Josh Larsen

There’s no doubt that Fennell has made something that shows impressive filmmaking promise and pulses with real pain.

Bob Fosse’s half-confession about what a jerk he was to the women in his life may pull a lot of punches, but there’s just too much art on the screen to completely disregard the effort.

A lot of fun, even if it could have been better if it had taken itself just a smidge more seriously.

Mickey 17 may not be my preferred mode of Bong Joon-Ho, but it’s the mode we need right now.

Blow the Man Down snagged me right away with its bold, stylized opening.

Wunmi Mosaku (Ruby on HBO’s Lovecraft Country) has a fierce sense of determination, even if her character has to defer in this traditional marriage, and Sope Dirisu keeps revealing more and more layers to the husband, a man struggling to survive under what ultimately feels like the curse of assimilation.

Nine Days is slow going at first—it sometimes feels as if the title is a reference to its running time—but eventually this pensive, existential thought experiment blossoms into something more cinematic.

Like Shinkai’s metaphysical body-switching fantasia Your Name, Weathering with You works on multiple levels: as eco-fable, social commentary, and teen romance.

The best numbers in The Color Purple capture the anger and/or exultation of personal experience.

Bugonia has its creative “pleasures.” . . But mostly it feels like we’ve been here before, with the same faces.

Possessor cranks up the aesthetic volume on two familiar subgenres—the hired killer psychodrama and the sci-fi body-snatcher—until they meld into a destabilizing case of extreme cinema.

Even for a 1933 movie musical, Flying Down to Rio is a vaudeville show shamelessly trying to pass for a feature film. Thank goodness, then, that it can get by on sheer showmanship.

What’s really spooky about Candyman is that the movie is confused in almost exactly the way that the first film was. Maybe the material itself is haunted.

The Killer is a gorgeously sterile, de-romanticized riff on the likes of Jean-Pierre Melville’s Le Samourai (which notably features a near-silent assassin) and countless other hit-man movies, peppered with sideswipes at capitalism.

A light delight, even if you have no experience with the role-playing game, Dungeons & Dragons: Honor Among Thieves takes its fantasy world seriously, but not itself.

The result is a sci-fi fantasy that’s part Fantastic Planet and part Miyazaki.

Like Hereditary, Midsommar functions as an outlandish imagining of the effects of personal trauma, especially for someone who already struggles with an unsteady mind. Yet the psychology and the horror aren’t quite as holistically handled this time around.

Lee gives this familiar figure of vengeance a soft, singular touch.

Even though she’s playing a woman who is suffering, Lawrence brings a playfulness to the screen that leavens the depths of misery in which Ramsay’s movies tend to wallow.

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.

Before it strangely peters out, lost in its own conspiracies, The Shrouds registers as a mournful, if macabre, meditation on losing a loved one—as only writer-director David Cronenberg could manage.

Moss shifts into another gear for the truly disturbing finale, when those eyes flicker with thoughts of revenge and events unfold in a way that remind us that Whannell’s big break was as the screenwriter of Saw. The Invisible Man ends on a nasty note, but then again the 1933 film was nasty too. Given the omnipotent power of invisibility, humans apparently do their worst.

Pattinson and Kravitz bring real heat to their scenes together—there’s a great moment where he holds her against his chest as they’re hiding from a pursuer and their breathing slowly, erotically falls into rhythm. Even at three hours, the movie could use more of her.

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.

Shang-Chi and the Legend of the Ten Rings isn’t perfect. There’s a bit too much exposition involving myths, history, and character backstory; that climax inevitably abandons the intimacy of the fight scenes for gargantuan CGI. Yet by that point the movie has earned too much goodwill to be affected much by such complaints. I’m sure there are plenty of punchplosions to come in the MCU, probably even delivered by Shang-Chi himself, but at least Ten Rings offers a momentary respite from the reverberations.

One of Pixar’s smaller, sweeter efforts.

As Naru, a smart, skilled young woman who would rather be hunting than gathering, Midthunder is mesmerizing—capable in the crunchy fight scenes (especially a single-take standoff between her and a handful of Frenchmen), but also in the ways her eyes are always watching, consuming every detail about the way the Predator works and the weapons it uses.

Even as the movie itself unnecessarily spirals further into madness and attendant plot holes—perhaps inspired by the wackadoo escalations of recent horror such as Malignant, Barbarian, and Longlegs—Grant makes for a genially deranged host.

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.

In its erratic narrative, random assortment of characters, and omnipresent soundtrack, Car Wash captures something perfectly: the rhythms of a working-class work day.

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.

For all its silliness, the musical also taps into something existential, thanks to its ticking-clock structure. As the hours slip away and impending separation looms over every note, On the Town becomes a bittersweet reminder that all our days are numbered.

Onward may not rank among Pixar’s best, but the studio’s ability to gently tweak heartstrings, without overdoing it, remains intact.

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.

On the surface, A Quiet Place Part II is another expertly crafted and well-acted monster movie, much like its predecessor.

Plummer, so good in Andrew Haigh’s Lean on Pete (another horse movie of a sort), shines here, especially in one of those final shots that holds on an actor’s face and asks them to seal the movie’s deal. Plummer does, with flying colors.

As adapted from the beloved Jane Austen novel by screenwriter Eleanor Catton and director Autumn de Wilde, Emma. is a cheerful confection—brightly colored, briskly consumed—and as such a worthy representation of one of the great literary characters.

Even for a Wong Kar-wai film, Fallen Angels is lavishly stylized.

The true revelation is Dyer. A fresh presence amidst the boys’ club of Stranger Things, she’s incredible here in a performance that ranges from understated drama to physical comedy.

If Beale Street Could Talk is less interested in railing against systemic racism than lamenting the everyday goodness that is lost when racism carries the day.

It’s the moral imperative of the found-footage formalism that sets REC apart, transforming Angela’s camera from a visceral instrument of voyeurism into a tragic, last-gasp tool of truth and justice.

Blitz gets a little preachy at times (perhaps another Dickens influence), but there is also a stark honesty about the dread and difficulty of living as a civilian under siege—as a person of color or not. And of course McQueen manages instances of jaw-dropping imagery.

Gazer owes an enormous debt to a few obvious influences, but the movie has just enough vision and atmosphere of its own for the makings of an unnerving, lo-fi, neo-noir.

Now, Voyager may not have the fine balance of some of Davis’ best films—Jezebel is probably the place to go for that—but it’s still, in its stronger moments, a fine showcase for an iconic actress.

Much of what makes a great Pedro Almodovar film can be found in The Room Next Door: a layered narrative, a thoughtful color scheme, a focus on women, and an intense interest in sex and/or death. But a certain vitality is strangely missing, and not because of the subject matter.

There are plenty of big laughs to be found in Theater Camp—Ayo Edibiri pops up to steal a few scenes—but it’s this ability to weave self-deprecation with theatrical passion that distinguishes the movie.

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.

What’s missing, in comparison to Nichols’ other movies, is an internalized angst.

If Starman works at all, it’s because of the way Allen gazes at Bridges, as if his mystery is her answer. We believe she’d seriously fall for this doppelganger because we understand how badly she’s hurting.

It’s as if Moss is directing the movie through her performance.

Thankfully a sharp cast and goofy wit mostly keep the movie light on its feet.

Hoss (so riveting in Christian Petzold’s Phoenix) gives the strongest performance, arriving at the party with a goddess-like superiority that Hedda tragically chips away at as the night proceeds. Though not without a riveting fight.

Thrumming with energy—thanks to vivacious filmmaking from director Lola Quivoron and a ferocious lead performance by newcomer Julie Ledru—Rodeo takes place within the world of underground motocross in the suburbs of Paris.

Still a fantasy, though a less mealymouthed one than The Devil Wears Prada, this follow-up to the 2006 Meryl Streep-Anne Hathaway buddy fashion comedy nods to the real world in interesting ways—fast fashion, corporate restructuring, the implosion of journalism—while still remaining charmingly light on its Gucci-clad feet.

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.

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.

Ballooning. Biking. Swimming. Parachuting. The Great Muppet Caper represented a giant leap for Muppetkind, in only their second big-screen outing.

Ant-Man and the Wasp is still beholden to an overwritten superhero/sci-fi storyline that involves lots of quantum talk and way too many players.

Hang in there with Together Together. What may seem at first like a slender character study eventually grows into a more expansive exploration of loneliness, before ending on a perfect, powerhouse final shot.

Watching Hold the Dark isn’t quite as interesting as ruminating on it afterwards, which is probably both a critique and a compliment.

Wong captures this in his usual, expressive style, employing black and white at times and staggering the frame rate to accentuate heightened moments (including an aching slide into slow motion as the two men share a cigarette).

Like each of del Toro’s nastier pictures, Nightmare Alley closes in on you with a hellish elegance.

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

A horror meditation on the biblical origins and self-perpetuating permutations of patriarchy, Men unfolds like an echoing primal scream.

Eventually a fatalistic torpor settles over the film, even during the increasingly gun-heavy action scenes. For all its early intoxication, The Old Guard has an aftertaste that’s deadening.

The Ugly Stepsister has macabre fun with what some women will do to make a shoe fit. It’s The Substance by way of the Brothers Grimm.

What’s missing from Johnson can be found in abundance in two brief, supporting turns. Zoe Winters, as one of Lucy’s clients, and Louisa Jacobson, as a skittish bride, knock out their slim scenes by bringing a unique verve and vitality to every second. Their characters pop as interesting, complicated, compelling humans, whose stories we want to hear. If Song had cast one of them in the lead, Materialists might have really been something.

It’s all incredibly immersive, to the point that these everyday farm animals—the sort that usually only receive a passing glance—begin to seem fascinatingly alien.

Certainly The Phoenician Scheme still fits within what I’ve come to call “Wes Anderson’s restoration cinema.” It just does so more plainly, less poetically.

Watson is reliably sturdy in the lead role—you can see her panicked conscience in her eyes—but it’s Franciosi who grabs the film by its shoulders and turns it into a searing, singular experience.

There’s joy in watching Cooper, for the most part, actually pull this off—including the gamble of casting an acting novice in the crucial title role.

The movie is a collection of ghoulish creative impulses (some of them gorily sadistic, as when a character is trapped in a room of barbed wire) rather than a coherent story.

In their hands, and with Pusić’s guidance, Tuesday registers as a magical metaphor for how we process death—and particularly how that might play out in this mother-daughter relationship.

A gem, in that there’s really no other movie like it. A mixture of camp, parody, and full-throated sincerity, Moonstruck ultimately coalesces into a romantic comedy that’s tonally aberrant yet emotionally coherent.

The brilliance of the screenplay, which Wenders wrote with Takuma Takasaki, is the way it doesn’t inflate the interruptions to Hiryama’s happiness (a pushy coworker, the appearance of an estranged sister) into contrived drama.

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!”

The movie is a hate-watch thriller that scoffs at its characters as much as you do.

It’s the performances that ultimately carry the film.

The silliness is as sharp and improvisational as ever, as are the impressions.

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.

Rowlands takes the movie by the throat in the dramatic, onstage sequences, just as Brando would have done, yet she’s equally compelling in the film’s smaller moments.

In a Selick film, every object has a rich inner life; perhaps Wendell & Wild just has too many objects

Like its predecessor, Spider-Man: Homecoming, Spider-Man: Far From Home is content to be a high-school movie first and a superhero saga second.

Despite all the mania and exaggerated characterizations, Raising Arizona is ultimately one of the Coens’ kinder (if not gentler) efforts, a raucous cartoon that consistently offers the beleaguered, desert-stricken H.I. little oases of grace.

Unlike Daze and those other predecessors, Selah and the Spades never convincingly establishes its own stylized universe, resting somewhat uncomfortably between the real world and a fully realized, believably hermetic place.

A mixture of hard-boiled intrigue and mental instability, this dark passage takes us from the film noirs of its time to the psychological thrillers that Alfred Hitchcock would make in the 1950s. Altogether, it’s a wild, harrowing journey.

A smart, sweet gem of a comedy.

If you can get on its moodily monstrous wavelength, the movie will have you asking why we let some animals sleep on our beds and put others in pens.

In so many monster movies, the pieces show. This creature is seamless.

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.

If Some Came Running survives its dated gender politics, that’s all due to MacLaine. Her Ginnie—overly made up and yet disheveled, with hamburger bun crumbs on her sparkly cocktail dress—is the only one to lend the movie an authentic sense of dignity.

Perhaps the defining moment of Robert Altman’s legendary career. It was here, after all, where Altman’s signature traits were all assembled and perfected: the extensive ensemble cast, the fluid and unforced narrative, the overlapping dialogue that freed the movies from the stilted patter of the stage and injected them with the interrupted babbling of real conversation.

Just enough insider detail to tantalize a hardcore basketball fan, but too much inspirational sports hooey to hook one.

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

The Deer King offers the personal touch of a hero’s journey alongside a more expansive vision of how to live in community. It’s a stunner.

With or without special effects, Twister delivers the same sort of suspense that’s been a staple of good drama since storytelling began.

Sophie delivers three “confessions” over the course of the film, each delivered by Streep with what can only be called a commanding fragility.

There’s a vulnerability to A Quiet Place: Day One that’s rare in big, would-be blockbusters.

If the overall project of the Craig pictures was to domesticate 007, No Time to Die accomplishes its mission. But it was a bit of a slog to get there.

Robert Redford hovers like a ghost over A River Runs Through It—not so much as director (this is a sturdy if uninspired adaptation of Norman Maclean’s novella), but rather via his sacramental voiceover and the casting of a young Brad Pitt.

During the many fight sequences, the action has a brightness and clarity—in terms of line work and movement—that should be studied by anyone working on the effects side of American superhero movies. There is admittedly too much plotting; in fact, you could argue that a final-act twist isn’t even necessary.

Given Kikuchi’s purposefully distanced performance, Zellner’s tendency to give scenes four lungs full of breathing space, and the often jarring musical choices, it’s almost as if the movie is daring you not to like it.

Just Mercy is a testament to what talented actors can do with material that might otherwise be stifling.

Lust for Life features exhilarating scenes of Van Gogh at work, often set in the locations of some of his most famous paintings and punctuated with close-ups of the original artwork. Like the 2017 animated experiment Loving Vincent, the movie functions not only as a biopic, but as an exercise in aesthetic reinterpretation.

The Shining is terrifying for what it doesn’t do.

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

Crawl lends credence to the claim that you should never give up on a director.

We’re largely left with an arresting return to the sort of wild work Cronenberg delivered in the 1980s and 1990s, if one where the shock is ironically missing.

The movie’s best moments are those of cinebro-bonding between Pascal and Cage’s characters.

Black Widow certainly suffers from MCU bloat—dutiful references to other installments in the franchise, an overly convoluted plot leading to a two-hour-plus runtime, an endlessly explosive action finale that takes place mostly in front of green screens—yet a strong cast and emphasis on character ultimately overcome much of those grievances.

Rustin is a dutiful history-lesson movie of the type that usually fails to stir me, yet in recent years I’ve come to put more value on such efforts. If any acknowledgment of the difficult, “inconvenient” periods of America’s past are going to be banned from libraries and schools, then let art do what it can to fill in the gaps.

Devastation without manipulation. That’s the miracle pulled off by writer-director Andrew Haigh with All of Us Strangers, his supple adaptation of a novel by Taichi Yamada.

A work of blockbuster auteurism, Avatar: The Way of Water wildly, weirdly expends massive resources on a vision at once generic and bizarrely idiosyncratic, for better and for worse.

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.

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

It’s like watching the problems of a pillow. Adam Sandler, as Jay’s manager, delivers the most interestingly human performance in the film, but he’s not given nearly enough to do. If the movie had been equally weighted between them, Jay Kelly might have been somebody.

Whatever else he ends up doing in his career, Adam Driver will always have Annette. Surely this will go down as his most notorious performance (and yes, I’m including his snit-fitty—and thoroughly magnetic—turn as Kylo Ren in the Star Wars movies).

Right out of the gate—and even working within the modern Hong Kong gangster genre—Wong Kar-wai burst onto the screen as a strikingly unique talent. This is clearly a filmmaker less interested in plot and dialogue than he is in movement, music, and color—no matter the time, place, or story.

The clarity and imagination of the world-building carried me through, as well as the fountain of charm that is Paul Rudd.

There’s a playfulness and a romanticism to the technique—a way of placing the characters both within and without history—that elevates Tesla from being a snarky art installation to something, presumably like Tesla himself, with a soul.

While the baby Ochi is something of a Grogu-Gizmo hybrid, the use of puppetry and animatronics gives it an idiosyncratic scruffiness. It feels as if you’re encountering a new species, not watching a digitized fantasy film.

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.

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.

Tell me that you have an expedition movie with clear objectives and unlikely odds, anchored by a compelling cast of characters, and you have my attention. Add dinosaurs and you have my money. Make it all work—especially within the context of the Jurassic franchise—and you have a miracle.

If Sunlight worked even a quarter as well as it does, the movie would still have been something of a miracle.

This is noir as costume party.

Nelson is jarring, scary and brilliantly bitter.

In a sense, the film only works because, in the real world, the system is rigged against someone like Axel Foley. Yet when Murphy seizes the screen, all bets are off, resulting in a work of racial subversion that’s both hilarious and cathartic.

Adonis’ motivations are less compelling here than they were in Creed—especially in the way they sideline his relationship with the pregnant Bianca. In the end, he does what he does so that there can be a Creed II, nothing more, nothing less.

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.

There is pleasure in Astaire and Rogers floating, a foot apart, to “Smoke Gets in Your Eyes,” as well as the elaborate, heavily furred gowns that the fashion setting allows.

Nearly every frame of Shaft is intent on doing one thing: establishing its hero – private detective John Shaft – as a powerful, independent, innately good yet still devilish man in complete control of his own destiny.

Watching Game Night is like witnessing someone on a hot streak while playing charades. As they keep nailing points for their team in rapid succession, you wonder how long they can sustain it. In Game Night, it’s the laughs that just keep coming.

Del Toro’s film is a gothic horror story, with gloomy settings and macabre dismemberments, yet it also holds, within its central Creature, a heart that yearns for an ecstatic life.

[Zellweger’s] unrecognizable, in appearance and level of conviction. Even with the gaps I have in her filmography, I feel safe saying this is a career-best performance.

Wonka may be more Paul King than Roald Dahl—it bears the clever kindness of Paddington and Paddington 2 far more than the clever cynicism of the Charlie and the Chocolate Factory author—but a worse fate could have befallen the iconic title character.

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.

White Noise is ultimately an absurdist comedy, with Gerwig and Driver as the victims/clowns at its center (he wears a suit of amusing denialism, while she floats about in a tragicomic state of daze).

The long, seemingly monotonous shots in Skinamarink will be trying for some, yet there are rewards if you have the patience: occasional, eerie beauty (that night-light evokes a twinkling star dangling in space) and clever filmmaking.

With a more streamlined narrative, it would have been stunning. As is, the movie certainly marks Diallo as promising.

As a political satire, Let the Bullets Fly is pointed and precise.

Brilliant in terms of its overall structure, Kuritzkes’ script also manages crackerjack individual scenes that stack up one upon the other, like little chamber dramas within a larger opus.

Erivo anchors even the hokiest scenes with exactly the qualities a faith-forward telling like this needs: conviction and fervency.

If you’re going to take on an iconic role like Mary Poppins, it doesn’t pay to be timid. You might as well go for it. Emily Blunt does just that in Mary Poppins Returns, taking the Julie Andrews template, honoring it to a T, and adding her own lively spark.

The movie has a self-aware streak that isn’t too self-impressed, as well as an amusing flair for the absurd.

This is a film of clashing ideas and clanging style.

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

Gazzara is riveting as man who exudes cool and calm—style—while also stinking of panic.

A romantic, flashback-rich narrative distinguishes this feature-length animated effort, which Warner Bros. was confident enough in to give a theatrical release.

There are certainly laughs and clever gags along the way, but there’s also considerable effort, without commensurate payoff.

The movie’s dark magic occurs when the stop-motion story and the narrative proper bleed into each other (often literally), with goopy puppets invading Ella’s space while she—perhaps psychologically, perhaps in reality—finds herself trapped in theirs.

In addition to the requisite action and excitement, there’s a painterliness to Twisters that I didn’t expect.

As things go very, very dark in the last third, the tone control starts to slip, eventually sliding away in the final moments, when what had been a sly critique of toxic masculinity turns preachy.

Throughout human history, there has been something in our broken nature that resists community and seeks conflict. Eddington captures this, particularly the way it was fomented by the historical circumstances of 2020 America.

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.

Brosnan is excellent, wearing Bond more lightly than any of his predecessors.

When it comes to 1980s comedies about urban anxiety, I prefer this Ron Howard lark to Martin Scorsese’s After Hours. Partly this is due to the manic brio of Michael Keaton in his feature debut, but it’s also the fact that the movie—written by the team of Lowell Ganz and Babaloo Mandel—has a better control of comic pacing and energy. Not all the jokes land (and some are problematically dated), but an awful lot of them do, with exactly the right timing and intensity.

While I may not particularly care for where things go in the final moments, I’m impressed by the movie’s audacity. Indeed, it’s another horror play—a bonkers big swing that’s less reminiscent of the other Alien films and more akin to recent gonzo fright flicks like Barbarian and Malignant.

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.

It’s astonishing, and a bit sad really, how prescient Real Life was in retrospect. In 1979, Albert Brooks had already predicted and skewered the contrived inauthenticity of reality television with this biting mockumentary, yet we’ve gone ahead and given over much of our entertainment hours to the format anyway.

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.

Boden and Fleck do deliver a crackerjack, climactic comic-book sequence that stands as one of my favorite moments in all of the MCU.

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.

In the lead, Mbatha-Raw delivers a shaken, exposed performance that hints at the more familiar stories of domestic trauma (drug use, suicide, having to give up a child) that this otherwise super story might stand in for.

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.

Ready or Not works best as a black comedy about how far the obscenely rich will go to keep what they (undeservedly) have.

It’s a welcome return to Luhrmann maximalism, if you’re a fan of his style. And it’s anchored by a wild, possessed performance by Austin Butler, who gets Presley’s singing voice and—more importantly—gyrations exactly right.

It’s amusing, in a Barry Lyndon sort of way, but also feels a bit blinkered. Discounting Napoleon Bonaparte as a buffoon who merely benefitted from societal chaos does a disservice to the hundreds of thousands, if not millions, he left dead.

I don’t know if I’ve ever seen a pair of performances—no, it’s really a singular, joint performance—like what we get from Kristen Wiig and Annie Mumolo in Barb and Star Go to Vista Del Mar.

What’s difficult to get past, even in Encore, is the queasiness of those minstrelsy club numbers, where the White audience gazes at Black bodies as the camera performs pyrotechnics. The vantage point is simply too compromised.

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.

Plemons roots each scenario in an individual reality. He rises above the movie’s rigidness to remind us that each of his characters is not just a sour joke or an intellectual conceit, but an unknowable, yet relatable, human.

You have a literally commanding Duvall at the center of it, wearing that uniform like a second skin. He’s more than willing to play Meechum as a monster of a father, while also giving hints, in small moments, that this is a man who has had tenderness of any kind ground out of him by a macho, mercenary system.

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 bit muted, especially for a movie about songcraft, The History of Sound nevertheless quietly builds in import until it reaches a devastating finale, one that musically meditates on the impermanence of love and life

If the movie features one (or two) too many explosive chase sequences, I did like one of the ways it envisions its moral thesis (which is that we all have a good side): whenever Wolf inadvertently does something nice, his tail embarrassingly, uncontrollably wags, like a divining rod for redemption.

I had no trouble believing all of the fantastic imagery that The Creator puts up on the screen; it’s the story I couldn’t quite invest in.

Turner and Douglas have great chemistry—in their best moments, they recall Claudette Colbert and Clark Gable on the road in It Happened One Night—helped by the fact that Douglas is willing to be undercut by both Turner and the screenplay.

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.

Make no mistake, Hall is terrific—sharply comic in the broader scenes, while also allowing little glimpses of Trinitie’s inner turmoil before she shuts them away behind her “first lady” facade. Brown, however, vacuums up the movie in a way that’s both entrancing and entirely true to the complicated character he’s playing.

Brosnahan trades in the quick quips of Mrs. Maisel for a quieter intelligence and vulnerable uncertainty.

If Knock at the Cabin is mid-tier Shyamalan, at best, it may be because I was more taken with these formal choices than the story, which riffs on the Book of Revelation in ways that feel fairly perfunctory. I did appreciate the final moments, though, which resist any sort of Shyamalan twist and instead rely on an emotional, diegetic needle drop that I won’t spoil here.

Yes, Meet John Doe is “talky” (if politically astute). That—along with a fairly inert romance between Stanwyck and Cooper—counts against it. But the cast commits with full hearts, especially Cooper, who creates a character both silly (there’s some great physical comedy in his reactions to being put up in a posh hotel room) and sincere.

Honeymoon in Vegas is a bit corny and contrived, but the movie gradually levitates above its limitations thanks to its three leads, whose performances count among the best in their careers.

If you’re on their wavelength (like Kumiko, Damsel is driven by a dry sense of humor, with the studied pacing to match), you won’t mind. But if you’re not able to completely buy in, the movie’s second half might feel a bit like the long stretching out of the same, sly joke.

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.

Another 1990s domestic parable chastising workaholic dads, The River Wild also functions as a gorgeous travelogue and a Meryl Streep action film. Director Curtis Hanson sure packs a lot into one river trip.

It has an optimistic charm all its own, as well as strong performances throughout—especially from White and Buckley.

Director Otto Preminger emphasizes the lurid whenever he can – the neon signs, the smoky interiors, the insinuating bass on the soundtrack – so that the movie plays like a blurry, bleary night-on-its-way-to-morning. Only Sinatra’s talent is clear.

Triangle of Sadness—despite the madness of that dinner sequence—is too controlled. As meandering as the overall narrative is, each individual scene feels like it’s placing its characters into an inevitable vice.

The notion of a villain’s power being born of his own suffering is a comic-book staple that’s intriguingly reimagined from the ground up here, in a way that speaks to the originality that Shyamalan first brought to the superhero genre with Unbreakable.

The movie, for its part, is fairly lively. Especially arresting, from a visual standpoint, is an extended sequence in which Beau encounters members of an interactive theater troupe in a forest.

Now this is how you reheat a piece of pop culture. Nearly 20 years after The Matrix Revolutions, which left its two main characters dead, director Lana Wachowski returns to the series with enough self-aware wit, narrative ingenuity, and filmmaking prowess to more than justify the endeavor.

Medicine for Melancholy is one of those feature debuts that equally hints at the filmmaker’s influences and the idiosyncratic direction they will eventually head on their own.

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.

Skull Island circles around a number of intriguing ideas—about American arrogance and the post-war military-industrial complex, to name just two—but never quite coheres into anything particularly incisive. The movie gives good Kong though.

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.

Au Hasard Balthazar has the transcendent beauty of a Renaissance painting and the inspiring fire of a sermon. It’s one of those rare movies that could change your life, by making you rethink how you live it.

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

At its best, Eric LaRue interrogates the rush to healing and forgiveness that can sometimes follow tragedy in Christian communities.

Kenneth Lonergan, who wrote and directed Margaret, deserves credit for the framework and dialogue he provides, but it’s Paquin who channels the roiling surges of that age with a startling combination of unpredictability and precision.

The movie’s best moments – especially those involving the futile acorn hunt of a squirrel/rat – are those in which [Wedge’s] wicked wit shines through.

The fabulous 1970s fashions don’t hold up too well, but what still resonates is the movie’s empathetic attention to what it’s like if your sexual identity doesn’t neatly fit into traditional norms.

Writer-director Craig Brewer (Hustle & Flow, Black Snake Moan) does more veering that navigating, but stars Hugh Jackman and Kate Hudson (the latter nominated for Best Actress) connect on such a genuinely exhilarating level in the music scenes (especially the early ones, where they’re refining their act) that you end up rooting for them and, by default, their movie.

Pandora—the stunningly imagined planet of James Cameron’s Avatar enterprise—has been populated by something unexpected and extraordinary: compelling characters.

It would be too dismissive to call Babylon—Damien Chazelle’s incessantly bravura period piece set during Hollywood’s transition to the sound era—a “giant swing at mediocrity” (to borrow a phrase the silent star played by Brad Pitt uses to describe one of his films). Babylon is better than that. But the swing still registers more strongly than the results.

There may have been better made movies starring Crawford (she’s working with director Vincent Sherman here, not Otto Preminger, Michael Curtiz, or George Cukor), but I don’t know if she ever had a richer opportunity to click on all of her intimate, melodramatic, and camp cylinders.

There is cuteness, to be sure, but also an honesty about dirty diapers, runny noses, and the sheer exasperation of the situation.

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.

It all goes down easy enough. And while never pushing the feminist angle too hard, Ocean’s 8 does ultimately become about the ways these women exploit the sexist expectations of men.

We get some great music in Respect, but only a surface sense of the rest.

In the fractured funhouse mirror that is Transit, contemporary France by way of World War II looks an awful lot like the United States in 2019.

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

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.

There’s an intriguing idea and an incredible sequence in Scream VI—which is just enough to justify this follow-up to 2022’s Scream (which itself was just clever enough to justify reheating the series 11 years after Scream 4).

Emerald Fennell’s follow-up, as writer and director, to Promising Young Woman, Saltburn is another stylishly glib exercise, entertaining and engagingly acted until the bottom falls out.

Standing out among the cast are Pierce Brosnan, clearly enjoying his scruffy beard and potbelly, and Helen Mirren, who threatens to turn this into something sexier and scarier at every moment. Chris Columbus keeps things on the straight and narrow, however, directing as if this were an adaptation of Harry Potter Book 78.

As long as Harley Quinn is on the screen, Birds of Prey has a propulsive, rollergirl energy. Unfortunately the screenplay, by Christina Hodson, unnecessarily complicates things in various ways.

Bad Hair really needs a loud, live audience, preferably around midnight, to reach its full potential. But it’s a fun, guffaw-producing horror comedy even without that.

Campion’s camera captures the sort of things most costume dramas are too fussy to notice: mirrors and windows that bifurcate Isabel’s distressed face; the bleary darkness of her home with Osmond, where the doors close behind her like those of a tomb; a slide into slow motion when one character smells a flower that has been given to her and another character crucially notices.

Sure, it may look like it was filmed in a parking garage and the story seems cobbled together by someone who fell asleep during Raiders of the Lost Ark and Romancing the Stone, but it’s still hard to resist The Lost City as it coasts along on the charisma and chemistry of its stars.

This is largely an obligatory Marvel Cinematic Universe installment until it becomes possessed, quite literally, by a horrific spirit.

Anora is a tale of two shots: its first and its last.

Once Wolfs leaves the hotel the charm begins to thin (though Austin Abrams has a giddily dizzy monologue as a third wheel they pick up along the way), while a last-act attempt to inject a moral dilemma into the proceedings feels false. Yet for a dad—and, let’s face it, mom—movie, Wolfs could have been way worse.

The meta irony is that even as Scream 2022 is telling certain fans to back off and calm down, it’s also wooing a new generation. Luckily the film is clever enough to earn such … well, let’s call it appreciation, rather than allegiance. It’s just a movie, after all.

One side effect of a tagalong project like Lightyear is that even while the movie is rightly being shrugged off as another reheat, moments of real artistry will get overlooked. The animation in this Toy Story-adjacent adventure is astounding; with each new movie, the studio advances the art form in incremental ways.

The movie belongs, without question, to Fraser, whose performance relies not on pity or saintliness (Charlie has his faults as well), but a gentle, even beguiling belief in dignity for all.

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.

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

Miller and cinematographer John Seale deliver some stunning tableaus, especially in The Djinn’s lush memories, but it all begins to feel as ephemeral as the spectral, CGI dust that swirls out of the movie’s various bottles. In short I appreciated the craft, but never felt the longing.

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.

A mostly meaningless film about meaninglessness, Under the Silver Lake nonetheless has enough fetid charm to justify wasting a few hours on it. After all, the movie ultimately suggests that wasting our time is the best we can do in this rotten, rigged life.

I laughed a great deal at the bad-boy banter during Fast & Furious Presents: Hobbs & Shaw. I also thought the action stood up alongside anything else in the franchise. But the thing I enjoyed the most about this riotously ridiculous movie is that way it functions as a near-brilliant exercise in cinematic parallelism.

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.

Diane is brutally honest about the losses that can define this stage of life.

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

Raimi and his camera never slow down, which is good because many of the gags don’t stand up to scrutiny.

Decades before an apologist Western such as Kevin Costner’s Dances with Wolves, The Searchers bluntly addressed this country’s racism toward Native Americans by putting one of Hollywood’s most famous faces on it.

Thanks to little filmmaking touches, Kong has real personality, which helps us come to care for his plight.

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.

Jaundiced and judicious, deeply cynical yet not quite ready to leap into the abyss, Joker is a provocatively toxic time capsule for an era of misguided rage. It’s galling, and pretty great.

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.

Exhaustingly over-directed (Craig Gillespie zooms in from an establishing shot to a close-up in nearly every other scene), the movie is also a nonstop parade of grating, obvious needle drops.

Colman and Cumberbatch easily keep up—they’re comic talents too—yet the best parts of The Roses involve the two of them alone together, either happily or in detest, leaving dazzling trails of repartee as they zip along.

It Chapter Two has structural problems, character problems, and aesthetic problems.... But the movie’s main issue is an unexamined streak of cruelty.

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.

There is no doubt the material is elevated by the interplay between Fey and Poehler.

This is either the worst time for a movie like Jojo Rabbit or the best time. I lean toward the latter. I’m perfectly willing to concede that the film may come across as gauche in the coming years, but in November 2019—as an irreverently comic middle finger to idiotic, irrational tribalism—wow, does it feel good.

A collage of religio-goth gestures, Mother Mary never adds up to quite as much as it promises. But the movie has a somnambulant pull, thanks to its woozy imagery and cloistered, two-hander structure, in which Anne Hathaway and Michaela Coel circle each other like figures in a hazy dream.

There’s a cheerful honesty to Elvis Presley’s Chad Gates in Blue Hawaii that’s irresistible.

You can feel the warm ocean breeze against your cheek while watching Moana 2, so supple and visceral is the animated artistry on display.

Joanne Woodward won an Oscar for her title performance in The Three Faces of Eve, but what she’s doing here feels like an exercise you’d see at theater camp.

Director Joe Dante provides a loving, detail-filled snapshot of youthful camaraderie and creativity – I love how their cockpit is a Tilt-A-Whirl – before indulging in the sort of bizarre satire that can be found in most of his films (especially Small Soldiers and Gremlins).

Crystal Skull (which I liked) didn’t really feel like a proper goodbye, however. Dial of Destiny does, allowing Indy to nobly, creakily hang up his hat and whip, leaving the rest of us in an increasingly exhausted multiverse of capes and cowls.

It’s ugly and tuneless, with characters whose actions are so arbitrary as to render any consideration of what it means to be “good” or “wicked” meaningless.

The unsung hero behind the best Pixar films is the story—the nuanced, inventive, resonant-for-all-ages narrative that provides a foundation for the indelible characters and dazzling animation. Elemental feels like a Pixar first draft, in story terms.

Cukor does stage a crackerjack sleigh chase in the climax (the movies need more of those), while overall managing to capture Crawford at what feels like a crucial juncture of her career, just as the gloves were really coming off.

Bad in ways that are similar to 1989’s Road House—namely, an uneven handle on how seriously to take its silly premise.

There is a sublime stretch of Thor: Love and Thunder—around the point where Russell Crowe, as Zeus, appears to be auditioning for either House of Gucci, My Big Fat Greek Wedding, or some combination—when the movie drops all pretense of being a coherent narrative, much less a portentous installment in the Marvel Cinematic Universe.

Sandy is heartbreaking in the lead role, as his face registers surprise, then betrayal at the way the adults in his life—including, at times, his parents—fail him.

The Fall Guy isn’t perfect, but as a crowd-pleasing, romantic action comedy, driven by the magnetism of its stars, it feels like an increasingly rare treat.

This is scruffy around the edges, especially with the awkward insertion of its politics, but there is no denying the movie’s potency as a metaphor for alcoholism.

I’m all for scaring kids at the movies, and even allowing dark magic to be a part of that. (I’m a fan of The Witches, after all.) But the indiscriminate application of intense horror tropes here feels both clumsy and inconsiderate. Kids deserve both more, and less.

Not quite one of the Disney classics, yet still delightful, this little ditty owes much of its charm to its precise anthropomorphization.

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

Wow, when this thing eventually curdles, it really curdles into something rank.

Shelley scholars will likely have much to quibble with here, but for Buckley admirers, The Bride! is a must.

Plan 9 from Outer Space may not be pure bliss to watch, but you certainly can feel the bliss that writer-director Edward D. Wood Jr. must have experienced while making it.

By its bombastic (and somewhat abrupt) final scene, you have to imagine that The Eyes of Tammy Faye accurately captures how Tammy Faye saw herself.

While mostly hewing to unremarkable biopic formula (yes, there’s a slow-clap response to a speech given by the main character), this dramatization of the life of double Nobel-prize winning scientist Marie Curie does manage a few inventive flourishes along the way.

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.

Overall, the movie seems impatient to get to the gory set pieces, which read less as horrifyingly inevitable consequences of the story at hand and more like standalone, gross-out art installations.

If the movie, at times, feels exhausting, there are also painterly details to savor, like the flowing locks of a dragon or the shimmer of a seascape at sundown.

Death Becomes Her doesn’t really work on a story or character level at all, but the central idea is too tantalizing and the cast is having too much fun for that to matter much.

When Cryer eases up and lets Duckie’s vulnerability show, there’s an undeniable sweetness to the character. Ringwald, though, is the true wonder: Andie’s head is always held high—and she frequently backs that up with a self-empowering speech—but her facial expressions are constantly in flux, revealing the many other things she’s feeling: uncertainty, insecurity, her own vulnerability.

The Fishing Place registers more as a calculated, intellectual exercise—particularly in the bold decision to break the fourth wall with 30 minutes left in the film and remain there, again via a single take.

“This is not your mother’s Wuthering Heights!” the movie howls back at the wind whipping over those moors. But it’s enough of Bronte’s.

Old is vintage M. Night: a high concept brought ever higher by a filmmaker apparently incapable of second-guessing himself.

Everything Everywhere All At Once is at once a showcase for one of the world’s greatest acting talents and a manic meditation on reality, regret, and the richness of family bonds. It’s a movie that’s difficult to describe, but easy to love.