Josh Larsen

The deeper American Beauty tries to get, the shallower it reveals itself to be.

Yes, Vampire’s Kiss features one of Nicolas Cage’s most outlandish performances (which is saying something), but it’s also a dismal film, ugly and misogynistic in a particularly 1980s way.

Ramsay has a gifted eye—the opening shot, of a boy twisting himself in a lacy curtain, is a stunner—and she establishes an undeniably vivid sense of place, yet there is a gravitation toward the tragic and repugnant that goes beyond description and toward a place of awed fascination.

Even while understanding that much of Belfast is supposed to be from the perspective of Buddy (Jude Hill), a young boy who witnesses the beginning of Ireland’s “Troubles” in his working-class neighborhood (and serves as something of a stand-in for writer-director Kenneth Branagh), I still felt a type of artistic naivete at work—a belief that all you need is black-and-white cinematography and a cute kid to create something of deep meaning and emotion.

The songs don’t offer much distraction from the silly story.

Garfield is fine, if a bit one-note in his show-must-go-on energy. The real issue is that the film is maniacally focused on Larson as the uber-struggling artist in a way that eventually feels monstrous, devouring any other character or concern that happens to cross its path.

Directed by Jacques Audiard (A Prophet, The Sisters Brothers), whose heart might be in the right place—the movie at least honors Emilia’s dysmorphia, rather than using it as a plot gimmick—but whose execution resembles something like community-theater Sicario, pulsed in an erratic blender.

Absolutely no one—Oscar voters included—should find Mortensen’s performance anything other than excruciating. From the hand gestures to the accent, it’s as if he jumped out of a vintage photo at The Olive Garden shouting, “Unlimited breadsticks for everahbody!”

F1: The Movie is a corporate conglomerate on cinematic wheels.

By the movie’s merciful end, you wonder what a nice guy like Superman is doing in a mean place like this.

Vox Lux has such snarky contempt for pop music—or at least the star-making machinery that governs it—that you wonder why writer-director Brady Corbet bothered to make an entire movie about the subject.

The film clumsily stumbles into feminist significance in its final moments, without having laid much groundwork for it beforehand.

If joy and liberation bursts from the best Astaire-Rogers films, The Story of Vernon and Irene Castle is defined by restriction.

Mission: Impossible — The Final Reckoning fumbles its own legacy, largely by believing it had one in the first place. With apologies to Simon Pegg and Ving Rhames, this has never been a franchise powered by our emotional connections to its characters, much less any sort of overarching, thematically resonant narrative. The Final Reckoning belatedly attempts to conjure up such qualities, while skimping on what has always mattered most in the series: scintillating stunt work.

This is noir as costume party.

The cultural context is at once vague and oppressive—there’s constant talk of “chi” and “ancestors”—to the point that it’s nearly rendered meaningless. With Yifei Lu in the title role, posing elegantly but not given much of a chance to project any sort of inner life.

This is a film of clashing ideas and clanging style.

Much of Vol. 3 feels like a combination of those exploitative ads from animal shelters and the Japanese body-horror endurance test Tetsuo: The Iron Man. Aside from that, the movie offers about 3,000 subplots and 2,000 supporting characters.

Washington has the most fun, swishing about in dangling jewels and flowing robes, while Mescal—one of our best young actors—struggles to define Lucius outside of Crowe’s shadow. As for the relentless fights and battles, I found them to be increasingly tedious—even the wild ones with animals, given their reliance on CGI effects.

To its credit, the movie gently questions Nyad’s compulsion—especially as it relates to her treatment of Bonnie—but it’s too eager to sweep all that under the rug when it comes time for the triumphant final swim.

At least in Kinski you can see why Schrader thought Cat People might work. Her feline eyes are part of it, but it’s the mystery behind them, especially in the second half, that almost redeems the project.

As a portrait of a real-world villain the movie is muddled and lacking any sort of compelling theory.

The movie wields its mockery with the subtlety of a power tool.

Swiss Family Robinson’s sole saving grace is the tree house the family builds, an inventive piece of production design that manages to capture the sort of imaginative delight the rest of the movie is striving for.

When you hit a home run with Gadot, who was so thrilling in the 2017 film, you might want to make a sequel that keeps her at the center.

The Living Daylights marks one of those moments when the Bond franchise was awkwardly caught between two eras.

In The Drama, it never feels as if the two main characters are in conflict with each other as much as they’re in conflict with the film’s form and screenplay.

Yikes! I understand we can’t always hold films from earlier eras to the social standards of the current moment, but even beyond the rampant offensiveness of Murder by Death, the fact that this whodunit spoof relies on race, ethnicity, sexual orientation, gender, and disability for the vast majority of its jokes speaks to a paucity of comic imagination that’s timelessly disheartening.