Kristen Lopez

Best Summer Ever isn’t the best movie ever, but what it does is continue to show that disability can be fun, unique, and enticing without being dour. It’s the best at what it’s doing and you’ll want to see more.

Yorgos Lanthimos's Bugonia is such a fresh exploration of humanity and what our future in the world is. One could say by the time it reaches its conclusion it's utterly depressing, and yet it feels so inevitable. This is a movie where you'll want to wait for others to see it so you can truly dive into its themes. Plemons is the MVP, though Delbis and Stone are also great. Another hit from Lanthimos!

The blend of the salacious with the historical will get audiences to watch HBO’s Hudson doc, though it might not have enough meat to it to get TCM snobs to find anything new. But what’s there is a sensitive story of a man whose best self was known to only a few.

Mitchell tells a story that needs to be told and demands the audience to never avert their gaze.

Hedda is one of the year's best movies with Thompson nothing short of wondrous.

The first Devil Wears Prada was certainly an artifact of the 2000s and this sequel is too, in that it's a soul-less nostalgia grab with some interesting opinions it doesn't really want to dive into.

The film presents a contemplative elegy for a hotel whose history is (still) being eroded, but by focusing on the literal walls (and how they, of course, can’t actually talk) only further removes the voices of the very people who live (and dream) inside of them

Leave the World Behind enters the stage as one of the year’s best and no doubt will spark massive amounts of conversation. It’s cast helps take viewers on a journey that, while they’ll feel the length, they’ll be so compelled by what’s happening it won’t even matter. Just don’t expect to sleep easy after seeing it.

Watching and processing Sansón and Me is a melancholy experience. As Reyes tells Andrade early in the process, this documentary won’t exonerate him or get him released from prison, but for Andrade, the opportunity to tell his story and have a living example of his memories saved is enough.

It is Channing Tatum who keeps the audience riveted to Roofman, even when the script gives him a gaggle of underwritten characters to work opposite.

It’s a character study, a moody atmospheric piece of contemplation with one character who, through interacting with others, unseen, on the phone comes away with a grander understanding of self. We, as the audience, come away with a grander understanding of our own interactions and how life changes without us ever knowing about it.

Kiss of the Spider Woman is astounding. If you aren't a musical fan, will you be in hell? Probably. But for those who enjoy a sweeping musical story, or for lovers of Old Hollywood, you'll be in Heaven for the next two hours.

A Haunting in Venice is a moody Gothic horror feature that feels completely refreshing in a landscape of jump scares and gore.

All the individual pieces that make “Allswell” interesting are smothered in treacle.

If you've been ride or die for this series since its inception then there's little that will change that. For those looking for a good time at the movies, Avatar: Fire and Ash offers some thrilling visuals but little else. The story is repetitive and unfocused, the characters dull and lacking depth.

There's little to Black Phone 2 to recommend it. At nearly two hours the pacing kills any sense of momentum and the story boils down to everyone wandering in the snow looking for dead bodies. The cast is fine, but there's no meat to their characters and their performances are reflective of that.

There is a tendency to overly explain things as opposed to letting Ginsburg’s words flow, but if you’ve enjoyed the previous looks at the notorious RBG, this is a new one offers a different angle to her remarkable story.

Eternity is a sweet little slice of life (and death) story with wonderful performances from Olsen, Teller and Turner. If the existential dread is getting you down of late this is a perfect story to quell it for the moment.

It’s a sanitized, Cliff’s Notes version of the original with a few songs thrown in. It’ll be great for audiences to see Renee Rapp, if they don’t know of her already, but she’s not in it enough to help save the rest of the film. This may not be your mother’s “Mean Girls” but it’s doubtful it’ll be anyone’s.

Wicked: For Good's problems are the results of being two distinct features. Screenwriters Winnie Holzman and Dana Fox understand the hard part is over in terms of crafting the world and characters and now audiences have to live in it.

Buckley is a powerhouse and Gyllenhaal's script is so bold and fresh that even when it doesn't work it pulls you in.

There are fits and spurts of '80s action cheese but, for the most part, the script is wildly inconsistent in terms of tone while characters are wafer thin caricatures.

The soul of the novel is there and "Wuthering Heights" stands on its own as yet another great adaptation of Bronte's novel.

It’s a decent Cliff’s Notes version of the narrative with glimmers of something far more fascinating. It just feels like Broomfield missed the point on saying anything ground-breaking.

There’s far more of Snakehead that works than doesn’t, and Leong shows a serious flair for crime dramas. Together with Chang and Wu, the talents of the film are for an electric trio, including stars worth watching and a director very much on the rise.

Hoult’s charm and sweetness is tempered by Cage’s showy, maniacal performance as Dracula and it’s frustrating that there aren’t more scenes where the two just play off each other.

The Moment might appease xcx superfans just content to watch the singer do anything, but it yields little beyond that. Though worthy in its attempts to modernize the rock mockumentary, there's no real humor or depth to the material, and what meaning is there has been done better before. Just listen to brat again. On repeat.

Bruised isn’t breaking any new ground from a narrative standpoint, but it does show the strength of Halle Berry as a director, boasting a powder keg of dominating performances within a simplistic story.