Emily Yoshida

This is an conversation- and character-driven film with an occasional eye for something more ineffable, but Falco and Duplass’s complicated, nakedly searching performances are the main event.

The film’s conclusion leaves a lot to be desired, which is unfortunate given how well it weaves its atmosphere and small ensemble together.

It’s at once familiar and unsettling, with shades of "Pan’s Labyrinth" and "Return to Oz."

As it turns out, the Ferris wheel is the other perfect parallel to Love, Simon, not the most thrilling ride in the park, a little slow, utterly predictable, perhaps even welcoming the label of “boring.” But like the chorus of a latter-day Taylor Swift song, it will lift you up, goddammit, and good luck trying to stop it.

Uprising’s script isn’t great at jokes or nuance or originality, but it’s pretty good at shuttling us from one set piece to the next. And when those set pieces are good — as is the case with an early Jaeger fight in Siberia, or the gee-whiz silliness of the climactic battle in Tokyo — it’s easy enough to overlook.

I’ll give Flower props — in an age when so many teen movies are grasping so desperately for message-y topicality, it does the impossible, and manages to be about nothing at all.

The flatness that is meant to shock early on quickly becomes boring, and the movie never sparks, slogging on in its nearly unbroken monotone all the way to its climactic moment.

Gringo is a slightly above-average crime farce with a way above-average protagonist — both in terms of writing and performance, and especially given the genre. It’s a surprising high point in Oyelowo’s already distinguished career.

It won’t fix the studio comedy, but it’s a welcome, watchable outlier for now.

A culture clash defined by an incredibly strong first-time performance, it’s continually more emotionally surprising than its dry packaging lets on.

To mistake Garland’s succession of haunted-house-like spectacles as Acid: The Place would be missing out on so much emotional work that he’s doing. (Although, the squeamish should be warned those spectacles range from mildly disturbing to gory and disgusting to absolutely terrifying.)

A half-baked tragic love story so desperately engineered to tear-jerk that it ceases to resemble anything human.

It’s so insistent that this isn’t your great-grandmother’s Peter Rabbit — while, again, not straying from the original character design all that much — that it feels like the animators are at war with the writers, and the loudest of the two groups tends to win out at every turn.

Ozon is doing sexual gymnastics all over his uncanny womb-based plot, and somehow it all coheres pretty seamlessly, even at its most ridiculous.

By the end of Freed, Christian and Ana are no longer a rich man and his middle-class girlfriend, but two rich people telling the tale of how and why they got rich to each other. Doesn’t get more deviant than that.

There aren’t a lot of people to necessarily sympathize with here, but the collective swell of a thousand nagging disappointments, both identifiable and not, make Perry’s film strangely haunting despite the bourgeois mundanity of its events.

The film treads familiar territory when it’s trying to carve cinema-worthy myth from its semi-fictitious protagonist’s life, but its more impressionistic, painterly moments are what feel truly fresh.

This is the sort of action film where the bad guys often hold their fire for no discernible reason, and are terrible at dodging things, but if one suspends one’s disbelief long enough, they’re rewarded with a rollicking, highly competent popcorn movie.

What Mary lacks in the resources to visually gobsmack, it partially makes up for with its unstoppable titular ginger, whose empathy, depressive streak, and enviably fierce eyebrows place her shoulder to shoulder with any Ghibli heroine.

This isn’t to say that the humans in The Commuter act anything like real people; the train is the most realistic performer here, but you could do a lot worse.

The film gets progressively funnier and more delightful as it goes on; King layers plenty of good-natured comedy on top of each daring escape and chase scene, stretching probability and sometimes patience near the end, but each new hitch and escape feels like an act of invention.

There is a real chance that one might be too busy trying to piece it all together to notice the jump scares, the film’s prime mode of horror-stirring.

Bright turns out to be more interested in its mythrilpunk world-building than any kind of social commentary, which is a good thing, because while it is so-so at the former (the plot holes in this thing), it is clearly out of its depth with the latter.

Musicals are inherently fake — they can be ecstatically, transcendentally fake — but this is a whole other level of disingenuousness.

I appreciate that Payne is more interested in blowing out a middle-class American perspective, and its perpetual victimhood narrative. But Damon is completely forgettable here — I suspect that’s by design, but nothing about him commands you watch him the way you watch Chau or Waltz.

Ends with a sentimentality I didn’t buy — the Bellas don’t seem to particularly care about each other outside of a competitive setting, so why should we?

It has its creaky corners, but there are enough twists and shocks to keep it engaging throughout.

Hostiles is a brutal if well-intentioned film that doesn’t help its cause with its lack of development of its Native characters.