Jason Bailey

It is a thoughtful and intelligent film, and it finds a gifted actor doing some very tricky things quite well.

Mortensen is playing with iconography here, so it’s less about that destination than the journey — and he finds the right, delicate, evocative note to conclude on and holds it exactly as long as he should. “The Dead Don’t Hurt” isn’t your typical revenge Western, but audiences willing to stick with it will find a picture rendered with grace, patience, and artistry.

"Rather” is ultimately a valentine, which is fine. But as such, it’s not as tough on Dan Rather as he would’ve been to such a subject himself.

First Time Female Director is a tremendous disappointment because Peretti is such a gifted performer; it’s understandable to go in pulling for her (this viewer certainly did), but those layers of goodwill just peel away as scene after scene simply does not work. Too much of what she’s assembled is just half-hearted cringe comedy—much of it without the comedy half of the equation.

What is truly, and thrillingly, new here is Morris’s thematic interest. The deeper he goes into the rabbit hole with Cornwall, the more his true subject becomes apparent, as the picture becomes a penetrating investigation of the idea that great artists freely use fiction to work through the very real pain of their own lives—even in work that’s not explicitly or even transparently autobiographical.

Lee knows exactly how it wants to look, yet it has little that’s new or interesting to say.

Kendrick leans more into the dark comedy and general dread of the situation, winding the picture tighter the deeper she goes, and her work here is ambitious and impressive.

Hamm makes himself look bland, which is no small accomplishment. But he’s also smothering much of what makes him an exciting actor.

He led a fascinating, complicated, often contradictory life, and Rock Hudson: All That Heaven Allowed does it justice.

Above all, I Used to Be Funny is a fine showcase for Sennott’s considerable gifts.

You can see the conflicts and dramatic beats coming from a mile away, and the corniness of the ending is absolutely immeasurable. It’s an inoffensive and even likable picture, but not a particularly compelling one.

It’s about as well-acted and enjoyable a version of this particular thing as you’re likely to find.

Johnson and Kendrick are just terrific together — ample chemistry, excellent comic byplay — and the sense of play, the feeling of one-upmanship in their scenes together, immediately cranks the picture up a notch.

The movie’s practical and special effects are a rogues’ gallery of gougings, stabbings, shavings, and scalpings; those who like to have their stomachs turned will find much to cheer about. But is it actually scary – suspenseful, tense, trafficking in more than the cheap shock of a jump scare or vivid effect? Not really, no.

Once you get on this one’s wavelength, it’s wildly funny and delightfully subversive.

There’s a curious shortage of honest-to-goodness laughs in Finley’s script; the humor is strained, and it doesn’t really land as science-fiction either. ... “Landscape with Invisible Hand” is, at best, an ambitious failure.

If we’re being honest, Carney isn’t breaking new ground here, and I keep waiting for him to make a movie that will finally fully exhaust his Whole Thing. But Flora and Son is not that movie.

It’s genuinely thrilling to watch a filmmaker with a specific voice and oddball style taking genuine risks, and the way she successfully navigates these tonal transitions, how she cuts the cynicism with sincerity and vice versa – well, it’s kind of miracle.

The new film most directly recalls “Enough Said,” Louis-Dreyfus and Holfocener’s collaboration of a decade ago, which also concerned the Louis-Dreyfus character hearing things she shouldn’t. This film doesn’t quite measure up to that one — Jeffrey Waldon’s cinematography is oddly murky, and Menzies can’t provide the strong counterpoint James Gandolfini did. But it’s nevertheless smart, warm, and very, very funny.

Barthes’ screenplay is clean; for the most part, it’s brainy but not didactic, and thoughtful but not dull.

This is a movie that barely speaks above a whisper, even when its characters are howling in pain inside.

Domont’s script just turns into a series of victories, defeats, increasingly distracting narrative leaps, and ultimately silly turns of tone that seem designed to provoke whoops and sneers and cheers.

“Walls” is more like a Wikipedia entry— the hyperlinked names appear, and the key events are noted, but there’s not much in the way of genuine insight.

If nothing else, Babylon is a giant swing, a three-plus hour orgy (sometimes literally) of sex, drugs, and cinema, a respected young artist reaching for a profound statement about art and commerce and America. He misses it by a country mile, but hey, he sure does take that swing.

Return to Seoul begins as an intimately off-the-cuff stranger-in-strange-land story and becomes a sprawling epic of personal discovery. It’s one of the best films of the year.

The film’s key asset is Johansen, and “Personality Crisis” pulls off the neat trick of serving as an introduction for us newbies while providing new insights and footage for the fans – the latter primarily in the form of the mellow concert footage.

A joyless, glacially paced compendium of interchangeable scenes of people floating around in their goofy masks and capes, tossing clichéd dialogue and CG lightning bolts, and punching each other into buildings.

The pace drags in the home stretch a bit, and the laughs dry up considerably. None of this matters much. George and Julia spark and sparkle, which is what the trailers promise, and it’s what the movie delivers.

And the score, again by Carpenter, his son Cody Carpenter, and Daniel Davies, is another banger, often lapping the action onscreen for mood and dread. It almost becomes a provocation, forcing us to long for more active involvement by Carpenter, a filmmaker whose skill and restraint frankly puts Green to shame. Who knows if Halloween Ends will actually conclude the slasher series (let’s not forget that “Friday the 13th: The Final Chapter” was the fourth of twelve installments). But I’ll say this: even as a fan of the franchise, when the title came up at the end of Halloween Ends, I found myself hoping to God they weren’t kidding.

The longer There There goes, the more it meanders and never into the realm of anything particularly funny or compelling. Instead, it plays mostly like a series of exercises – in writing, acting, and covid-era production. It feels like a movie Bujalski made to make a movie. Which is fine for him but doesn’t offer much to the rest of us.

Mckenzie is a good match as an actor, countering Davis’s big emotions with a quieter turn and more introverted but no less affecting. She isn’t afraid of the difficult contradictions of the character, and by the film’s end, we’re struck by how much everyday horror this young woman shoulders and sucks up.

Mary Harron is too good a director to make a drab, conventional biopic, so it’s disappointing to report that with Dalíland, she’s done just that. It’s not a complete waste, and she manages to insert a handful of distinctive flourishes and memorable characters. But the picture never escapes the box it’s been placed in or transcends a key, fundamental error in its conception.

With Emily, Frances O’Connor has crafted a first film that feels like the work of an accomplished master.

Peter Farrelly’s “The Greatest Beer Run Ever” isn’t so much a bad movie — though it’s certainly that — as an inexplicable one, a comedy/drama set in the Vietnam War that somehow believes it’s saying anything that hasn’t been said a million times already about that conflict, and far more skillfully.

The picture clangs clumsily for stretches, particularly in its second half; Selick is trying to merge the doomy darkness of “Coraline” with the high spirit and good humor of “Nightmare Before Christmas,” and they don’t always mix.

Confess, Fletch is an absolute pleasure – the mystery is a corker, and I giggled from beginning to end.

Catherine Called Birdy is delightfully witty, irrelevant, and modern-minded while carefully dodging the self-satisfaction and smugness that those descriptors can conjure up.

In “Glass Onion,” the filmmaker shows absolute mastery of his genre, and his craft. It’s pure, pop pleasure.

Comedy is all about timing, and the timing here is all off, so the laughs are disturbingly few. What a missed opportunity this is.

This is not the return to form Leitch needs, and that’s mostly because the well-crafted fight scenes are surrounded by so much other nonsense. The picture wants to be a manic action-comedy freight train, but it has exactly three jokes.

This notion, of the supervillain antihero and the gibberish-spouting minions who serve him, remains an awfully thin premise to hang a movie on – much less five of them.

It’s tempting to take it easy on Alone Together, because harsh criticism feels somewhat cruel – it’s just such a gosh-darned nice movie, about two nice people who meet up and are nice to each other. But this is one tepid piece of work, a story of bland people doing and saying bland things as the world burns around them.

Some of Novak’s camera sense, particularly early on, betrays his sitcom roots, and he commits the classic rookie mistake of going on three or so scenes too long, tying up inconsequential loose ends. But he crafts a good mystery, consistently engaging and entertaining, and the thoughtful turns of the last confrontation are sly, smart, and knowing.

'Trouble in Mind' barely feels like a movie at all. ... Absent any contemporary reflections by either the subject or outside observers, we’re left with no real idea how anyone feels about Jerry Lee Lewis and his exploits on either side of the camera.

Ambulance is absolutely ridiculous, and undeniably entertaining.

The nicest thing I can say about it is that it’s short.

Ryan Binaco’s screenplay is full of tiny, keenly observed touches, but its greatest virtue is its attitude towards her addictions, the way it occupies her space with her, looking on passively but not judgmentally. It’s a movie that understands the desperation of alcoholism.

Colin West’s Linoleum is the kind of movie that’s all but impossible to review with any specificity, because so much of its achievement lies in its surprises – how it seems to be doing one thing while slyly doing another, without deception, and then revealing its ultimate intentions with grace and style.

I Love My Dad cannot overcome its off-putting premise. Nothing is out of bounds, of course (especially in comedy), but if there’s an approach to make the material palatable, either played straight or broad, it is left undiscovered here.

With its shout-outs to horror classics and juicy pay-offs of its own, X feels like the movie West was born to make.

The jankiness of this structure is a bit much, at least on first viewing, drifting into memoir material for so long that it the picture feeling shapeless for a good long while. But then again, that’s our Linklater, and complaining about narrative aimlessness is kind of like coming out of a Scorsese movie bitching about all the voice-over. It’s a new Linklater, is the point, and that’s good news indeed.

Tatum and Carolin might have been capable of the light, personality-driven fluff the trailer promises, but not, ultimately, whatever the hell Dog is trying to deliver.

Soderbergh’s direction is, per usual, tight and efficient (as is his editing – it runs a lean, mean 89 minutes).

A bloodless, musty museum piece stuffed with stars but dull as toast.

All in all, Summering is a very nice movie – sweet, affectionate, nostalgic, harmless – so it’s tempting to give it a pass. But “nice” and “compelling,” sadly, are not the same thing.

"Nanny" feels less like a misfire than a missed opportunity. Those early scenes are so tightly wound and so beautifully played that by the time Jusu trots out the blood and knives and bathtubs, I wasn’t even sure what movie I was watching anymore.

You get a sense of Poehler’s energy in the fast pace and comic timing of film, which moves at a good, precise clip. There’s a lot of material to cover here, some of it overly familiar, but Poehler does it with pizzaz.

Their latest fusion of science fiction, character drama, dark comedy, and overwhelming paranoia, Something in the Dirt, feels like their most personal film – and not just because they wear so many hats, directing and writing and producing and editing and starring.

It’s cheap, and crass, and by the conclusion, downright infuriating.

The whole thing moves like a freight train, its 156 minutes passing in barely a breath, and that breakneck pace, combined with the expressionist aesthetic and candy-colored imagery, reminds us that blockbusters don’t have to be these lumbering processions of greyscaled dreck. It’s a rarity, a big-budget holiday movie with style and pizzazz.

There’s not much here for anyone over 10 to focus on, aside from how strange it is that the puppy Clifford looks so much more fake than the giant one.

Tom Hanks is such an avatar for optimism and goodness that the qualities of this character – his heartbreak and vulnerability and resignation to a certain kind of hopelessness – land with greater impact, and he’s so good that when the filmmakers go for the big emotional wallop at the end, they almost pull it off.

The new Slumber Party Massacre feels like the last thing a movie with this title should be: safe.

Even its weakest pieces are still entertaining, and the good stuff is exceptionally so.

Derrickson can build a mood and craft creepy imagery, and he moves his camera with precision. But this feels like a notebook of compelling visual and narrative ideas that never quite fit together, that can’t quite manage to coalesce into coherence.

There are a handful of genuinely chilling compositions, copious buckets of blood, and while I know we’re all tired of throwback synth-heavy scores in horror, this is a pretty good throwback synth-heavy score. Unfortunately, There’s Someone Inside Your House otherwise rarely feels like this is more than a job for hire.

One can’t help coming away with the feeling that if the intelligence and originality of All My Puny Sorrows matched its earnestness, they could’ve really had something here.

Movies like “Earwig” defy criticism or even explanation. ... Lucile Hadžihalilović took a risk by making a movie this peculiar; it feels like the least we can do is take a risk by watching it.

The Survivor is occasionally infected by the aridness of the handsome, well-made historical film — it feels old-fashioned, in both the complimentary and pejorative senses. But some of that is purposeful and even a little subversive.

Gellar and Goldfine manage the tone expertly, inserting little jolts of humor to keep things from getting too reverent.

McDonagh is such a smart writer that one spends much of the movie waiting for his script to exhibit some awareness of the trope, and to comment on it, but that acknowledgment never arrives – and as a result, this is his thinnest screenplay to date, flimsy enough that, in a lesser actor’s hands, it could really fall apart.

That ending, poetic and beautiful, is the chronological conclusion of Days; emotionally, it crests a few minutes earlier, as the two men go on a modest dinner “date” after their encounter.

The picture is hobbled by the bland, lifeless color palette of too much contemporary genre filmmaking, as well as a buffet of unintentionally hilarious dialogue, and when the big third act reveal arrives, it’s comically dopey. And once that turn is taken, well, you can pretty much predict every beat that follows.

There’s little in Respect that one couldn’t glean from a Wikipedia scan, and in terms of her work, time would be better-spent re-watching “Amazing Grace” or revisiting her albums.

A fairly vapid and shallow affair, even by the low standards of the celebrity bio-doc subgenre, Wolfgang provides copious archival montages of “the first celebrity chef” (Julia Child apparently didn’t count), but precious little understanding of what actually makes him tick.

The complexity of the plotting overwhelms the picture a bit, which gets a little fuzzy in the middle – but it eventually forcefully snaps into focus, mostly by finding its spine in the simple notion that this is a movie about people under pressure.

It’s so fresh and so funny in its first hour or so, in fact, that it’s a real bummer to watch it all fall to pieces in the home stretch, with a pivot into drama that’s too much, too fast — and, more importantly, too much of things we’ve seen before.

It’s all so breezy and light that you just want to join them and hang out for a while, even with all the drama they’ve got brewing.

At its best, it does what Bourdain’s work did: “Roadrunner” makes you want to jump on a plane, discover a new place, a new culture, eat a great meal, and make a new friend. What could be more valuable?

Hitman’s Wife’s Bodyguard is a marginally better movie than “The Hitman’s Bodyguard.” But that’s kind of like saying that getting stabbed in the gut is marginally better than getting stabbed in the neck.

Bana is one of the producers of The Dry, and it’s not hard to see why he wanted to act the role, which is uniquely suited to his specific talents – his potent mixture of brusque physicality and barely bottled emotion. Connolly is a patient enough director to let us take in the pain this man holds in his face and the quiet power in his eyes.

It’s rare for a film to simultaneously balance such wildly divergent tones, to interweave big laughs with gut-wrenching discomfort, but Seligman pulls it off.

The pacing is wobbly – it runs a too-flabby 105 minutes – and some of the filmmaking is pretty rickety . . . . But Swan Song is about its performers, and they shine.

Gregg, who wrote and directed, has mostly written for television, and while this is her feature directorial debut, she’s a born filmmaker.

The de rigueur slapstick scenes for the title characters don’t even play, as the integration of animation and live action is so clunky that it feels like we’re watching special effects demonstrations rather than gags.

One of those movies that starts off so well, that shows such promise, that its slow unraveling feels less like a disappointment than a betrayal.

Filled with fascinating yet long-forgotten anecdotes ... "Street Gang" ultimately focuses on the correct subject: the artists and educators who made "Sesame Street," and how much of its power and influence seems an outgrowth of the unique chemistry created by those specific people, at that specific moment.

In the Earth isn’t a complete washout; there are moments of bleak humor, genre fans will enjoy the striking imagery and gross-out shivers, and the director has an undeniable gift for setting and maintaining a mood (he gets a big assist on the latter from Clint Mansell’s synth score). But ultimately, it’s kind of a slog.

The revelation here is Zengel, who has says little (none of it in English), yet has the presence and gravitas of a silent film actor, putting across her history and trauma primarily in her haunted eyes and loaded expressions.

In its new form, The Godfather Coda is still not a masterpiece. But it’s a fine film and worthy conclusion, and its alterations – the repositioning of several scenes, the cutting of others, and a new opening closing –genuinely improve the final product.

Hillbilly Elegy has nothing to say about the circumstances that caused these addictions and resentments, and it certainly has noting useful to say about “economic anxiety.” There’s nothing remotely thoughtful or even provocative about it, which is a shame – at least that would’ve made it memorable.

There is some pleasure in spotting the winks and legends and shout-outs, but as with any biopic, of any figure, you can’t just bank on familiarity— you have to give the unfamiliar viewer (and, considering the platform it’s on, there will be many) reasons to care. By the end of Mank, even I wasn’t sure any of this mattered all that much.

This is a stunning piece of work and a triumphant fanfare for the arrival of a remarkable new talent.

This is an excruciatingly stupid movie, and the nicest thing I can say about it is that, at 83 minutes, at least it’s over quickly.

What Wiseman’s film boils down to, in many ways, is a much-needed dose of competency porn – a snapshot of government officials trying their very best to do better, and to be better. And that might be the story he’s really telling: a reminder that government, for all of its speed bumps and snags, can work. It can help. The people running it just have to want it to.

Enemies of the State is powered by a sense of momentum – it’s a story filled with unexpected twists and turns, and not just in terms of “plotting.” Kennebeck finds herself wrestling with the prickly proposition of unraveling where, exactly, the truth lies; it’s the job of any good documentary filmmaker, of course, but in this particular case, it’s a journey of discoveries and often disturbing ones.

Summer of ’85 is ultimately not entirely successful, because its disparate tones don’t always mesh. But more than that, the carefree, romantic stuff is so enjoyable, and so sincere, that in retrospect, one wishes the entire film had lived there – both in that flush of first love (or at least lust), and in reckoning afterward with the complexities of that emotion.

Class Action Park loses its footing somewhat in the closing passages; Scott and Porges don’t seem to know quite how to wrap things up, and the film’s big tonal shift is a turning point that is all but impossible to come back from.