Dominick Suzanne-Mayer

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.

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 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.

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.

While the film’s intentions are noble, and its story worth retelling, it struggles throughout to lend a lasting weight to its straightforward plotting.

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.

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.

Deadpool 2 likes to situate itself as the subversive alternative to so many bloated X-Men films, with all their grave self-importance and bombastic action, but even more of this go-around resembles those movies than its predecessor, and if it reads to you as more than a bit hypocritical, just know you’re hardly alone.

American Made speaks in shorthand, in its visual and narrative language alike, and it’s less the ribald ripped-from-the-headlines commentary it aspires to be than a cynically breezy take on an ugly, unduly buried chapter of American history.

The Front Runner is a naively misguided product of panicked, desperate modern times. But perhaps even worse, at least for the type of film it wants to be, it lands somewhere between irrelevant and a woeful misreading of the room.

Sunset is difficult filmmaking, the kind which almost seems impenetrable at times. But if you’re willing to meet Nemes on his level, the film’s rich textures will eventually prove themselves beguiling.

It’s a sparse film, to be sure, but one authentic to the time in which it takes place, even if that authenticity reads in a significantly different light in our own time.

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.

It’s intelligent, frequently resonant, and even wryly funny at points in its own weary way. This is sci-fi which trusts its audience to fill in the blanks and do just a little bit of the heavy lifting, and it’s better off for it.

While the charm of Always Be My Maybe can and should be attributed to its performers, there’s a real sweetness in its reframing of the romantic comedy as the struggle of two people who already have fulfilling lives, attempting to add to them by rediscovering lost pieces of themselves in each other.

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

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.

Throughout Piercing, it’s never clear who’s getting played, at least except for the audience. Those with the stomach for what Pesce and his stars have to offer will likely give over to the rush of it, as the film plays fast and loose with expectations at every turn.

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.

This is punishing filmmaking, both in its sense of overwhelming despair and in its all-too-physical violence, but what sets Apostle apart from being an especially well-shot exploitation feature is its interest in the ideals behind the violence we perform on one another.

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

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.

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

True Romance is for the most part a delightful relic of its era.

Voyeur leaves its viewers with more questions about what happened in the Manor House and what it meant than they’ll have coming in. If that’s hardly the note of finality that many will want or expect, it’s the aspect of the film that perhaps feels the most authentic and honest.

White Boy Rick is a collection of interesting enough scenes in desperate need of a more cohesive framework.

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

Lizzie isn’t exactly an exciting film, but it’s absolutely a compelling one. Much of that, again, emerges from Sevigny’s work, who finds the notes of delicacy that the film around her occasionally lacks.

It’s a movie made of brief chuckles and obvious but well-meaning lessons, and if it lacks the grander ambition of some of the studio’s best and most memorable work, it’s still an enjoyable watch.

Roman J. Israel, Esq. is sometimes a compelling movie and often a difficult one to keep with, but it’s a flawed challenge that you’ll be grateful you gave a chance all the same.

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

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

The little beats throughout Cold Pursuit are distinctive enough to cover for this gory caper’s periodic misfires.

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.

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.

If it never fully realizes the horrors of its prescient setup, it’s nevertheless effective in fits and starts.

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.

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.

The Dead Don’t Die is a zombie movie of an odd stripe, and for all its blatant synthesizing of influences, it never shakes off the impression that it’s working out exactly what it wants to be as it goes along.

Like its unstoppable heroine, Alita: Battle Angel is something strange and unique and special, built from the finest repurposed parts.

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.

As a family movie, Detective Pikachu is enjoyable enough. But if the Pokémon games drew players into the world through immersion, it’s then strange that the first major live-action adaptation frequently races through those moments of immersion in order to get to the next sequence of middling buddy-cop banter.

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.

Kuso is a hallucinatory, scatological, grotesque, and occasionally hysterical work of utter mania, the kind of wild cinema that cuts through the noise of all safer, more marketable filmmaking.

The film may deliver the spectacle of dinosaurs body-slamming other dinosaurs with their mouths, but that’s about all that connects Fallen Kingdom to the wonder and fright of the original film. As a horror movie, it’s diverting enough when it’s not continuously shooting itself in the foot with ideas it can’t explain and doesn’t care to.

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.

Skyscraper‘s knowing sense of transparency about its own corniness turns it into exactly the right kind of summer outing, a tight 93 minutes of consistently well-executed overstimulation that takes itself seriously enough to avoid total self parody while also going out of its way to avoid insulting its audience’s intelligence.

Director Wes Ball frames the film as one long siege on the central city with few exceptions, and while that lends it a certain sense of momentum, after a while the sensation of watching it turns into one of checking off boxes

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.

Goon: Last of the Enforcers often feels far more like a stock sports film than its predecessor, and that’s what ultimately turns it into a highly underwhelming follow-up.

It’s also not all that good, even if it’s hardly the kind of “bad” that most would get riled about. Escape Room is cut from one of Hollywood’s most familiar cloths: the “mall horror” movie.

It’s not reinventing the wheel by any stretch of the imagination, but The Meg is a perfect outing for a balmy late-summer evening at the movies. It’s a little preposterous, a little moving, and a lot entertaining.

Although its leads find the odd moment of charm together, even Kidman in what’s somehow the worst-shaded part of all three, The Upside fumbles far too often when it attempts to enlighten or edify its audience.

While it’s a reasonably paced thriller, The Prodigy is almost wholly devoid of real scares.

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 worst kind of ridiculous: not enough so to be memorably fun, but far too much so to be taken with any degree of gravitas.

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.

It’s a nasty piece of work, and one that at the very least stands as an active interruption of the escapist, family-friendly superhero fare currently dominating the industry.

As with any number of popular YA novels-turned-feature films, Mortal Engines has a wealth of possibilities and curious ideas at its disposal. Instead, it tears past them in pursuit of some of the subgenre’s most exhausted narrative tropes, chewing up everything engaging as it grinds along.

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.

In adapting Death Note for a presumably American audience, Wingard loses the whole of its identity, and never finds a different one with which to replace it.

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.

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.

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’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.

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.

By now, you likely already know whether or not Jigsaw is for you. The series is nothing if not consistent, but the diminishing returns that led to its near-decade hiatus only continue here.

There’s agony in the margins of every frame, but it remains muted beneath so many layers of color and so many hands drifting across surfaces.

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.

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

All Eyez on Me is the opposite of an ideal biopic.

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

The movie is reasonably successful in its own modest way; its interests go no further than offering a handful of pratfall-driven laughs, and a few lessons about kicking back and cutting loose before you miss out on the simpler pleasures of life.

Mute has gobs of style to burn, but it’s virtually the textbook definition of sound and fury signifying nothing.

Henson, ever the magnetic performer, elevates so much of Najafi’s boilerplate direction with sheer presence alone; while the film consistently suffers from the tendency to bathe nearly every scene in maudlin strings and over-exposition, the actress manages to convey multitudes about Mary’s interiority with little more than a sustained gaze.

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.

A curiously loud and ugly beast of a sequel.

As an adaptation, Cats is declawed, never delving fully into the possibilities offered by its proportion-manipulating trick photography and its animated cast. As a big-budget spectacle, it’s a triumphant disaster, if one at least born from a unique idea.

There’s nothing particularly memorable about Robin Hood even when you’re laughing at it, and that may be one of the saddest fates a movie can meet.

That the film never fully gets to the heart of its savage commentaries is probably its greatest disappointment.

It aims for the kind of sprawl that could contain a film with so many big ideas about death and grief and cruelty and salvation, but it’s somehow at once too modest for how bizarre it eventually gets and too excessive to meaningfully deliver on those emotions.

The first major problem with Slender Man is that it’s not anywhere near as scary as many of the fan-made mockups that can be found online right now, but the second and arguably bigger one is that it’s barely a Slender Man story.

If Peppermint has one thing going for it, and it’s by and large the only one, it’s Garner.

It’s the kind of film that sets up a compelling sandbox in which to play, and then smashes gracelessly through it, cackling all the while.

While the flagrant product placement is dialed back (at least on Bay’s curve) and there’s mercifully 100% less discussion of sexual consent laws this time around, the latest outing suffers from arguably the most fatal flaw a movie about giant fighting robots can: it’s brutally and relentlessly boring from start to finish.

When the film isn’t simply boring, it becomes unintentionally hilarious in its occasionally inept production.

When people talk about Hollywood movies feeling more and more like product, this is what they’re driving at.

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.

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.

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

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.

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.