take.

The Lost City is proof that star power and chemistry can only take a film with a mediocre script so far.

Aside from further vilifying the Nazis, the film's ideological endgame remains a bit too slippery.

Will Gluck’s rom-com doesn’t bother to create a compelling world around its charming leads.

The film is an easily digestible replica of the truth, bathed in honeyed cinematography and sentimentalized adulation.

The film's biggest problem is its inability to lend its clichés and tropes any dramatic thrust or satirical bite.

The film is content to peddle the naïve notion that love is the panacea for all that ails you.

Its most amusing moments are in the interplay between the central characters as they adjust to an abruptly shifting reality.

Initially offbeat, Bitch awkwardly pivots toward a more inspirational story of regret and reconciliation.

A Simple Favor haphazardly vacillates between suburban satire, goofy comedy, and dark, twisted psychological thriller. Which is to say that the film doesn't evince the seamlessness of presentation of its clearest antecedent: David Fincher's "Gone Girl."

The film is all surface, and its depiction of trauma becomes increasingly exploitative and hollow as it moves along.

In the gradual development and expansion of the Wickaverse, the filmmakers seem to have lost the thread of what makes the first and, at times, second film in the series work so well.

Ridley Scott’s tale of greed and revenge practically begs for melodramatic excess.

Behind the violence and gore, Nobody 2 only offers the skeleton of a narrative.

Like Vice before it, the film too often uses satire as a tool of castigation rather than as a means of truly attacking the status quo.

Ultimately, Kidnap is an efficient vehicle for the delivery of some lean action that's frequently weakened by a scarcely whip-smart script.

Once the film shifts into a broader comedic register, it no longer capitalizes on Kumail Nanjiani and Issa Rae’s gift for gab.

The film muddies its sense of moral righteousness by suggesting that violence and vengeance can only be defeated by more of the same.

Wendy veers awkwardly and aimlessly between tragedy and jubilance, never accruing any lasting emotional impact.

The charitable representation of Bryan Cranston’s character greatly diminishes the emotional resonance of the film’s dramatic turns in the final act.

The only past that Dial of Destiny is interested in plundering is the glory of its predecessors.

The film takes aim at myriad targets and bluntly satirizing them in disparate styles that never mesh into a cohesive whole.

More times than not, the film’s bursts of humor clash awkwardly with the far more frequent attempts at gravitas that the filmmakers strive for when our protagonist is in battle or engaged in political discussions.

As effective as director Josie Rourke is at exposing the emotional and physical toll of reigning as queen when exploring Mary and Elizabeth's relationship, her portrait of an endless string of betrayals ends up as simply faceless and impersonal.

In the end, the film is all too ready to transform into just another shiny pop object indistinguishable from so many others before it.

The film Despite its weird flourishes, the film succumbs to the tropes and emotional contrivances of the family melodrama at its core.

This unfocused, awkwardly paced film never quite gets off the ground and, as a result, will do little to change perceptions of the Korean War as the “forgotten war.”

The film is admirably frank in its depiction of lingering trauma but too often struggles to capture its more ineffable qualities.

With Ocean's 8, Gary Ross serves up a mildly engaging riff on the heist film, but he rarely strays from the established formula of Steven Soderbergh's original Ocean's trilogy.

Greenland 2 plays out as a much more generic thriller than its predecessor.

For all of its slavish devotion to Mary Poppins, the sequel doesn't even seem to recognize its greatest attribute: its star.

Not Okay doesn’t make any points that, now over a decade into the ubiquity of social media, aren’t painfully obvious.

Stillwater gives itself over to drastic plot twists that derail what was already a film over-stuffed with narrative incident and ideas.

The film is subsumed by the unshakable sense that Jared Leto is intended to make Martin Zandvliet's take on the yakuza underworld more palatable for American audiences.

The film celebrates individuality even as it suggests that everyone needs their own A.I. tech to validate everything they like and think.

Despite Ari Gold’s knack for visual flourishes that capture a sense of place seemingly outside of time, The Song of Sway Lake plays like several disparate melodies overlapping one another.

Pearl is ultimately an empty exercise in style masquerading as a character study, and for as fantastic as Mia Goth is, her performance mostly succeeds at making Ti West’s homages just a little bit easier to stomach.

Through this endless string of undercooked subplots, Avi Nesher’s film continually trips over itself.

The film’s manic blend of gore and relentlessly cheeky comedy eventually leads to diminished returns.

The film is almost sadistically driven to turn a woman’s trip down memory lane into fodder for cringe humor.

All of the time spent on Thomas Munro’s various campaigns for reconciliation and harmony between two Māori tribes hampers the film, which would have been better served had it expounded on the grander conflicts that it only superficially acknowledges.

The film reeks of the extremely idealistic notions of young love that plague many a YA adaptation.

The film frequently falls back on the stately demeanor of countless other historical biopics and period pieces. Read our review.

The original Brian and Charles short focused entirely on its titular characters, and it’s clear that was for the best.

The film is overstuffed with characters and subplots that ultimately have little to do with Ip Man and his legacy.

The film seems almost content to have you forget about everything that inspired it in the first place.

On the Basis of Sex is too often busy revering Ruth Bader Ginsburg for her confidence and brilliance to bother with presenting her as a living, breathing human being.

Humor for the sake of humor is a worthwhile pursuit, but Missing’s final act is more unintentionally funny than intentionally funny.

As the film spirals outward from its central relationship to delve into other characters’ hidden pasts, the story becomes too unwieldy and fragmented for the audience to develop a comprehensive understanding of Callum Turner's Thomas or his personal evolution.

Throughout, the too-brief depictions of Luciano Pavarotti’s flaws are conspicuously shrouded in a veil of hagiography.

The film's performances and narrative flounder to strike the right balance between comedy and drama.

Although Last Rampage's overarching narrative travels a well-tread road, it strikes a number of potent grace notes along the way.

The film seems far more interested in celebrating a short-lived era of artistic invention than interrogating it.

Whenever its main characters are pulled apart, the movie magic, in every sense of the phrase, dissipates, leaving us with a bland, derivative action-comedy that’s never quite as funny or thrilling as it thinks it is.

The Bad Guys is a heist film that steals all of its moves.

Den of Thieves displays a reverence for the taut and moody tension-building tactics of Michael Mann's Heat, but without a single compelling character or backstory to speak of, it's unable to bring even a modicum of emotional resonance to action.

So many grandiose tactics portend a grander revelation than the film’s otherwise low-key three-hander delivers.

The film is loaded with inconsequential detours and questionable and inconsistent character psychology as it stumbles awkwardly to its foregone conclusion.

By the end, it becomes what it initially parodies: a dime-a-dozen slasher film with a silly-looking doll as the villain.

Sebastian Junger and Nick Quested’s prismatic look at a devastating new chapter in the War on Drugs lacks for cohesiveness.

After a while, the film’s parade of contrivances subsumes the acutely observed friendship at its core.