Jenny Nulf

The longer it goes, the more True Mothers gets weighed down by its melodrama. Kawase is just hopeful and soft enough to keep her film glowing, but it doesn’t quite stick the landing, and is a bit frustrating with its blatant red herrings.

The heart is in the right place for Your Lucky Day, but the execution is a little loose. Brown puts a lot of tenderness in his film, particularly with the film’s central couple, but there’s not enough friction and surprise to create a tight holiday-set thriller.

Tunisia’s first Oscar-nominated film, The Man Who Sold His Skin, is an emulsion of ideas, each as ambitiously thought-provoking as the next.

At a two-hour run time, Hart attempts to make you feel every moment, but most of these plotless, meandering moments just seem to feel empty. The magic never clicks, and this rich-looking, Seventies-set thriller ends up feeling more like a drag on an unlit cigarette than a burn.

The casting is the only part of the movie that feels genuine, with Hudson channeling the Dreamgirls emotive performance that earned her an early career Oscar.

In the end, Saltburn doesn’t have a lot to add to the conversation Fennell keeps wanting to have about the power of white men in this world. It’s a surface-level critique of the upper class and a style-over-substance poke at the out-of-touch aristocrats and the bitter have-nots.

The fifth Scream is an ultimate reflection of the beloved first film, and perhaps its only misstep is that the directing duo didn’t relish in their finale, soaking in some of the beautiful homages they visually set up. Even so, Scream is a blast, a solid setup for more to come.

Fraser often brings a warmth to Charlie that the film desperately needs, but his positivity is only an ember in a fire dying in the pouring rain.

While St. Vincent’s The Nowhere Inn is not the standard performative music documentary, it opens a window to her soul that many are never able to give away so freely in front of the camera.

Where Mad Max: Fury Road was lean, Three Thousand Years of Longing feels like a rough draft that should have stayed in a dusty bin somewhere in the middle of a tourist shop.

Despite Paxton’s high ambitions to serve up be the next great elevated horror movie, there’s not enough meat on its bones to ultimately feel satisfying when the final holy image is served.

Cruella is not as perfect as the seams Estella stitches, but there’s something ever so charming about its strut.

A shot-for-shot remake would have had more school spirit than this.

Chon’s ambitions are astonishing, but his bloated script needed an edit or two. It’s a film written with big moments for big performances in mind, which is too painfully obvious as the film treads on.

It all seems as if it was a riot to film, but the finished product is just a few bombastic jokes stitched together to create a mid riff.

Minions: The Rise of Gru might not be sophisticated storytelling, but not all animated films have to be. Sometimes they can just be about joy.

Based on the folky country song “Just Like Old Times” by Todd Snider, the film feels like a throwback to the heyday of Austin: eclectic acoustic guitars, dingy pool halls, dive bars with fountains of whiskey, neon signs, and lots and lot of late-night tacos.

Showalter’s film never finds the right tone, leaving its audience with pleasantness in favor of sharp wit.

It’s a film you can easily fall into and out of, a breezy walk through the park. French Exit is simply an enchanting day at the movies.

It’s disappointing to stop rooting for a blockbuster behemoth horror series, but The Conjuring movies’ quality and talon-tight hold has rapidly deflated over time.

Long Weekend had all the tools to make a wistful, escapist romance that explores and overcomes some of the stigmas of mental health, but it flatlines.

The film retroactively makes Baz Luhrmann’s Elvis look like a masterpiece for actually trying to be bedazzling and insane, because Whitney Houston: I Wanna Dance With Somebody is so stale it might as well have been shoved directly onto a streaming platform to wither away forgotten – unlike Houston’s discography, which will be remembered for decades to come.

There are so many interesting components of Umma that never click, wasting a completely original idea on banality.

The camp in Malignant is fun, but if only the camp was all the film needed to be as monumental as Wan’s previous horror entries.

The Foo Fighters are a rare band that has maintained a roughly decent amount of relevancy decades after rock ruled the music industry. Their self-aware horror-comedy is a sweet ode to their ride, but where Medicine at Midnight brought them a nice wave of good praise, Studio 666 feels like a dud – a horror movie with no good hooks and a rock & roll film that lacks the bombastic energy that’s ever present at the band’s live shows.

It Lives Inside at least isn’t just another mainstream horror weepy about grief – there’s a lot more that it’s playing around with, which is so refreshing in a time where horror is either extremely insane for the purposes of camp or about extremely damaged people who should just go to therapy. It’s nice to see a spooky movie that is having fun with a new box of tools.

When de Armas’ performance is given the space to be quiet and chilling, Blonde suddenly hits, and what once felt hollow feels painfully visceral.

Golda isn’t a failure of skill, but one of vision. Nattiv and writer Nicholas Martin deliver a biopic that feels like a complete misfire. Stale and without any sense of self, Golda unfortunately does nothing for Israel’s only female prime minister.