Derek Smith

Aneil Karia’s Hamlet, which is nearly defined by its handheld camerawork and the medium close-ups on Riz Ahmed’s face, is one of the more intimate adaptations of Shakespeare’s play to date.

Vanessa Caswill’s film feels reverse engineered to maximize emotional impact.

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.

Hope and fear are inextricably bound in Akinola Davies Jr.’s semi-autobiographical film.

The documentary ultimately reveals itself as a paean to female strength and resistance.

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

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.

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

Zootopia 2 provides plenty of food for thought for its young audience, making a more expansive statement on the dangers of intolerance than the first film, and without sacrificing any of its charm, humor, or visual ingenuity along the way.

The third film in the series reliably delivers on the promise of both flamboyant showmanship and a steadfast refusal to adhere to more than just the rules of physics.

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.

The decision to have Allison Williams and Dave Franco, both in their late 30s when the film was shot, play their characters as teens may be the most egregious example of Regretting You’s indifference to verisimilitude.

A story of hazy memories that’s also a city symphony, Dreams elegantly captures the disorienting rush of first love and the frustrations and anguish that stem from romantic fantasies colliding with reality.

One small, shrewd decision after another allows Preparation for the Next Life to sustain its naturalism to the end.

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

As The Home trudges along until its inevitable rug-pull, its obnoxiously loud and incessant score tries to convince us of the sinisterness at play at the retirement home. And by the time the rubber finally hits the road well into the third act, the twist is aggravating not only because it’s so patently absurd, but because so little in the previous hour feels remotely connected to what occurs in the homestretch. All of the horrific imagery and supposed clues that came before are revealed to be signposts signifying nothing. Even the outbursts of violence in the climax do nothing but remind us just how empty and cynical the whole charade has been.

There’s a grating meta-ness to Gareth Edwards’s Jurassic World Rebirth that speaks to the filmmakers’ knowledge that they’re at the mercy of pressures to bring something new to a franchise that’s now on its seventh installment.

Like its predecessors, the film is an often awkward mix of YA drama and R-rated gore.

As The Accountant 2 drags out to over two hours, and its two storylines remain tonally at war with one another, it becomes increasingly clear that, two films in, this series still hasn’t figured out exactly what it wants to be.

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

David Ayer’s film proceeds as an unambiguous celebration of its hero’s vigilantism.

The Ballad of Wallis Island plays both its drama and comedy in decidedly minor keys, straining neither for grand emotional revelations nor big laughs.

The Quiet Ones is a reminder of the simple pleasures of a caper film with ice in its veins.

The interjections of quotidian reflection give a fullness and emotional resonance to a film that can, at times, be borderline oppressive in its depiction of war’s brutality.

Always exhibiting a deftness of touch and willingness to continue probing a cultural taboo that’s now, more than ever, a delicate and charged topic, Obit also challenges our preconceptions of a much-maligned group.

Alireza Khatami’s third feature is a subtly enigmatic examination of the nature of masculinity.

It’s as if by being confronted by new innovations that appear to have come straight out of a sci-fi film, Werner Herzog exercises his galaxy brain to see what we could be capable of a decade, even a century, from now.

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

Here is all moments, some small and many big, but it’s lacking in gravitas, concerned as it is with tugging at our heartstrings by serving up little more than signifiers that we can project our own memories or personal baggage into.

John Crowley’s film blunts the force of the naturalistic performances by Florence Pugh and Andrew Garfield as it shifts around the timeline of the story with little rhyme, reason, or rhythm.

There’s a certain pleasure in basking in the anarchic behavior of the SNL cast as depicted in Saturday Night, but it’s rendered hollow by the film’s often grating mythologizing of them, which includes trying to turn the 90 minutes before the first episode into a frenetic comedy of Safdie-esque proportions.

As the film goes on, it stretches its own internal logic and, following a genuinely shocking third-act twist, renders the world that it’s created virtually incoherent merely in a ploy to keep the audience on the edge of their seats.

The world of My Old Ass retains a lived-in quality, in large part due to the shrewd, sensitive way in which it treats the emotional struggles of its teenage characters.

The film’s treatment of its subject is belligerently hamfisted, disingenuous, and incurious.

The remake gets bogged down by a superfluous, hackneyed backstory and narrative threads that are conspicuous for their lack of emotional gravitas, causing the film to feel like a wheel-spinning exercise.

The importance of touch between a parent and child—and, in the case of this film, specifically between a father and daughter—is rarely discussed openly in Daughters, but it looms large over nearly every scene.

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

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 is all table-setting, with the stories lacking in polish and dramatic momentum and the characters never developed beyond archetypes.

Ultimately, in trying to make Katherine both a historical girlboss and a near-martyr to a vaguely articulated cause, Firebrand’s meandering, under-baked screenplay manages to neither have its cake nor eat it too.

The film leaves no room for doubt about what Trudy Ederle will accomplish, and thus creates virtually no dramatic tension in her inevitable rise to the top ranks of women’s swimming.

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.

Slow steadfastly remains a character-driven piece, homing in on the intricacies of its protagonists’ psychologies and engaging with their subtle emotional shifts as they become more intimate with one another.

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 held together by the universal strength of its performances, particularly James and Smollett, and the elegance with which it veers between dreamy interludes and poetic flourishes stemming from Malik’s imagination and the more quotidian presentation of the small world he lives in, warts and all.

The last 20 minutes live up to the promise of bludgeoning viewers with plenty of rock-‘em-sock-‘em combat and demolished human landscapes, but what any of it is actually for will be forgotten even before the dust begins to settle.

The film’s final act contains some of the most twisted, gory violence this particular subgenre of horror has seen in years, ultimately recalling nothing less than the films of the ultra-violent New French Extremity movement.

The film never thinks to lean into the blatant silliness that its premise invites.

This shaggy, disjointed film is less interested in the complexities of Marley’s personal or professional life than it is in presenting him as a hero and an inspiration.

Much of Rich Peppiatt’s film isn’t about respectability, but rather debasement, and sugar-coating Kneecap’s widespread antics isn’t on the menu.

Suncoast spends much of its runtime trafficking in tiresome coming-of-age tropes, until the resulting crowd-pleaser has snuffed out much of what’s so singular about its central story.

The film approaches a new tech frontier with an objective, responsibly apprehensive, eye.

It’s not unlike a partially completed sketch whose occasional flashes of color only serve to remind us how incomplete and lazily constructed the rest of it is.

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

Paul King again proves himself a masterful engineer of imaginary worlds, and it’s the meticulous attention to detail that makes Wonka so captivating.

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.

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.

The searing images of various gulags, public executions, and private beatings will not be easily forgotten.

By its conclusion, what we’re left with is a cinematic Frankenstein, whose disparate genre elements have been cobbled together without much consideration or fuss.

A fascinating metacommentary courses beneath the film’s emotional storytelling surface.

In the instances where it’s not going hard, Dicks is a surprisingly flaccid affair.

The film’s unique blend of deadpan and absurdist humor, and its tendency to occasionally push the boundaries of good taste, shows that Emma Seligman is comfortable working on both ends of the comic spectrum.

The film views its main character’s culture, as well as her struggles to suppress her identity in order to fit into her suburban world, with a nonchalance that often scans as negligence.

The film suggests a gene splice of a slasher flick and supernatural horror. But as enticing as that combination may sound, André Øvredal’s rendering of it is as bland and listless as the blues and grays that dominate the film’s color palette.

If your hook is the promise of seeing Jason Statham go mano a mano with prehistoric sea behemoths, then leaning into the ludicrous is the only way to go.

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

What ultimately sinks No Hard Feelings is its inability to convincingly meld its excessively bawdy humor and its Hallmark Channel-level drama of two opposites who help one another to embrace life.

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

It achieves the rarest of feats of any tentpole Hollywood release, animated or not: gleefully matching exhilarating stylistic experimentation with a multi-tiered narrative of equal ambition.

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

The film is a pointlessly complicated house of cards that crumbles due to its own hollowness.

Christophe Honoré’s film tackles grief in a subtle, intriguingly indirect manner.

With Beau Is Afraid, his third and easily most ambitious feature to date, Ari Aster traces, to more cosmic and absurd ends, how tragedy is birthed by, well, birth itself.

The film brims with authenticity and the electrifying emotional intensity of the best melodramas.

The more that Zach Braff’s script tries to thematically tie its disparate threads together, the more that A Good Person comes to resemble the very same type of neat and tidy self-contained version of reality that it ironically skewers in its prologue.

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.

As Champions tediously veers between the increasingly rote narrative beats of an inspirational sports story and a love story of opposites attract, it further stresses its own archaic qualities with a consciously anachronistic soundtrack that includes Chumbawamba’s “Tubthumping,” EMF’s “Unbelievable,” and Outkast’s “Hey Ya.”

The film comes down to a draw between its flashes of brilliance and its missed opportunities.

Quantumania feels less the start of a new phase of Marvel films than a tired retread of adventures we’ve already been on.

At its core, 20 Days in Mariupol is a testament to the citizens of Mariupol.

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

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.

The film often feels like one of the corpses in its story: cold, lifeless, and without a heart.

Ultimately, it’s the filmmakers’ insistence on both subverting the expectations of the family Christmas film and upholding them that leaves Violent Night feeling like it wants to have its Christmas cookies and eat them too.

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.”

While Strange World’s examination of generational tension is tender and inspiring, as well as nicely tied to its theme of the necessity of adapting to changing times, the film’s sci-fi elements and environmental message are more half-baked in their execution.

The film signals that Alejandro G. Iñárritu, perhaps, is unable to push the limits of his own artistic expression.

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.

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.

Funny Pages eschews the platitudes and carefully scripted character arcs that often cause coming-of-age tales to feel not only predictable but coated in a sheen of nostalgia.

George Miller’s film is a passionate exploration of how image-making is inextricable from storytelling.

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

The film is a perfectly entertaining retelling of an offbeat tale, but it’s also superficial and borderline exploitative.

The film spins a soapy yet dramatically inert and often tone-deaf yarn about societal rejection and female empowerment in the wetlands of North Carolina.

Dean Fleischer-Camp’s Marcel the Shell with Shoes On convincingly proves that bigger sometimes is better.

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

Emergency is uneven, but it’s grounded by dynamic performances and a vivid portrayal of the minutiae of friendship.

Distractingly indebted to No Country for Old Men, the film’s wild tonal swings mostly leave it feeling impossibly disjointed.