Dom Sinacola

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

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.

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.

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.

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.

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

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.

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.

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 only in Dayveon’s final act that plot contrivances begin to wander away from Abbasi’s carefully calibrated realism.

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.

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.

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

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.

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.

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.

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

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.

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

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.

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.

The context, however much of it there is, affects little, and the whole film begins to resemble a fetish object more than an adaptation. In a bad way.

Bad Boys for Life is better than it should be—the audience at my screening clapped when it ended—but not quite up to being what it must: a reminder that, you know what, a thousand years from now, Bad Boys will still fucking be here.

It doesn’t necessarily matter—nothing matters, really—but Dark Fate is so self-serious, so expositionally overwhelming, that its tendency to tell rather than show bleeds into its every aspect.

For some, Piercing may be a sign of an exceptionally talented filmmaker still finding his stride, this expertly handled erotic thriller an imaginative, stylized headache. For others, Piercing may be all those things, but ultimately not worth the punishment.

Lawrence (and his star, Jennifer Lawrence) want to leave no doubt that this is the lurid, infuriating stuff of the adult-minded, drenched in sophistication and pain—much like Lawrence’s dystopic vision for The Hunger Games, only anchored in the hyperreal world of the New Cold War we may be starting to realize isn’t “new” at all.

White Elephant too often proceeds as dull and dreamy, an occasionally violent eulogy for a life of crime for which we have little context.

None of it ever escalates past a baseline of digestible insanity, which isn’t really all that insane when the pasts of Cage and Taylor are littered with the skeletons of seedier films and more preposterous premises.