Josh Larsen

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.

Ducournau’s insistence on taking this scenario to unimaginable extremes may occasionally distance us from the humanity she’s also clearly interested in, but there’s no denying that her handling of craft and form—particularly the way the reddish-pink glow of a fire-truck’s flashing light filters much of the imagery—is masterful.

Malignant isn’t much of a horror movie—the scares are standard, the dialogue is awful, the performances are incongruous—but as a horror idea, it’s a whopper.

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.

With The Card Counter, Schrader offers another self-flagellating portrait of a man who’s experienced—and enacted—great sin, struggling to perceive anything akin to divine grace.

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.

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.

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.

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

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.

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).

This is, in many ways, a deeply thoughtful film—about loneliness, grief, anger, and finding something to truly care about. And Cage gives a performance that embodies all of those things.

At its heart, The Green Knight is about the very idea of legends and myths: how they grow, what they reveal, what they conceal.

Holy Moses! (No need to desecrate this with any more words.)

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

Cheadle is wonderful—weary and gravelly as an underestimated ex-con playing everyone’s assumptions about him to his advantage.

A dizzying story told at a dizzying pace, Zola might register for some as a transgressive lark (it certainly has comic touches, including a montage of Stefani’s clients’ penises). My experience was more like a simmering panic attack; it’s “fun” in the same way Uncut Gems was fun.

It’s not just the historical footage that makes the documentary special, however; it’s also what Questlove and his filmmaking team do with it.

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.

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.

One of Pixar’s smaller, sweeter efforts.

If In the Heights is packed with enough bold choices to invite both effusive praise and endless nitpicking, that comes with the genre.

The movie considers what it means to move on, to reconcile with the past while creating a new future. For both a city and a person. And, perhaps, a sea nymph.

All Light, Everywhere is very smart and extremely meta (Anthony often films himself and his crew setting up a shot, to emphasize the observational point), though it can be a bit dry.

Much of Holler’s plotting feels driven by issues (factory layoffs, opioids) rather than allowing those issues to naturally exist within the narrative, but Adlon brings an exhausted authenticity to the film that makes up for it.

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.

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

Shiva Baby has a comic claustrophobia that almost makes you choke, so intense is its depiction of familial/traditional walls closing in on its main character.