Leah Greenblatt

Unlike Remorse, and other bloody misfires out this month, Dead isn't particularly ugly or offensive; it's engaging enough and sometimes almost unintentionally fun. For a star who so rarely chooses to be on screen these days though, it feels like another kind of mortal sin, at least in Hollywood: forgettable.

Wrath is just another loose bag of lizard-brain thrills and wood-block dialogue: too ugly to be camp, too grimly familiar to feel new.

The movie marches on in grim, silly lockstep to its themes: a compendium of jump-scare terrors almost exhaustively heard and seen, but rarely calibrated to make you feel much of anything at all.

Vengeance is wrought without remorse and even less sense. The only sure thing, judging by the promise of a post-credits scene, is a sequel.

Writer-director Ricky Staub brings real-life rhythms and texture to his feature debut by filling the screen with that homegrown scene, and casting several actual riders from the city's Fletcher Street Stables in supporting roles.

Enter Shiva at your own risk then: a hell of Danielle's own making maybe, but still a witty, jittery trip.

If you want a great monster movie that's actually also about people — how they think and talk and feel when they're more than just screaming kaiju chum in the water — try 2017's Colossal, currently streaming on Hulu. If not, maybe Godzilla vs. Kong's brawling lizard-brain shock and awe is exactly the void you came for.

Most illuminating are the various journalists, attorneys, witnesses, and admissions counselors who testify to the case

If Raya's outlines and endpoint are strictly fairy-tale familiar (evil is vanquished, good triumphs, reconstituted dragons romp), the movie feels fresh not just for the mere fact of its female-forward and predominately Asian cast, but for the breeziness with which it bears the weight of Disney history.

As her success spikes exponentially, so does the film's momentum, shifting toward the more familiar touchstones of a traditional music doc: The smear of foreign cities seen through a town-car window; the endless roundelay of interviews, meet-and-greets, and promo signings.

The skillfulness of the telling, paradoxically, can make The Father feel at times almost too painful to sit through; as the story shifts elliptically in and out of time, Anthony's losses become our own.

There's only so much real-world intrigue a crime committed almost entirely via ones and zeroes can entail, and the script's halfhearted attempts to make it all Mean Something feel more than a little callow in the end.

For all the frenzied action of the final scenes though, there's an airless, overwrought sense of diminishing returns — and that's a comedown we've seen too many times before.

Daniels has a way of molding the chaotic murk of history into something neat and shiny — whether it be the roots of Holiday's addiction or the decidedly 2021 cut of Rhodes' rippling torso.

Pike . . . feels unleashed by the wickedness of the role, gleefully sinking those gleaming white teeth into her finest villainy since Gone Girl. As the mercenary Marla — cool-eyed and indomitable, a razor blade poured into a buttercream blazer — she's delicious, a shiny-haired nihilist who couldn't care less if she tried.

The immersive look of the film, with its strikingly unadorned landscapes and dim-lit interiors, casts a spell, and Waterston (the Fantastic Beasts franchise) and Kirby (The Crown, Pieces of Woman), bring both urgency and fragility to their constrained characters — two lost souls aligned and finding love in a hopeless place.

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.

Director Kevin MacDonald (The Last King of Scotland, Touching the Void) gives the movie both the global sweep of a thriller and the more granular details of a procedural, though in the end hardly any of it takes place in a courtroom.

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.

A wry low-key dramedy that lands with surprising sweetness.

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.

It feels like an actor's film: a delicate, melancholy study in black and white, nearly every scene filled with careful silences and subtext.

Black Messiah's center of gravity has to be a Hampton you can't look away from, and Kaluuya — alternately raw, tender, and incendiary — duly electrifies every scene he's in. Righteous as the road may be, his Fred hasn't been flattened to fit the broad Wikipedia-worn contours of a martyr or a hero; he lives and breathes, down to the last indelible frame.

The movie settles into the blackest kind of buddy comedy — a lacerating slice of nihilism rooted in real despair, and real I-love-you-man tenderness too.

Mass, as maddening as it can be, still feels like an urgent and necessary movie, if not at all an easy one — and an exceptional opportunity too to watch four great character actors, finally called up from the sidelines to center stage, do what they do.

Jones — who trained intensively in voice work and American Sign Language for the role — has the gift of coming off like a genuine teenager, and more particularly a girl torn between her unique obligations to the people she's always loved and known and the bigger dreams she holds for herself.

The interviews are their own historical document, though it's the visceral thrill of being inside all those archival clips — the flick of Simone's wrist, an ecstatic face in the crowd — that makes Summer of Soul comes most fully alive, somehow both as fresh as yesterday and as far away as the moon.

In the larger sense of whatever a movie like this promises to be — that you will laugh (in a properly low-key English way) and cry (but not too outrageously), and feel the sudden, urgent need to drink milky tea and own a pair of dungarees — The Dig more than fulfills its destiny.