Dominick Suzanne-Mayer

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.

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.

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.

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.

Good Time is a film of trembling anxiety, and while the score and the Safdies’ terrific direction both aid this, it’s Pattinson’s outstanding performance that pins even the most outlandish occurrences to a deep sense of emotion.

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.

There’s a strangeness to certain passages of Sisters that bolsters it through its seedy saloons and cacophonous firefights, and it constitutes the best the film has to offer.

As many note throughout the doc, the best moments that film as a medium has to offer are found in the smallest details. And when you find something truly great, as with this scene, you can just keep looking and looking until you spiral into the same void on which the grisly sequence ends.

The film maintains a hum of stoic, nerve-trembling anxiety that carries through to its finale.

It’s exhausting, but it’s also frequently effective. It’s surface-level with its emotional beats, but a number of them still land, largely thanks to the continuously all-in performances of the series’ endlessly patient stars. It’s an event that advertises itself as an event in every way, while somehow still managing to justify the immense hype around it.

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.

Menashe offers an affectingly intimate glance into a world largely unknown to those outside of it, one where faith is omnipresent over every facet of daily life and the troubled society outside is no concern of the neighborhood’s residents.

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.

Filmworker makes a compelling argument that the Kubrick who lives in cinematic legend may not have become the man he’s remembered for being without Vitali around.

Grass Is Greener may ultimately be preaching to the chorus, but its simple messaging could draw in people who enjoy getting high, but aren’t fully aware of the broader political implications. As uses for streaming services go, there are far worse ways to burn down an afternoon.

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.

This is a story with a message, and perhaps an overlong one, but the triumphant staging of the film’s action sequences often tends to erase any lingering doubts of its purpose before long.

While the connections Knappenberger draws between private and government corruption are sometimes belabored, they’re also accurate, and a stark reminder of the increasing popularity of “bought” news.

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.

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

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.

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

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

The romantic comedy beats are familiar enough, but the ways in which the film attacks them gives it a subversive shade that nicely compliments an otherwise straightforward fish-out-of-water story.

By the time Whitney reaches the point it inevitably must, Macdonald’s film stands as an archive of how preventable Houston’s passing truly was.

Malcolm D. Lee’s stab at a Bridesmaids-esque journey of debauchery is funny, sometimes uproariously so, but its greatest strength isn’t in the filthiest stuff. It’s in the rapport between four women who’ve worked hard to remain friends, even as the natural progression of time continuously pulls them further and further away from one another.

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.

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.