Dom Sinacola

Bad Boys: Ride or Die is a genuine crowd-pleaser, just undeniably captivating, funny and raging, neon-pink copaganda.

Unsurprisingly, Dead Reckoning Part One’s plot, as convoluted as the best in the franchise, comes together stupendously.

This is all the makings of Oscar gold, rife with the story beats that The Social Network codified—and even succeeds in some clever elliptical storytelling, the stuff that makes award bodies shiver—but Johnson’s and Raab’s aesthetic consistently pulls the iconism of the story into messier immediacy.

This time around, Murder Mystery 2 isn’t much of an actual murder mystery at all, less interested in the deductive skills of the Spitzes than in their indefatigable charm.

Everything on screen is stupendous. This is what we want, to watch John Wick murder the whole world, forever and ever amen.

The Way of Water’s true achievement is that it looks like nothing else but the first Avatar, unparalleled in detail and scale, a devouring enterprise all to itself. Watching The Way of Water can at times feel astonishing, as if the brain gapes at the sheer amount of physical data present in every frame, incapable of consuming it, but longing to keep up.

A legacy sequel that does nothing to revitalize its characters, expand its canon, extend (heh) its mythos, or even really tell a new joke. I laughed through the whole thing.

Tippett purges his Id until he’s wrung the last bit of bile from the Assassin’s journey, but even throughout all the harrowing imagery, the director never loses a sense of cinematic wonder.

Kosinski’s dogfights are pristine, incredible feats of filmmaking, economical and orbiting around recognizable space, but given to occasional, inexplicable shocks of pure chaos. Then quickly cohering again.

Though an ensemble of Angelenos fills out the film as it barrels to pretty much the only conclusion it could have, Ambulance is about as tidy as a Michael Bay film can get.

Procession feels like the surest execution of Greene’s voice.

Against a lean genre construction, Cummings sputters and apologizes and screams at people and breaks things—vaping constantly—less a force of nature than a flesh-and-blood body half-failing to contain the whiny forces of nature within. His performance is a miracle of control and timing, focused by how little control Jordan has in his life, how poorly timed everything seems to be.

Ghostland is a movie and place borne from nuclear disaster, populated with the denizens of countless B-movies and the spectres of whiplash Hollywood careers.

Like RaMell Ross’s Hale County This Morning, This Evening, Faya Dayi wanders lovely, liminal spaces between narrative and fairytale, between documentary film and something looser, something personally vérité.

Two lives connecting across the wasteland of modernity can be among the rarest and richest parts of our days on this planet. When Tsai makes those connections, all too briefly, it’s indelibly moving.

Ostensibly, Ema revels in the pulling down of walls, insistent on stripping away the artifice of civility and systemic conservatism.

As in all of Petzold’s films, Undine builds a world of liminal spaces—of lives in transition, always moving—of his characters shifting between realities, never quite sure where one ends and another begins.

A sequel of rare sincerity, Bill & Ted Face the Music avoids feeling like a craven reviving of a hollowed-out IP or a cynical reboot, mostly because its ambition is the stuff of affection—for what the filmmakers are doing, made with sympathy for their audience and a genuine desire to explore these characters in a new context. Maybe that’s the despair talking. Or maybe it’s just the relief of for once confronting the past and finding that it’s aged considerably well.

It’s all pretty marvelous stuff, as much a well-oiled genre machine as it is a respite from big studio bloat, a flick more decidedly horror than any version before and yet another showcase for Elisabeth Moss’s herculean prowess.

A marvel of so many confounding, disparate elements that somehow conspire to bring us from one side of the earth to the other. One would think the Safdies got lucky were we not wiser to their talent.

Ready or Not revels in expectations—it’s a survival thriller, dark comedy, gross-out revenge splatterfest—but rarely exceeds them, treading well through each genre signifier, as suspenseful and funny and violent as any one of us could hope.

Waugh’s action set pieces don’t surprise so much as operate with impressive efficiency

Levant gives The Mountain context, structure, bones.

Like a particularly bad trip, Midsommar bristles with the subcutaneous need to escape, with the dread that one is trapped. In this community in the middle of nowhere, in this strange culture, in this life, in your body and its existential pain: Aster imprisons us so that when the release comes, it’s as if one’s insides are emptying cataclysmically. In the moment, it’s an assault. It’s astounding.

Juxtaposing human-sized drama against classic Toho iconography and one jaw-dropping silhouette after another, King of the Monsters is often more magnificently overwhelming than not.

As video games and action movies parabolically draw closer and closer to one another, John Wick 3 may be the first of its kind to figure out how to keep that comparison from being a point of shame.

It’s not always clear that Denis’ film is convincing enough to prove a point, or if any point it would prove is inevitably consumed by the nihilism at the core of its narrative. It simply exists, finds a moment of empathy now and then, is maybe pointless in the end. Like every one of us.

It is, despite its surprisingly gruesome violence, little more than another superhero movie that will make more money than the GDP of a small island nation. It’s pretty good.

Let the Hitchcock comparisons come. Peele deserves them well enough. Best not to think about it too hard, to not ruin a good thing, to demand that Us be anything more than sublimely entertaining and wonderfully thoughtful, endlessly disturbing genre filmmaking.

Like any obviously competent action director, Johnson establishes geography and spatial stakes with rigor, but then, like any incompetent action director—cough, Peter Berg, cough—he loses focus, the idea of the action overtaking its execution. It’s frustrating, because Johnson clearly understands what he’s doing.

Everything is not awesome, but everything isn’t so bad either. How could it be when everything is everything? Perhaps this is the lesson on which kids can glom amongst this admittedly overlong, overwhelming experience: Yoda was wrong; trying is what matters. It’s a lovely lesson, and a lovely movie.

The heartbreaking bravery of Barry Jenkins’ third brilliant film is that he rests upon a clean, aching ambiguity: Such hope is both enough, and will never be enough, because nearly 50 years later nothing has changed.

For the most part, the DCEU just can’t square its admittedly exciting set pieces with solid storytelling. In turn, whenever Aquaman pops a squat to unload exposition, it grinds to an interminable halt. Those action scenes, though. Revolutionary at best, innovative at worst.

Where Hill’s characters fill every frame with warmth and empathy, the world they inhabit is as contrived as a memory one trusts too much.

As was the case in Cosmatos’s first film, the comparatively sedate Beyond the Black Rainbow, each frame, every shot of Mandy reeks of shocking beauty, stylized at times to within an inch of its intelligibility, but endlessly pregnant with creativity and control, euphoria and pain, clarity and honesty and the ineffable sense that Cosmatos knows exactly how and what he wants to subconsciously imprint into the viewer.

Once all these characters come together, the film’s manic, disjointed first act settles in for some seriously rollicking ’80s-esque hijinks, replete with brand new Predator aliens and a healthy dose of worldbuilding that touches on today’s every hot button issue, from climate change to genetic modifications to anti-ableism that’s actually probably just ableism.

It’s true that no one’s really making films like this anymore, but it’s also true that everyone pretty much wants to.

McQuarrie’s sense of building a scene on the barest of elements, communicating the most empirical of information, is so breathlessly impeccable, the plot barely seems to matter aside from creating easily understood stakes and giving Ethan Hunt a reason to keep, in the parlance of the film, figuring it out.

What Leave No Trace portrays so beautifully, with so much unspoken grace, is that divide between living and surviving to live. One can find all of that dissonance in Foster’s fathomless eyes.

It’s a gorgeous film, mourning the impossibility of being alive as it celebrates that which binds us, a conscious-rattling, viscera-stirring piece of art.

It’s a pretty great blockbuster if you don’t think about it much.

What cinematographer Joshua James Richards can do with a camera bears the weight of countless filmmakers in thrall to the pregnant possibility of this marvelous continent. Every frame of this film speaks of innumerable lives—passions and failures and tragedies and triumphs—unfolding unfathomably.

Bewitching and masterfully rendered, Zama is an elegant, ravishing, often delightfully strange achievement.

If the film’s direction is workmanlike and the writers’ plotting flimsy, then the better to focus on the cast. They’re a joy to watch together.

As much as the movie is an enrapturing, sometimes overwhelming experience, filled with passion and hard work and adoration for the impossible task of making such a singular movie at all, Anderson and his animation team find the film’s soul in these dog’s eyes.

Black Panther might be the first MCU film that could claim to most clearly be an expression of a particular director’s voice.

Gorgeous and gross in equal measure, propelled by the sense that anything could happen, Like Me is a visual feast.

It’s a beautiful thing, Wright’s film, an act of historical tension made with the grandest of ambitions tempered by the most careful of portrayals—precise in its bloat and fearless in its fantasy—a reminder today of what makes for actual leadership in a world exhausted by flummoxed white men with sound and fury, signifying nothing.

Anthony’s is the rare film that thrives in its parts rather than in the sum of them, though the sum is breathlessly simple, to the extent that one wonders why no film has ever connected the lines—lined up the parallels—as Anthony has.

Blade Runner 2049 should resonate deeply with anyone who’s ever held love for the original.