Justin Clark

Once it turns into a home-invasion thriller, the film becomes more sadistic than hilarious.

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.

Christophe Gans’s film does away with all the psychosexual nuance of Silent Hill 2.

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

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

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.

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.

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.

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

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

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.

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.

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

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.

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.

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

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

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.

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.

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

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.

There's nothing behind its contemptible eyes, no spine to house the fading diode that once contained a soul.

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.

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.

By the time You’re Cordially Invited finds the correct mode to operate in, it’s about five minutes before the end credits roll.

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.

Aaron Taylor-Johnson skulks and slays across a slew of gory insert shots that scream “reshoots” from the highest mountain, and while he certainly looks the part with his shirt off, there’s little here that Hugh Jackman hasn’t delivered multiple times over the years and with a deeper well of earned pathos to draw from.

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

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

It’s neither naughty or nice, and in Santa’s book, that likely means it just ends up getting nothing this Christmas.

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.

Even a banal life can have a musicality and life to it, but once it leaves high school, Plastic’s portrait of adult life comes off as a monotone drone.

In grappling with the implications of its story, Folie à Deux’s every attempt at showcasing cleverness, verve, or engagement is held cruelly underwater by staid direction, shoddy emotional plotting, a gleeful sense of cruelty, and a grave nihilism that makes Zack Snyder’s work seem like a season of Bluey.

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.

Jam-packed with his familiar brand of vulgar yet verbose stoner humor and free-flowing riffs on movies—especially his own—the vibes are certainly off the charts in Kevin Smith’s film.

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.

The film makes mind-boggling choices for an adaptation of a game series so inseparable from its obnoxiously rough-and-tumble tone, characters, and humor.

M. Night Shyamalan’s stylish thriller is schizophrenic in more ways than one.

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.

The most charitable read on John Krasinski’s IF is that using your imagination shouldn’t be bound by traditional story structure, so why should a film about unfettered imagination need the same?

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.

The Scargiver feels like a loosely threaded series of grand ideas and sincere emotional beats that require so much more connective tissue to thread together into an actual narrative worth investing in.

If you’re looking for flash and snark, Boy Kills World has them in spades, but it’s too punch-drunk on its own juvenile grandiosity to bother offering even a whiff of substance.

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.

There are protracted moments of humor, fright, and pathos in Frozen Empire, but as it’s all so scattershot and disconnected, the film ends up being defined by its lack of conviction when it comes to exploring its ideas to the fullest.

There are versions of this premise relevant to a modern world, but the film’s point of view on the state of race relations feels stuck somewhere around 1954.

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.

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.

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

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

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

Next Goal Wins feels like five different films, all of them failing to coalesce in an effective way because every 30 seconds the script thinks it has to crack wise.

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 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.

Five Nights at Freddy’s has absolutely no idea what kind of ride it wants to be.

The film is a mélange of tired normcore horror tropes indistinguishable from any film in the Conjuring universe.

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.