Josh Larsen

It’s a great conceit, with abundant potential. But the movie gets off to a shaky start by failing to flesh out, so to speak, the central couple.

The animated action in The Bad Guys 2 has the deftness and ingenuity of a Mission: Impossible movie, but in terms of storytelling, this follow-up to 2022’s The Bad Guys represents a step back.

Partly an impale-the-rich horror comedy, partly a fantasy monster movie, and partly a father-daughter trauma drama, Death of a Unicorn tackles more tones and ideas than a firmly established filmmaker could probably manage, so it’s no surprise that writer-director Alex Scharfman, making his feature debut, struggles to rein this in. But you have to admire the ambition and bonkers vision.

Unlike its protagonist, Babygirl is too easily satisfied.

As someone with only a basic knowledge of Bob Dylan, I can’t say I came away from A Complete Unknown with much more of an understanding of the man, his music, or his cultural significance.

As for the werewolf effects, I appreciate that they appear to mostly rely on practical elements, but the end result still leaves you wanting: this wolf man is less rabid animal than angry burn victim.

Nasty stuff—of the sort, lord knows, that I’ve praised plenty in my time. But in this case the return on icky investment just isn’t there.

There’s a beating heart to the film, but it’s faint.

The screenplay, by the team of Alfred Gough and Miles Millar, is at once overstuffed—in this it resembles Burton’s Dark Shadows—and full of missed opportunities.

MaXXXine gestures toward themes that have been explored throughout the trilogy—namely the lengths one will go to for fame, as well as religious hysteria—but without much conviction. Take away the endless Hollywood references and 1980s signposts (yes, there’s a New Coke gag) and there’s not much else going on here.

Kudos to Patel for not making a dull vanity project for his feature directorial debut, but Monkey Man is still a rough watch of its own kind.

There are moments when Godzilla: King of the Monsters resembles a fantasy version of a National Geographic documentary—except those tend to deliver far more stunning visuals without any special effects whatsoever.

In Drive-Away Dolls, almost every line is squeezed a bit too hard for cleverness, while the acts of violence frequently cross over into callousness. And although Qualley’s verbal dexterity is impressive (even if it owes a lot to Holly Hunter’s Edwina in Raising Arizona), her performance mostly made me eager to see what she might do in the future, with stronger comic material.

Maestro does manage an incredibly moving later section depicting Bernstein’s response to Felicia’s struggle with cancer (though much of these scenes owe their power to Mulligan), yet I ultimately came away feeling that the movie was more interested in Cooper as an artist than Bernstein.

There can sometimes be a significant gap between a great high concept for a movie and that concept’s execution. Such is the case with Dream Scenario.

Monster takes the long way around to get to the movie it ultimately wants to be, and I’m not sure the process is to its benefit.

The two main characters in The Royal Hotel—young women abroad who take bartending jobs at a run-down resort in the Australian outback after they’ve run out of traveling funds—make so many ill-advised choices that you begin to wonder if director Kitty Green, who wrote the film with Oscar Redding, is conducting some sort of feminist litmus test.

The Little Mermaid mostly takes place in an uncanny valley between imaginative invention and relatable live action. When we can see what’s on the screen, it tends to look like a cheapie commercial for Royal Caribbean Cruises.

A charitable reading of Master Gardener would be to say that it feels unfinished and unformed—that there might be something here with another pass at the script or a different cast.

Women Talking reduces women to their words, as the title implies, a choice that is bold but limiting.

Black Panther: Wakanda Forever suffers from a giant, Chadwick Boseman-shaped hole that it can’t fill, no matter how many characters, storylines, and muddled, chaotic action sequences it tries to throw on the screen.

Despite Hamm’s evident comedic potential (still best exemplified by his appearances on Saturday Night Live), Confess, Fletch plays like an attempt to perform CPR on DOA dad jokes.

All in all, Tomorrowland suffers from the quality that defines many of its characters: outsized vision and ambition.

Blonde so wholly commits to its vision of Monroe as a damaged soul—with the filmmaking acumen of a gripping psychological horror film—that it drowns out any sense of the rare talent she was and the rarified art she helped make.

V/H/S is icky stuff that doesn’t deserve a pass just because the awful men in it get what’s coming to them.

Other than these visual delights, Moonfall isn’t much fun.

The result is a laboriously convoluted narrative (Benedict Cumberbatch’s Doctor Strange plays a significant role) that only grows exponentially as the story unfolds, to diminishing returns.

Director Ridley Scott and cinematographer Dariusz Wolski lacquer things with the right sheen—and the outfits and hairstyles, if nothing else, will keep you awake for the nearly three-hour running time—but House of Gucci’s promise as a campy, fact-based crime melodrama is only realized when Germanotta is running the show.

At its best, this is galaxy-brain, comic-book stuff rooted in a tactile sense of place. Unfortunately, Eternals runs nearly three hours and is bloated with elements that have served other MCU installments well, but fall flat here.

I don’t know if I’ll ever be a connoisseur of kill-shot comedy, but director James Gunn at least makes it somewhat palatable.

Director Justin Lin (making his fifth Fast film) nicely balances chaos and clarity in one early chase scene through the jungle, but later lets the visual bombast take over.

This is too neat, tidy, and digestible of a take on such a wrenching topic—especially when we know the forces of injustice at work here were only temporarily stymied by this trial, and hardly defeated.

When Pieces of a Woman is at its best, it’s focusing on this traumatized couple and how neither knows how to make room for the other’s grieving process, partly because their respective processes conflict. Unfortunately the movie wants to be so much more.

Day has a startling combination of confidence and corruptibility as the legendary jazz singer, but the film itself is a jumble of barely established characters, over-stylized techniques, and didactic dialogue.

Considering the limited material, what we get from Washington and Zendaya is doubly impressive. There’s not enough in the text for them to form full characters, but wow do they nail individual moments, shifting from tenderness to cruelty to scorn to reluctant introspection (in this way the film comes across as a series of successful auditions).

Boys State is a thoroughly depressing portrait of American teen masculinity, Texas politics, and the overall state of democracy.

Cummings is a unique talent; Snow Hollow is just an awkward fit, beyond the ways he intends.

The dispiriting truth is that Borat Subsequent Moviefilm’s staged pranks can’t compete with our awful reality. The movie is trying to expose people who have already been walking around the past four years with their pants down.

One of Nolan’s greatest attributes as a filmmaker is his trust in the intellect of mainstream audiences—audiences who have rewarded that trust by making challenging, original works like Inception huge hits. This time, though, it might have been smart to dumb things down a bit.

This is largely Dickens as farce, which is occasionally fun—Peter Capaldi is a delightful Mr. Micawber, whose creditors are so insistent they try to yank his rug out from under his front door—but it often feels forced.

This is a middling Ferrell project that has its moments but mostly brings to mind better, music-themed comedies (A Mighty Wind in particular).

An even more callow cousin to Steven Spielberg’s The Adventures of Tintin, Ready Player One combines motion-capture performance with state-of-the-art animation to free the filmmaker from the constraints of the traditional, live-action format. Yet form seems to be about all the movie is really interested in.

A goggling miserabilism defines Beanpole, making it hard to connect with the film on anything other than an aesthetic level.

A torturously convoluted extension of an already complicated narrative that can’t decide if it wants to be an origin story for snow queen Elsa, a romance for her sister Anna, a metaphor for living with grief and depression, or a parable about reparations due to indigineous peoples.

The real problem, however, is that neither Molly, nor Newbury, nor anyone on her staff is very funny.

In Parabellum, the shootouts—and there are two disastrous ones, that finale and a mid-film sequence featuring new costar Halle Berry—are less about Wick (his motivations, his anger, his technique) and more about the grandiosity of the violence.

I suppose if you wanted to be really generous to the film, you could argue that this Dumbo takes a subversive swipe at Disney, its own corporate overseer.

A bit more investigative work on the part of the filmmakers might have gone a long way, especially because there is something of a black hole at the center of Fyre: McFarland is depicted as ground zero in terms of responsibility, but we never get a real sense of who the guy is, what drives him, or how he was able to pull the wool over so many eyes.

McCraney has a background as a playwright, which may explain why High Flying Bird mostly consists of a series of zippy conversations. Each one is overstuffed with so many ideas—not just about sports, but also sexuality, faith, economics, and history—that the characters don’t quite register as flesh-and-blood figures.

The first Suspiria is a psychedelic sensory experience, but it didn’t really mean much. The remake, written by David Kajganich and directed by Luca Guadagnino (Call Me by Your Name), tries to bring too much meaning to its horror conceit.

There are two curious elements to The Land of Steady Habits: writer-director Nicole Holofcener centering a film around a male protagonist; and Ben Mendelsohn giving a regular-guy, mildly comic performance. I wish both experiments had paid off a bit more.

The horror comedy Slice has so many amusing, eyebrow-raising elements that at the very least it entertains as a curiosity.

I’m convinced more of Hawke’s passion for the man than his place in music history.

Despite the strong lead performance and these immersive aesthetics, Madeline remains frustratingly at a distance. Even as the movie puts us inside her head, it somehow fails to illuminate her.

Thoroughbreds has a brazenness that’s promising, then, even if it also seems to be a bit too taken with its characters’ amorality. The movie works hard to make your eyes open wide, but doesn’t seem to realize that a squinting introspection can have its own sort of edge.

There is something unseemly in its choice to document the Beales at all. It’s not exactly that mother and daughter are being unwittingly exploited (though one wonders what a psychologist would make of their mental states). It’s that Edith and Edie – who both pursued show-business careers at different points in their lives – are such eager subjects, so willing to let the camera roll with little thought to what, aside from their immediate selves, it might be capturing. If Grey Gardens doesn’t exactly exploit that, the documentary certainly takes dubious advantage.

This has little of the insinuating nature of the best film noir, as Lana Turner and John Garfield go from 0 to 60 in their first scene together.

The performances are sweltering...This isn’t a good thing. Yes, it’s fitting for the setting – a humid, suffocating Louisiana mansion where the family of an ailing tycoon (Burl Ives) connives to inherit his fortune – but the overall result is like watching a melodrama in a sauna. It’s just too much.

This is a crazed and lurid character portrait that spends most of its time psychoanalyzing itself.

A Woman Under the Influence made me wonder: What’s the point of only showing a mentally challenged character’s distress? Is it fair to reduce Mabel to her rock-bottom experiences?

It’s all wild, but too intentionally amped up to be any fun.

By the time Streisand takes over the entire movie with the title number, in which the massive waitstaff of an upscale restaurant gathers to sing and dance her praises, I couldn’t help but wonder what all the fuss was about.

Just about every line of dialogue written for a child or teenager is painful (the movie must have been dated a week after release), though I suppose that helps Hocus Pocus work as a time capsule. Far more charm can be found in the largely practical effects and sets.

When the plot is this much of a lark, it’s in need of far lighter execution than this.

Director Wayne Wang and his dreadful cast – the performances are almost across-the-board atrocious – had no chance.

As the parents of a busy family in an early 20th-century English hamlet, Donald Crisp and Anne Revere save this treacly family drama from choking on its own sentimentality.

Coffy is at once a notable moment in female-empowerment cinema and a pervasive exercise in the objectification of women. It’s as if Gloria Steinem wrote a screenplay that was then handed off to Hugh Hefner to direct.

The Exorcist is provocation at its ugliest.

From Gene Kelly’s forced grins to its boldly monochrome sets to the horn-heavy George Gershwin music that is the genesis for the picture, An American in Paris is an all-out assault on the senses. If Kelly’s Singin’ in the Rain, which would come a year later, revels in movie-musical joy, this effort’s defining trait is insistence.

Oddly inert, except when it’s blithely nasty, 52 Pick-Up may very well suffer from mismatched sensibilities: those of grim thriller director John Frankenheimer and witty crime novelist Elmore Leonard.