Gregory Nussen

The film never really leans into the farcical possibilities of its premise nor its earnest appraisal of Augusto Pinochet’s legacy.

Thomas Salvador frustratingly never offers a concrete sense of what his character feels that he’s lost, and so we’re tasked with loading meaning onto the character’s journey of apparent self-reclamation.

The film handily invokes the campiness of the iconic Disneyland attraction, if not its kinetics.

As tantalizing as the film’s ambiguity can be in certain moments, there comes a point where it starts to feel at once half-baked and a transparent means of delaying the inevitable.

The film is at once a journey of self-actualization and a testament to female solidarity.

In the end, The Miracle Club is splintered at the seams between its desire to tell an uplifting story of forgiveness and a cheeky tale of patriarchal floundering, all the while doing both a tremendous disservice.

The Line isn’t without its moments of genuine beauty, but it’s difficult to shake that its distinct lack of a clear story hasn’t given enough space to the characters.

Despite Earth Mama’s bleak subject matter, it exudes a beatific warmth, in large part because Leaf takes remarkable pains to dramatize a web of solidarity between a group of Black women alongside her depiction of the very system that disenfranchises them.

Sweet but narratively thin and didactic, the latest from DreamWorks Animation always seems as if it’s trying to find its footing.

This Little Mermaid feels more or less like two-hour-plus cosplay with the texture and gravitas of a Disneyland sideshow.

Being as this is the first of a possibly three-part finale, Fast X’s sense of fun is constantly deflated by all the table-setting.

This is a theatrical story told in a purposefully and self-consciously theatrical manner.

The film is devoid of serious conflict, yet it hits with unexpected feeling.

The film undermines its initial sense of intimacy and momentum with a stop-and-start story structure that by and large exists to make as much room as possible for its characters’ banter.

The film is a meditative, slow crescendo of wounded feelings and quiet epiphanies.

The film bangs the drum loudly on behalf of American exceptionalism.

The film doesn’t have a clear opinion on its main subject and the scourge of misogyny in media.

Air is shot through with an infectious energy, but it’s more poignant for the way that it rhymes the histories of its actors in the public eye with all that Nike’s creatives were struggling to reconcile when they were chasing after Jordan.

Tótem is a film of unexpected beauty, using its main character as a conduit for exploring the quandaries of a family navigating matters of love, heartbreak, class, innocence, and, perhaps most prominently, mortality.

It simply picks up the baton from the previous film, relying on a series of increasingly nasty, and at times exciting, kills to thrill audiences, while leaving everything in between to feel as fake as its vision of the Big Apple.

The innocent, it turns out, isn’t a single character but the person inside us all, playing at the version of ourselves we’d rather be.