Justin Clark

BenDavid Grabinski’s film is less of a crime drama than a punch-drunk comedy of errors.

The Bride!’s aims to show that being good in a cruel world is as foolish as falling in love—as foolish as attempting to be out and proud freaks in a repressive society. Guillermo del Toro might be brave enough to let his monsters fight and fuck in their own defense, but Gyllenhaal and her monsters do it nastier, sloppier, and louder as an act of magnificent defiance.

Good Luck, Have Fun, Don’t Die’s obviousness only makes its proximity to the real-life A.I. slop invasion more unnerving, and the extent of what humanity has accepted for convenience’s sake more abhorrent.

The beauty of Kristen Stewart’s focus is how she excavates the profound from the mundane.

Arco is a children’s adventure set in world that’s literally on fire, which makes the moments of childlike wonder and connection all the more endearing and vital.

The action is horrifying, inventive, and heart-pounding, but it’s also the least surprising part of Predator: Badlands.

Jiaozi’s film is a sprawling, hyperkinetic exercise in mythological storytelling.

Scarlett Johansson’s direction keeps things simple and intimate in a way that Tory Kamen’s overambitious screenplay doesn’t.

This ferocious adaptation of Stephen King’s 1979 novella as a passion play about class solidarity.

Splitsville thrives on the unpredictability of this formal freedom before settling back into a familiar Hollywood narrative formula: the comedy of remarriage.

The Naked Gun is of a piece with the “joke in every frame” approach that Zucker, Abrams, and Zucker brought to their best work.

This is a film that projects an unflinching sincerity and optimism, and the first in the MCU, a franchise that has brought much of Marvel Comics’s wildest flights of fancy to life, to really channel the spirit of Kirby’s creations and how that first endeared them to audiences.

Imagine John Waters at the helm of a Terminator 2 remake and you have an inkling of just how wild a pivot M3GAN 2.0 is from its predecessor.

The film’s best trait is the one that permeates every truly great first-contact story—not just the hope that our first meeting with the strangest of strangers is benevolent, or that the universe is too vast to determine they all wish good or ill on us, but that connecting with humanity still has value.

The human struggles at play are too dire and relatable for us to say that these people don’t deserve that level of grace, but making the audience generally sympathize with them doesn’t make spending time with them particularly pleasant either.

Killer of Killers only gives us just enough to get by, get invested, and get to the goods.

Here, “ohana” doesn’t just mean family but community, and the film does moving and spirited work in showcasing how crucial it is for us to lift each other up.

Faced with oblivion, our third- and fourth-string MCU characters choose life, all while the film hammers home that there’s no reason why they should.

The film is a slow-burning tale of very real traumas suffered by a woman far out of her element and forced to process a tragedy on top of it all.

Heart Eyes is a slasher movie first, and a gnarly one at that, with some imaginative, seat-shiftingly gruesome kills, and some particularly ominous set pieces.

The film revives Friday’s spirit while bringing its own flavor, and taking the current state of the world into full account.

Grand Theft Hamlet excels at blurring the line between low and high art.

The hedgehogs are the stars here, and after three delightfully breezy good times at the theater, it’s no longer a surprise as to why that is.

The film, unbound by having to recreate large swaths of the original Lion King whole cloth, was clearly allowed to be a product of its director.

The film combines cutting-edge Japanese animation with the audiovisual language established by Peter Jackson’s original trilogy of films.

Melissa Barrera’s Laura may be full of rage, but the kind of monster she is doesn’t line up with where her rage leads her.

If Megalopolis, as many speculate, marks the end of Coppola’s career as a filmmaker, it flourishes in that finality, having held back or compromised nothing.

A realm without physical limits is truly where the Transformers belong, but it doesn’t stop the film from delivering some surprising pathos while it’s there.

Tim Burton’s belated sequel to 1988’s weird, wild, and hilariously macabre Beetlejuice abounds in morbid, nauseating delights.

Rebel Ridge never rises to the panic-infused heights of its opening, but Jeremy Saulnier is still able to maintain a baseline of oppressive tension as we watch a man navigate the deep-seated corruption of a sundown town.

Deadpool & Wolverine doesn’t flinch from speaking some measure of truth to power.

Like most of this series’s best action, the big bombastic noise is often a distraction from something far more intimate, and in Day One’s case, something far more existentially beautiful.

The film’s visual complexity isn’t matched by the actual journey the core emotions take back to the forefront of Riley’s mind, which can’t help but feel like a more convoluted retread of the first Inside Out’s abstract buddy comedy.

The film plays out like it might be preparing us to let go of its big-name legacy leads.

While there’s plenty to be said about Abigail’s impressively over-the-top scarlet mean streak, the hellride that the filmmakers take us on is all the more effective for the character groundwork laid prior.

Monkey Man is in no rush to get where it’s going and Dev Patel puts a lot of trust in his audience to stick with him to see where it arrives.

At its best, Damsel suggests a dark fantasy riff on Neil Marshall’s The Descent.

The film is a good time, and it doesn’t exactly betray any of Kung Fu Panda’s strengths, but it also exhibits the telltale signs of a series struggling to justify its existence.

Even as the film revels in violent, necrophiliac delights, the dialogue keeps everything grounded with its humor.

It’s the balance of comedy and existential drama that truly elevates Thelma.

There’s considerable emotional truth on display throughout Benjamin Ree’s documentary.

The things that elevate Chiwetel Ejiofor’s film are those that elevated Rob Peace’s life overall.

The film does keep the smirking undercurrent of the first half present in the more serious second, but, slowly but surely, it starts asking big questions about the nature of God, what measure of divinity lies in us all, and the value of basic humanity and grace in a world where God’s intervention isn’t a given.

The glue holding it all together is the same that gave the earlier Hunger Games films an edge over its YA brethren: the steadfast portrayal of the cynicism and emotional neglect required to regard other human beings as numbers and meat that have to be placated to be useful.

The overarching plot of the film is pretty boilerplate, but the fine details count for a lot.

Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles: Mutant Mayhem is a film that feels ripped right out of a high school art-class notebook, and sounds like a Twitch stream.