K. Austin Collins

Layton’s portentous style does the story no favors. It’s all mood, mood, mood: sharp angles, dark interiors, long pauses, and quietly thrumming background music.

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.

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.

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.

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.

Where Coogler’s movie runs hot, Caple’s runs warm; where Coogler dwells, steeping every scene in a sense of shared history and a love of Philadelphia, Caple takes for granted that this ground has already been sowed.

The film doesn’t glamorize addiction, or make it irrationally melodramatic, or gussy itself up in bespoke tragedy. (The same cannot be said of Beautiful Boy.) It’s all just right—even if “just right” is just O.K.

Mulan emerges as a curious act of market negotiation. It is a perfectly fine movie; it will no doubt be meaningful for children, especially those who could afford to see more of themselves onscreen in heroines like Mulan. But its cast, its attitude, its overall eagerness to please — all benefits, one would think — don’t add up to a good movie. They add up to a blueprint of the movie this ought to be.

Say what you want about Michael Bay, but at least his movies have their own identity. They occupy their own territory—albeit one I don’t necessarily want to visit often. But Bumblebee could have been made by anyone, as long as they were working from the right style guide.

I admire Zellwegger’s performance most of all for risking outright broadness, even badness, to chip away at the truths of the star’s persona. Frankly, it’s a performance that threatens to fly free of the movie enclosing it, which is well-made but not nearly as compulsively odd as its star.

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

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.

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.

What works best about Mid90s is what’s casual about it—but what makes it verge on being genuinely original is all the weirdo stuff at the margins, which is too pronounced to be subtext and too minimally handled to really mean something to the movie.

It doesn’t have the polish or prestige of your typical Oscar movie ... But there’s a tension at work in Harriet that’s missing from other, “better” movies. ... It’s also a vaster and in many ways wilder film than it will get credit for, a movie that leans into the excitement of Tubman’s mission so energetically it almost morphs into a heist picture, dredging up odd romantic and religious energies along the way.

There’s no other way to put this: Deadpool 2 is a regular, shmegular superhero movie, distinguished only by an obnoxiously unearned dose of “see what I did there?!” It’s a drag.

François Ozon’s Summer of ‘85 — which adapts the YA novel Dance on My Grave, by Aidan Chambers — is moving but contained affair, aflush with overwhelming feeling but also distant from that feeling, probing but not always revealing, sensuous and charismatic but not always easy to like.

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.

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.

A strange, uneven, but ultimately effective satire of masculinity.

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.

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.

The difficulty of The Mountain is the growing sense that its sinewy, thoughtful style may tip over into outright preciousness—which is exactly what happens.

The Lodge falls into the more common trap of spinning its wheels in a mudbath of obviousness and red herrings, dredging up anxieties and questions that it doesn’t quite know how to push forward, or inward.

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.

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.

The results are, understandably, thrilling at times, because violence is thrilling—vengeance even more so. But what it adds up to is a chaotic, misbegotten mess.

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