Dominick Suzanne-Mayer

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