Joshua Rothkopf

Enveloping you in its vintage folds, Peter Strickland's hypnotic horror film turns fashion into a death sentence.

When De Palma started taking himself too seriously—circa Casualties of War—is when he lost the thread. His genius was always in voluptuous nonsense. He needs to drop the politics and get back to baby carriages.

When Ma breaks bad, it breaks bad hard, with some real wince-inducing moments of bodily harm.

Connoisseurs will thrill to hints of composer Akira Ifukube’s original orchestra motifs or the passing mention of an “oxygen destroyer,” but mourn the lack of political stakes. It’s big dumb fun (a sequel with King Kong is on the horizon), and maybe that’s what these sequels always were.

Actor-turned-director Olivia Wilde (shockingly, this is her behind-the-camera feature debut) shows off something rarer than technique or comic timing. She’s got loads of compassion and has somehow managed to make a high-school movie without villains.

Mikkelsen is endlessly compelling.

We’re here for the rigorously conceived, blessedly coherent action showdowns, the work of director Chad Stahelski.

Seriously missing the memo in a cringe-inducing way, The Hustle takes a perfectly fine premise from Dirty Rotten Scoundrels—two predatory men get played by a savvier woman—and obliterates it by swapping genders and ultimately selling out its feminist credibility.

But when it’s being dumb enough to have Charlotte drop molly and space out in an impromptu war room during a crisis, it has just the right amount of irreverence, thanks to fun performances (including one by O’Shea Jackson Jr. as Fred’s superwealthy friend, cruising on a LaCroix-fueled cloud of serenity).

Endgame often pays tribute to itself, which makes it as fascinating as it is self-serious. It taps into a live wire of doomy tragedy and phoenix-like rebirth that comics do so well.

It’s the opposite of frightening: a sludgy collection of tired jump scares, inexpertly mounted period décor—this time we’re in a too-shiny 1973 Los Angeles—and a continued slump into generic blahness.

As dark spells go, Lane’s is complex, one that will lead viewers down a surprisingly benevolent path.

Feeling anything in a DC Universe installment is, in itself, evidence of filmmaking that’s superheroic (that overall bluish-gray glumness is completely gone). So imagine the shock to also encounter a nuanced, funny script, a richly developed surrogate family, a visual appreciation of Philadelphia and its heroic Rocky iconography, and not one but two expert jokes involving a strip club.

Still, you can’t help but be swept up by the sincerity here — that and the sight of a hard man softening to a sympathetic nuzzle. (This is some excellent equine acting.) The Mustang is leagues beneath the recent "The Rider" or "Lean on Pete," both superior in terms of articulating silent human-animal relationships that fulfill larger psychological needs.

Us is too confidently made, too expert in its scene-to-scene command, to call it an example of sophomore slump. Still, after the film reveals itself to be the home-invasion thriller it is (and then the lesser Invasion of the Body Snatchers it becomes), you feel a slight letdown.

Moore makes it all play like the classic club remix it is.

Brie Larson isn't given enough to do in a Marvel movie that marinates in '90s nostalgia but doesn't quite rise to the occasion of its own significance.

While it’s unspooling, The Souvenir feels like the only film in the world—the only one that matters.

There are occasional visual flourishes — a nightmarish PowerPoint presentation ending with a slide about mock burials — that hint at the better-balanced film The Report might have been. But mainly we’re pinned down by a firehose-stream of didactic outrage.

Like Barry Jenkins similarly set Medicine for Melancholy, The Last Black Man in San Francisco supplies positivity to the struggle.

Subtly, the film draws you into the science. You’ll be nervously eyeballing ticking velocity numbers in the corner of the screen. But always, Apollo 11 is about people working together in a single-minded spirit of peaceful ambition.

After the Wedding contains enough domestic revelations for several seasons of something delicious, but Freundlish’s showdowns all seem to dissipate or get curtailed abruptly.

Merchant never loses our interest: He’s made a sparkly, strutting film that doesn’t apologize for or look down upon its heroes. A “soap opera in spandex” is what Hutch calls pro wrestling to his trainees, and the movie follows suit. Who doesn’t love a melodrama in tights once in a while?

It's diminishing returns for a horror sequel that grinds the original premise into the ground while shirking on scares.

A sumptuous romantic epic that's too polished for its own good.

There’s a way to make this kind of trashy noir work beautifully—was Wild Things director John McNaughton somehow not available?—but Serenity is too blandly generic to stick its snout in the muck and luxuriate, barring the occasional jail-baity line of dialogue from Hathaway (“You said I was finally old enough,” Karen whispers, reminiscing).

It’s both stupefying and a little sad to realize that this is the movie Shyamalan wanted to make.

Ben Is Back has seriousness in mind, but too much showmanship in the making.

A completely charmless, laughs-free experience.

An uneven but fascinating spectacle.

Destroyer is a movie that confuses Kidman’s unmodulated funk for actual depth. In fairness, a brooding depression may be the reality of much police work, but onscreen it plays like a two-hour murder of our patience.

The happy surprise, however, is that McKay has seasoned the meat in satisfying ways, salting it with wince-sharp performances and an almost experimental style of editing that creates an apocalyptic whirlwind. For those reasons alone, Vice feels particularly timely.

Glib, underdeveloped dreck.

Emily Blunt is hypnotically charming in the year's sweetest surprise—a big-hearted contact high.

Jason Momoa's surf-bro superhero is a welcome addition to a ponderously serious genre, but his movie as a whole feels waterlogged.

Viggo Mortensen and Mahershala Ali are masterful in this rousing period piece, alternating belly laughs with an unflinching view of a nation at war with itself.

Free Solo is about getting dangerously close to the edge, where some people feel most alive. We get to experience that thrill secondhand, and that’s enough.

The Old Man & the Gun plays like a long-winded joke with a sneaky punchline that warms you belatedly, like a shot of bourbon.

impressively, the movie compensates with some fascinating father-son Drago tensions, the Russian oligarchs swarming, redemption at hand.

Visually dull and intriguing in only the most generic sense, but still a showcase for the twin talents of Saoirse Ronan and Margot Robbie.

This version will make you side with the Sheriff of Nottingham.

There’s a whiff of inconsequence to Reitman’s take, fizzy and watchable though it is. It should be about the stealth weaponization of outrage (and of women)—a tragedy that’s leagues more sophisticated that this.

Worthy is a marvel, transitioning from pasty wallflower to a glowering, unencumbered threat.

Feels like the kind of movie that would have been designed for Meryl Streep or Sigourney Weaver back in the day, ragged yet sumptuous, filled with moments for devastating monologues yet never so obvious as to be self-aggrandizing.

Once intriguingly strange, Lisbeth Salander returns as a boring action hero, her rough edges sanded down.

Gay conversion therapy gets the indictment it deserves, from an insightful script based on a you-are-there tell-all, and an outstanding cast.

Even this kind of WWIII escapism—it’s based on a 2012 novel by Don Keith and George Wallace called Firing Point—requires a sturdier hero than Gerard Butler, who finds himself in a time machine that delivers actors to rejected Tom Cruise projects.

Two struggling souls come together to pull off a hoax on a world that's rejected them, in this powerhouse showcase for Melissa McCarthy and Richard E. Grant.

The movie is nostalgia, pure and simple, unfettered by examination. Even its title is fuzzy and vague.

Parents will feel heard by this movie in a way that few other films have tried. Everyone else should go for the kid, who's a rocket taking off. You want to be able to say you were there when it happened.

It’s a lot of plot for one sitting, but Widows will remind you of how massively entertaining crime movies can be, especially when they’re animated by the spirit of cool-headed capability, on and offscreen.

A punk call-to-arms about being yourself, this Joan Jett documentary vibrates with attitude and a true spirit of independence.

Entertainingly, Hardy lets himself get jerked around, Evil Dead–style, but he’s never enough of a jerk—so much for that journo-snoop backstory—and Venom isn’t vicious enough to justify its own existence.

How filmmaker Robert Greene got an entire town to ham it up remains a mystery, but his gift for inviting self-interrogation (also on display in his equally fascinating Kate Plays Christine, a 2016 hybrid about an actor’s plunge into the life of a suicidal newscaster) marks him as an innovator who may become a future Errol Morris.

What makes The Favourite work are its women—who rule, both literally within the movie and outwardly, dominating our enjoyment.

The subtle pleasure of watching Tyrel comes from raising an eyebrow at every inferred (implied?) slight.

What makes Moore’s latest so ferocious—and pound for pound his most effective piece of journalism—is the way it pivots to a meaty central subject that isn’t Trump but has prescient echoes.

Cosmatos needs you to be charitable toward his performances. Or, barring that, he needs you to be stoned. Many will oblige: Mandy is an instant midnight mood, graced by a thickly menacing synth score by composer Jóhann Jóhannsson (Sicario), whose recent death from a drug overdose robs us of not only a singular talent but also an obvious superfan of Vangelis.

Once A Simple Favor hits the first of several I-can’t-believe-they-went there moments (there are a few too many), it loses some of its lure, and Feig never quite regains tonal control. But you won’t be bored by this.

Let those who come to the theater counting American flags get incensed over nothing. They’ll miss something more provocative: a moment when the nation pursued excellence and, in turn, was celebrated for how smart it could be, and how big it could dream.

What elevates Halloween beyond mere fan service is the presence of Jamie Lee Curtis, whose willowy Laurie Strode has been converted, Sarah Connor–style, into a shotgun-toting shut-in with more than a hint of crazy about her.

Were it not for the hard-R violence and a generous amount of computerized splatter, The Predator would play like a slightly naughtier Independence Day or Armageddon, sci-fi movies that had their squareness dirtied up by pop-culture-riffing jokesters hired to polish up a draft or two.

It’s only hours afterward that Guadagnino’s film will cohere for you and yield its buried treasures: the bonds of secret sorority, the strength of a line of dancers moving like a single organism, the present rippling with the muscle memory of the past. It’s so good, it’s scary.

Calling the new A Star Is Born a “valentine” from its star, Lady Gaga, to her fans sounds a bit coy and delicate, so let’s call it what it really is: a hot French kiss (with full-on tongue), filled with passion, tears and a staggering amount of chutzpah.

Amazingly, the remake—by Danish director Michael Noer—is nearly as long and equally as depressing. But he’s made a slightly more exciting movie.

Stuffed with lifeless gags, this cringeworthy puppet provocation is too pleased with its own naughtiness.

What makes this latest installment such a riot — apart from having more money than usual, thereby allowing the practical special effects to achieve a splattery early–Peter Jackson glee — is its original script by "Brawl in Cell Block 99’s" S. Craig Zahler.

The film works best during its (too-brief) getting-to-know-you section, which balances humor against snarly danger.

If you remember Larry Clark’s downbeat 1995 "Kids," a vastly more adventurous movie, you’ll feel a depressing sense of indie sellout.

The Meg proves only that, at least cinematically speaking, great-white movies may have finally jumped the shark.

The plot takes a timely turn toward homegrown terrorism, and even as cinematographer Alexander Dynan amasses ominous clouds, the film’s break from head-bound matters is a tonic.

The ambition of Under the Silver Lake is worth cherishing. It will either evaporate into nothingness or cohere into something you’ll want to hug for being so wonderfully weird.

Finding reciprocity—in the eyes of the law, your partner, your colleagues—is the essence of this documentary, one that comes at a moment that desperately lacks it.

Everyone rises to the occasion of a special project of subtle significance: a comedy about nothing less than the proper way to say goodbye to the past.

Bland, artless and unoriginal, it's a horror sequel as faceless as its mask-wearing killers.

It’s hard to give sibling co-directors Joe and Anthony Russo (makers of the thornier Captain America films) any credit—or blame, really—for steering a product that’s been so corporately fine-tuned. They toggle dutifully between million-dollar quips and Wrestlemania smackdowns, and when they find room for a vista of galactic stillness, it’s not out of any inspired vision so much as the need for air.

The film’s languorous, tangential flow isn’t for everyone, but you’ll be surprised by how easily you can roll with it, especially if you tune into Zama’s cringe-funny frequency.

Truth or Dare ultimately plays like soap-opera trash.

The Broken Tower feels unique as a young man’s tribute to an adventuresome, doomed soul.

A wonderfully crude film (we're talking "Superbad" levels of raunchiness), but one in which the overall vibe is sweet: kids patiently waiting for their parents to grow up already.

Is Gemini on the level of classic L.A. films like Heat or The Player? Hardly. But you sink into its mood, and that’s enough.

Alicia Vikander makes for a scrappy, spunky Lara Croft, even if the overall concept remains less a movie and more of an exercise routine.

No Hollywood film can ever solve the central problem of adapting this book, in that it inevitably does too much of the imagining for you. DuVernay makes a big-hearted go of it, even if she seems slightly dazzled by her own magical mystery tour.

Thoroughbreds plunges you into an ice-cold bath of amorality, but debuting writer-director Cory Finley has such a command of details—the perfectly soigné clothes and hairdos, the lavish Connecticut living rooms and attentive gardening staffs—that you’ll laugh your way through the shivers.

Garland’s creeping pace lulls you on an almost molecular level; he’s made something akin to an end-of-the-world film, but one in which the changes afoot might not be wholly bad, title be damned.

Pfeiffer is nothing short of heartbreaking in a part that requires her to be completely unvarnished.

Handsomely mounted by Creed director Ryan Coogler and starring an enviable slate of black actors that makes cameoing comics godhead Stan Lee almost seem lost, the film is provocative and satisfying in ways that are long overdue, like its ornate, culturally dense production design and the deeper subtexts of honor, compassion and destiny.

There’s pleasure to be had in seeing Brooklyn’s Carroll Gardens expertly used as a backdrop for bougie romantic frustrations. If you miss the JakeWalk, here’s your opportunity to see the bar revived as the perfect place for neurotic conversations; if you ever ambled down Smith Street in your own mess of emotions, you may be feeling this one.

Dramatically inert and flatter than a buzz cut, the movie ends up diminishing their moment of heroism by turning it into a defiantly amateurish piece of junior-high-grade theatrics.

If you want to feel good about a war with no end, this one’s for you.

They get at the essence of Vertigo, haunting us via ghostly transmissions.

Hard-core fans get the loud noises they came for, but true fear vaporizes.

Ex-Glee geeks and those who sing in the shower: Your passable time-waster has arrived.

Deceptively hidden under layers of gorgeous surfaces, Paul Thomas Anderson’s borderline-sick romance waltzes toward a riveting tale of obsession.

Undeniably, The Post feels timely, but there’s a counter-argument to be made that, in our current era of “fake news” and easily swayed public opinion, it’s actually a dinosaur of a film—and not Jurassic Park. Thank God for the owners, it ultimately says, who sometimes do the right thing. That’s a perfectly fine idea, but our times could use something sharper.

David Scarpa’s nail-biter of a screenplay—based on John Pearson’s 1995 account Painfully Rich, adapted with a free dramatic license—amps up the tension with phoned-in demands and impulsive raids by knuckleheaded local police, yet it never loses the bitter, fascinating taste of imperious wealth.

A triumph of comic irreverence and dramatic purpose, Episode VIII dazzles like the sci-fi saga hasn't in decades.

Destroyed yet defiant, Robbie walks the emotional tightrope of the most fabulously, tragically American film of the year.