Josh Larsen

Certainly the movie’s two nods toward the grim reality of warfare – the shooting of one prisoner and an offscreen mass execution at the end of the film – carry less weight than they should because of what surrounds them. Such glibness makes The Great Escape an enduring entertainment, not a classic.

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

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.

Train to Busan is a cleverly concentrated shot of zombie terror.

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.

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.

The race itself is another of the movie’s astonishing set pieces; Mann and cinematographer Erik Messerschmidt give it a fresh sense of vroom, even if you think you’ve seen all the movie car races you’ll ever need.

Even taking a step back from current events, News of the World registers as a fine film at best. Hanks is sturdy, though this is also one of those performances where there isn’t much surprise in those kindly eyes.

Good Boy is a harrowing experience for dog lovers—or possibly anyone who’s noticed an animal staring at something you can’t quite perceive—yet the movie never quite unearths the subterranean chills of the most potent horror.

It might be corny, but the basketball nerd in me can’t resist their rivalrously romantic games of one on one, which is a sweet motif throughout the film.

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

One of Them Days is propulsively directed by music-video veteran Lawrence Lamont, who knows how to frame a punchline, from a sharp script by Syreeta Singleton, who wrote many episodes of HBO’s Insecure. The same mixture of hilarity and humanity is on display here.

Ultimately, Charlotte’s Web is too potent a tale of life and death, as first learned by observing life on a farm, to keep even this so-so effort from ringing true.

When it’s clicking—and it mostly clicks—Athena balances aesthetics with import, even interweaving the two into something that has the grave intimacy of Son of Saul and the political potency of The Battle of Algiers.

Director Sian Heder had an obvious aesthetic card to play with CODA, and she saves it for just the right moment.

When experimenting with his own techniques—Shackleton gets ingenious mileage out of slow zooms and pans in those location shots—Zodiac Killer Project works as a provocative, meta consideration of the genre’s form. When dumping on other films and the genre in general, the movie comes across as a bit hypocritical and smug.

At its best, the movie captures the thrill of those moments, whether romantic or friendly, when you realize something special is happening.

In some ways this is as metaphysical as something like Close Encounters, it’s just lacking the tonal control of Spielberg at his best.

Cooley High has the same youth-movie energy that defines some of the genre’s greats: American Graffiti, Ferris Bueller’s Day Off, Scott Pilgrim vs. the World. All of these films run on the mischievous, unfounded optimism that characterizes our teenage years. They make you nostalgic for naivete.