Hoai-Tran Bui

All These Sons falls short of Liu’s tremendous documentary feature debut, but shows that the Minding the Gap filmmaker is capable of tackling a complicated and knotty subject with the same kind of laser-focused intimacy that he showed in his first autobiographical outing. There may be a distance to All These Sons, but its clear-eyed compassion makes it a solid and effective follow-up.

The layered dynamics and pure, honest emotions underneath Luca‘s simple coming-of-age story are what elevate the film to one of Pixar’s best — and an example of what animation can be if they stop trying to race forward, and just stop and take a breath.

After the empty soullessness of Fate of the Furious and the ribald nonsense of Hobbs and Shaw, F9 feels like Lin is pulling the franchise back on track. Whether that track is properly placed or not, or whether it’s actually a track that takes you off the deep end…well, your mileage may vary.

Despite its minor missteps, In the Heights is an unabashed delight. The cast all give deeply felt, deeply fun performances, with Ramos, Merediz, and Barrera as standouts. In the Heights is a celebration of a rich culture and a group of dreamers, who are messy and full of contradictions, but whose emotions always ring true.

It’s a dichotomy that makes up most of the movie — is it a horror or a post-apocalyptic adventure? Krasinski frequently rejected the “horror” label for the first A Quiet Place, presumably to make the film more accessible to all audiences, but it might be that he doesn’t have the interest in making a straightforward horror film. In the process, A Quiet Place II falls somewhere in between, with the effective thrills and jump scares of a horror film, but with an overly familiar post-apocalyptic plot that we’ve seen many times before.

It’s a sturdy spy thriller from Zhang, a competent first outing in the genre for the filmmaker. But most of all, Cliff Walkers is safe.

Other than a few inventive sequences around the film’s central conceit of “the Noise,” Chaos Walking is a grim retread of the YA dystopian story that offers nothing else but a misguided attempt to elevate the genre through a darker, more “adult” tone. It ends up being little more than a joyless exercise with bad wigs.

One film shouldn’t have to handle the weight of representing an entire geographic region, and I don’t expect Raya and the Last Dragon to do so, though it appears to desperately want to. But taken purely as an action epic, Raya and the Last Dragon is a real treat.

Earwig and the Witch feels like a film going through the motions, but not understanding the emotion behind the big narrative beats it’s trying to pull off. It’s a film matched by its flat animation style: incomplete and uninspired.

It’s pop art made into a feature film, which is a swell idea — if there’s an emotional core that can carry the audience through the staid surrealism. But Audley and the rest of the cast choose to play their characters like stoic ciphers, barely formed archetypes who glide through the film as if in some kind of permanent dream state themselves, making Strawberry Mansion feel even less anchored to reality.

It’s an interesting idea on page, but in John and the Hole, it is all a little too opaque to make sense of Sisto’s muted portrait of adolescence.

With its flat hand-drawn characters moving briskly across the richly detailed backgrounds, Cryptozoo is bursting to the seams with dazzling, shocking, brutal (and edgy, this is an adult animated film, remember) visuals.

It’s a crowd-pleaser, to be sure, and a little on the corny side, but it’s so unwavering in its sincerity that it manages to hit all the right notes.

Soul is dealing with themes that may even be beyond its grasp. The idea of creative passions becoming a reason for living has been a recurring thread through most Pixar films, but Soul attempts to dig deeper. And while it may not find one perfect discernible answer, it’s a search that feels inherently…soulful.

If there ever was a role that played perfectly to Pascal’s natural charisma, it’s Maxwell Lord.

Its disquieting moments of magical realism paired with the all-consuming romance shared between Undine and Christoph — which feels as grand and tragic as the best cinematic love stories — add some warmth to Undine‘s chilly, cosmic exterior.

In The Woman Who Ran, Hong lets go of all vanity and gives Kim a well-deserved spotlight. With Kim’s rueful performance, and the film’s roaming, Eric Rohmer-like sensibilities, The Woman Who Ran allows itself to take solace in serenity and not worry so much about the would haves and could haves.

It is difficult and uneasy, and often feels more punishing than entertaining.

On the Rocks isn’t Coppola’s most momentous film — it’s a little too frothy, all crackle and no pop — but its near lackadaisical tone and a delightful Murray performance make it an entertaining watch. It goes down like a smooth glass of wine, with perhaps a little bit of tartness.

With Mangrove, it feels like McQueen has put the story — of Black pain, Black joy, and Black triumph — back in the hands of the London West Indian community.

Clocking in at a little over an hour, Lovers Rock is naturally a little lean, limited by its one-night premise and its brief sojourn into these characters’ lives. But it’s a tone poem that feels at once a love letter to the style of reggae music which it’s named after, and to the people who danced and fell in love to that music in ’80s London.

What Mulan does suffer from is the absence of the levity that the musical elements would have brought. Mulan is serious verging on dour, so bent on presenting itself as a serious war drama that its rare moments of comedy feel almost awkwardly slotted in.

Face the Music is just so overwhelmingly nice. It’s a cheesy, dopey, pure comedy about people who care a lot — maybe about trivial things, maybe about the wrong things — but boy do they care. And they just want to share their joy for the things they care about (namely rock ‘n’ roll) to the world. So sit back, don’t think too much, and party on, dudes.

Train to Busan may have injected some life into the genre once again with its surprisingly heartfelt narrative, but Peninsula brings it back to those B-movie trappings. It’s not particularly clever or groundbreaking. But you know what? It’s pretty damn fun.

Howard feels like an in-memoriam tribute from a friend: made with a rosy sense of nostalgia, and perhaps a few too many photo montages, but with love.

Though Munden attempts to overload our senses with rich visuals, The Secret Garden does end up feeling kind of slight, like the film rushed through the SparkNotes version of the story.

The problem is that Eurovision Song Contest can’t dream of capturing the real-life weirdness of Eurovision. And while there’s some chuckles that can be drawn out of McAdams and Ferrell lip syncing a surprisingly catchy song while running through a hamster wheel, there’s only so much fun that can be made of a televised singing contest where weirder things have happened.

Artemis Fowl is not just a disappointing adaptation, it’s a badly made movie. Its Frankensteined plot and its shockingly poor CGI — which could have passed in an early 2000s movie, but not in 2020 — leave it no redeeming qualities. It gives me no joy to say that yet another movie adaptation of a beloved childhood property has wasted Colin Farrell.