Henry Stewart

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.

Many genre movies in which bad things happen to women end with them fighting back, but here, as people surely would in real life, they just take the money and run.

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.

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

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

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

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.”

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

It’s as if Nicholas Ashe Bateman is commenting on a distinctly American suburban malaise, using a fictional place, digitally made, to get at a real, painful truth about being stuck in a place you didn’t choose, amid circumstances you didn’t create.

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

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

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.

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.

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.

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

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

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.

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

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.

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

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

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

The character drama becomes afterthought as it’s superseded by action.

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

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

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