Justin Clark

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.

Mortal Kombat II is done waiting around. It’s ravenous to get down to bloody business.

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

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.

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

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.

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.

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

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

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.

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

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.

Nothing Batman or Supergirl do in The Flash to save the world is more effective than what Barry Allen does to save it with a hug and a can of tomatoes.

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.

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

The film leaves you wishing that the aspirational way the sport is presented in real life had been read for filth.

For a solid hour or so, the film is patient and tense, with just the right touches of levity and romance. Until, suddenly, it isn’t.

Sans a mythology of its own, or any substantive ties into where the John Wick films go chronologically after this, Ballerina is just another 87Eleven joint.

In the end, this sub-Sorkin-esque political potboiler sidelines Chisholm's most meaningful community work to the fact that she tried and failed to run for president.

The film proves itself incapable of or unwilling to follow through on its ideas to an ultimate conclusion.

Sylvain Chomet provides only a scant sense of Marcel Pagnol’s creative inklings, such as the ideas and themes that fuel the films that he fights so vehemently to make.

The film is very old-fashioned in its thinking and approach to fantastical romance, despite some occasional, vague allusions to the fact that it is, still, a 2025 film.

Caitlin Cronenberg vests her images with an eerie, confident power, but that’s more evident in her examinations of the frictions between the characters, and not so much in the tapestry of murder and mayhem that ensues.

Dramatic moments create tonal stutters that prevent the film from becoming the unhinged Looney Tune that it wants to be.

The film hits its plot milestones as fast as humanly possible, cohesion or depth be damned.

The film is in such a rush to get to the bloodshed, deception, and panic that most of the fertile ground of its premise goes unexplored.