Emily Yoshida

Adrift is enough of a boilerplate piece of survival drama that you know to expect those beats more or less coming on schedule, but Woodley makes it more emotionally satisfying than it would be otherwise.

A great and grimy little screw-turner of sci-fi schlock, the kind that they truly don’t make anymore, the kind that would make Carpenter and Cameron proud.

It’s remarkable how engaging and light on its feet the director and cast are able to keep this subject matter, how much permission he gives them to f*ck up and try again.

It feels like the self-admittedly emotionally bottled Talley is ready to talk about all of it. It’s too bad his biographer is less so.

Ibiza doesn’t have the strength of wit and character to suffice as a hangout vacation movie, and it has zero idea how to be a romantic comedy, either. It’s not a movie, it’s Netflix.

Two biographical documentaries in, and it still feels like we’re in need of a Houston film that digs into her music first, and the hows and whys of its enduring power.

Its lead protagonists and their endless reserve of raw, bittersweet chemistry are Kahiu’s greatest asset.

Unfortunately McEwan, adapting his own work, and first-time director Dominic Cooke, have a hard time rendering the touchy, interior subject matter cinematic; a potentially promising story of an emotional and physical impasse is flattened so much as to be offensive.

There is so much fascinating, underplayed tension running through Burning.... I was a little let down, then, when Burning lost its steam in its second half.

As it turns out, Book Club is only tangentially “about” the Fifty Shades trilogy, and that’s what makes it so smart.

Like any conspiracy theorist, you sense that landing on an actually airtight unified theory would almost spoil the fun for Mitchell.

The film’s most offensive qualities have nothing to do with its grotesque violence and displays of human mutilation, but its terminal navel-gazing and reductive, borderline harmful ideas about art.

BlacKkKlansman is a nuanced story of race in America, but Lee doesn’t take any chances with vagueness or ellipses, nor should he. As much as BlacKkKlansman plays with the mechanics of blaxploitation fantasy, it doesn’t leave one with any question about what’s real.

By the end, the transformation of China is more compelling than Qiao’s love for Bin, but watching both unfold over time is continually thought-provoking, given the ephemerality of whole cities, much less love affairs.

I was shocked to discover that I was actually … touched. Climax is a small miracle, and if this is Noé going soft (for him, of course), that might actually be a very good thing for the movies.

Pawlikowski understands the mythic, destructive pull such narratives have on us — as audience members and those swept up ourselves.

Lu Over the Wall...is every bit as imaginative as the rest of his body of work, but whereas previous Yuasa works would veer from ominous to outrageous to sweet to explicit to metaphysical, Lu is perfectly happy to stop at sweet. And so am I, quite frankly: Yuasa can be really good at sweet, something that’s often overshadowed by his more mile-a-minute tendencies.

The mystery becomes popcorn-chompingly compelling, each new piece of information adding shading and dimension to the true shape of the family. Nobody is above suspicion or below empathy.

By shifting its perspective and updating its anxieties, Overboard is a decent-to-great model for a rom-com renaissance, the kind of film that sends one out on a high note great enough to blur many of the blemishes that have come before.

Most Likely to Murder, a perfectly fine and forgettable story about a man who still has some growing up to do coming back to his childhood home, is not the worst or the best, merely the latest.

Cream-puff light, but is deceptively rigorous, and about so much more than one woman’s quest to find the One.

A brutal, meandering depiction of a quarter-life crisis, Gillan’s script is staunchly resistant of silver linings or “it gets better” messaging.

Thanks to a beautifully lush, moody score by Michael Nyman and great sound editing, even a fan who has pored over these archives obsessively will see them in a new light. What McQueen reminds those obsessives and laypeople alike is that fashion is an incredibly emotional art form, and McQueen’s work was some of the most moving there was or ever will be.

Duck Butter is a lot — I felt dizzy upon leaving the theater, like I myself had just gone through that same wired 24 hours the protagonists did. For that, I have to give Arteta and Shawkat props — and as the writing debut for the latter, it isn’t shabby at all

This is clearly all fantastic material for a film, but the problems begin with the woeful miscasting of Elle Fanning as the title character, and continue from there.

The plot-engine joke — that Schumer’s character Renee hits her head and wakes up convinced she’s gorgeous — is nothing if not well-intentioned, but veers into cheap and easy enough times to be misinterpreted. When it’s good, though, and when Schumer’s fully locked into her take-no-prisoners charm assault, it’s pretty undeniably delightful stuff.

During the many scenes back home in Jamaica, blessed with the lively Jones clan as subjects, the director doesn’t have any idea what to do with her camera.

I’m not terribly convinced that the overtly campy version of this film would be any better, but I’m very certain that this one is bad.