Emily Yoshida

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 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.

With its martini-swilling leads and swingy French pop soundtrack, A Simple Favor seems to yearn for a bygone era of nail-biter, but rather than wallow in pastiche, it comes up with something truly contemporary feeling.

The first time I saw Peterloo, it sent me out of the screening room onto Park Avenue with my blood boiling. Despite the oratory and the funny hats, Leigh’s ability to incite felt utterly contemporary and urgent.

The film builds to an anarchic set piece, in which a school full of rambunctious children defend the world from evil while the adults literally disappear off the face of the earth. It’s the closest thing Cornish comes to a real-life prescription for what ails us, and it goes down pretty well.

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

It’s a light musing on adulthood and monogamy and sisterhood, washed in Pavlovian period nostalgia. The revelations are gentle, but worthwhile.

If you’re the type of viewer who thought "Wolf of Wall Street’s" failing was that it looked too cool, American Made is for you. It’s the grubbiest, greasiest vision of bad boys gettin’ away with it in recent memory.

The childlike, free-associative playfulness is now underscored by a palpable hunger to be the cleverest and coolest kids’ movie on the block, a hunger that weighs down Lord and Miller’s plenty-smart silliness.

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

Condor is a ready-made star, and Centineo rises to meet her, the adoring, throaty lunk any introverted teen dreams of coming around and melting away her shyness. Theirs is a teenage romance I can believe in, despite its ridiculously convoluted circumstances.

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.

We’re left floored by the facts of Colin Warner’s case; the film itself falls away.

As a psychological down-is-up horror movie, The Lodge has a few solid tricks up its sleeve. But when the smoke and mirrors clear, it’s ultimately a story about trauma, and a rather bleak one at that.

When Day of the Soldado truly wallows in violence, it does so exquisitely, with the kind of hopelessness that film violence, especially around this subject matter, should convey. But it also destabilizes any marketable attempts at heroism or character investment.

Five Foot Two distinguishes itself from similar projects from Justin Bieber and Katy Perry by not trying to be a 101 class in the subject and her personal history, but when it hits similar beats — heartbreak, the physical demands of performing, tearful scenes with family — anyone who doesn’t have a Little Monster’s encyclopedic knowledge might feel a little emotionally lost.

Alex Strangelove is a little stylistically unambitious, nor is it terribly compelling as a romance — who Alex ends up with is ultimately beside the point.

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.

There’s nothing cheap about the rest of Annabelle: Creation, so this scattered finale felt like a letdown.

The film lives and dies by Latimore’s performance, which is quiet and ever-shifting.

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.

The experience of watching it, especially given its dreamlike unreality and head-scratching punnery (this is a deeply unfunny movie) is like listening to a doddering old man for whom every story — about art, politics, local goings on — ends up being about how every woman is an evil witch that can’t be trusted.

I left Ocean’s 8 more convinced than ever that no amount of fierce, fantastic female ensembles can overcome the mediocrity of a dull male director.

It’s clear between this and Nightcrawler that Gilroy and Gyllenhaal have some kind of gonzo chemistry. Even if Velvet Buzzsaw starts to sputter slightly after it’s made its point, it’s plenty exciting to witness the incredibly specific madness they whip up together.

An altogether warm, sharp, and unobjectionable family holiday film.

It’s neither a rigorous history lesson nor a particularly interesting work of drama and character, and it ends up doing the exact same things — pitting women against each other, fixating on fertility and virginity — it claims to find so oppressive for its heroine.

Despite the heavy context and historical precedent, there’s not a whole lot on Overlord’s mind, and a gestured-at “defeating the monsters makes us monstrous” philosophical thread ends symmetrically but pointlessly.

It is one of the more sadistic family films I have ever seen, a picture of the residents of a neglected childhood reckoning with the abandonment of their beloved, now grown-up human leader.