Josh Larsen

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.

Good One is a crafty feature debut from writer-director India Donaldson, in that its unassuming air and “small” story create little ripples that eventually coalesce into something shattering.

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

For a based-on-fact drama about incarcerated men finding hope via a prison theater group, Sing Sing presses gently on the inspirational pedal. This is due partly to the behind-the-scenes talent—screenwriter Clint Bentley has fashioned a tender, mostly restrained screenplay, while writer-director Greg Kwedar establishes a crucially authentic sense of place—but largely due to the cast.

Unless you’ve seen every Archers’ film, you’ll come away with at least two you’ll want to track down immediately after watching Made in England: The Films of Powell and Pressburger. And you’ll want to revisit Scorsese titles like Raging Bull and The Age of Innocence to fully appreciate how their work directly influenced his.

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

Fly Me to the Moon, a breezily farcical variation on Apollo 11 history in which the truth prevails, is a time-capsule curiosity—marking a movie landscape that’s slowly fading, alongside our ability to tell fact from fiction in media of all kinds.

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

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.

Beneath all the formal sophistication and dark humor, there is a roiling anger that defines Do Not Expect Too Much from the End of the World.

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.

In Longlegs, writer-director Oz Perkins establishes a strong enough sense of mood and atmosphere to absorb a DEFCON-2 level Nicolas Cage performance

This is as much Looney Tunes as Chaplin or Keaton—what with the manic pacing and animated flourishes, like question marks over characters’ heads—but in truth it’s unlike anything I’ve ever seen.

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.

This prequel—drawn from the novel by series creator Suzanne Collins—retains the hard edge that made most of those movies register as piercing satires of our reality-television age, rather than hypocritical exploitation flicks.

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

This is a sad film, if beautifully observed, about a young girl learning that she won’t always be able to have her mom to herself—that, in fact, she never really had her in the first place.

Wise and witty, Inside Out 2 continues the Pixar tradition in the ways that matter most.

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.

There isn’t a boring frame in the film, even when the scenes involve little more than long conversations between two people.

It becomes more interesting as it goes along (and gets slightly darker), even if it never entirely works as a cohesive project.

The Ross brothers—who handle the cinematography and editing in addition to directing duties—manage some indelible images, even as they stay as inconspicuous as possible.

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.

If Fury Road wound its way, through much pain and violence, to a vision of a new “green place,” Furiosa leaves us in a place of tension, one caught between mercy and wrath, hope and despair. It’s the rare prequel that nearly feels necessary.

Maya Hawke, the director’s daughter with Uma Thurman, plays O’Connor. Her performance is one of the movie’s strengths.

While pop culture will never replace our need for genuine connection—for a relationship that both gives and receives—a movie like this, with a welcoming weirdness that communicates in a subliminal way, offers sustenance to anyone who has felt misunderstood, ostracized, and unsure of themselves. Even amidst the movie’s horror, there’s a glow here that feels warm.

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.

If not a cohesive whole, then, Evil Does Not Exist still has its captivating moments as a modestly scaled eco-parable.