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.

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

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

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

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.

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.

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.

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.

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

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.

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.

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.

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

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.

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

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.

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

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

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.

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

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 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.

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

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.

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

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

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