Justin Clark

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.

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.

The horror here proves as much a dead end as the main characters’ relationship.

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

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.

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.

Blue Beetle plays out with all the revelry of a contractual obligation, hitting every note of the hero’s journey with no variation, murky action sequences, and little in the way of imagination, despite the titular object itself granting Jaime the ability to manifest anything that he imagines.

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

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.

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.

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.

The War of the Roses, both the book and the Danny DeVito film, is an infamously brutal comedy of terrors, and The Roses is cuddly by comparison.

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.

For a story that so prizes how far its heroine will go, Moana spends so much of this sequel stuck in a rut.

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.

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.

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 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.

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 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.

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.

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

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

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 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.

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.