Leah Greenblatt

Soho is one hell of a half of a movie: a wildly styled neon reverie whose spooky bedazzlement only crashes to earth when it succumbs to bog-standard horror in the final act.

Director Olivia Newman (First Match) bathes the story in so many broad, creaky tropes and odd tonal shifts that nothing ever feels real for a moment.

The screenplay, by Matt Lopez, leans bright and broad, but there are sweetly specific moments scattered throughout, from a whisper-fight over dominoes at the local social club to the frequent snatches of Spanish woven into the dialogue.

Despite the source material's similar popularity, though, the movie drags, a confluence of silly plot points and mile-wide archetypes with too little natural chemistry between its ridiculously good-looking leads.

Mostly, the joy comes from watching Reeves and Winter on screen, two holy fools just doing their best to bring light and love and non-heinous riffs — and remind the bleary-eyed citizens of 2020, perhaps, of a simpler, sweeter world gone by.

It’s a minor-key tale by any measure: a May-December romance played out in the fading shadow of Old Hollywood glamour. But it also has the benefit of a thoughtful script, sensitive direction, and leads gifted enough to breathe fresh air into nearly every moment.

Novak, who spent years refining the squirrelly ticks of his self-regarding salesman Ryan on nine seasons of The Office, isn't a demonstrably different dude here. His callow-millennial act — and the navel-gazing vagaries of modern content culture — make fertile ground for satire, and many of the jokes here do find their soft targets. But it can also feel hollow and exhausting in main-character movie form.

The movie is disappointingly flat-footed about both rock and journalism, and its shaggy plot sheds logic as it goes. Still, the actors are excellent; they’re triple crème slathered on an odd little undercooked biscuit of a script.

Unexpected isn’t particularly interested in driving the plot forward or holding its leads up as avatars for a cinematic lecture on poverty and white privilege. Instead, it just lets them live and breathe and make mistakes — not for the aim of any greater message or grand epiphanies, but because that’s what people do.

A better, subtler movie lurks somewhere in Mincemeat; for dads and history buffs, the pleasant hash it presents instead is passable enough.

With its political power struggles and prodigious body count, all rendered in a thousand shades of wintry greige, the movie feels less like teen entertainment than a sort of Hunger Games of Thrones.

Ironbark might not be a great film in the end, but it is a satisfying good one — a story that’s at its best when it colors outside the black and white (or Communist red, as it were) lines of war and hones in on the real, fallible men and women who fight it, one quiet inglorious step at a time.

You wish you’d seen more of this Taylor a long time ago. But that’s the point of the whole movie, maybe: She was always there; it just took her 30 years to get to here.

In the final third, as the plot accelerates and moves toward more purely outrageous acts, Casey’s awakening should feel like freedom from the stultifying smallness of his old life. Instead, it mostly just feels like another kind of box, and an ugly one, too; less artful, all offense.

Meneghetti, a first-time but remarkably assured filmmaker, gives Two a dreamlike realism, letting the score go ragged in its tensest moments and swooping in artfully on aching closeups and empty spaces.

It feels like a faint insult to say that The Good Nurse could be a premium-cable product from long ago, one of those lightly prestige-y Sunday-night movies Showtime or HBO used to make. But it's also one crafted with sturdy, consummate skill, burnished by two Oscar winners who don't stint on their performances just because most people will end up seeing Nurse on a small screen.

Even as the pacing falters, Majors is impossible to look away from: a man who desperately needs the world to see him — and if they refuse, to feel his pain.

Blunt but brutally effective little slice of supernatural horror.

In the Fade is a flawed filmgoing experience, but still a viscerally affecting one.

It's easy to lose count of the double and triple crosses in Sharper, a silly and unabashedly camp thriller that is, frankly, exactly the kind of sleek, shenanigan-y frolic that bleak midwinter calls for.

Ejiofor’s performance make the movie; the rest, you may just have to take on faith.

It’s a smart, flawed movie about smart, flawed people.

Mbatha-Raw brings a fierce, quiet containment to the lead role, and Hart builds so much mood through her atmospheric cinematography and deliberately slow pacing that it nearly papers over the sketched-in quality of the script. Eventually, though, you start to wish her characters would speak in more than just vague koans and disaster-movie platitudes.

The stuff of a thousand future Twitter gifs, though, is a featured appearance by Keanu Reeves. It’s better not to know too much about his role going in, other than that nearly everything about it has the winking air quotes of a movie star playing directly to his own storied Hollywood history, and that it is for the most part ridiculously fun.

Bombshell belongs to its three main female stars. It’s their fierce, finely shaded performances that transcend the film’s drab visual style and drier episodic moments — not just by speaking truth to power, but by confronting the audience’s own ideas of who the right to do that belongs to.

So come for the crossbows, etc., and to watch Weaving’s star be born in real time; stay for the socio-economic lessons and sweet, sweet revenge.

Subverting expected narratives may have been Silva’s aim all along; still, the turn isn’t just nasty, it’s confounding.

The result is a dadaist swirl of satire, pie-eyed whimsy, and speculative futurism — like "Gulliver’s Travels" through the wrong end of a telescope.

Like some of the old-timey classics it recalls — Blazing Saddles, Airplane, the first Austin Powers — Barb and Star commits to its deep silliness so sweetly and completely that you can't help falling a little bit in love with them too.

For young people suffering, the movie offers both hope and clarity; for more experienced viewers, it may come off a little too much like "Girl, Interrupted" through a Lifetime lens.

Chastain fully commits to her boss-bitch persona, even if we only obliquely learn why she might have chosen such a lonely, mercenary life.

If Big Time isn’t exactly a PSA for good adulting, it’s still an endearingly messy portrait of boyhood and manhood and all the lessons in between.

Life is hard; Downton Abbey is easy.

The movie borders on hagiography, but Gordon is a charmingly voluble storyteller; he’s like Dos Equis’ Most Interesting Man in the World recast as a balding Jewish guy from Long Island.

The movie maps its course by Hanks' steady hand: A ship moving swiftly and with sure purpose — compelled by death and danger, but safe in the certainty of history.

And even as the narrative goes through its sometimes sermonizing paces, it’s hard not to be moved by the singular passion of a woman who effectively dismantled her own life not just to salve her conscience, but to save the soul of a nation.

Guilty, for all its wild-eyed excess, does find some blunt-force propulsion for a while, particularly if you're coming to it new. But the movie seems to mistake the taut minimalism of the original for something that needs to be goosed and adrenalized, a thriller on constant defibrillator.

A gothic moodpiece masquerading as a thriller, My Cousin Rachel is a misdirected swoon of a movie—long on black-veiled romance and ravishing atmosphere and a little short, alas, on dividends.

The film can't seem to stop piling on idiosyncrasies, a kind of willful kookery that mixes uneasily with the more serious elements of personal tragedy and mental illness that run through it.

Sadly, it’s hamstrung by a patchy script (by David Hare) and an oddly flat-footed performance by Rachel Weisz as Lipstadt.

PP2 sometimes feels less like a movie than a two-hour episode of Glee ghostwritten by Amy Schumer; jokes fly like they’re being shot from T-shirt guns at a gonzo pep rally, and not all of them stick the landing.

Honk for Jesus shares a lot of Tammy Faye's small-screen feel and sense for winky episodic comedy; like that movie too, it's held together by the tensile strength of the petite, bedazzled female at its center. Awards-season gold probably won't strike twice in a row for pastor's wives, but Hall deserves some kind of prize for the soul she pours into this part.

A New Era is strictly high-toned formula, from its God's-eye opening over spire-tipped turrets and green-velvet lawns to its soft-focus finish, but it feels like home.

If wallpaper and polyester were any metric to judge a movie by, I'm Your Woman could have been a masterpiece.

Halftime is often hagiography, but a keen and sympathetic one too, designed to humanize a tabloid-headline life and remind us once again that where she comes from (the Block, the boogie-down Bronx) is as integral to her success as beauty or talent or sheer tenacity.

Shyamalan may be saying something meaningful about faith or environmental destruction or the corrosive fraying of the social contract (could this vigilante crew really be motivated by pure homophobia, as Andrew believes?). But the message is mostly lost in sentiment, and a lingering sense of the better, messier movie that might have been.

Barring any greater lessons on motivation or forgiveness, the movie becomes little more than an endurance test; one far easier — at least for the viewer — to fall away from than to stay.

If shrewd one-liners and small moments ultimately override the episodic narrative, Someone‘s takeaway — that love is a messy-splendored thing, and “happily ever after” is just a story that hasn’t finished yet — feels refreshing modern and true.

Triangle hits more marks than it misses, and in a somber, often underwhelming season of would-be arthouse hits, the movie is a bona-fide trip: not the funhouse mirror we need for these ridiculous times, maybe, but one we deserve.

As an instrument of righteousness and retribution, Let Him Go can feel both familiar and at times shockingly brutal, especially in its final climactic moments. Still, there's blunt power in the execution, most of it concentrated in Bezucha's moody big-sky atmosphere, and in the seasoned professionals he's found to tell the tale.

If One Child sometimes seems to raise more questions than it can answer, and more pain than it has room to explore, the movie offers an urgent and affecting reminder of what happens when the rule of law subsumes not just free will but the very act of existing — and the humanity that still, against all odds, endures.

[Perry] also has a way of making even the most telegraphed twists and overheated dialogue ring with conviction, a consummate entertainer to the end.

At times, Amulet can feel a little too in love with style over story; immoderately hung up on gooey close-ups of gutted fish or Magda engaged in a sort of jerky, mesmerizing dance whose offbeat rhythms rival Elaine on Seinfeld. But even as it builds toward a more conventional climax — only the first, it turns out, of several twist endings — the movie casts a grim sort of spell; a brooding, stifled dread that creeps in quietly from the margins, and lingers long after the last triumphant frame.

Beautiful Boy keeps you strung on that line for nearly all of its run time, and sometimes it feels less like a movie than an endurance test — one that’s lovingly, meticulously made but almost too much like real life: an impressionistic series of highs and lows, relapses and recoveries, without the necessary anchor of a cohesive arc.

Even the cast’s uniform excellence can’t quite crack Children’s outer carapace, or bring full life to Fiona’s emotional struggle as she’s forced to confront her own failings. Instead the story drifts iceberg-like toward its carefully muted conclusion, only a small part of its true scope visible above a beautiful, chilly surface.

Pine and Newton work valiantly to fill in the blanks, though the gray-flannel template of the dialogue often pushes back. When they do manage to transcend it, the movie becomes something still rare enough to appreciate: an urbane thriller calibrated for slow burns and analog attention spans.

Writer-director Angus MacLachlan also penned the acclaimed 2005 indie "Junebug," and he aims for the same kind of gentle absurdity here.

Subtle it is not; Strangelove can feel aggressively self-aware, nouveau John Hughes with a pocket full of f-bombs and carefully worked one-liners.

In a genre where winky self-awareness has become standard-issue, Free might have come off as manic and hollow; instead, it has fun having a heart.

Una’s raw, deeply dis­comfiting dance between obsession and exploitation isn’t easy to watch by any metric; they make it hard to look away.

What’s left is primarily a series of grand battleground set pieces — filmed crunchily, and well — and a series of consistently strong performances. (Has Mendelsohn every not been menacing and great in anything?).

Kidman, to her credit, goes all in, but it’s hard to ignore the neon sign over her head that keeps flashing “See? I’m Acting!”

Director Dominic Cooke is mostly known for his Olivier Award-winning theater work, but Chesil never feels stagey or static. It’s beautifully shot, and he pulls lovely performances from both his leads.

A neat, nasty little thriller with a brutally effective final third.

Based on a lauded 2011 novel of the same name, Lamb is about as strange as it sounds: a Lolita story almost more unsettling for the lines it doesn’t explicitly cross.

Touched With Fire has something to say about a thorny, serious subject, but the light it shines doesn’t really illuminate anything new.

A dizzy, fizzy comedy with occasional flashes of real wit.

Richardson and Ferreira have a sweet, sharp chemistry: one the type-A perfectionist trying desperately to keep it together, the other a hedonist in green fun fur whose outrageous exterior masks a deeper hurt.

Boogie had a dramatic throughline, and something genuinely unsettling to say about the strange soul-bargaining of fame. Chazelle often steers his characters toward tragedy or anguish, without ever quite rooting his inscrutable thesis in anything real.

Director Gregory Jacobs worked under original Magic Mike helmer Steven Soderberg for years, but sadly he has almost none of his former boss’s ability to elevate material that is essentially one lamé thong away from a TLC reality series.

The shrewd, relentless winkiness of McKay’s filmmaking style may have worked better, though, for breaking down subprime mortgages in The Big Short than it does chronicling a deadly misbegotten war. What remains then is the cipher at the center of Vice: the Man Who Wasn’t There, and probably never will be.

Ocean’s 8’s girls-just-wanna-have-grand-larceny conceit is the kind of starry, high-gloss goof the summer movie season was made for, even if it feels lightweight by the already zero-gravity standards of the genre.

Even at a relatively brief hour and 37 minutes, the familiar contours of Scanlon's story line struggle to conjure the wonder that Pixar’s most transcendent movies do; instead of truly new, it’s mostly old things borrowed, and tinted blue.

For a lot of its runtime, Velvet is fun and silly and enjoyably outrageous. It’s hard, though, to walk away with a real sense of anything more than blood on the canvas and a blank where your feelings — beyond mild bemusement, and a sudden appetite for prime Los Angeles real estate — should be.

Adapting the script from his own 2020 audio play, Eisenberg treats his cast with measured acidity, drawing out their snarky moods and narcissistic missteps without mocking them too cruelly; you may not particularly love these characters, but that's no match for how little they like themselves.

Ejiofor is eminently relatable as an analog man who can't seem to understand where it all went wrong, and Clarke's eyebrows knit with such pained expressiveness, it's as if they're having their own wriggling monologue throughout the movie.

Does the movie’s pop-feminist message need to be as consistently, cartoonishly violent as it is? Almost definitely not. But in a world gone mad, the catharsis of Prey’s twisted sisterhood doesn’t just read as pandemonium for its own sake; it’s actually pretty damn sweet.

The whole thing is feverishly earnest and more than a little manipulative, but it’s also possibly the prettiest two hours of emotional ­masochism so far this year.

Nothing in Lost City would really hang together without its main pair, whose chemistry movies like this inevitably live or die on.

The movie may feel minor next to Vinterberg’s more serious work, but it’s more personal, too: A messy, tender window into the world that shaped him.

Give Sam Raimi a multiverse, and he will take a mile. The director's take on Doctor Strange feels like many disparate and often deeply confusing things — comedy, camp horror, maternal drama, sustained fireball — but it is also not like any other Marvel movie that came before it. And 23 films into the franchise, that's a wildly refreshing thing, even as the story careens off in more directions than the Kaiju-sized octo-beast who storms into an early scene, bashing its tentacles through small people and tall buildings like an envoy from some nightmare aquarium.

Saints can't be what Sopranos was — without the time or the ones who've been lost to tell it, fuggedaboutit. But for a hundred-something minutes, it feels close enough to coming home again.

What keeps the film from feeling like period-piece amber, all whispered alliances and wiggery, is the keenly feminist sensibility of first-time director Josie Rourke (her background is largely in theater) and the fierce charisma and complicated humanity of its two leads, sovereigns till the end.

In the end, it’s their fundamental goodness — not all the wicked, winky “bad” — that’s easily the best thing about Boys.

If it all sometimes feels trapped in the amber of his intentions, Brooklyn still casts a quiet sort of spell: a meticulously, lovingly made mood piece, full of empathy for the ones who can’t speak — at least not always the way they want to — for themselves.

Here it often feels clumsy and maddeningly inconsistent, stranding Fraser in a melodrama undeserving of his lovely, unshowy performance. Whatever he wins for The Whale — and early prizes have already come — he deserves. The rest is just chum.

Forster (Finding Neverland, World War Z) never quite finds the alchemy in Milne’s timeless tales, or the melancholy sweetness of his being-and-nothingness koans. Instead it’s just an earnest tribute, tastefully faithful to the source — and flatter, somehow, than the story ever was on the page.

It’s British stage actress Erivo who feels like the real star. Her steely charisma and gorgeous powerhouse of a voice (Goddard takes every plausible opportunity to let her loose on a classic 1960s songbook; can you blame him?) is what gives the movie not just a different kind of heroine, but a heart.

It's a gentler, sadder movie than the dizzying trailer suggests, and less driven by plot than a stickler for storytelling like Alithea might prefer: a loopy little jewel-box reverie, slipped between two Furies.

It’s also a haunting, thought-provoking piece of work, made infinitely more powerful by all the things it chooses not to show.

It turns out that Rules Don’t Apply is hardly about Hughes at all. Instead, it’s a small-scale, lovingly filmed study of the blossoming romance between two fictional show-business newbies.

Jones reportedly did nearly all the stunts herself in a real balloon, and she makes the stakes feel fretfully real despite the dreamy, almost painterly quality of George Steel’s cinematography. By the time the story comes back to earth, though, that urgency is largely gone with the wind, and the film returns to what it was: a whimsical, oddly airless curiosity.

A nervy, deeply felt drama that gets a little lost on its winding path to redemption but still finds a way home.

Director David Leitch (Atomic Blonde, Deadpool 2) seems to know how to set up his outrageous set pieces, then get out of the way often enough to let his stars do what they need to do: Joke, chokehold, kiss, and smash until the helicopters come home.

Smallfoot has its own silly, beastie charm.

Gucci might have been a better movie if it had fully committed to the high camp its Blondie-soundtracked trailer promises. It's more serious than that, at least intermittently; a strange melange of too much and not enough. The script also skimps, weirdly, on the actual murder, which is treated mostly as a framing device and felonious afterthought until the final moments. But even a House divided is still more fun than it probably should be: a big messy chef's kiss to money and fashion and above all, movie stars — criming and scheming like they have nothing left to lose, until it's true.

A shiny-bright jukebox musical with a heart of gold and a plot of pure polyester, Mamma Mia! Here We Go Again works hard to be the feel-giddy movie experience of the summer. And it mostly succeeds in its own glittery, aggressively winsome way.

The story belongs to its young cast, and Lords' ramshackle comedy sweetly captures the rank anxiety, random humiliations, and undiluted hope of being young.