Justin Clark

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.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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.

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.

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.

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

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

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

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.

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.

Ryan Prows’s film comes across as just straight-up exploitative.

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

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

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.

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

As heartwarming as this story remains at its core, it’s hard to shake that you already know how it will play out.

The film is paced in such a languid, dreamy way that it’s hard to get a grasp on how each scene connects to the larger themes or the larger mystery until fairly late.

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.

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

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