Jesse Hassenger

If you’re looking for two hours of not-quite-escape, the solipsism of Locked Down has real charm and entertainment value, not least in its willingness to be a movie about adults — and for adults. If the specter of a global pandemic haunts the material more than it enriches, well, it’s not alone, is it?

The movie keeps enough of Richard’s messy past off screen to feel like a hagiography with a few concessions, rather than a true warts-and-all portrait.

It’s not that The Amateur explores moral gray areas; it just swirls generic and weirdly apolitical spy-movie elements around until all that’s left is a watery blur, accidentally paying faithful tribute to studio mediocrities past.

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.

Though he’s been accused of re-carving the same dollhouse-scale miniatures over and over again, The French Dispatch finds Anderson continuing to fill out his increasingly elaborate skill set.

No matter where he goes, even when he’s working in a subgenre he helped build, Bekmambetov loses himself in the pixels.

Though Davis makes Tully convincing both as a human being and as a mysterious godsend, it’s Theron whose work is absolutely vital to Tully’s success.

The dead air in the movie’s opening section is intentional, yet there are moments where Final Cut, the movie you’re actually watching, feels off – not through outright incompetence, but the eerie, imitative quality of a too-soon-too-little remake. Call it undead air.

Spy, similarly, doesn’t exactly send up James Bond or Jason Bourne espionage thrillers, but it places McCarthy in the middle of the action while subverting the traditionally male domination of that arena.

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.

Diggs, Casal, and Estrada are all walking on a high wire here, requiring a balance so delicate that it may not be visible to some of the audience until they have to decide for themselves whether Blindspotting’s leap-of-faith climax works.

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.

Even Dafoe, seemingly incapable of a false note or forced delivery, ultimately must fall in line with the movie’s broad-arc predictability.

If The Lego Movie was a delightful tribute to the multifaceted experiences of playing with Legos, this movie is like one of the licensed sets that inspired it: Less essential, more market-driven, and still irresistible for certain kids, fans, and nerds.

Unlike many comic vehicles and just as many big-city romances, it’s a real, and ultimately rewarding, piece of work. A big-studio romantic comedy infused with actual human feeling is just as rare an accomplishment as the perfect comedy sketch.

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.

Despite some white-knuckle moments, Dynamite slackens with each runthrough of its perma-climactic 15 minutes. In the world of global catastrophes, Bigelow increasingly resembles an unwitting tourist, just like the rest of us.

Instead of deepening his material, Condon has made an unsuccessful fling of a movie: fun for a while, but trying to get as far as it can by leaving crucial material off of its profile.

On a scene-by-scene basis, though, They Cloned Tyrone is well-crafted entertainment, buoyed by its three major performances.

Lorain’s film ultimately doesn’t go especially deep in detailing its romantic relationships, its friendships, or any overarching storyline. But Slut In A Good Way is more than the sum of its entanglements; the actors and the camera work so well together that it feels, at times, like a musical.

The cast is uniformly strong, and willing to go wherever Guadagnino takes them, in however little clothing he deems necessary; the ensemble-wide equal-opportunity nudity is almost frequent enough to qualify as confrontational.

Like The Prince of Egypt or Sinbad: Legend of the Seven Seas before it, The Sea Beast ditches talking animals and funny sidekicks, but it can’t fully shake off its Disney influences. It’s a whole lot of well-animated beasts and water, with nowhere to flow.

As-is, Scarlet is a beautiful loll, content with its self-made magic.

Even as Plaza’s character and presence nudges the movie out of its comfort zone, the youthful, romantic recklessness it tries to celebrate feels theoretical – a lesson, not a life.

More casual viewers’ mileage may vary on which stunts are laugh-out-loud funny and which are abjectly horrifying, and the rickety carnival rollercoaster ride works better when the other passengers—whether fellow audience members or the on-camera talent—are screaming and laughing along in equal measure.

The movie is too vividly realized to be boring, but it spends a lot of time scrambling out of the gap between pulpy fun and serious allegory. It’s also hobbled by the fact that it’s very much, as the opening credits say, Part 1; no real resolution is offered by the end of its 155 minutes. It’s just half a movie.

As is, Cheatin’ offers little narrative or emotional advantage over watching a series of the director’s more concise works. At 76 minutes, it should play like a short feature. Instead, it’s more like an extra-long short.

Gray’s many fans will probably love Armageddon Time, and it may even win over some more neutral viewers who respond to his decidedly non-nostalgic look at a pivotal (and not especially promising) moment in U.S. history. But anyone who has found his movies less articulate than the ideas behind them will only get occasional respite here.

The emotional impact is ultimately surprisingly muted; she dies too soon, and the movie ends. Then again, it’s hard to blame anyone for assuming that consistent access to Radner’s voice, in moments both public and candid, would be enough. She radiates such joy, all these years later, that it nearly is.

For all of its current touchstones, Hidden Figures feels far too late, both in the recognition these women deserve and the filmmakers’ goodhearted but dull approach to their stories.

Anchored by the filmmaker’s coming out as a trans man about a third of the way through the film, Chasing Chasing Amy has an undeniably sweet and well-intentioned story to tell about its maker, but Rodgers comes across as a little self-fascinated in a familiarly youthful way, like he’s taking an extended selfie at a fan convention.

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.

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

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

Schrader pushes the somber score and just-the-facts cinematography as close to pure explication as possible. There is visual storytelling, but little in the way of mood or evocation.

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

Even when Creed III treads familiar ground, this series feels like the ideal outlet for the on-screen persona Jordan is building: a resilient man who needs to better understand the power he’s fought so hard for.

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.

Writer/director Nicholas Colia builds out Griffin’s world slowly, and winds up with a quietly formidable ensemble.

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

Kline’s movie works best when it blurs the lines between the people of a nerdy subculture and the style of their obsessions.

As it turns out, EDM is a mere soundtrack for what turns out to be a stalker thriller rife with the kind of details that the filmmakers might call “psychological” and that psychologists might call “insultingly stupid.”

Of course, a single documentary can’t cover everything, but this one’s slim but entertaining 80 minutes suggests that Nguyen erred on the side of brevity.

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.

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

Ultimately, Appropriate Behavior works almost in spite of itself; so efficiently does the film explain why Shirin and Maxine split up that eventually it lags behind its own premise.

For better and worse, The Inspection seems like the movie Bratton had to make, a story so personal that some of its biggest emotional confrontations start to resemble a therapeutic exercise.

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

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

True to its small, sometimes nearly microscopic, scale, The Adults draws a perfect miniature portrait of a highly specific demographic: People obsessed with doing bits, making up songs, and perpetuating their own inside jokes who nonetheless never turned to a life in the performing arts.

Galluppi’s premise has ingenious simplicity.

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

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

Love, Simon is touching as a gesture. As entertainment, it’s nothing Degrassi hasn’t done better.

By its end, No Good Deed becomes troublingly easy to read as a parable about the untrustworthiness of black men. The filmmakers may not have intended it that way, but the movie is so bereft of anything else that its forays into moralistic paranoia stick out.

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

Twice now Reilly and Silverman have helped to give a cartoon’s happy ending real emotional depth. And twice now, they’ve made their characters so endearing that some fans may feel oddly conflicted about the prospect of undoing those endings just to see them again.

Some jokes may dissipate quickly, but its unusual warmth lingers in the air like a friendly ghost.

So squarely old-fashioned that it’s a little jarring to notice that many of the characters have smartphones.

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

The real Noble accomplished a lot, but the movie insists on giving her achievements a mystical and mythical dimension...without the imagination to carry it off.

Fans of the series will likely bask in the warm feelings, particularly a handful of scenes following a one-year time jump toward the end, like Tolkien devotees reveling in final stretch of Return of the King; agnostics may regard this same section as if it’s, well, the final stretch of Return of the King, playing to the similarly unconverted.

The techniques of the movie, then, are sound. Wan still moves his camera and composes his shots with a patience that belies his dank Saw origins. But the cinematography isn’t as virtuosic this time around.

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.

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.

Its creepy unease lingers, and just as in It Follows and The Guest, Monroe is the face of that unease. That’s the power of a great scream queen.

As a children’s movie, it’s uncommonly sensitive and complicated, rooted in relationships rather than dazzling action. But adults may notice its simple poetry turning, after a while, to suds.

Even when it’s slowing down, Fight shows beguiling confidence in both its filmmaking and its characters—enough to make its smallest romantic moments feel significant.

Moss also strengthens the notion that this is a monster movie unusually interested in looking past the toxic-male machinations of its famous character and toward the lasting horrors left in his wake. In other words, the stuff that previous movies, and real life, have sometimes tried to turn invisible.

As a thriller, Searching is both ruthlessly absorbing in the moment and relatively disposable as soon as it ends, sliding itself gracefully into the desktop recycling bin.

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.

Like a lot of memes, Ralph Breaks The Internet appears proud both of its clear place within a system and its ability to stand outside and poke fun at that system.

As visually appealing as much of Gemini is, it wouldn’t work nearly so well without Lola Kirke playing Jill.

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.

If You Are So Not Invited to My Bat Mitzvah does have the feel of an expensive, well-appointed, but not exactly lushly-made family project – maybe even a coming-of-age gift to the younger Sandler daughter – at least it mounts a charm offensive, rather than treating its audience like a pack of easily manipulated rubes.

Before the opening credits have finished rolling, voice-over narration is lamenting the distance that can grow between even the tightest of friendships and hyping up the audience for a reunion of characters who have barely been introduced. It may be shameless, but it’s honest.

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.

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.

The ongoing sight of a blood-soaked Thatcher finding herself through violent confrontations, essentially figuring out on the fly whether she’s a Terminator or a Final Doll, is diverting enough. Her melancholic presence hints at the trippier, more genuinely unsettling horror movie this could have pivoted into. It’s also a reminder of how facile the rest of the movie really is.

It takes a surprising amount of time to adjust to the film’s shticky conception of its main character, Hope Ann Greggory (Melissa Rauch).

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.

The promise of more music keeps the movie on life support when its drama threatens to flatline. When these sequences gradually recede from the movie, it feels as if someone should call an ambulance, but it’s also too late. What’s left are shadows of what might have been Saldaña and Gomez’s best on-screen performances, or Gascón’s breakthrough.

Mike & Nick & Nick & Alice practically warns the audience against taking it too seriously, even while talking out the other side of its mouth about its own heartfelt themes.

Though director Nicholas Hytner does his best to enliven the material, Bennett very much comes across as a dull man’s Charlie Kaufman, even more so when the movie ends with flat, unearned whimsicality. Good as she is here, Smith must cede this round to Dench.

Here is the problem with making four movies about a middle-schooler who only ages a little and learns sitcom-ready lessons: After a while, it all starts to feel as repetitive and uninspired as any number of more ambitious franchises. The Long Haul has a chance to reimagine the series and only comes up with Vacation Junior.

Paramount+ should have thrown this movie a theatrical run; it may more or less amount to an 86-minute pilot episode for the new series that’s coming soon, but it’s also one of the funniest movies of the year.

Late Night is admirably eager to address the messy problems of the comedy world, but it ultimately can’t stop cleaning up after itself.

Despite a few nasty bits of violence, Cat’s Eye almost plays like an intro to King for younger viewers ready for some shocks but not yet prepared for full-on nightmares.

Men is a horror film operating largely under nightmare logic and allegorical rumbling, and in a broad sense can’t offer many true surprises.

The Current War employs actors capable of their own eccentric stylizations, and gives them very little leeway to make the material their own. Gomez-Rejon keeps snatching it back with every offbeat composition idea he can muster.

So many romantic comedies revel in formula, turning a genre into an embarrassing mating ritual soundtracked by the rustle of screenplay pages and bad scene-transition pop. If nothing else, The Threesome understands a greater range of emotional, physical, and logistical possibilities – so acutely, in fact, that it sometimes wanders away from the “com” part of the rom-com altogether.

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

Here is a film that manages to be observant without being especially insightful—without deepening thematically beyond the observation that inner city life can still be really, really lousy for everyone involved.

A relatively straightforward comic love story/environmental parable, it’s a sharper bit of whimsy than CJ7 and less weighed down with mythology than Journey To The West.

God’s Creatures doesn’t have quite the same enchanting, unnerving mystery of The Fits, where a girls’ dance troupe begins to suffer unexplained seizures. The hardscrabble working-class details here inevitably feel a bit more familiar, whether from American kitchen-sink indies or Irish plays.

It’s telling that the filmmaker captures one of Gallagher’s best moments in a long and relatively uneventful take situated at a breakfast table; this movie may wander, but Akhavan’s attention to perfect little moments is unwavering.

As tedious as Rocketman is when it’s going through the biographical motions, it’s equally delightful when it launches into something most rock movies pointedly avoid: full-on musical numbers.

Most of the time, though, How to Train Your Dragon’s live-action craft fails to match the equivalent in its animated counterpart, even with original filmmaker Dean DeBlois on hand for his live-action feature debut.