Jake Kring-Schreifels

A romantic comedy that functions best as a fable of friendship and self-reflection, Am I OK? is the kind of lightweight, amiable movie that just barely earns the emotional beats at the heart of its story.

[Okuno’s] made a smart, controlled movie of pricks and gestures and tones that accumulate into a satisfying catharsis. And perhaps validated the urge to follow your gut.

In an era of superhero gluttony, in which these familiar stories, characters, and visuals tend to bleed together, The Batman holds the rare distinction of creating and embracing its own identity.

The risk for these kinds of stories––the best ranging from 12 Angry Men to One Night in Miami––is that they lose momentum after the initial setup. You need strong, convincing characters to make persuasive arguments and unearth deep-seated secrets. Brooklyn 45 supplies such.

This is a movie engineered to resemble a thrill ride, a greatest-hits carousel powered by fan service and corporate recycling. It practically embraces Marty’s designation—and that’s OK. Despite their noted limitations, theme parks like this still offer plenty of fun.

It’s exciting to see a debut so self-assured and comfortable in its own sun-baked skin.

The beauty is that Torres never forces these messages down your throat. The movie is too looney, too specific to be so obvious.

While The Damned sometimes resembles a reenactment, Minervini makes a valid attempt to highlight war’s aimless priorities on its marginalized and unheralded members.

The ingredients look enticing enough, but director Nicole Beckwith isn’t cooking with real spice. Her insular drama operates at a consistent slow burn—it has just enough steam to keep you interested without ever bubbling over into interesting.

Lee has crafted strong, sensible character studies, filled with long pauses and reflective beats. It’s just trapped in the wrong vehicle.

The narrative manipulation is the only thing clouding an otherwise crystal-clear dip into sublime terror.

It’s hard to find movies—no matter their scope—that grasp and depict the human experience with the kind of honesty and dexterity Raiff has committed to the screen so far.

The Wanting Mare is a soft and silent seduction, an alluring yet unfulfilling poetic fable that leaves you wanting more.

Murphy keeps Steve on the tracks. Among his great gifts is an ability to convey feelings while internally processing information.

Greengrass doesn’t have you squirming in your seat because he’s manufacturing drama but because he knows when to cut, when to slow down, when to fire on all cylinders. This sounds like a science, but it’s actually an art.

Call Jane is a competently made, well-acted historical drama that doesn’t give its charged subject matter the stakes or urgency it needs.

These people and places read more like figments of imagination, part of a borough Holder wants it to be. As such, the movie is a rough, painterly sketch, a first draft that’s easy to read, provokes warm feelings, and deserves just a little more detail.

The loose spiritual ends don’t stitch together to produce the kind of scares that stick with you after their initial jolt.

Is it possible to stand out and disappear at the same time? Matt Damon makes a convincing case study in Stillwater.

The characters here are half-baked, archetypes meant to fit into this semi-supernatural mystery box without the cathartic release that defeating various hate-groups should have.

It runs pretty thin pretty quickly, a monotonous circle of arguing, indecision, concerned looks, and anxiety that stalls out the whimsy and momentum and all unique aesthetic possibilities of Freyne’s under-explored setting.

You can sense Bautista making the best of Snyder’s father-daughter formula, but pacing feels off. And the script, which Snyder wrote with Joby Harold and Shay Hatten, settles into mechanical plotting that undercuts all the zany, pop energy that began its trajectory.

Sans some overarching Avengers narrative providing these standalone epics their thrust, Thor: Love and Thunder plays adrift and uneven, once again resistant to use its untethered narrative and leading hunk in any meaningful—meaningfully sexy—way. By film’s end, when one character tells another to “choose love,” I could hear a handful in my theater beginning to sniffle and cry. It’s hard to understand why. The only thing my eyes could do was roll.

You need some urgency and momentum to carry a movie like this. The incoming armageddon, occasionally seen as a small CGI blip in the blue sky, doesn’t have it. But as the day ends, Lister-Jones and Spaeny have enough chemistry to supply the real drama.

Like its main character, this movie seems hesitant to say anything. It sacrifices exhilaration and settles for emptiness.

The younger Day-Lewis has crafted something haunting and exquisite, a slow-burning, two-handed meditation about grief, regret, and the kind of absence that irreparably fractures a family. Mostly, though, it supplies the elder Day-Lewis a chance to flex his dormant muscles, most prominently with a couple of monologues—one humorous and scatological in nature, the other reflective, darker, and more vulnerable—that sneak up on you in overwhelming ways.

As the movie’s romantic arc unfolds, everything just feels a little too goofy and distracted, considering the earnest monologue that Fayruz gives near the end that questions why so many young men and women are dying for causes they don’t understand.

That you can’t always tell—the movie arbitrarily pivots from serious conspiracy to buddy comedy throug every scene—only highlights the chaotic tonal friction at its core. There’s enough heat to call this a lukewarm mess.