Dominick Suzanne-Mayer

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.