Joshua Rivera

Ride or Die, the joys of Smith and Lawrence’s characters getting on each other’s nerves during improbably explosive shootouts is constantly derailed, as the script workshops or retcons every previous element from prior movies into the grand scheme of this one.

Hamaguchi slowly pivots away from dispassionate naturalism, building to an impressionistic, opaque finale.

Kingdom merely seems like an act of franchise maintenance, a reversal for a series of unusually thoughtful blockbusters. Every frame is a technical marvel. And every minute of it is probably better spent watching something else.

The movie represents months and months of sustained labor from hundreds of people, including many of the most talented and recognizable names in their field, in the service of a story that possesses no satirical edge, nor any human connection. It takes whatever pleasure that can be derived from a Pop-Tart, and chokes on it.

Godzilla x Kong (yes, it’s styled like that, like a streetwear collab) is beyond “good” or “bad” or “movies.” It’s an arena show, a pro wrestler shouting in the squared circle, thumping their chest and raising the jumbotron hype meter before doing their signature move.

It doesn’t fully cohere, but it sure is a party.

It’s merely pleasant, a nice diversion that mostly suffers from the strong association with a much better film.

In spite of its compactness and intimate focus, Oldroyd maintains enough ironic distance that the audience is never fully immersed in Eileen’s subjective viewpoint. In the way he lingers on details and nervous fidgets, the director invites the audience to speculate about what’s really going on with Eileen.

With Maestro, Bradley Cooper makes a metaphor of Bernstein through the lens of his tumultuous marriage. It’s less a portrait of a life than a depiction of the fulcrum creators pivot on, presented by a talented artist whose ambitions lie along similarly oppositional extremes.

Napoleon isn’t a movie about grand triumph, or about disastrous failure. It’s a story about masculine insecurity, and how it can reduce the world to violence.

Director Nia DaCosta, who previously helmed 2021’s Candyman remake, has inherited all the downsides of a project set in a shared universe, and few of the upsides. But the good stuff she has to work with? She makes it sing.

Flora and Son excels in its humane yet prickly depiction of Flora’s relationship with motherhood.

The Creator is a fully realized future in the service of a rote story and flat characters that only gesture in compelling directions; I’d rather not bother with that story at all.

The Expendables movies had one trick, and that trick has been played out. Director Scott Waugh has to resort to something else with Expend4bles: finally trying to turn one of these projects into a good action movie.

I admire Blue Beetle’s craft in portraying the rhythms of a day-to-day life I recognize, but I resent it for trapping that life in a snow globe, where it’s safe and removed from the lives of white folks who think of themselves as allies. In this movie, that life isn’t much more than a nice Latin corner of the DC Universe, a place to visit for good tacos while everyone waits to see what the next Superman movie looks like.

There are no surprises in The Last Voyage of the Demeter. Just about everything in the story plays out exactly how the average horror fan might assume it would, exactly how they know it will, because the movie begins with the end of the story, then does little to play up the dread that comes with that knowledge. And most of us, unfortunately, know too much about this story already.

Unfortunately, the film’s most compelling questions don’t ever get answered.

Sometimes, for a good time, all you need is a great actor and a story that seems like a real bad idea.

These films use movie magic to make real humans look like they’re actually doing outrageous things, rather than using them as faces meant to humanize a digital creation being put through its paces. This is why Dead Reckoning Part One makes for an incredible blockbuster experience.

It’s a bright, breezy film that is overwhelmed by corporate hagiography, a pat on the back for a bunch of movies that never really worked out.

The new White Men Can’t Jump will likely struggle to linger in anyone’s head the day after they watch it. Every character interaction is straightforward, every motivation and foible is stated out loud. Every joke is delivered for the camera, not the characters.

Guardians of the Galaxy Vol. 3 is a Marvel film of unusual conviction, where every character beat is given the same weight, whether it’s the climactic battle against the villain, or perennial goofball Drax quietly explaining that someone hurt his feelings.

This new take on Mario is so faithful in its efforts to recreate iconography from four decades of video games that there’s almost no energy left to expend on reaching the unconverted. The Super Mario Bros. Movie is a sermon for the Nintendo faithful, their children, and few others.

There’s a focus on ritual in Huesera that builds both its horror and its character study in compelling ways.

The movie’s drama efficiently ratchets up the tension for its action to hit hard and move on. Again: Like an actual plane, it’s a marvel of craftsmanship so unobtrusive that it’s easily mistaken for mundanity.

It’s all extremely effective, mesmerizing stuff, undercut by Shyamalan’s habits as a blunt, obvious writer.

Babylon marries bombast and tragedy in one fell swoop, embracing Chazelle’s hubris as an artist by letting him insert himself into the cinematic canon, while he’s endeavoring to earn his place there at the same time.

Cregger merely uses the premise as a foundation for something more ambitious, delivering a lean, surprising film with effective thrills, while also giving viewers plenty to contemplate afterward.

The craft Miller brought to Fury Road’s relentless chases is now channeled into wondrous stillness, a canvas meant to capture the sheer yearning at the heart of a story. The desire to be known by and know others more fully. One could call that love.

Cartoonish as it is, Bullet Train is committed to letting its core cast make as big an impression as they can through quirks and fights, as Olkewicz’s knotty script ping-pongs between past and present.

Realism isn’t necessarily the problem here; dissonance is. The Gray Man is a story about assassins who are, we’re told, the very best in the world. And yet over and over again, they are shown to be shitty at their jobs. They incite international incidents. They wage small wars in town squares. And they have a very hard time holding a small girl hostage.

Thor: Love and Thunder isn’t just a misfire, it’s a scam. Its characters only move forward in the most artificial ways. Their status at the end of the film is no more intriguing than it was at the beginning. It’s the worst thing a film in this mode can be: inconsequential.

The animation is gorgeous and crisp, and the script keeps its referential nature low-key. This could easily be someone’s first Bob’s Burgers experience, and it remains likable enough throughout that it probably wouldn’t be their last.

It’s worth remembering this era of cinema, and everything it says about specifically male fantasies and male rage. But it isn’t necessarily worth remembering Memory itself.

We’re All Going to the World’s Fair isn’t just a movie about connecting, it’s about becoming. It’s a powerful acknowledgement of how confounding and frightening young adulthood can be. But it’s also a film about hope.

Smith’s dynamism painfully underlines the lack of imagination and energy elsewhere in the film.

The script lets all three characters get satisfyingly messy, as each of them crosses small lines that surprise the others, in a series of transgressions that pile up until the three people at the end of the film are entirely different from the three at the start.

There is nothing particularly bold about The Batman. Its strength is in execution.

There is some allure to Death on the Nile’s old-fashioned appeal, with its wide shots, its warm hues, and its utter confidence that its mystery is enough to keep the audience interested.

It’s very difficult to walk away from You Won’t Be Alone without wanting to fill a notebook with its words and recollections of its images. It’s a film of wonder, of watching, mimicking, and soaking in awe.

This film could have literally given us the Moon. Instead, it offers the world’s noisiest lullaby.

Nightmare Alley is straight noir, a stylish and dark work about lies and liars. And in our current theatrical moment, its slow drama is a slightly harder sell than the latest Marvel movie, but no less of a dazzling spectacle.

Humor is subjective, but giving an example of Don’t Look Up’s specific jokes feels like a spoiler, depriving you of one of the three times you’ll likely experience a genuine laugh.

It’s an agitprop romance, one of the most effective mass media diagnoses of the current moment that finds countless things to be angry about, and proposes fighting them all with radical, reckless love. On top of all that, it is also a kick-ass work of sci-fi action — propulsive, gorgeous, and yet still intimate — that revisits the familiar to show audiences something very new.

Simon Rex’s performance as Mikey sweeps up everything around it, including the movie’s audience.

Spider-Man: No Way Home brings Peter to his biggest screw-up yet, making for a fascinatingly messy film that tries to juggle fan service with a finale for Peter’s high school years.

Provocative in every sense of the word, the movie is equally capable of drawing viewers in with its witty study of sexuality and faith, and turning them away with its unabashed titillation. In this film, as in many of Verhoeven’s previous works, those two opposing forces are very much the point.

After over a decade of the MCU formula’s dominance, it’s easy to mistake Eternals’ deviance for profundity. Films that wrestle with difficult experiences can often be difficult to watch, and intentionally so. Unfortunately, Eternals isn’t bold, merely incongruous. The simpler explanation is truer: Eternals is a mess.

Shang-Chi is refreshing in how little it’s concerned with big-picture universe-building details. Instead, the movie focuses on an extremely personal story that also implies exciting things about the future of Marvel movies.

Gunn, for a time, was uniquely aware of how expendable he was. And The Suicide Squad is thoroughly focused on notions of expendability. It’s also violent, perversely comedic, and despite pacing issues, an impressive effects-driven spectacle.

Old is a pretty lousy horror film about adults, but a pretty good one about children.

Its battles are conceptually interesting — one rainy, neon-drenched fight across the alleys and rooftops of a city slum is a highlight — but an excessive reliance on shaky camerawork and jarring cuts makes the action unreadable. Rhythmically, Snake Eyes never really finds its footing, as fights end abruptly, and character stakes rarely align with the scale of a confrontation.

Space Jam: A New Legacy is so overwhelmingly suffused with corporate propaganda that it seems like the filmmakers are seeking exactly that sort of praise: not satisfying cinema, not a worthwhile story, not a fun time at the movies, but “a great product.”

It starts as a crime caper, makes a pit stop among the sitdowns and power-jockeying of gangster films, and somehow manages to tie its many disparate threads together in a period drama about the destruction of an American city. It’s all the more dazzling that it does all this while being slickly entertaining and assured

An overwhelming chunk of The Forever Purge’s brisk 103 minutes is devoted to the film’s Mexican immigrants saving the Tuckers’ lives, helping them survive, and furthering their moral development. It is, frankly, an insulting running thread that sours an otherwise deft horror-thriller.

While Black Widow’s director and writers try valiantly to make the film a fitting swan song for Natasha and an impressive action vehicle for Johansson, tying up the Avenger’s disparate character beats across seven other movies in an action movie that out-fights her male peers, it’s impossible to shake the feeling that it’s circling around a cul-de-sac.

Ultimately, The Devil Made Me Do It’s attempt to shake the franchise up with a new director falls short, and like the young man at the heart of its supernatural horror, it risks losing its soul.

The film is a horror story with the heart of a family drama, and for the most part, it works very well. But just like real families, it’s pretty consistent in both its strengths and its flaws — in other words, it’s the perfect sequel for fans of the original movie, while also being not that bad at welcoming viewers who might have missed the first go-round.

This is how In the Heights won me over. Because in spite of its flaws — like lopsided twin romantic subplots where the lead characters are overshadowed by their best friends, or cloying lyrics that play on both the literal and figurative meanings of “powerless” — it’s ultimately a work of affection for both its subject and its medium.

Godzilla vs. Kong is a gorgeous, kinetic spectacle that’s so effectively big in its loud colors and ridiculous choreography that any screen outside of a multiplex feels too small for it.

It’s mostly a plain thriller, but in its focus on espionage as relationship-driven work, it’s still entertaining.

While Palm Springs is a fun rom-com, it’s a story haunted by the idea that we’d secretly be tempted by a world where nothing really matters, to absolve ourselves of responsibility.

Like learning how to cook a meal you grew up eating, Mucho Mucho Amor connected me with my past. It’s like the way air smells different and your heart feels a little bit bigger when you’re home with people you love and miss.

She Dies Tomorrow is a house of mirrors, a film much more interested in the reflections it offers you than in conjuring anything overly specific for you to ruminate.

While it’s not big on declarations of love, comic misunderstandings, or many of the genre trappings, it understands that the best romantic comedies are ones where the two leads are always talking, with each other, at each other, or past each other, constantly trying to sort out their relationship, despite whatever chaos is around them.

The horror of The Invisible Man comes from the knowledge that not only would Griffin’s schemes work should such a technology exist, but also from knowing that they already do.

As an action movie, Bloodshot is the worst kind of uninspiring: not bad enough to circle back around toward fun, not good enough at action to be even momentarily impressed by a fight scene.

Calling Crip Camp a feel-good movie feels contrary to its purpose, even as it is tremendously inspiring. It’s more of a reminder that something that seems impossible can be done; it just takes an immense, downright unfair amount of work to will it into existence and support from others who may not be impacted but benefit from a more equitable society because everyone does.

Bad Boys for Life is admirable in its lack of ambition. It’s here to serve action and comedy in roughly proportionate amounts, with big set pieces that are just thrilling enough to hook you and jokes that are just funny enough for you to hope no one dies.

The movie is dreck made just acceptable enough for children with still-developing frontal lobes, one that would bore most adults to tears if it didn’t stop to do things like give a dragon a colonic.

It’s fine. A perfectly watchable film that could have been great if it, like its protagonist, remembered that the secret to magic is really believing in the wild thing you’re about to do.

The conversations in Portrait of a Lady on Fire are among the most memorable people have had on a screen in some time, with each line a stanza in a poem, a reversal, a shift in perspective. With every exchange, the relationship between Marianne and Héloïse changes subtly.

Anything can happen, and Birds of Prey relishes in the havoc that implies. That manic energy is all that’s holding Birds of Prey together at times, and the fact that all of its characters seem to thrive in it makes it all the more disappointing that the movie doesn’t really take any time to get to know them better. It’s almost enough to derail the movie, but at a brisk hour and 47 minutes of genuinely fun spectacle, it’s hard to hold too much against it.

It’s the visual language of video games, but video games pull it off because that distanced voyeurism also comes with something additive: interactivity. Eventually, you will become involved. That is not something a film can offer.