Josh Larsen

Amidst all the controlled artistry on display in Tár, it must be acknowledged that as much as the movie seeks to skewer the pretensions of Lydia and her world (beginning with her flamboyant stage name, pronounced “tar”), it also exhibits its own indulgences.

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.

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.

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 a lot of invention here, but as a complete film Barbarian lacks coherence.

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

A stylish, saucy entry in the “stepford wife” subgenre, Don’t Worry Darling treads familiar ground while wearing a killer pair of pumps. The movie won’t surprise you (although I found its “reveal” to be timely and perhaps even prescient), but it sure looks great while not doing it.

Unfortunately the screenplay, by Dana Stevens, relies on crowd-pleasing story beats and injects a groan-worthy romantic subplot; the movie yearns a bit too much to be a hit. At least director Gina Prince-Bythewood (Love & Basketball, Beyond the Lights, The Old Guard) brings a lively musicality to the sequences depicting Dahomey cultural rituals, as well as a clean ferocity to the many (and gruesome) battle sequences.

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.

Mostly a work of stop-motion, the movie boasts expansive, intricately detailed sets that the eye can’t help but want to explore, despite the horrors that take place among them.

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.

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.

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

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.

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.

If you gave Jordan Peele a list of random cultural ingredients—some songs, a few television shows, a film genre or two, a variety of actors—chances are he could concoct a smart, funny, thrilling filmgoing experience out of the randomness. Peele makes pop-culture smoothie movies that are nutritious and delicious.

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

If Neptune Frost plays like a visual album rather than a traditional movie (even a movie musical), it offers more substance than that description suggests.

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.

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.

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.

Slate gives Marcel a bit of wit along with that gentleness (I love when he teases Dean), but it’s the openness of heart you hear in the voice that defines the character—without ever making him mawkish.

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.

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.

You can argue with the movie in your head, even while you admit—say, when Dick and Jo dance their way across a stream by lightly stepping onto a floating raft—that your heart is having all sorts of fun.

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.

Potential abounds in As Above, So Below—a sort of “Indiana Jones and the Haunted Catacombs”—though the many ideas at play never fully come together.

V/H/S is icky stuff that doesn’t deserve a pass just because the awful men in it get what’s coming to them.