Emily Yoshida

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.

In the hands of "Iris" and "Notes on a Scandal" director Richard Eyre, McEwan’s story is stagy and austere, taking place in gleaming flats and spotless courtrooms, like a Nancy Meyers movie with more court wigs. It’s a wan, sapped atmosphere, making the life, faith, and literal blood of a 17-year-old boy all the more stark a line to run through it.

Peppermint has no surprises up its sleeve, and casting Jennifer Garner as the put-upon housewife turned gun-toting vigilante doesn’t change that. If anything, changing one element of the formula does more to expose its dullness than the same movie starring Liam Neeson.

From the script to the music to the unfinished-feeling sound edit — nothing about Sierra Burgess feels like it got past a first draft.

Suspiria is a gorgeous, hideous, uncompromising film, and while it seeks to do many things, settling our minds about the brutality of the past and human nature is not one of them.

Cuarón never seeks a tidy resolution for their loving, lopsided, complicated relationship. But it’s one of the reasons why Roma leaves such a deep and lasting impression.

Levin’s dialogue is relentless. Every line and retort is a punch line, and every punch line more or less amounts to Lindsey and Frank telling each other how much they stink.

It never gets tiring to watch the girls coast down the Manhattan streets, cocky and breezy and effortless, turning the heads of younger girls who gaze at them, starstruck. But it’s also featherlight, not meant to endure much longer than those brief airborne moments Camille and her friends live for.

That’s what’s great about The Wife: Joe is no saint, and his philandering appears to be an open secret in the literary community, but it doesn’t mean Joan doesn’t love him. If she didn’t, none of this would be half as wrenching.

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.

It is neither dumb nor smart enough to be fun, and spends way too much time with its boring human characters when it could be spending it with, you know, the giant shark.

Luckily, Crazy Rich Asians is, at its heart, a fish-out-of-water story, and it has a lot more going for it than its literal money shots.

The Darkest Minds is just too foggy to make out much of anything in.

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.

Cameron Post is the kind of film that openly courts falling into the cinematic limitations of an “issues film.” Akhavan’s sense of place and ensemble do a lot to counter that, but that specificity ends with the main character.

Like its protagonist, Puzzle finds itself as it goes along, and Agnes becomes a truly interesting person to root for.

As it cliff dives, unprompted, into reheated cocaine-nightmare territory done better by any number of 1990s ’70s nostalgia films before it, it not only ceases to be fun, but stops pretending it has any vision for where its lead characters should go.

In Dark Web, the threat is wholly of this world, which makes the sequel feel as though it comes from another universe entirely. It is scary, but it isn’t much fun.

The film starts to feel like it’s more invested in selling the idea of the series rather than a film in and of itself.

Here We Go Again ties up these two wackadoo films’ hijinks in a very sincere bow. After all, Mamma Mia is a mom movie, in every way imaginable.

Ultimately, Hotel Transylvania 3 is for very young children, and God love it for that.

The problem isn’t Reiner taking dramatic liberties with the facts, it’s that his toolbox for doing so hasn’t changed since the mid-’90s.

With a light touch but deep reserves of respect for fans both old and new Ryuichi Sakamoto: Coda is an extremely fitting portrait of the influential composer. There’s an air of patience that presides over director Stephen Schible’s footage, even during a period that presents a lot of tumultuous questions for his seemingly unflappable subject.

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.

The doubt about what is real and what isn’t has permeated so much of the film that when things take a turn for the serious in the final act, we the audience can’t even quite believe what we’re seeing, until the credits roll and you shrug to yourself, “Huh, I guess it was for real.” That’s a weirdly muted note to end such an otherwise over-the-top — conceptually and physically — comedy.

Ultimately, in all its artifice and haphazard but enthusiastic invention, Hotel Artemis makes me a bit nostalgic for French ’90s genre fare of Jean-Pierre Jeunet and Marc Caro and, of course, Luc Besson, embracing their daffiness and dreaminess with an somewhat counterintuitive, almost naïve lack of vanity.

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.

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.