K. Austin Collins

Creed III is very much a boxing movie. But it’s got a gnarled, contingent conflict at its center that’s a little too knowing for the movie not to have a little more than usual on its mind.

Long before Palm Trees becomes an outright film about sex work, it establishes itself as a film about the dire social transaction that sex can be — an old story, tragic every time, and effective here.

There are movies that were never going to be good, no matter the effort, and then there are movies that decide upfront to be bad and have a much easier time asking us to go with it. Cocaine Bear is the latter. It gives us what we’re asking for. Turns out, that isn’t much.

Frances O’Connor’s Emily, her directorial debut, takes a familiar literary biography and garnishes it with the right kind of creative liberties — the vibrant, suggestive kind.

Cut out the extra layers of nothingness piling up in the margins and you’ve got the kind of surreal tension that only romantic comedies, that dying but not dead genre, can offer: a case being made for romantic love, even when it doesn’t exist.

Even when it seems at risk of spinning its wheels into oblivion, there’s an urgent pleasure in watching it spin.

Tame is what Magic Mike’s Last Dance is — what it apparently wants to be, what it becomes in exchange for its new, cardboard-simple, ostensible pro-woman worldview. The movie’s pleasures mute themselves beneath its good intentions. It wants to be about what women want. But it feels like it never asked.

Full Time works because of, not despite, its cutting thrills. The anxiety we feel as we watch is very much the point. Julie is living on the edge. The movie marvels at her ability to keep her balance. And it laments the fact that her survival should depend on it.

One Fine Morning is yet more evidence of how far Mia Hansen-Løve can push her naturalistic style, using seemingly plain storytelling to advance intellectual ideas that rarely feel drawn from the mind because they are so in tune with felt experience: feelings and attractions, the passing of time, the sense of a life being lived. This movie is no different.

The actors, working from a script by Sachs and Mauricio Zacharias, and swept up in Sachs’s characteristically perceptive, subtle dramatic style, make the whims and wills of these people feel consistent and predictable, which is to say, true to life.

Eileen wants us to notice how the psychological brick house it’s been building all along explains the outcome. But the outcome almost doesn’t matter. The real joy is in the hungers we tasted along the way.

It fails as a character study because the murky inner workings of the character are all manifest, outwardly, in turns and attitudes that you can see from a mile away and are no wiser for being able to predict.

The film is moving. It’s also a bit reductive. The flaw is in the way that one enables the other.

Diop’s direction of Saint Omer is spare in style but dense in emotional intelligence, heavy with its own inquiries.

Skinamarink isn’t scary because of what it depicts. It’s scary because it already knows that our imagination will do half of the work.

Simón refuses to allow Alcarràs to settle for being just one thing; she drifts between her characters’ moods with rare realism.

The Pale Blue Eye is heavy, and not always to its advantage. Its glumness, meant to come off as a good-looking take on American gothic, gets in the way of its juicier, freakier bits. The offense is that it does so in service of a mystery that barely matters.

One of the more fun things about M3GAN, besides the batshit megabitch AI in pop starlet’s form at the center of the movie, is that this is all, immediately, such a bad idea.

The disappointment is that the movie wields so much and achieves so relatively little.

Corsage is not a great movie, but it’s good at detailing one woman’s circumstances. It doesn’t browbeat us with meaning, which it had every right to do, but instead attempts something humbler.

Baumbach overreaches in White Noise. The movie is unsuccessful because its various energies eventually begin to feel mismeasured.

The movie is moving — the source material has been hanging around since 1883 for good reason — but del Toro’s better at the violence and the dark irony, better at revealing the ways in which this story was already sort of twisted.

How can a movie that seemingly does so little amount to so much? It’s because of the story lurking beyond it all — the psychological battle being waged, so quietly, under the surface of everything.

The Way of Water is like its predecessor: sincere to the point of being brash, wide-armed and open-hearted toward the world it loves and vengefully, comically violent toward the people who arrive to destroy that world. It’s a better movie than the first outing because Cameron lets things get weirder, wilder.

Emancipation is not better off for laying any claim to the actual man that it purports to be about. It is a historically dubious, morally incurious piece of genre fare that satisfies as entertainment and not much else. Pure Hollywood heroism.

Nanny starts as a movie about a reality that we’d rather not face — the plight of Black domestic workers, of immigrants, of the barebones fact of financial survival — and ends as a movie about reality that we cannot bear. That is the horror of it — and, in Jusu’s hands, the galvanizing thrill.

Jerzy Skolimowski’s EO, a winding misadventure about a sweet-tempered donkey, inarguably qualifies as an animal’s-eye view of all that’s warm and cruel, comical and arbitrary about human nature.

This is not a tale of a young man who can “pass” and, knowing that it may matter to his survival, toughens up, puts on a masculine drag. It’s a movie intent on showing us that this is all drag — it’s all put-on, all available to the play of identity.

Mitchell has an inside-scoop aptitude for titillating details and unexpectedly insightful connections, a gift for association and cool, collected storytelling that propels the documentary along at a fast, satisfying clip, overwhelming us the number of nods to stars, to movies — big and small — and to his own impressions.

Lohan’s most distinguished quality as a star is that glowing goodness, a real, unshakeable joy that can only barely be imitated, let alone replicated, and which feels perfectly at home in the bright, buoyant, only glancingly ironic realm of happy-go-lucky comedy.

The movie isn’t always on such sure footing. But that’s almost appropriate: a messier movie trying to reckon with a messier range of feelings.

Ultimately, Something in the Dirt doesn’t quite convince as a genuine mystery — and it doesn’t seem to be meant to. Having fun with the artifice of it all — the loose “documentary” format, the well-played and visibly signaled “clues” scattered throughout — seems far more to the point.

If anything, Good Night Oppy could be nerdier, a little more in the weeds of the science that makes all of this possible. That’d prove a little less lightly entertaining, for some. But it’d also be true to what the movie is already about.

With a single shot, Descendant ceases to be a story about the recovery of a ship. It rapidly morphs into something broader: a story about the land. Who owned it back in the 1800s, who owns it now, and what all of this means for everyone else.

All That Breathes favors a poetic, almost dreamy style, filled with the kinds of ugly-beautiful images and thoughtfully dispatched voiceovers that can strip a narrative of outright propulsion in favor of mesmerizing us with ebbing ideas and moments of wonder. It occasionally strains. But the basic conflict at play, between the selflessness of these medics, the growing need for their work, and the utter folly of this mission — it can feel a little like standing in front of a moving train — gives it all an urgent undercurrent.

Armageddon Time isn’t a movie about bad people or good people. It’s more shocking because it’s more banal: It’s a movie about people. It doesn’t excuse peoples’ choices. But it knows that it cannot change them.

Chukwu’s script, co-written with Michael Reilly and Keith Beauchamp, is interesting for all of the predicaments it stares down and quietly works its way through.

Aftersun, which Wells also wrote, is for the most part a thorough depiction of a brief period in these two peoples’ lives. But its emotional canvas is far more encompassing than this implies.

Carlota Pereda's debut feature, Piggy, takes horror’s revenge trope and twists it just so. It isn’t so simple as a much-abused underdog getting a freakish chance to get her payback and painting the landscape with her enemies’ dispatched blood and guts, though in this case, as in many cases, you might forgive her if she did.

Halloween Ends is a curious and mostly effective mix of slasher antics and dramatically straight-faced themes. It’s a good enough slasher to provoke laughter in some of its grimmer moments, because the deaths are that ridiculous and the targets are sometimes, unfortunately, a little deserving.

The actors try their best, but Östlund’s insistent conceptual droning overtakes them.

Perhaps the best thing that can be said about Tár is that it is far more than a mere vehicle for one showboating performance. And even if it were, with a performance like this, who would mind?

God’s Creatures is a quiet movie, but its emotional drift is violent; Watson and Franciosi are particularly effective at giving us women being swept up into the currents.

Sidney works as a tribute, or a beginner’s course. More probing questions about Poitier’s “meaning,” the impossibility of his position, the way it served as a measuring stick for taking stock of Black politics over many decades — these are problems bigger than, and largely beyond, this movie.

Blonde is no truer or more intelligent than a more openly sleazy rendition of this story. It leaves too little room (despite its two hour and 40 minute runtime) to reconcile the fuller reality of this woman.

Honk for Jesus is a fine, often funny movie about the moral hypocrisy of the church and an even better movie about a woman forced to endure looking like a fool, an outright clown, because of her husband.

Owen Kline’s script is boisterous, funny, and very much committed to the bit. This is a movie about junior independence, after all, about a slightly full-of-himself young talent who’s journeying out on his own for the first time. So Kline makes sure the journey is memorable.

Breaking is a family affair, a film that works because every person in its cast, even those playing the “villains,” gives you a character whose flawed humanity is worth believing.

When it’s working, Three Thousand Years is an old curiosity shop of a movie, a cache of curios and strange conceits, many of which, when the movie isn’t working, are submerged into the bland uniformity of Miller’s stylistic approach to large stretches of this film.

It’s funny to think of this new chapter, with all its mean twists and its tense character convolution, as a prelude to the story we already know. Orphan is the longer movie, but compared to First Kill, it’s a psychologically slim, unmessy affair in comparison.

Free Chol Soo Lee is not a true crime documentary. If anything, it goes out of its way to avoid becoming one.

As a social tract, Emily the Criminal is more impassioned than wise. As a thriller, it fares better — in that case, no one’s asking for wisdom.

Fall is a straightforward survival thriller with just enough personality to glue you to your seat.

What makes Dunham’s art worth watching is what makes so much of it feel like a gamble. It invites projection.

It wants to be a slasher, but it isn’t reckless enough. It wants to be funny, but it only has two jokes, and it repeats them ad nauseum. It wants to be tense, but it takes advantage of almost none of the tension that this scenario and its McMansion setting have to offer.

Vengeance exercises [Novak's] knack for making unappetizing social qualities watchable, maybe because he’s playing a character whose self-confidence you don’t really believe in, or maybe because you already know that the movie will make him the butt of some of its rudest jokes.

This is a movie that knows the power of images. It has learned, from the greats of the genre, that what we fear most is what can’t be seen, what’s merely implied.

The cast puts its effort into a slightly less underwhelming movie, one a little more willing to engage this gallery of personalities, which, insofar as they’re based on the characters in the novel, are just engaging enough to watch this once and never think about again. Austen works hard. But mediocrity, this movie reminds us, works harder.

Elvis is an entertaining movie about the man’s sex appeal and a pretty good movie about his life, even as it never dials things back enough for anyone to catch a breath. Luhrmann’s zigzagging, triumphantly kitschy style suits his subject.

Spiderhead was adapted from a short story by George Saunders, but halfheartedly and with decidedly less wit.

The movie is at its best when it’s twining together the stories of characters whose fate seems to be pulling them toward possibilities that they hadn’t only just dreamed of. Where it manages to go once they’ve gotten there is almost less satisfying. The getting-there, the discoveries made along the way, are not only the central pleasure, but the point.

As a movie about the subjective fears of a woman on her own, being hunted or haunted by male violence both commonplace and supernaturally eerie, the movie basically works: Your heart races, you’re skeeved out, you’re crawling out of your skin. As a movie about why those men are the way they are, which is an idea that occupies a substantial chunk of its runtime, well…

It’s a fresh-faced gloss on the original, in other words, powered, like the original, by a star who’ll simply never stop being a star. The big mission makes for the most exciting moment; the build-up is worthwhile. When Maverick goes its own way, it tends to lose itself.

It’s an oft-stunning visual feast and an entertaining peek into Eggers’ instincts as a choreographer not only of historical detail but of bloody action. It is also an instructive example of how the most visionary intentions can’t always enliven an otherwise rote story.

All the Old Knives is brief enough, politely suspenseful enough, for its stars to carry without much hassle.

What starts as one of those rare, unplaceable, maybe-satire, maybe-camp, high-wire pop confections morphs into a fairly straightforward biopic about a beloved superstar that seems overly wary of pissing off a living idol.

It’s comically postmodern to the point of feeling almost retro, which also describes Everything Everywhere’s sense of action, its enriched sense of comedy colliding violence, practical materials (like fanny packs) taking their ranks amid the physically superhuman feats of choreography — a mix many of us rightly associate with Jackie Chan.

The movie has the makings of a devious erotic game, of a dirty pas-de-deux that spills out of the Van Allens’ marital bed and into a friend’s pool, a nearby quarry, and the woods. But the movie doesn’t quite have the backbone it’d need, or even the sense of fun, to clarify the extent to which this is a game that both players know they’re playing.

The Tragedy of Macbeth is Joel’s first outing on his own but, in this regard, he’s made a movie that suits the broader world of his work. That he’s done so most cogently through a character most other approaches to this play have barely noticed only makes it that much more thrilling.

Colman brings Ferrante’s creation to life with all the withering pathos she deserves. Gyllenhaal catches it handsomely, awe-struck, as if even she didn’t know how painfully real this woman Leda could seem or, in Colman’s hands, be.

I was moved, impressed — far more than I expected to be. The emotional engineering of The Matrix Resurrections is exacting and rapturous.

Deeply felt sincerity of the kind that Mills offers can be a tough pill. You kind of have to be in the mood. But this isn’t a film that works despite those excesses. Instead, it makes a case for them.

Despite its well-worn triumphant narrative, King Richard proves convincing at giving credence to the idea of Williams as a fact already stranger than fiction — the kind of man you can’t help but feel is a real character, in the everyday-life sense of that phrase: a one-of-a-kind guy, hard to reproduce.

The Harder They Fall is a good piece of wish-fulfillment pop. It knows what it is. It’s accomplished enough not to be mistaken for what it isn’t trying to be.

Eternals is good at telling us where to look, at impressing us with its manufactured sense of grandeur. What it lacks is any credible sense of what’s actually worth seeing.

Even when the film doesn’t entirely work, there is, simply, joy in watching Anderson work.

It takes seriously the challenge of adapting a seemingly unadaptable novel, and keeping all its big-picture implications in full view. It earns its distinction as a faithful adaptation — and proves a satisfying movie, too.

The movie makes you wish you were there. Lights darkened, dots and rays and Reed flickering before us, we nearly are.

Yes, it’s a gender-morphing, misery-and-mystery tour of sensational and at times incomprehensible events, rife with questionable life choices and odd twists of fate. There are absolutely ideas at work here about gender and sex and all the rest. But it’s the movie’s sense of play that feels most striking.

Complicated, overly talkative, a little too slow and not-infrequently rote, the movie is just the ride we’ve hitched to the Departures gate. It’s Craig we’ve come here to see — and see off. And off he goes.

Carnage is for the most part, in ways that count, another dirtbag delight. It’s a lesser movie than Venom, but one that scratches many of the same itches and then some.

Even with its familiar visual and dramatic approach — the extent to which we are firmly, subjectively pushed into Joseph’s world and made to tumble around for a while amid his unpredictable behaviors — the movie packs an odd little punch.

The movie has real moral terror at its center. It gets ugly: It gives that word fresh resonance. This is where it gets things right — what will, one hopes, make it worth remembering.

In a moral universe so keenly prescribed as this, the goodness we see in Cry Macho — goodness that seems to come with age or, as in the case of Marta and Mike both, after great sacrifice — resounds even as, scene to scene, the movie feels shaky.

The promise of Shang-Chi, which is as much martial-arts movie as it is standard superhero origin fare, is that a lot of people will get their asses kicked: sometimes gracefully, even beautifully, and other times with the battering-ram power you can expect of a movie advertising 10 rings at play.

What the movie’s effortful attempts at symbolism and meaning do most effectively are undercut what’s smart about the questions it raises — and DaCosta’s fine hand at creeping us out. The movie wants to be more than it is. The result is that it winds up amounting to less than it could have been.

[Franklin's] music blows the movie out of the water — and the movie, at its best, is wise to let itself get blown away.

Homeroom’s power in is allowing us — encouraging us — to hear these students out for themselves, bearing witness to political identities in the midst of their formation, still molten and moldable and all the more useful to see for that fact.

The premise is ripe; the thrills are rich; the payoff doesn’t come together quite as easily as the rest.

The movie is too much, too long, but not lacking in its glories. To find them, follow Harley. She’s leading the way.

The movie’s attentive sense of noticing makes its flaws, its leaps in logic, easier to notice. But this seems to matter less to the filmmakers than what the style has to offer the movie in terms of a message; on this front, Stillwater is tellingly consistent.

This being a Lowery tale, the monolithic, the overwhelming, are only more powerful for being rendered in intimate, miniaturized terms. The creepiness creeps just that much more; fear is heightened; fantasies, mysteries tingle with a sense of the unpredictable.

For Joe Bell to largely be a tale of one man’s inner journey rather than a dive into the unknowns of his son’s inner life and eventual tragedy is not out of turn. It is a worthwhile story to tell. The flaw is not in assigning gravity to Joe’s journey.

Old isn’t trying to be fashionable, low-fi, artisanal horror of the kind that seems to be setting the tone for the genre in the indie world. This is, instead, a credibly old-fashioned movie in some ways, a creature feature with something more diffuse than a “creature,” per se, a monster movie in which the monster is an unlucky pairing of longitude and latitude.

As a pure dilemma-fest, the movie basically works, resetting the clock scene by scene, making the joy of survival deliberately short-lived. The suspense works. Watching these people figure things out, just in the nick of time — except in the cases of the people who run out of time — doesn’t really get old, even if the movie somehow gets a little old.

An exercise anchored to a likable LeBron charmfest, melding multiple forms of animation, recycled cartoon jokes, and the basic plot of the original Space Jam, but with a twist that updates the original for our new, streaming content century.

It’s a good-looking, well-acted movie with a solid kicker. As for the odyssey of emotional nuance that its style and portent seem to promise, it digs beneath the surface, but to a shallower depth than it seems to think.

Credit is due to Pugh and Johansson, most of all, for proving, in the movie’s opening chunk, that their foes-then-friends dynamic could satisfyingly hold an entire movie.