Dominick Suzanne-Mayer

Beatriz at Dinner has an ear for the microaggressions that tend to constitute so much modern racism, and these moments tend to play better than the broader attempts at cultural commentary.

There’s no linear path to being “okay,” or to overcoming grief, and Band Aid is ultimately as much about how people have to do these things on their own as it is about a couple doing it together.

It’s still a reasonably funny movie when it hits its marks. It’s just a funny movie prone to going to some ugly, barren wells for laughs throughout as well.

It’s the rare Marvel sequel that manages to expand on what came before in new and rewarding ways, while also striking its own distinct tone even as some of its narrative devices skew familiar.

The Circle aims for slow-building dread, but Ponsoldt’s direction and the script are both so uncharacteristically stiff that the film’s tone never solidifies.

Furious 7 is at turns a celebration and a farewell, a film that goes for broke in using its many seemingly forgettable bits of established canon to tie together all of the films and pay its respects.

The Lost City of Z is as much about the struggle of progress as the real-life story it’s telling, and Gray sharply observes the ways in which mankind continuously tears itself apart, usually in the name of progress.

Even as Fate has its fun and chases its highs (a few of which are pretty satisfying), it’s hard to shake the growing sensation that the bloom might be coming off the rose.

Your Name is the kind of film that’s all the more striking for how easily it could have gone awry, but Shinkai has accomplished something unique and genuinely special here.

That world is so well-realized that the film is worth seeing, but it’s a mild letdown given the number of philosophical queries that it raises, only to leave ultimately unexplored.

Power Rangers ably sates all appetites: it’s absurd enough to avoid the self-seriousness that threatens to swallow it throughout, but just straight-faced enough to stop short of the kind of referential irony that would sink it.

In one sense, here’s a sequel to a ‘90s classic that trades heavily on audiences’ appreciation for that previous film. In another, here’s a film that uses that fact in service of an insightful, affecting commentary on how there’s no choice in life but to either move forward or to not.

If Raw is hardly subtle in its depiction of burgeoning womanhood, from the social to the sexual, Ducournau delivers the film’s parable with a candor that suits it perfectly.

Perhaps the most satisfying thing about the film is what comes after, when you stop to realize how darkly comic and sickly fun the film was after you’re done reeling from all the impaling and dismemberment.

It’s a genuine drag to watch talented actors struggle through tepid material, and Table 19 offers this more readily than it does its laughs or its pathos.

It’s a simple story of children who have to figure out, at too young an age, what kind of people they’ll be. And in its pervasive sense of hope, Barras seems to suggest that they can be anybody they want. There’s always still time, as long as love remains in the world.

What’s most unfortunate about Fist Fight is the wealth of talent it amasses for little to no discernible purpose.

Chapter 2 is a hyper-violent piece of pulp action cinema through and through, but it’s also an exemplar of how to make such a film with style and intelligence.

Given the sheer volume of jokes on hand, it’s impressive how often LEGO Batman successfully lands its punchlines.

Where Imperial Dreams occasionally wavers is in its unsubtle storytelling, which often feels at odds with Vitthal’s appealing and naturalistic direction.

XX is a horror anthology more admirable for its intent and concept than for its execution.

Patti Cake$ is a rags-to-riches story that too often comes off as a carbon copy of other, similar rags-to-riches stories.

It’s a transcendent love story, and a work of overwhelming empathy.

Dayveon’s muted, largely allusive storytelling takes a backseat to tone and place throughout, and Abbasi demonstrates an assured command of both.

Brigsby Bear offers a touching and daringly unconventional reminder of how no approach to filmmaking is inherently bad with the right mind at the helm.

What’s perhaps most remarkable about Mudbound is its emotional honesty, Rees rarely sidestepping the inner lives of her characters and never diminishing their own battles to live in an unlivable time, however wrongheaded they might be.

A Ghost Story is filmmaking that challenges and exhilarates, a potent reminder of how many new places film can still be taken even after a century of people working in the medium.

Peele is a talented director of action as well as horror, and Get Out is always far from boring even in its more familiar scenes.

It’s a perfect marriage of direction, performances, and writing, the kind of comedy that people eagerly wait for. Its solutions aren’t easy, and its paths unusual, but it’s a love story that completely earns its emotional peaks, and the kind of comedy that makes you wish every single one of them were this great.

Where the narrative is sometimes slack, and the film’s larger purpose left to interpretation after a while, Landline’s great strength lies with its performances.

Though Colossal does occasionally waver, most often due to its recurring tendency to hastily discard characters before their stories feel complete, it’s also a genuinely touching film that works phenomenally well for the most part, bolstered by the lingering sense of regret that hangs over the film’s funniest and most wrenching sequences alike.

It’s less an attack on big business (though such sentiments are certainly present) than a call for a rational assessment of proven facts. If it does occasionally dabble in hero worship of its subject, it also makes the effective case that somebody has to keep showing up when nobody else can be bothered.

While he has a decent enough handle on the right tone for the proceedings, Caruso’s action sequences are slapdash to the point of incoherence.

In its unwillingness to settle on a singular approach, Live By Night undercuts the things that occasionally do work, and leaves it a film in search of a grander purpose.

It’s so spectacularly inept, at so many different points, that it’s hard to imagine anybody will be able to forget it. It’s not a good movie by any stretch of the imagination, but it’s the kind of bad movie that audiences with the taste for that kind of thing will eat up by the spoonful.

It is not a bad film because of its sincerity of intention. It’s a bad film because it manages to make that sincerity feel disingenuous as it goes on, more and more so with each passing scene.

It feels like a missed opportunity overall, a movie that’s just funny enough often enough to make you wish that more of it fit together.

Even allowing for its recognizable traits, Moana is as much a treat to watch as any recent Disney outing.

The Edge of Seventeen has more than enough earnestness of heart to make up for its structural shortcomings. It’s a teen film with an uncommonly honest ear for interactions.

While there are no chapter breaks or anything to formally guide the audience in that way, Into the Inferno feels unusually episodic by Herzog’s typically cohesive standards.

Ejiofor is truly incredible from start to finish. McQueen’s approach to Solomon’s struggle is seamless, eschewing onscreen titles or obvious discussions of lapsed time or virtually anything that could briefly detach a viewer from their immersion into Solomon’s real-life nightmare.

The Handmaiden is film at its most exhilarating by a director at the height of his powers, and it’s the kind of singular rarity that must be savored when it comes around.

If the film often takes an aggressive approach to driving this central thesis home, Shin Godzilla manages to negotiate a difficult balance between delivering the monster movie thrills promised by its central creature and a film that utilizes those thrills in service of something more substantial.

If Julieta weren’t such a crushing bore, it might have been a lusty little delight.

In Andrea Arnold’s sublime film American Honey, freedom is relative, but every once in a while it can feel so damn good that the whole world disappears around it.

Snowden is a film of sincere outrage, even when it strains to articulate that outrage in a less from-the-headlines manner.

Eight Days a Week will be of most value to die-hard and casual fans of the band alike, but it’s also a reasonably effective primer on them for anyone who might not yet be initiated.

The more affecting moments in Sully come when the film puts aside its posturing and really examines what it is to be heroic in a cynical age.

The Light Between Oceans is an effective melodrama, but the lingering sensation the film leaves after its end is that it might have been much more.

Mechanic: Resurrection plays in an uncommonly generic key, and the film only makes intermittent attempts to enliven the proceedings.

A simple story told well can still be effective if the emotional resonance underneath it comes through. In Kubo, it absolutely does, thanks to the uniformly excellent voice performances.

The Hollars deals in weighty personal tragedies, and yet neither the treacly, offbeat humor nor the moments of more straightforward pathos tend to work for any real length of time.

For all of the film’s nonstop, aggressive insistence on its subversive qualities, it’s about as radical and unconventional as a teenager buying a Leftover Crack shirt with their mom’s credit card from Amazon.

Hillary’s America is repugnant, and while it exists to get people who stand against it yelled at as much as anything, it’s essential that D’Souza not simply be written off as a hack pandering to a willing and lucrative audience regardless of the moral implications, though he is. D’Souza peddles the kind of “media” that’s become cancerous to the country he unyieldingly purports to worship.

It’s a warmly empathetic documentary, the kind that simply observes instead of attempting to sound one kind of rallying cry or another.

Captain Fantastic loses its intriguing premise in a muddle of ideas about the redemptive power of family and the right of all people to live as they please.

For a film designed to spawn ancilliary products and sequels, Pets is not entirely without its charms

A curiously loud and ugly beast of a sequel.

The film’s belief in and commitment to the simplicity of its premise takes it a lot farther than it might otherwise go.

Raiders!, as a documentary, is much like Zala and Strompolos’ film in that it’s rough around the edges at points, but so utterly sincere that it’s hard to deny after a while.

It’s a classic case of sequel bloat, a film that seems to exist less because of any extended story it wants or needs to tell than because it must repackage something that was once popular.

Last Days in the Desert explores Jesus in his most mortal phase, and McGregor’s exhausted performance is essential to its success.

It’s a feel-good story enlivened by the fact that there’s no overly sentimentalized hokum to be found.

By firmly rooting all of the film’s sprawling drama in a singular conflict, directors Joe and Anthony Russo manage to do what many superhero films have struggled with in recent years: find a truly effective reason to pit superpower against superpower.

It’s a marvel of filmmaking created from nothing (and one of the more meaningful uses of 3D in recent memory as well), and Favreau stages one scenic tableau after the next with uncommon skill.

The Invitation is supremely well-crafted.

There is a tone of anger that sneaks out of the film in even its moments of levity.

It’s a film with no easy answers, and rightly, Hood doesn’t strain to offer them. If the film’s attempts at barbed satire don’t land as well as its graver moments, it’s nevertheless an effective look at the new kind of war.

The Bronze is so satisfied with its own winking crassness that it lets epithets constitute everything it has to say. Between that and the film’s scene-by-scene tonal shifts, what could’ve been an off-kilter curiosity curdles into a dull roar of disappointment.

Creative Control ably captures the entitled narcissism of modern Brooklyn twentysomethings by way of a plausible near-future,

There’s a note of reflexive, self-aware irony to it, but portions of Knight of Cups feels as though they’re indulging in precisely this same kind of early-college navel-gazing.

To have seen a disaster movie before is to have seen The Wave. But if there’s not necessarily anything remarkable or new about the film, Uthaug finds ways to make the familiar immediate, with a fraction of the money usually involved.

There’s a depth to the city that shows how far the form has come in a short time, and Zootopia is better off for it, especially when it still ultimately doesn’t break away from the familiar Disney formula as much as some of the studio’s other recent films have managed.

How To Be Single doesn’t break much at all in the way of new ground, but it’s a decent walk over well-trodden territory.

It’s hard to imagine a movie much more aware of itself both as a movie and as a moment in a cultural progression of similar movies than Deadpool.

While Yoga Hosers continues Smith’s quest to push himself into increasingly strange and uncomfortable directions as a filmmaker, it’s either too derivative or too malformed to work the vast majority of the time.

At points the film simply observes the smaller, more innocuous moments of a coming-of-age story; much of it is framed in intimate medium shots and close-ups, and there’s a distinct kinship between the numerous wayward souls in its world that carries it along.

The Lure somehow manages to seamlessly assemble a film equal parts hilarious, affecting, and grisly while trading and warping aesthetics and tones by the scene.

As both an utterly mad true story and as a document of the boundless reach of the cinema across borders and cultures and even ideologies, The Lovers and the Despot is wild, valuable viewing for all.

If Lo and Behold is more just a collection of interviews on a series of themes than a cohesive piece of storytelling, it’s still a fascinating endeavor into how the Internet went from personal to unimaginably broad and how it could either continue to expand or perhaps even return to that infant phase again.

Much of Kate Plays Christine is more of a form exercise than it is a documentary portrait, which works to both the film’s benefit and detriment.

It’s true that few movies are this aw-shucks nice these days, and for a short while The Fundamentals of Caring finds ways of retaining that kindness without lapsing into platitudes.

Indignation resonates at times with the tension of things said and unsaid, regretted and forgotten.

There are moments of true terror to be found among the silence and the encroaching existential dread in which the film deals most prominently.

In fits and starts, the film matches the fire of its lead performance. Miles Ahead is far from a traditional, boilerplate music biopic, for better and worse alike.

At times, László Nemes’ film induces the sensation of drowning, slowly. Not the kind where you’re pulled under by the riptide, but the kind where you’ve been treading water for so long that the body starts to betray you in tiny increments, and any life preserver must be met with utter desperation.

Don Verdean is the sort of comedy which presumes its own hilarity long before it gets around to telling any actual jokes, or staging anything that might otherwise be considered funny.

Unlike in some of the filmmaker’s past work, however, Youth foregrounds the performance over the spectacle; Keitel turns in some of his finest work in years as the aging, fiery Mick, and Caine delivers a performance composed of untold multitudes.

For a film where not much ultimately happens, per se, Cronies is a thoughtful reflection on nostalgia and how the sins of the past affect the present.

The terrors put forth by the film are at once specific to the era of its production and timeless in their direct connection to the American experience.

There’s a lot of depth to Rushmore, but lingering in those depths for too long does a disservice to how consistently funny it also is.

Like so much of Linklater’s best work, the film is profound through its being deliberately unassuming. It’s sincere without being dopey, honest without being mean, optimistic without being oblivious of how hard the future can be.