Johnny Oleksinski

After two lousy sequels, here’s a pitch for Warner Bros.: “The Matrix Retirement.”

The last time Guillermo del Toro directed a movie, 2017’s The Shape of Water, he won the Best Picture Oscar. His latest, Nightmare Alley, probably won’t, but it is nonetheless a far more entertaining and satisfying film than its overrated science-fiction predecessor.

It’s the gargantuan and deeply satisfying Spider-Man: No Way Home in which the former Billy Elliot proves he’s more than a teen idol with a perfect American accent. This time, his Peter’s got gravitas, emotional oomph, brutality, believable love, an anguished scene in the rain! The movie is the actor’s best performance yet, in anything, Spandex or no.

If McKay crafted the most enjoyable parts of his satire with a scalpel, somebody should’ve handed him a machete to chop the script down some. The film clocks in at nearly two hours and 10 minutes, and we grow exhausted by it as the surprises stop and the ending becomes inevitable.

I’ve always had my reservations about Sorkin as a director. His scripts tend to be better than his final products. Those druthers started to fade with the moving “Trial of the Chicago 7” and are now completely gone after “Being the Ricardos.” His vision of ‘50s TV production is spot-on — nostalgic, quick, boozy, but without the glamor of Hollywood movie-making.

It’s the ensemble that wows most, though. Faist makes an unusually spindly Riff, yet he is scarier than any I’ve seen. Bernardo, the best role in the show, is given real intensity by David Alvarez and Ariana DeBose dances the dickens out of “America” as Anita.

It was always going to be an emotional experience watching the late Philip Seymour Hoffman’s son Cooper Hoffman make his acting debut. His father, an Oscar-winning genius, died in 2014...What we never could have imagined, though, is that Cooper’s freshman performance (he’s so green, his IMDB page doesn’t have a photo yet) would be one of the best of the year in what is easily the best film of 2021, Paul Thomas Anderson’s brilliant Licorice Pizza. This wonderful kid should be in the Oscar race, but we’re too predictably infatuated with big names. Let’s fix that.

OK, it’s no Frozen — a Let It Go only comes around once every couple of ice ages — but it’s nonetheless a heartfelt and joyful take on a good old dysfunctional family.

Berry wears two hats effortlessly. Her direction is gritty and assured, and her leading performance hasn’t lost an ounce of that star quality — to simultaneously be so weak and so strong — that won her an Oscar for Monster’s Ball.

The film is empty-headed good fun that’s blessedly under two hours and has just enough character development to make you kind of care when someone gets bitten.

The abysmal “Gucci” would get a better grade, perhaps, if it was a term paper titled “How to Make the Assassination of a Famous Person Boring.”

Richard is flawed, never villainous or heroic, and rarely follows his own fervent advice to be humble. You leave in awe of what he accomplished, but not admiring the whole man. Few biopics dare to have layers anymore.

While Rentheads and Broadway fans will certainly connect to it on a deeper level than those who only know Idina Menzel as Elphaba, not Maureen, Tick, Tick is a terrific, moving, propulsive film on its own terms. It’s about New York, art, life and love.

Fresh off of winning the Best Director Oscar for "Nomadland," Chloé Zhao has upchucked one of the MCU's worst movies in ages.

Anderson’s film is told via a prologue and three episodes that bring to life the quirky publication’s stories. They just barely engage the audience as we watch the director’s entire mobile phone contact list show up for about 15 seconds each.

Degreasing a stove is a more enjoyable way to spend your Saturday night.

[Reitman] finds the perfect tone here . . . He’s also skilled at getting genuine performance out of young actors, as he proved in “Juno,” and balancing humor with stakes — essential for comedy-horror like “Ghostbusters.” The jokes are very funny and Wolfhard and Grace make life-threatening peril look like a ball.

Watching it, unless you’re already a demented diehard fan, is utter agony.

Cary Joji Fukunaga was the right choice to direct “No Time To Die,” even if he wasn’t the first in this rocky road of a production. His Bond feels reverential and classic, but not campy, and he makes bold choices.

When you make a film out of the greatest TV show of all time, there’s bound to be a hint of disappointment. What you’re getting here is a very enjoyable mob movie that can be appreciated by anybody, but will undoubtedly be preferred by Sopranos fans. The Godfather IV it ain’t.

The undeniably sweet film, based on the wonderful West End musical, fixes some of the (much better) show’s flaws, but loses its humor and energy while it wallows in sadness.

Writer-director Michael Mohan’s “drama” tries to be a modern Rear Window (emphasis on “rear”), but Hitchcock it ain’t. The Voyeurs is a cheap, never-ending trifle that takes itself more seriously than Hamlet.

Those confessionals can and should deliver an emotional wallop; however, Sara Colangelo’s direction isn’t skillful or nuanced enough to give the scenes power. The speeches from actors, such as Laura Benanti, about the worst day in all of these people’s lives feel too rehearsed and polished for us to believe them.

Writer-director Kay Cannon has shattered Cinderella’s glass slipper. And we, the audience, are forced to walk across the shards barefoot.

It’s fresh, it’s alive, it’s not the same old Marvel Cinematic Universe.

The talented quartet saves the movie, but making it great would take a rewrite.

While the movie could be a notch scarier, the unsettling imagery and slow build to chaos make me want another movie by this director stat.

This wannabe works oh so hard to be a contemporary detective noir, with its shadows, damsel in distress and brooding narration. But it never finds the suspense or sensuality of that genre.