Henry Stewart

About a drug that sends its users back in time for seven minutes, the film holds your hand and walks you through its chronology mazes

This is a film that employs imaginative twists to illuminate the racism that’s entrenched in American history and society.

The character drama becomes afterthought as it’s superseded by action.

This a parable about adulthood boasts deeply cynical takes on home, community, and childrearing.

The film was almost canceled for being too partisan, so it’s ironic to discover that it’s practically apolitical.

It’s best appreciated not with the parts of your brain responsible for reason and judgment, but in the unthinking terror centers, where the film’s style of God-fearing fanaticism also resides.

The film’s tone is extremely eerie, with creeping camera movements, striking imagery, abrupt edits, and a delicately sinister score.

Patrick Lussier’s film is an incompetent, nihilistic exercise in gore and pseudophilosophy.

The film argues we’re stronger and better when we’re home, building communities that can oppress the oppressors and build up so-called “losers.”

Would that Jacob Estes had kept the particulars of his murder mystery as intricate as the sci-fi of his main characters’ communion.

Once it gets past what feels like submission to genre demands, the drama reaffirms its focus on the central themes.

In the end, the filmmakers settle for stigmatizing victimhood, abusing Sue Ann almost as much as her former tormentors.

Even though it’s not as tidily satisfying as Get Out, the new film is both darker and more ambitious, and broader in its themes.

Happy Death Day 2U pushes further than even matters of life and death into a realm in which stakes don’t even really apply anymore, concerned as it is not with how we live our best lives, but with how we can be the best possible versions of ourselves.

The filmmakers fail to realize that the darkest horror here doesn’t lie in the triumph of true evil, but in seeing how far a regular family will go to protect itself before doing the right and necessary thing, however hard or horrible it might be.

The Vanishing seems truly troubled by its action violence in a way that many similar thrillers aren’t.

When Ralph Breaks the Internet ignores the glittering marvels of the internet and focuses on the rapport between its two leads, it's deeply moving.

The film's victims are simply pawns in a super-gory bacchanal, which is aesthetically striking but emotionally dull.

The film moves evenly toward a conclusion that feels as inevitable as it does inescapable, while providing a plausible framework for the still-mysterious true crime.

Pierre Morel's first feature film set in the United States is brainless propaganda for the MAGA market.

Like the teenagers at its center, Hot Summer Nights tries too hard to look cooler than it ever could be.

The film is preposterously conceived, but writer-director Stephen Susco so tightly, excitingly executes it that you hardly notice.

Especially early on, Gerard McMurray often rejects the exhibitionist slaughter that James DeMonaco established as the Purge series’s modus operandi in favor of violence that’s rawer and realer.

There’s a lot of sexual violence in the film, but it scans as unimaginatively repulsive, as well as blatantly misogynistic.

Director Jeff Wadlow's Truth or Dare is a startlingly mean-spirited but otherwise dimwitted horror film.

Justin Benson and Aaron Moorhead veer away from the deeper, even meta-cinematic, implications of their plotting.

Throughout, the film raises metaphysical issues of physical and psychological autonomy only to gloss over them.

Throughout, the film raises metaphysical issues of physical and psychological autonomy only to gloss over them, probably because addressing them could too quickly shut down the romance.

Annihilation gets momentum from the deeper it pushes into the uncertainties of ecology and the self.

Eventually, the filmmakers reveal the secrets they'd previously withheld, spoiling the film's sustained mystique.

The fourth film in the Insidious franchise, directed by Adam Robitel, is lazy and sometimes even loathsome.

As released, All the Money in the World is by and large a conspicuously manufactured thriller that moves between manipulative psych-outs.

The film advances that old Hollywood trope: Blacks can't get justice unless whites are willing to get it for them.

Once the film gets to the Orient Express, it's as if Kenneth Branagh is always itching to get off of it, even having Hercule Poirot at one point look over a list of names while standing atop the train for no discernible reason, except perhaps to enjoy the way the sun peeks out between two distant mountain peaks.

The outline of Miles Joris-Peyrafitte’s As You Are is certainly well-worn, but this coming-of-age film nonetheless stands out for its nuanced sense of detail and the sympathy it extends to its main characters.

The film's central theme, about where attention-starved narcissism leads when taken to extremes, isn't quite sufficient to sustain an entire feature.

Greg McLean and screenwriter Justin Monjo faithfully hit the key plot points of Yossi Ghinsberg's 1993 book Back from Tuichi but fail to sell the severity of the threats Yossi confronts.

The film gives Una a little more agency, but director Benedict Andrews often invalidates such empowerment.

The transformation of a teen into a serial killer isn't credible compared to the portrait of idle suburban adolescence.

It becomes the obnoxious equivalent of trying to have a serious conversation with people who are high out of their minds.

The film successfully argues that it’s through sensory details that we access the deeper aspects of our lives.

The filmmaker has a bad habit of dropping the psychological inquiries to dully go through the genre motions.

The film is at its strongest when navigating the story's uneasy relationship to its genre.

The film's storylines fail to inform or intensify each other in any theme-deepening or character-developing ways.

Split is personal and outlandish, with questionable themes, riveting plotting, somber storytelling, and elegant construction.

As it unfolds, Whatever Works assumes an increasing note of poignancy, becoming a quasi-optimistic story about securing whatever little love you can in this fakakta world.