Josh Larsen

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

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.

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

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.

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.

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

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

Unlike its protagonist, Babygirl is too easily satisfied.

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.

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.

Predators lost credibility with me well before its stunt ending.

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.

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.

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.

In some ways, this second Bond film was already too self aware to remember to be itself.

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.

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.

Hitchcock diluted by De Palma diluted by mid-tier M. Night Shyamalan leaves you with, well, bottom-tier Shyamalan.

I wouldn’t call Little a showcase for Issa Rae, who gets one of her first significant big-screen roles, but anyone who can bring this much life and intelligence to such tired material certainly deserves praise.

This is a film of clashing ideas and clanging style.

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

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.

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

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

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.

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

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.

The Happytime Murders is at its best not when it’s at its most “adult,” but when the filmmakers find new, surprising ways to employ their puppeteering creativity in the real world.

There are at least four movies stuffed into Jurassic World: Fallen Kingdom, and about a third of one of them isn’t half bad. I don’t think that math adds up to a decent film, but if all you need is a roaring dinosaur every 15 minutes or so, it might not matter.

It’s become a crutch for critics to say that this or that movie is so generic that it must have been generated by AI. I’ve resisted, but I’m finally going to play that card in regard to Wish. Thanks to a banal familiarity mixed with a dose of inhuman idiosyncrasy, the movie feels as if someone fed the opening Disney logo sequence — of fireworks bursting over a fairytale castle — to an AI program and asked it to spit out a 95-minute animated musical in the mode of the studio’s classics.

This bloated, big-screen take on the DC comic is dumb, but not nearly dumb enough.

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

Chris Hemsworth and Tessa Thompson are the reason to see Men in Black: International—she has a comic precision that nicely deflates his humorous hubris—but for some reason the movie doesn’t bring them together until a third of the way in, after failing to establish any real sense of their characters.

Not controlled or competent enough to work as a spoof, a serious action flick, or anything in between.

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.

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 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.

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.

Watching Dune is a bit like trying to dig your way out of a sandstorm. Wave after wave of lore and nomenclature pile up around you until you finally succumb, and are buried. At which point you’re best off giving up on the movie as any sort of coherent, compelling piece of science-fiction and simply embrace it as camp.

This is noir as costume party.

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!”

Before it goes completely off the rails into yoga sex and ill-advised special effects, The Keep manages to establish an intriguing sense of atmosphere and dread.

The audience is never fully let in on either character’s interior life, as we skip from incident to incident. This is despite Streep and Nicholson working overtime—a strange sight for two effortless actors.

The real crime in Holmes & Watson is the waste of the supporting cast.

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.

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.

Amsterdam is one of those movies that reminds you how hard it is to make a good movie. You can have a strong idea, a talented cast, and a director with an impressive track record and still wind up with something that trips all over itself on the screen and lands in theaters with a thud.

The comic setups take longer than they should, then the punchlines give you a violent bear hug when they should be lightly slapping you on the cheek before quickly moving on to the next gag.

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

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

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

The movie is both vile and risible.

The result is a convoluted, overstuffed narrative that operates like two parallel movies until they converge for an extended climax.

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.

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.

Not the worst of Adam Sandler’s Netflix vehicles, but not any good either.

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.

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.

The extensive dialogue sequences literalize the sort of things Wong usually captures via woozy imagery; moments that have powerful emotional weight in his other features here feel like silly gestures.

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.

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.

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

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.

It’s too bad that The Week Of isn’t the odd-couple routine it was marketed as, because Adam Sandler and Chris Rock have a handful of funny moments as fathers of the bride and groom, respectively, who don’t have much in common.

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.

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

Holbrook—a Garrett Hedlund-Charlie Hunnam hybrid—at least delivers the tough-guy one-liners Black specializes in with the right combination of sincerity and bemusement (even better is Sterling K. Brown as a government agent). But in the mouths of pretty much everyone else in the cast—including Trevante Rhodes, Thomas Jane, and Keegan-Michael Key—the dialogue falls flat.

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.

The original Miss Bala was a slyly feminist take on what could have easily been an exploitation flick. Guess what? This Miss Bala weirdly sexualizes things to undermine everything the original was interested in and become, yep, an exploitation flick.

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.

A woefully bad low-budget slasher flick, complete with a requisitely inept cast (including Kevin Bacon in uncomfortably tight shorts); laborious pacing; and an interminable catfight climax.