Jordan Raup

Never genuinely thrilling or sincerely hilarious, Beauty and the Beast ho-hums along until the next needle drop of a prominent musical cue. If Disney believes these tales are as old as time, they ought to have a better reason for bringing them back to life than unimaginatively cashing in on nostalgia.

A culturally specific story is being told, but the film’s familiar structure helps to add a commonality for any viewer.

Most nuanced and effective in the feeling of getting to know someone the first time, when the evident foretelling is put to the side, this is simply an absorbing love story.

Even if the last act doesn’t succeed as intended, On the Count of Three threads the difficult task of finding the humor in hopelessness while not exploiting the genuine pain of severe depression.

My Old Ass yearns to go down easy and succeeds at such, but one wishes it dug a bit deeper into its Pollyannaish script and aesthetic.

Woman of the Hour likely won’t be the last re-telling of this shocking tale, but it’s hard to imagine a more perceptive take than the one Anna Kendrick provides.

While Palm Trees and Power Lines functions as a harrowing lesson for the worst-case scenarios of grooming, there’s an emptiness to the experience that, while reflecting our protagonist’s journey, results in a film that doesn’t feel fully formed.

Chloe Domont’s feature debut Fair Play cuts deep even as it comes dangerously close to careening off the cliff of plausibility with a screenplay that dips into sophomoric.

Let down by muddy characterization and a choppy directorial style, the drama finally coheres in its final act to deliver the uncompromising thrills that have been Sheridan’s trademark.

It’s his commitment to the physicality required that signifies a mythic status to both the henchman who have the honor of fighting him and those watching the spectacle on display.

Despite succumbing to the seemingly inescapable monotony that pervades most final setpieces in this genre, the film exudes a charismatic quality of nimble fun with its playful direction and lighthearted lead performance.

Whether intentionally intended or not, this earnest endeavor does wonders to enact sympathy and overturn any negative public perception of his outbursts, even if it can feel more like self-therapy than a fully-formed film.

It’s such a step-up in vibrancy, scope, and emotion that it feels like the introduction of an entirely different, more accomplished filmmaker.

Never laboring too exhaustively on a single trope, yet feeling comprehensive in the breadth of what’s dissected, Shackleton has crafted an entertaining, even self-deprecating investigation into a global addiction.

In the end, even with its shaky introduction and unsatisfying climax, Always Shine effectively lingers with a pair of deeply committed performances and Takal’s layered dissection of the vulnerabilities inherent in the world of filmmaking.

It may end up playing as a silly lark, but along with dismantling ideas of masculinity, Daniel Scheinert has also created a singularly entertaining crime comedy built on utter idiocy.

Despite a compelling performance, we rarely get an authentic sense of the psychology behind her eyes.

Along with Aisholpan’s enduring spirit, The Eagle Huntress excels in portraying the beauty and respect the people here have for both the animals and environment.

Considering how Perry intricately carves out the understated instincts of each of these characters, it’s easily his most humane and emotionally complex film.

This superhero adventure, like most of Marvel’s output, is well-paced enough with a few interesting ideas up its sleeve (including a refreshing climax featuring anti-destruction) that it should thus hold one’s attention. But for being devoid of a compelling story at its center, one walks away from Doctor Strange feeling as empty as the magic on display.

My Donkey, My Lover & I is a sun-kissed, transportive charmer that doesn’t bring much new to the table yet never hits a snag. In other words: the ideal summer watch.

If laudable for the ways in which it can find comedy in the banal, and for showing a new side of Ridley, one wishes Sometimes I Think About Dying ultimately left more of a finite impression considering its weighty, universal subject matter.

William Oldroyd’s Lady Macbeth follow-up Eileen is lacking in a considered formal approach but strives to make up for this misgiving with a script that offers its talented ensemble an unexpected mix of sensual longing and perverse thrills. While this clash of tones doesn’t entirely gel, part of its appeal is the shock of such contrasts.

Not giving into audience expectations and thus creating something more terrifying in its relatability, Sebastián Silva’s TYREL follows a testosterone-heavy weekend and the anxiety-inducing isolation one character is faced with.

In capturing childlike wonder through Pete’s eyes, this film has more than a few heartbreaking moments regarding the definition of a home and the people (or fantastical creatures) that give it life. And by keeping things relatively small-scale, David Lowery’s studio debut retains a personal touch with an unceasing supply of magic running through its lovable, full-hearted soul.

In a Hollywood where sequels are mandated to go bigger and expand the I.P. to chase the dollar signs of a cinematic universe, on paper, it is refreshing that Krasinski decided to stay relatively small-scale with the sequel. Yet, in carrying over the narrow scope, the narrative hang-ups of the first outing are only expounded upon here with a rinse-and-repeat blueprint to the stakes that feels all-too-repetitive. Considering the resources at Krasinski’s disposal to do something genuinely exciting, it’s disappointing to see the lessons that went unlearned as the same tricks get duplicated.

In his directorial debut, Matt Spicer gets right what so many other films commenting on today’s technology obsession fail to capture: the aesthetic appeal of the technology.

With its whirlwind, surface-level observations of fascinatingly complex lives, The Thief Collector is the kind of scattershot true-crime documentary that grips in the moment but, with reflection, is more entertaining to discuss than revisit for additional clues.

Marczak himself, who also plays cinematographer, is wary to delineate the line between narrative and nonfiction, and part of the film’s joy is forgoing one’s grasp on this altering perspective, rather simply getting wrapped up in the immaculately-shot allure of its location.

Delivering a happy ending that feels like a cheap way out of the story, Resurrection may initially shake one to their core, but by the finale it devolves into little more than a diabolically outrageous genre outing for two great actors.

Ant-Man and the Wasp may never achieve that level of surrealist humor, but as a series of amusing quips and inventive setpieces, the rest of the Marvel family could learn a thing or two from the scrappy small-scale of their tiniest colleague.

The film is all the better for not over-explaining its gleefully outrageous final moments, but one wishes the journey getting there was handled with more consideration.

While Blichfeldt might revel in the gruesomeness a touch too much, this is a well-crafted debut––commendable in the unexpected, gnarled ways it finds sympathy with the downcast and dismissed.

While some of the story’s turns can feel overtly manipulative, Shortland finds a bracing humanity in depicting the perverse situation of Stockholm syndrome.

With a docudrama approach capturing moments of reflective tranquility next to the beach or on a rooftop, Viva feels deeply rooted in its location.

While it doesn’t land with as much impact as it should, the contradictory, heart-numbing effects of such a dehabiliting program are conveyed with a keen sense of nuance by Akhavan.

It’s far from achieving the holy grail of comedy, but as a frivolous, fleeting time, The Little Hours has its charms thanks to the strength of its cast.

You won’t float off the film’s intended horror high, but the characters will endear you enough to show up for the promised second chapter.

Farrelly is telling a heart-warming, comical buddy story first and foremost, and Green Book, for better or worse, feels more like a wholehearted familial embrace than a treatise on the state of race in America today.

Capturing a stressful environment of constant interruptions that distract from medical urgencies, Switzerland’s Oscar-shortlisted procedural is a work of high intensity and acute resonance, even if it lacks a certain personality by design.

The narrative might get a touch too solemn, injecting a bit of reality when it comes to unanticipated hardships, but some welcome closure is offered without tying things up with a neat bow.

What’s lacking in aesthetic cohesion, pacing, and subtlety is made up for in a powerful lead performance and an essential story with compelling religious undercurrents.

By keeping characterization and plotting to a minimum, García has crafted a film in which he invites his audience to bring their own interpretations to the pensive story.

With the ensemble of mostly non-actors never less than utterly convincing, Amman Abbasi’s debut drama is captivating in its immediacy, despite a script that doesn’t feel fully formed.

Fighting with My Family doesn’t pull too many unexpected punches, but as someone who has never watched a split-second of wrestling in their life, the fact that I was engaged with this underdog story is a testament to the success of Merchant’s first solo directing effort.

This story may be on its last legs, but as table-setting for an even bigger threat, Infinity War daringly leaves more questions in the air. The way this world ends looks to be not with a bang, but a whimper.

Laika’s craft makes the sweet-natured, grand adventure worth going on, but the accompanying dialogue from those leading the journey is ultimately too simple-minded to make a memorable mark.

He escapes the confines of being just a hired gun, but in the case of A Quiet Place: Day One, Sarnoski’s tender, apocalyptic character drama keeps getting interrupted by a bunch of pesky aliens.

As a film capturing increasing condescension until a breaking point is reached, Beatriz at Dinner impresses with an impassioned performance by Hayek.

Dave McCary’s directorial debut is a film of imagination, adventure, and discovery, but also one too hesitant to challenge in its tone, traveling down a tiresome path of tropes.

While not fully engaging on a narrative level, the project at least demonstrates Kogonada hasn’t lost his filmmaking mojo, crafting a movie that may seem more personal to him than most viewers.

It’s the director’s most emotionally attuned and narrowly focused work, a film in which our attention is not pulled along by heavy dramatic shifts or distracted by a mountain of subplots, but rather how trauma can form a life of complacency and it’s only slivers of progress that hint at a more promising future.

While there’s an infectious energy to the process of musical creation and an impressive lead performance from newcomer Danielle MacDonald, the feature debut of Geremy Jasper is ultimately hindered by predictable story beats and a cynical outlook at the world it’s capturing.

John Callahan’s life is a fascinatingly complex one, and Phoenix is certainly the ideal actor to portray him, but Gus Van Sant’s maudlin, erratic approach leaves too little of an impression.

For fans of the series, The Trip to Spain gives one a wholehearted meal of all they could possibly desire.

With Wiener-Dog, Solondz is perhaps at his most evidently candid, showing all the different, damaged people that can enter and exit one’s life, and what our mutually shared, inevitable destination will be.

It’s difficult to imagine something funnier, dumber and more action-packed coming from this group.

Has a compelling hook ... but the follow-through leaves something to be desired.

The rigorous perspective solely on these mythical creatures is a daring decision––a more compelling experiment than the overdramatized recent entries into the Planet of the Apes franchise––but the end result is more commendable than dramatically captivating.

While Burns is certainly damning of the forces that let these tactics be utilized, the message of the film is ultimately more about coming clean as a nation for one’s mistakes and the oversight needed between branches to have a government of integrity.

Landline is a film about many things: sisterhood, infidelity, growing up, marriage, parenting, self-discovery, etc. That it manages to have illuminating insights about each, and none feeling like they are taking the backseat, is a feat unto itself.

The Sky Is Everywhere is certainly a delight to behold; one just wishes Nelson mined a bit deeper in the adaptation process, pulling back on trite verbosity and letting Decker’s fanciful, psychologically striking vision do the talking.

For an 11-year-old sneaking into the theater for his first R-rated movie, Deadpool could prove to be a revelatory trip. For myself, it was an exhausting, grating experience, lacking in wit and cleverness as it crumbles underneath its wall-to-wall torrent of jokes. If this represents a new stage for comic-book adaptations, the future is even more dismal than one could have imagined.

While Donzelli’s latest feature is a well-acted, stifling study of domestic violence, one wishes there was more to take away than a schematic lesson in the horrors of abuse.

A ruthlessly nihilistic beast of a movie, Elijah Bynum’s second feature Magazine Dreams provides a one-note powerhouse acting showcase for Majors, who ends up getting lost in the drawn-out second half as thematic points that initially sting get repeated ad nauseam and red herrings meant to shock become unnecessary side plots.

Throughout Photograph, Batra shows a sensitive touch and a patient eye for the subtle rhythms of human connection

Goat is a compelling watch, but in the end, its themes are a bit muddled, and certainly not unique.

While Adam seems almost like a rite of passage before we get more complex trans dramas in mainstream filmmaking, one can’t help but feel frustrated by its missed opportunities.

Swiss Army Man is an exceptionally unusual, one-of-a-kind achievement, worthy to seek out for that factor alone. However, if as much time was spent on refining the script as was the world-building, this could have been a magical realism fever dream like few others.

As the fun hits a brick wall, the film doesn’t quite have the pathos of other coming-of-age stories like The Edge of Seventeen, more focused on selling the amiable, Superbad-esque hang out vibe that is so attuned to Davidson’s brand of comedy, but when it is time for some comeuppance, it’s easy to feel for both Mo and Zeke.

Jeff Zimbalist and Maria Bukhonina’s new documentary attempts to elucidate the thought process behind these daredevil theatrics. Yet it ends up doing more to glorify and celebrate their life-threatening, thrill-seeking actions than interrogate the complexity of why they have devoted their existence to an insane diversion that has seen many of their friends fall to their deaths.

Despite a committed lead performance and flashes of finding beauty in the bizarre, Buster’s Mal Heart loses confidence as it proceeds, resulting in a journey of half-formed ideas that could’ve used as much focus as Malek’s dead-eyed glance.

There are few films that make one rethink the entire genre that came before it, but with their continually surprising, feminist bent approach, the Zellners have succeeded in doing so.

Mortensen is clearly attuned to the emotional toll of maintaining such a relationship—loving someone even if they don’t show any love back—but once this idea is firmly laid out early on, the repetitive narrative doesn’t expand to reveal more layers of complexity.

Joshy doesn’t provide any new revelations about the transition into adulthood, but, with an amusing ensemble, you could be stuck with a much worse group of guys.

Babylon is a brash, bombastic, unwieldy comic opera conveyed with enough bad taste and directorial panache that it—refreshingly—registers as a refutation of the well-mannered prestige drama to which these kinds of nostalgic odes often conform. And while there’s a touch of wistfulness in regards to the communal power of big-screen cinema, the film is more defined by an acidic unsentimentality, both when it comes to its characters and the precarious world they inhabit.

Finding new ways to draw humor out of the MeToo movement and carnal objectification, this is a limber, gratifying sex comedy that has more on its mind than successful innuendos and punchlines.

The entire saga of The Man Who Killed Don Quixote is compelling in showing the burden that journey can take, even if the end results don’t make for Gilliam’s finest hour (or two).

Despite an under-developed script, Wolfhard and Moore both deliver strong performances as their characters continue their parallel tracks, with narcissism blocking the desire to achieve their true goals and neither truly listening to the person they want to make happy.

As a morality play that will surely leave the audience contemplating what they might have done in the situation, The Light Between Oceans mostly works. As a layered drama with indelible characters and an intricate narrative, it falls short, giving credence to the more contrived climactic moments while losing specificity.

While it doesn’t quite reach the height of laughter or thrills of Feig’s best work, Ghostbusters has a persistent dose of rollicking, scrappy fun that the ideal summer blockbuster should contain — all the way past the last credits.

To the Stars is quaint in its aims, but this compact focus brings an enveloping level of intimacy.

Never truly scary or side-splitting hilarious (aside from one of the single greatest visual jokes I’ve seen in a long while, involving a kindergarten class picture), Little Monsters can often feel toothless in its bite, ending up being a watchable, if watered-down zombie comedy.

Putting a modern, live-action spin on this fable-esque puppet tale, director Mirrah Foulkes crafts a vibrant, brutal directorial debut, even if the ultimate catharsis leaves something to be desired.

Rather than focusing on Lizzie as a figure out of a horror movie or creepy folk tale, she is portrayed as a woman who found liberty only through the death of her oppressors.

The adventure rides on the charisma of the ensemble, who milk the body-switching situation for all it is worth.

As the film progresses and a comedic rhythm clicks into place, L.A. Times blazes its own distinct, disenchanted trail of romance in the modern age.

Troop Zero drowns in its cloying aim to please at every moment. It doesn’t bring anything new to the table, but that wouldn’t be a problem if its familiar heart and humor landed in any memorable way.

Slathered in nostalgia for past moments in the franchise yet still introducing entirely new backstories, this humdrum antepenultimate adventure leaves one convinced those steering the series don’t have a firm grasp on where it’s heading.

by staying true to his offbeat brand of comedy, Martin has something compelling to say about moving on amidst — or perhaps because of — the humor of life.

This is the kind of comedy one imagines will only earn a few chuckles when it eventually arrives on a streaming platform.

Them That Follow has a compelling hook, but what’s left is nothing but an unfortunately wasted opportunity.

It’s a sharp script with distinct observations helping it rise above the plethora of other similarly-themed fare.

If Collet-Serra put Neeson on a merry-go-round and added some danger, I’d gladly show up.

The drama’s formal elements aren’t as compelling as the ideas it wrestles with, but it does make for one of James Franco‘s more accomplished and complicated performances.

Due to its relatively simple base pleasures, there’s a sense this madcap comedy will be dismissed for choosing nimbleness over pathos, but it is Coen and Cooke’s clear love for both B-movie tropes and the wonderfully game ensemble they’ve assembled that makes Drive-Away Dolls go down so easy. Even if one doesn’t fully connect with the attempts at humor, to see the film’s MacGuffin revealed––and precisely how it pertains to a certain supporting character––is ultimately worth the price of admission alone.

If The Pale Blue Eye dances around potentially intriguing ideas––the dehumanization of being in the military and who ultimately answers for the crimes carried out in the name of religion––it’s all window dressing for what is ultimately a murder mystery lacking momentum.

While Bay’s frantic approach is a double-edged sword, delivering pure entertainment from the get-go while lacking in any particularly ingenious set piece, it’s a refreshing proposition to see him return to the basics of action filmmaking.