Joshua Rothkopf

It’s a movie about a citizenry at war with itself, hoping to keep the plates spinning for one more night. You watch it and think how easy it would be to envision an American remake — and wonder, too, if a filmmaker like Lapid even exists here.

There isn’t much of an original signature here. Returning director Dan Trachtenberg hits the beats competently but not too stridently, like a good superfan should.

A film this well-made and cut (the pacy editing by Aden Hakimi calls back to the elder Romero’s own cutting of his major titles) shouldn’t be relegated to just one kind of audience. Anyone who appreciates horror should find something to smile at here.

More testimony to the experience of eating at Nobu would have helped this feel less like a commercial.

This isn’t the kind of puzzle thriller in which all the elements click into place with a thudding literalism that compliments an attentive eye. It’s one that accommodates the vagaries of human behavior, leaving punishment aside as a secondary concern.

A timid, far-from-revelatory film, authorized by the three surviving Zeppelin vets and graced by their presence in new interviews that give off the faint scent of impatience.

Superfans aren’t necessarily going to love this. It’s a movie made with affection, but also with the wisdom that visionaries can sometimes be jerks.

The potent image-making and performative ferocity turns what could have been a crime thriller into a near-metaphysical showdown.

A miraculously subtle piece of work.

This is a film that seems to know a lot about future psychology. May we never know such mournfulness outside of an ambitious summer blockbuster.

Once you let go of the understandable dream of Coppola returning with another masterpiece, there is much to enjoy in “Megalopolis,” especially its cast members, leaning into their moments with an abandon that was probably a job requirement.

For the first time in Miller’s now-five-film franchise, he seems to be falling shy of the immediacy he’s sustained, often deliriously, for an entire feature.

The takeaway isn’t exhilaration; the unease is what makes Garland’s film valuable. You watch it with your jaw hanging open.

Let’s credit debuting feature director Arkasha Stevenson (a former photographer for this paper) with the stylishness to pull off a potent sense of atmosphere and the kind of lovely period detail that deep studio pockets can fund but rarely have cause to summon.

If I call the movie a love story, don’t laugh. Torres has made it with love in his heart.

Villeneuve has made good on one of the great Hollywood gambles in recent memory, delivering a two-part epic of literary nuance, timely significance and maybe even the promise of another film or two.

Not only has a real filmmaker emerged with A Real Pain, with both the sensitivity and boldness that could launch a career, but Eisenberg has never let himself be this exposed as a performer.

Out of Darkness is effective enough — and gory — to function as a thriller of the loud-noise-springing variety. But a last-act grasp at profundity in Ruth Greenberg’s screenplay feels unearned.

The ambition here is invigorating and, during its most exhilarating stretches, Night Swim seems to be actually pulling it off — until suddenly it’s not, a victim of overplotting, pushing the water thing a little too hard.

Woo is capable of bigger and better.

The Killer is an opportunity for America’s most stylish director to reboot, to get back to basics, to come in under two hours.

Saw X may not be the best one to start off with, but it’s hard to imagine a better one to end with.

That title, Cobweb, suggests only one cobweb, but why be stingy? This movie’s screenplay is strewn with them: dozens of dusty tendrils linking it back to older, better horror films, sometimes on a shot-by-shot basis.

Splattery, puncture-heavy violence — the hard-R rating is earned — alternates with deadening rafts of therapy-speak, including an actual therapy session. But there's no deeper meaning to any of it; the Scream idea, meta to its core, was always a preening celebration of its own cleverness, never mind the occasional half-explored nods to toxic fandom or cancel culture.

In its colorful, Godardian way, Return to Seoul becomes a quest movie, but not the one you're expecting — it's the opposite of sentimental or overly therapized.

At least Mia Goth, herself recently reborn as indie horror's new scream queen with Pearl, understands the assignment, getting more unhinged with every scene (her character starts off with vigorous flirting and a brusque handjob, and goes from there).

Obliquely related to her recent movies, Hogg's latest is either her slyest joke to date, or another swerve in an especially fecund career phase.

A team of screenwriters more creative than Pat Casey and Josh Miller (best known for two manic Sonic the Hedgehog movies) might have done more with the backstory, and director Tommy Wirkola's beatdowns never transcend the merely serviceable. But there's no denying the joy in a child's eyes when she sees Santa's weapon of choice, a sledgehammer hefted with brutal artistry, and squeals its name: "Skullcrusher!"

Unlike The Father, which expanded Zeller's stage source material with maze-like complexity, The Son pins us in for an endgame that you wish had more of a takeaway than a gut punch.

Union's sour presence suggests the tougher film that could have been, bookending the movie with a double dose of viciousness; theirs is a relationship that won't be solved by a crisp uniform. If this is Bratton's calling card — and it should be — her scenes are the ones that suggest the real promise to come.

A global celebrity during America's earliest conversations about civil rights, Armstrong preferred to keep his dissatisfactions to himself, becoming a symbol of change rather than a spokesperson of it. That tension comes to vivid life in Jenkins's worthy account, sure to be appreciated by those who come in on solid footing

Black Adam is what happens when artists say they want to go dark but don't really have the stomach for it. Cue scenes of humorless mid-air wrestling, shake vigorously, wait for the sequel.

You'll forgive the movie its cluttered shagginess because its universe is so strange — even an icy puddle is rendered exquisitely.

Though any honest summation can't do it justice, Charlotte Wells's tender feature debut is the kind of revelation that movie fans dream of finding: not a wow so much as a guaranteed piece of emotional ravishment.

Before it lumbers to its big showdown — halfheartedly, with all the excitement of a third installment of a third reboot cycle — Halloween Ends is an unusually Michael Myers-free affair. Where's the big guy?

Co-scripting with her director, Goth is the standout, displaying a verbal vigor and earthiness she's been unable to tap so far (not even in movies like Nymphomaniac and A Cure for Wellness).

Give yourself over to the movie's absorbing sense of process and rehearsal, complete with notes of humor that never quite puncture into mockery, and you'll have a better time with it.

Even with the original cast on board, there's surprisingly little chemistry or humor, and the movie makes repeated pit stops to stress family values.

It may not be slavishly devoted to the facts (this isn't your typical birth-to-deather), but as with Todd Haynes's glam fantasia Velvet Goldmine, the movie achieves something trickier and more valuable, mining shocking intimacy from sweeping cultural changes.

Pruning would hamper the unencumbered risk-taking on display, which extends to some atmospheric animation (as it did with Morgen's Kurt Cobain: Montage of Heck), and instantly vaults the effort to the top of the Bowie docs. The music itself, gorgeously remixed by Bowie's longtime producer and friend Tony Visconti, has never sounded better or stranger, with isolations of instrumental passages that stick in mind.

A nuanced exploration of situational ethics tinged with guilt, it's a small, near-perfect New York story.

For its whole running time, X has ideas on its mind. Like the doubled-edged title itself, both an evocation of the grungy rating this movie might have received in 1979 and something more suggestive ("You've got that X factor," Wayne says of Maxine's allure), it indicates a film that feels unpinned, ominous, and potentially unforgettable.

A remake could have been fun if it had been made with vision, or at least an appreciation of the original. If that's grade-A beef, call this one a rancid veggie burger.

An extraordinary blend of personal reflection and inspired craft, Flee is a harrowing child’s-eye adventure that lends lyricism to the plight of migrants while showing there’s always a new way to make a documentary.

Mostly, though, as TV newscasters inform us, civilization has taken a serious nosedive — definitely the case when a well-financed Emmerich disaster flick can't even get its dumb-fun groove on.

There's a deeper idea here — really! — and it's one that only gets more obvious with time, something to do with arrested boyhood and the gleeful self-ruination of one's own body.

The movie also gets deeper and more emotional as it goes, becoming a metaphor for restless empathy and non-binary points of view. You Won't Be Alone is a fitting title, bearing the ominous warning of a juicy thriller, but also a subtle sense of compassion. It's a big world and you won't be alone, if you let the witches in.

Doubling down on COVID-era listlessness and QAnon paranoia, the impressively fidgety, crammed-to-bursting Something in the Dirt ends up with something like: Please let my life make sense. It's an understandable wish in an uncertain moment.

Diallo, an inspired stylist with bold things to say, strikes the balance between thrills and ills in a way that's wholly her own.

The romance of the documentary emerges out of its deep, unfaked appreciation for nature: long, uninterrupted stretches where these self-described "weirdos" go off on their own to explore alien worlds like astronauts in their protective gear.

While the new movie is laced with Easter eggs and homages to the late master, it doesn't build its sequences with the same meat-and-potatoes solidity as Craven did. Bettinelli-Olpin and Gillett don't have those chops yet.

Affleck and Clooney make sense as collaborators; both of them became directors to get out of the way of their public images. Hopefully, the next time they decide to work together, they'll lean even further into the intimacies of a setting like the Dickens, a universe unto itself.

It's a moviegoing experience, sure — and if you need to hear it, one of the best of the year. But it's really a call to compassion, which makes it transcendent.

Resurrections does eclipse its predecessors for full-on, kick-you-in-the-heart romance: Reeves and Moss, comfortable with silences, lean into an adult intimacy, so rare in blockbusters, that's more thrilling than any roof jump (though those are pretty terrific too). Their motorbiking through an exploding city, one of them clutching the other, could be the most defiantly sexy scene of a young year.

Quiet, unforced and delicate, Pig provides a forum for Nicolas Cage, one of our most dazzling showmen, to get serious and burrow more deeply into his talent than he has in years.

A Twilight Zone–worthy premise, subtly sold by ace make-up effects, makes for a decent-enough thriller, intriguing in the moment but ultimately too timid to say anything meaningful about ageing.

Course-correcting to some degree with the return of its most inspired director, Justin Lin’s latest F&F instalment is a little too plastic at times, but back on track.

Cats may flop but it will be found by a likeminded audience, maybe the same one that rescued The Greatest Showman. Don’t be the sourpuss to tell these people they’re wrong.

It feels like a massive retrenchment—privately, a rebellion seems to have been fought and lost—and only the most loyal fans will be happy about it.

Sophia Takal's update of the cult classic turns the real horror of campus assault into a springboard for cheap thrills.

The material is worthy, but this continuing struggle deserves a more nuanced take.

Ballour’s presence makes Fayyad’s film inspiring, even as we cringe for her safety with every overhead explosion.

But for every Thelma & Louise–like golden-hour drive into the sunset (there are several too many), you wish the movie also had the sophistication to cram from that classic script’s complex sense of injustice, one that had room for a subplot involving a sympathetic lawman. Believe in Matsoukas, though; she’s the real deal and she’ll get better material.

Little Women sometimes plays like a comedy, one that includes a crumpled cry over a bad haircut and several kitchen interludes that feel like Christmas miracles. Yet it’s Alcott’s visionary attitude, well-struck by Gerwig, that stays with you the longest: the loneliness of female liberty.

Of course we all hate insidious environmental destruction; it’s valuable to have movies about that. This one works fine enough. But let the other less-talented filmmakers make them.

For all of its #MeToo heavy lifting, though, the film still doesn’t work, mainly for the same reasons as before: Constructed as symbols (not human beings), these characters have too much spy stuff to do and yet, not quite enough.

Steel battleships and raining fire are Midway’s primary colors; the movie flaunts its hugeness at every turn. You’ll never mistake it for the real thing, but Emmerich’s eye for historical detail is scary.

Yet it’s rare that we get a movie this municipally minded and Chinatown-ish, and Norton invents new elements with a free hand, including a Harlem turf war, a skittering jazz undercurrent (the music is by Daniel Pemberton) and a love interest in Gugu Mbatha-Raw. Alec Baldwin, playing a powerful urban planner, makes for a ferocious Robert Moses stand-in.

You could call it fan service, if the service is to teach fans that mimicking Stanley Kubrick’s chilly elegance—and even reshooting scenes from the original film with lookalike actors, a crime bordering on sacrilege—doesn’t make your take nearly as scary.

As proven by Mary Elizabeth Winstead in Final Destination 3 or the spunky Jessica Rothe in Happy Death Day, these fate-driven, high-concept horror flicks can be redeemed by a committed central performance. Countdown’s Elizabeth Lail, as a nurse who wants to get to the bottom of things, joins their company; she’s got a certain Jennifer Lawrence scrappiness.

Heroically, Double Tap’s new actors, rare though they are, save it from being completely brain-dead.

It’s made with so much love, care and enthusiasm—plus no small amount of risk—you thrill to think that they’re just getting started.

Philippe earns his keep, not only by mounting a crisp, elegant production well above the standard of your typical video-lensed making-of, but by skewing toward anecdotes that most corporate clients would frown upon.

After a while, you adjust, or rather, you get tired of probing the slightly-off evidence of your eyes and the headache it produces. There’s a lot of fun to distract you.

There’s comfort to be had in executing on such a durable formula, and—life lessons accompanied by Coldplay’s treacly “Fix You” aside—Abominable usually resembles the swift adventure it wants to be.

None of the care that Stallone imparted to his recent Rocky reboots—Creed and Creed II (both of which were produced by him)—is in evidence; it’s as if he were admitting that the Rambo movies were always trash. He may not be the best custodian of his own legacy. Graying, splotchy and barely intelligible, Stallone turns in a self-negating performance, just as ugly on the inside.

Damon and Bale are unfailingly enjoyable company to be among, steering the psychology away from alpha-male dominance to something more complex and occasionally mystical.

On its way to an uncathartic climax that somehow involves a black-market-fenced oil painting and an Amsterdam shootout, The Goldfinch throws in so much diversionary character work that you wonder if anyone thought the stew was going to be edible.

Breathtakingly risky but valid under scrutiny ... Jojo Rabbit isn’t perfect; sometimes it strains to reconcile Waititi’s more relaxed beats (“Let everything happen to you,” is a line from poet Rainer Maria Rilke that gets big play) with his visual fussiness. But he’s legitimately breaking new ground. It will find an audience that gets it.

Murder, skulduggery and an avalanche of plotting makes Rian Johnson's latest a retro pleasure for those who enjoy being dizzied.

The film doesn’t know how innocent it wants to be. Establishing shots of Manhattan’s 1998 skyline arrive in the cutesy form of a colorful diorama, just like Mr. Rogers’s show, but that gesture feels utopian and unearned, not to mention a little boring.

The Personal History of David Copperfield feels, to a large degree, like a writer’s stunt. If you’re in a mildly irreverent mood (like Iannucci himself), you won’t complain too loudly about that.

Waves shudders with ambition and nervy style; it never quite relaxes out of its harrowing first hour but the longer it stretches out, the more humane it feels.

Kids train for guerrilla fighting in a gorgeously atmospheric film that feels like a transmission from the future.

Even as it drifts into narrative indiscipline, you appreciate the movie’s attempt to make sense of a troubled, beclowned present.

Featuring powerhouse performances by Scarlett Johansson and Adam Driver, Noah Baumbach's divorce drama is a bruising tour-de-force.

As games go, this one’s a little too easy to outfox, but it’s worth playing if you need a quick diversion, or if the chess moves of The Favourite felt overly vicious—Ready or Not is pure checkers.

Though its come-on is playful, this documentary sinks into some swampy subjects, including racism, secret biowarfare and political assassination.

The idea that we would want even a few of these draggy, didactic scenes (the poorly paced French plantation sequence plays better with self-satisfied critics than with audiences) may remind you of one of Marlon Brando’s immortal lines, the one about an errand boy, sent by grocery clerks to collect a bill.

Generation "Home Alone", now grown up and maybe with children of its own, will be amused in the moment, but the film’s heart isn’t as subversive as it wants us to believe.

“Stories heal, stories hurt,” we hear in voiceover, and while any horror film would unavoidably literalize such a claim, this one can’t hold a candle to the power of the page, as read by a thirty, ghoulish mind.

When featherweight Domhnall Gleeson, as an intense angel of death, is your feminist Irish mob movie’s most interesting asset, you need to find Hollywood’s witness-protection program immediately.

Between epic bouts of bickering, Dwayne Johnson and Jason Statham save the world in an offshoot that gets the job done.

A horror movie that should have been a lot more fun.

Always effortful and desperate to impress, The Lion King may serve as a virtual substitute for going to the zoo (don’t slide down the Black Mirror cynicism of that idea), but let’s hope it never replaces such outings, nor its 1994 forebear, a passport to something far more sublime.

Awkward teenage energy is the secret weapon in Marvel's post-Avengers palate cleanser, one that strains to keep things light and fun.

When the doll has more vitality than the movie around it, there's a problem.

Not helping matters is dead-eyed snark source Aubrey Plaza, somehow less expressive than the doll itself (creepily voiced by Mark Hamill).