Joshua Rivera

One of Marriage Story’s biggest successes lies in its straightforwardness. It’s not a story out to change how you think of relationships or marriage. It strives for honesty, even if it’s cliché.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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

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.

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.

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.

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.

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

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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

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

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.

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

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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

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.