Jesse Hassenger

The movie’s thread about parental neglect and/or sacrifice is wispy. As a carnival geek show, though, Lee Cronin’s The Mummy delivers the goods, and at greater volume than its unofficial predecessors. It isn’t as personal a movie as the possessive title implies, but the marketing is largely correct: For the first time in ages, a mummy presides over a real horror show.

Though their conflicts eventually lead to horror-movie violence, the cruelest fate, the movie implies, may be a professional life consigned to malls, overpriced novelty coffee drinks, and other commercial/cultural remnants of a millennial youth.

It’s both a canny contemporary riff on the material and a well-made but only moderately scary slasher.

It doesn’t capture the full horror potential of climate change, rising floodwaters, or even bloodthirsty sharks. But the filmmakers sure throw themselves into the fray with enthusiasm.

Alpha is more of a horror-inflected drama than an outright genre piece, which allowed plenty of critics to fixate, not unfairly, on its failings as an AIDS metaphor. Yet the movie has resonance beyond simply recalling the years of its creator’s youth.

After so many smirky bloodfests, They Will Kill You scarcely needs believable human relationships to earn some goodwill. All it really needs is Beetz convincingly going through hell.

While there’s plenty of familiarity in Pixar’s small-scale animated romp Hoppers, there’s also a smart, unruly variation at its center.

Cold Storage makes horror-comedy look as easy and appealing as it’s supposed to be.

The actual sports stuff feels a little sweatier, with too much clamor for each animal teammate to really pop. But Goat still leaps over the worst pitfalls of big-studio kid-centric animation. Where it counts, the movie knows just enough ball.

As much as some of the imagery feels like Raimi playing the hits, Send Help also suggests a later-career shift for the filmmaker, one where his comic-book throwbacks run into (or over?) contemporary obstacles without losing their go-for-broke loopiness. It can get messy. Good for him.

It’s a neat surprise that DaCosta extracts more dark humor from the series than Boyle himself.

Primate makes a characteristically concise case for Roberts as a genre stylist to keep watching.

Paul Feig has always seemed a little uncomfortable with exploitation, but he makes some progress with this thriller.

Fire And Ash is terrific entertainment that occasionally gives the impression of well-appointed vamping; it’s almost enough to wonder if all the meticulous writer’s-room blueprinting of two-to-four Avatar sequels might have done as much harm as good. Viewers who just long for more time in Pandora are in luck: Cameron may not see a way out himself.

The miracle of Chalamet’s performance is that as brazen, indecent, and dishonest as Marty is, he makes a temporarily convincing case for himself as a thwarted athlete, rather than a crook with an athletic fixation.

In traditional terms, it could simply be described as a tearjerker. Like Buckley’s performance, though, it’s richer than that, a cross between an out-of-body experience and a full-body sob. Some will likely resist it on those grounds, understandably. But, again, framing our reactions with the feelings of others is rarely a good idea, and despite its moments of faltering, Hamnet hits like an emotional wrecking ball—devastating as it clears its path.

Zootopia 2 feels like it came out as the filmmakers intended, even if they set their own expectations at medium instead of high.

Part of what makes Perkins’ film so refreshing is the way it prioritizes its visceral effect on an audience over a desire to bend that story into a modern relationship parable. As clever as so many contemporary horror movies are, they often write toward theme rather than shooting toward immediacy.

[Wright] continues to prove more adept at tightly weaving his thematic concerns into genre-friendly comedy. Making a muscular, fun-enough adaptation of The Running Man is at once beneath him and beyond him.

It deserves a big screen if possible, though; Bentley and Kwedar have made an enveloping movie, one that might more closely echo its obvious influences from the comfort of home. This is a movie that belongs out in the beautiful, terrible world.

The movie works in its moment. It seems to know that an obvious, crowd-pleasing helping of franchise nonsense at least needs to have some kind of meat, however synthetic it may secretly be.

Die My Love is a powerful primal scream, only undercut by the question of whether it’s in love with the sound it’s making.

What Jan Komasa’s film gets right is how so much right-wing radicalization, especially in upper classes, stems from status-based grievances.

Hedda is DaCosta’s most direct and purposeful adaptation yet, but like her other films, it’s missing some ineffable push past its beginnings into more expressive territory. The process of adaptation feels more confident than the conclusion.

For much of its runtime, Good Fortune sustains a kind of witty, neo-Capra sensibility. When it comes time to bring that sensibility up to date, Ansari politely skips out.

Is This Thing On? might come to its healing from an appropriately modest place, but there’s still a bit of actorly grandiosity under its skin.

The movie illustrates the gambler’s lifestyle almost too clearly; it’s a great example of how big, splashy victories can still feel like too little, too late.

This latest Kiss of the Spider Woman is nearly as ramshackle as its fictional namesake; it’s not the powerhouse it should be. But it comes together. And for Lopez, its artifice looks more like a form of honesty.

It’s a star vehicle for Tatum and Dunst that can’t put all of its faith in the healing power of charisma and chemistry.

The result is a pretty dumb movie with beautiful visual effects, cleanly shot action, and a kickass soundtrack. Wouldn’t it be great if the future of blockbusters was only this bleak?

After The Hunt does eventually add up to something greater than its flood of but-what-about details.

There are hints of The Life Aquatic, which Baumbach co-wrote with Wes Anderson, with its absentee father who may not be a great artist either, as well as Anderson’s train-set Darjeeling Limited. Gorgeous as Jay Kelly is, and as funny as it is in moments, it can’t help but feel a little minor by comparison – a little easy, even, on its man-who-wasn’t-there protagonist.

Day-Lewis, as expected, is utterly convincing inhabiting this space, with two very different showstopping monologues, one grossly comic and one filling in a defining event in his past. It’s easy to forget, given his legendary status and reluctance to play the game, how much fun it can be to watch Day-Lewis at work.

The movie evokes retro genre coziness and unease in equal measure, one creeping up from beneath the other.

For roughly the length of a TV episode, it floats above its ugly franchise architecture in a dreamlike state of divine ridiculousness.

DiCaprio is so terrific, and Infiniti such a charismatic find, that viewers may find themselves wishing the cast, both principal and supporting (which also includes Regina Hall and Alana Haim), had room in this 162-minute movie to bounce off of each other with a little more frequency.

The Long Walk reaches for something profound and disturbing, while at the same time wary of risking a bad stretch.

It’s remarkable, then, how well Caught Stealing holds together as entertainment; as much as Aronofsky seems incapable of the modulation needed to make a crime caper, he’s also a big part of why this particular variation works anyway.

Eden winds up yoking Howard’s more domesticated movies with his thwarted-adventure narratives. The suspense lies in whether certain characters will figure out whether they’re on a bold, one-off exploration or the cusp of a sustainable new life—and whether humanity on the whole is any good at telling them apart.

In pure plot mechanics and interpersonal dynamics, Splitsville resembles any number of Woody Allen movies, double-hinged on the capriciousness and endurance of love.

Like a lot of Coen movies, it’s not exactly an outright spoof, but it takes place in its own little stylized pocket universe. Unlike a lot of Coen movies, Honey Don’t! doesn’t quite come together as a mystery.

It somehow manages to lack both the true moral murk of a great noir, while also eschewing the elemental drama of a great Western. It’s pretty good at both, though, and Tost seems like he knows it, without letting the movie’s solid craft go to his head.

It’s a movie that sometimes feels obsessed with music, and sometimes feels like an old man flipping back to his preferred, familiar playlist.

Weapons is masterfully entertaining and far more ambitious than Barbarian, and it feels more personal in the abstract. It more closely resembles a collage of nightmares than the expertly calibrated rollercoaster ride of Cregger’s previous film. But there’s something elusive about Weapons, too, meaning that — to stick with Fincher comparisons — the movie lands somewhere between Seven’s blunt-force didacticism and Zodiac’s sophisticated ghostliness.

Cop-supremacy pulp may be hard to revive with a straight face; the laugh-a-minute spoof, though, is momentarily and gloriously back.

Together doesn’t succumb to the dreaded “metaphorror” effect, where every plot point and character serves a clearly coded metaphorical purpose. It’s often grimly funny, with the actors (and their talented physical doubles) throwing themselves into their roles.

The sequel is another indication that Sandler is still undertaking his longtime mission of making silly comfort-food comedies with the stealth seriousness of older age.

For a lot of Marvel fans, it will be more than enough. For the more superhero skeptical, it offers a helpful example of how simply skipping the origin stuff on the fourth try doesn’t automatically confer a sense of dramatic urgency or comic-book wonder.

González-Nasser offers glimpses of what might make the work rewarding enough to stick with, and, with it, how elusive those feelings must be.

James Gunn’s real superpower is his ability to wear this comic-book nonsense lightly — to take it seriously within the world of the movie without feeling like he’s assigning homework.

For all of its craft, 40 Acres feels fenced in.

In its fusion of Edwards’ craft with characters who aren’t thunderously stupid or unlikable, this is the best Jurassic movie in ages – in part because it works so comfortably as an ooh/ahh/run/scream monster movie.

The overall structure of the movie is just race, break for argument, race, occasional montage, race some more; it gets a steady rhythm going but it’s not exactly white-knuckle suspense, either.

It’s a little too pre-programmed and self-conscious to be truly witty, yet the tone it strikes and the genre space it carves out feels undeniably itself: part comedy, part sci-fi mayhem, with remnant notes of shlocky horror.

As with the first film, the look of 28 Years Later is key to its effectiveness.

The opening of the movie has some perfectly timed visually-delivered laughs, like an early car scene involving an accidental failure to reverse, and the bottle-episode staginess of later scenes limits the visual invention. Still, by this point you’ve boarded the ride, and Oh, Hi! keeps you captive in a way that Iris only dreams of: by sheer force of Gordon’s personality.

Fun as it is, Elio just goes for the montage, eager to speak a universal language.

Sweeney’s film, his second high-achieving, high-wire act in a row, lives on the line between yearning and helpless fixation.

A paranoid thriller that sneaks in its character study so stealthily that it takes a while to realize who is actually being studied.

Yet none of this stuff, largely but not exclusively confined to a rote opening 30 minutes or so, works as well as the seemingly lower-stakes but far more evocatively handled saga of John Wick’s dog.

It is a solidly sweet and corny live-action children’s film at a time when kids are mostly being sold live-action remakes of perennial streaming-service rewatch faves.

Portman acquits herself charmingly, as she usually does in her occasional slumming blockbuster role; maybe she and Krasinski should have swapped parts. The erstwhile Jim Halpert isn’t even all that terrible here; at least he makes his character’s smarmy-doofus quality work for his non-relationship with Esme. The real star, though, is Ritchie’s unflagging spirit, as if chasing after bigger blockbusters in the 2010s led him to his own rejuvenating fountain.

Kandhari’s film emerges as an off-kilter treatise on identity, and what cultural, social, and physiological elements can shape it, even well into adulthood.

But even for a highly satisfied 30-year fan of Mission: Impossible as a Hollywood institution, this adventure is a little exhausting, and leaves Cruise looking ready to move on to the next world, even if he refuses to admit as much on screen. He’s a great actor and peerless movie star. Maybe it’s time to find another mask to put back on.

Final Destination Bloodlines does deliver. The elaborate opening set piece is one of the series’ best.

If the movie’s adult characters are conveniences, its evocation of teenage yearning-slash-horniness (and the ways those can get mixed up) feels pretty real, even in the more outlandish moments.

Thunderbolts* is the first Marvel movie in a couple of years to make a good-faith effort to live in its characters’ heads, rather than just their Wiki pages.

Can 20 minutes or so of brutally inventive action really prop up a whole movie? In this case, yes. Havoc doesn’t reach the mayhem-as-characterization heights of John Wick or the Asian films that clearly inspire Evans, but it does turn its gnarly spectacle into a kind of absurd redemption for the flatness of its characters.

For maybe half its 103-minute running time, maybe even a little more, Until Dawn gets by on its spookhouse variety and surprising humor.

That’s the true power of Affleck and Bernthal’s collective charm offensive: They can make a junky story about a computer-brained savior of human-trafficking victims resemble a whimsical hangout session.

Sinners, which the filmmaker himself has been touting as his first wholly original feature (Fruitvale Station, his debut, was based on a real-life tragedy), is both Coogler’s most fantastical and most closely rooted in the history of American racism. It’s pulp from the heart and the gut.

Drop is ultimately a nice movie about an abuse survivor being terrorized by seemingly omniscient forces, loaded with moments that don’t really hold up to scrutiny and well-sold by Fahy’s performance.

That the movie is “only” a silly romp makes it all the more charming to watch Boden and Fleck find a less mechanical, less programmatic way to have fun.

On its terms, and especially with an ending I read as ambiguous, The Woman in the Yard is also unflinching enough to maybe count as daring, and maybe Sollet-Cerra’s most viscerally moving film. It’s also among his least playful, least comforting. Your anxieties can’t follow you around if you can barely make it out of bed.

Ash could be a rumination on the nature of identity, or the destructive colonial spirit of Americans, or the indescribable horrors of a world beyond our own ruined one, but despite all of its cranked-up imagery and sometimes-confusing storytelling, it’s tidier and less thought-provoking than any of that – a genre exercise, capably extended.

Snow White is really one of the better Disney remakes.

Without slackening its tension, Black Bag sometimes resembles a bitter comedy of manners, which are apparently also kept in the black bag for certain stretches. These are people who like to tell each other what they find irretrievably boring, especially if it’s each other, whether or not they’re even telling the truth about their disdain.

What sometimes resembles a goof on Stephen King becomes a form of tribute to the author’s ability to mine terror from the mere facts of living.

Despite or maybe because of its unusual, constant-reset rhythms, large swaths of the movie actually work. It helps that Derrickson has two genuine stars on his side in the form of Teller and Taylor-Joy who both, lacking an infrastructure for proper romantic comedies, channel that energy into an unusually convincing version of a romance that would normally be obligatory at best.

Heart Eyes can’t help but swoon at the rich tradition of slashers serving as first-date fodder. It’s not especially scary, but it’s a thrill all the same.

Most of the movie is colorfully antic; another fearsome villain is a dead fish voiced by Ricky Gervais (too easy), and at one point a bunch of buildings come to life and rampage like meta-kaiju. There is, however, surprisingly psychological depth afforded to Petey’s clone, Li’l Petey (Lucas Hopkins).

Presence has the story, limited scope, and 85-minute runtime of a 1940s B-picture, infused—as those pictures often were, and as his crime movies usually are—with a disciplined style and contemporary electricity. It’s budget Gothic that’s worth every penny and then some.

Mostly, though, the movie’s cartoonishness feels pitched just right, a heightened silliness that the characters’ circumstances keep bringing back to earth.

If Gudegast is indeed aiming for Michael Mann, as some contemplative shots and a synth-y score suggest, he’s arguably missed the mark wider than ever. If he’s hoping to chart his own territory, well, Pantera spends a lot of time in the wilderness – before teasing another sequel, of course, where surprise will be even harder to come by.

The series may actually be subject to a bizarre formula: The looser and more disparate the parts of a Sonic movie are, the better the whole somehow holds together. At least that would explain why Sonic the Hedgehog 3 is, improbably, the best of the lot so far.

There’s never a true early-check-out moment of the sort that arrives with such numbing frequency in so many bigger-scale blockbusters; the movie locks in and moves.

Kraven The Hunter gets closer than any of its predecessors to understanding the silly, entertaining freedom of shedding continuity. Then again, maybe it’s best that this misbegotten series quits while it’s just-barely ahead.

As ruthless as some of the deaths can be, and tongue-in-cheek as the movie’s heightened reality becomes, Y2K remains affectionate toward its characters; it has a surprising amount of warmth and sweetness for what’s essentially a comedy about teens trying to get laid that pivots to a comedy about teens getting hacked to death by robots.

Nosferatu is a hell of a picture. If Eggers often appears to be reaching as far back as possible for his cinematic influences, riffing on a silent movie allows him – forces him, even – to reveal his more modern sensibilities, where men are repped by the contorted, strangled scream face of Hoult and the ineffectual Friedrich (Aaron Taylor-Johnson), whose wife Anna (Emma Corrin) is this story’s version of Lucy from Dracula. In a plague-ridden town, it’s Ellen’s visionary, full-tilt fever that allows her to more closely commune with the evil around her, maybe even finding a hint of sick ecstasy. Nosferatu, in its enveloping-shadow way, finds more than a hint.

Wicked makes the old Wizard Of Oz look even more like a vivid original, while the newer movie unfolding in front of us looks like a faded memory.

Enjoyable as it is, Scott’s movie is adrift in a closed system, a massive warship floating around a coliseum.

There’s something rattling around, somewhere in Heretic, dealing with the power and limitations of belief, a movie that aspires to the deviousness of something like Barbarian, to which its setting bears the mildest of superficial resemblance. At some point, it escapes into the night without much trace.

Eastwood, still so earnestly attuned to the mechanics of personal guilt and faltering systems, finds timelessness in that growing unease.

Smile 2 ultimately seems struck dumb by its own possibilities, and gets stuck franchising hopelessness.

Blitz often feels like a pitched battle between the conventions of big-canvas war recreation and McQueen’s attempt to evoke the stranger, less obviously narrative-driven chaos that happens when the battlefield descends on a major urban center from the sky.

Though Nickel Boys is at least in part about Black oppression and the suffering that comes along with it, Ross uses the movie’s point of view to avoid making a movie that turns that suffering into a marquee attraction or an endurance test.

It all threatens to resemble a hat on a hat, possibly worn by a snake eating its own tail. Yet Perry isn’t really going for a trippy hall-of-mirrors approach, even when he cuts together multiple performances of songs so that Pavements past, present, and fake-ass trade verses on their catalog of ’90s non-hits.

With his careful attention to the controlled emoting from both Swinton and Moore, so free of showy tearjerking or breakdowns, Almodóvar humanely and pointedly avoids turning The Room Next Door into an issue movie dedicated to assisted suicide. Then the movie backs into feeling like one anyway.