Marshall Shaffer

La Grazia embodies much of the Sorrentino appeal, even if it registers in more of a minor key for the Italian auteur. The film is playful when it wants to be and pensive when it needs to be.

By the end of The Incomer, Paxton makes explicit that this is a story about making decisions from an outlook that favors hope over fear. And, at least for the duration of the film, he creates an imaginary universe where such a choice feels both logical and lovable.

In line with his protagonist’s ever-shifting whims, a spirit of restless reinvention characterizes director Giovanni Tortorici’s aesthetic approach.

It’s a perceptive film about the way men of a certain age act around each other. (Which, is to say, like boys.)

For In a Violent Nature, careful calibration of chills just feels like second nature.

The film’s lack of character development might not appear so evident were it not in such stark contrast with all the other elements of “Harvest.”

The humor lands as if it’s coming not from the writers but through the characters by its grounding in the details of their lives.

Even the most hair-brained of Wain’s films have some quality elements, and Gail Daughtry and the Celebrity Sex Pass is certainly no exception to that rule. But it’s nevertheless a slight disappointment to see a luminary operating at the lower end of his power and promise.

It’s engaging to watch without requiring viewers to completely turn off their brains. Van Sant makes “Dead Man’s Wire” move like a well-oiled machine, even if he can only get so much mileage from an old vehicle. Simple, familiar pleasures are still pleasures.

This is not just content you ingest. Avatar: The Way of Water is a movie you bodily inhabit for three stunning hours. We come to this place for magic, indeed.

Comfort with loveable loserdom is the glue – or maybe the scotch tape – that holds together a rickety contraption careening constantly toward calamity.

Ultimately, Scott knows when to let the script beguile the mind and when to let the action dazzle the eyes.

A simplicity of spirit guides writer-director Isaiah Saxon’s fable-like feature debut.

Mike Flanagan’s film doesn’t escape the mires of unpersuasive pop psychology.

Until the final shot, the Zellner Brothers leave unclear whether all of their oddball observations are building to a grand statement about humanity or a punchline. Sasquatch Sunset can accommodate readings of both.

The brothers tend not to dally much with their narratives, but even adjusting for their typical brevity, Young Ahmed feels like a cursory examination of the social issues they raise. It lacks the incisiveness of their other glances directly into the heart of Belgian society.

The Return may render its mythological figures lifelike through flesh and blood, but nowhere inside that viscera lies a beating heart.

While the film does struggle a bit with some jumbled tonality, the latest work from the famously prolific French filmmaker strikes a new and surprisingly stirring combination of steamy and sweet thanks to the love story at its core.

Last Night in Soho, with all its warts and wonders, shows you can teach an old dog some new tricks. Wright shows he still hasn't hit his ceiling as a filmmaker, but's heartening to see him stretch and reach rather than just keeping his artistic ambitions planted on the floor.

The Disney animators clearly had a blast creating a world beyond their wildest dreams and finding the connections between all the curios they created. Too bad that they could not let the wider creative team in on the fun – and the audience as well, for that matter. A visual feast leaves the other four senses wanting.

The film is at its best when it’s keyed to its main character’s breakneck energy.

Its zippy stylings never feel derivative or overly familiar. Watching this adaptation is like getting caught up inside a storybook drama designed for adults, maintaining a mythic quality while harnessing the complexities of reality.

For a film so fixated on provoking fear and dread through the medium of audio, it’s naturally strongest when it does not bother to stimulate the eyes at all.

As told through Szumowska’s highly symbolic aesthetic, The Other Lamb makes for a chilling glance at the strange pull that cults exert on their members and how their values imprint themselves on their members in irrevocable ways.

This bloated documentary will not create any new fans of Led Zeppelin because MacMahon caters exclusively to the group’s superfans.

Laura Casabé abstracts the typical emotions of tortured teens, only to then amplify them.

The film movingly conjures the feeling of music’s creation of a suspended present tense.

The film gets too caught up in concern trolling about the sexual timidity of today’s youth.

Condon’s conducting of the whole affair is technically competent … dazzling, even, in sections. But all that flashiness is not blinding enough to conceal the gap between the tune it sings and the routine it dances. That is to say: Kiss of the Spider Woman may be about movie magic, but the film itself isn’t always magic.

Even if Master Gardener can feel like a bit of a potboiler moral drama, the heat generated is proof that Schrader can still bring the fire. The filmmaker grapples thornily and thoughtfully with difficult issues and destructive people, finding new ways to approach the questions that still haunt him.

It’s unmistakably a return to joy for a legendary director, and that goes a long way in making this film stand out in a sea of ill-conceived sequels.

Hansen-Løve is undoubtedly aided by the soulful performances she draws from her two leading actors. Banerjee, in her first on-screen appearance, both dazzles and delights with an effortless charm. But it's Kolinka, making his third and most substantial collaboration with the director, who leaves the lasting impression.

Shephard’s film is a half-baked thinkpiece on cancel culture in search of a plausible narrative. While hitching her ideas to a scammer story, it loses the thread in a sea of topicality. No matter the potency contained in portions of her message, “Not Okay” is muddled by her delivery through the wrong medium

Shannon’s first feature might begin to sag under the weight of this stilted dialogue and stunted duration, but there is still a lot to admire in Eric Larue. Those qualities are not necessarily all concentrated in Judy Greer, either. Even if the film moves in circles, at least it’s circling something honest and true about spirituality and society alike.

Once the basic parameters of Franco’s thought experiment in Dreams are grasped, what’s left is an obvious parable about immigration with little to offer beyond spitefulness and a smugly superior sense of self-loathing.

Dead for a Dollar provides a decently intriguing yarn within the framework of the Western that burrows a few inches below the surface. No one can say Hill didn’t hold up his end of the deal, which may be all that matters to him in the end.

It does not take much imagination to imagine a version of “Rob Peace” where, given the room to sit with events, Rob’s journey provides a damning X-ray of American society’s shortsightedness. But far too often, the film settles for simply conveying information through dramatization.

Be it sexuality, gender, class, age, or race, there’s scarcely a hot-button issue of identity that Emerald Fennell won’t invoke to amplify the stakes of an obvious metaphor.

The Whale" stays too intellectual in its exploration of the physical and spiritual dimensions of redemption to and from bodily captivity. This comes at the expense of the director's strengths in the visceral realm. It restricts what could have been a truly great comeback performance from Brendan Fraser into being merely a good one.

It’s still a hilarious adventure, but Ulman loses some of her magic within a more diffuse narrative framework.

It proves entertaining and enlightening when exploring Jacobs’ contributions to the world of fashion. But more often, it’s just like listening in on an engaging chat between two artist friends who share a fan-like admiration of each other’s craft.

Ballerina is passable as a continuation of “John Wick” mythology. However, it’s not strong enough to organically generate comparable enthusiasm for continued storytelling with this character.

The film never manages to reconcile the enormity of the Holocaust with how ordinary a bureaucrat Eichmann was.

Boston Strangler steps right up to the line of the hokiest girlboss tropes and narrowly avoids crossing into a cringeworthy injection of contemporary feminism into a historical narrative. Rather than blaring its priorities throughout, Ruskin’s film gradually reveals the biases suppressing the idea that women’s stories matter. It’s just enough of a twist on an otherwise imitative, iterative story to hold interest.

[Boden and Fleck] re-emerge carrying some of the hallmarks of comic book cinema as well: an overemphasis on in-jokes, a sprawling web of larger-than-life yet flimsy characters, and a belief that a kick-ass fight scene at the end can overwrite many of the wrongs that came before.

The scattershot Mother Mary can never effectively find the connective tissue between different modes of storytelling. To put it in musical terms, this is less a mixtape and more of a playlist on a chaotic shuffle.

Christy lulls us into complacency by deviating little from the standard inspirational sports-movie playbook.

When given the space to explore the knottiness of being a gay man in a world taking but tentative steps toward recognizing the community’s full humanity, Luke Evans provides the complex representation that audiences are craving.

Not unlike the on-screen pair, Mickey (Sebastian Stan) and Chloe (Denise Gough), Papadimitropoulos excels in exploring the couple’s carnal journey but can never quite hit a groove when it comes to finding stability in their cohabitation.

There’s a floor for entertainment with a cast this strong, especially two leads who can contort themselves bodily and emotionally with such dexterity. But “The Bride!” spends too long operating at that level because it cannot escape the mire of confusion about its own identity.

Hocus Pocus fans wanted a new movie, but Disney just gave them a mascot appearance masquerading as a sequel instead.

The film does not waste the brilliance of its two leading performances. But it doesn’t expand much upon their skilled interpretations, either.

The Pale Blue Eye works best when Cooper lets it be a two-hander between Landor and Poe. Iron sharpens iron as the two men push themselves down fruitful paths of deductive reasoning. The game of twisted allegiances, false partnerships, and premature resolutions makes for a wicked mystery that continues unfolding in riveting ways.

The film ultimately feels like little more than hired hand work from Wright. What he lacks in compositional vision, he tries to make up for in clever casting (Colman Domingo, William H. Macy, and Lee Pace all deliver their best), as well as some simple gags. But like the people in Ben Richards’ fictional dystopia discover, amusing ourselves to death can only go so far. “The Running Man” settles for being good when, if the topline talent had leaned into their fortes, it could have been truly great.

Law’s take on the Russian leader feels both real and mysterious — two features that the film otherwise struggles to corral across its unwieldy runtime.

Whether talking to himself or talking at his audience as if delivering wisdom deserving of an inscription on stone tablets, Iñárritu has nothing new or interesting to say. He's established he can move a camera with astonishing fluidity as well as blur fantasy and reality seamlessly. Now what? "Bardo" is a film high on its own supply yet low on any sense of actual intrigue or intuition.

If the people on screen only feel like characters, then no amount of creepy creature design or surprising twist can make a venture such as Perkins’ here register as anything other than an antiseptic experience.

It’s Kormákur’s directorial verve and vision that elevates Beast to something slightly more than just disposable entertainment. Perhaps one day, he’ll choose a studio blockbuster with a story more worthy of his talents.

Green’s humanistic stamp is evident when Wahlberg expresses a soulful sentiment or denunciation of narrow-minded thinking, yet there’s little for any director to do when faced with such an untidy script.

Assayas becomes so subservient to the sheer volume of events and information he must bring to life that the film completely subsumes any sense of personal style or voice.

The film tastes like the cinematic equivalent of Clooney's tequila brand Casamigos. That is to say, The Boys in the Boat goes down smoothly, if somewhat unremarkably.

Orphan: First Kill only merits viewing if it is a viewer’s first exposure to the series. For anyone else, a rewatch of the original ought to do – it holds up remarkably well on repeat viewing.

As it goes on, Cocaine Bear becomes far too sober an affair for its subject matter, where no amount of carnage can fully compensate for its lack of comedy.

Watts certainly makes that internal struggle compelling without resorting to overwrought physical transformation.

Trying to clarify the fog of war is a patently paradoxical task, Gates successfully argues – and she can prove the assertion within the grand satirical framework of the script or in a wry comic detail derived from the immediacy of a scene.

2073 might sacrifice some eloquence to make its creative points, but the sincerity shines poignantly and powerfully. Let it be a galvanizing call to action.

The best that can be said about everything surrounding Powell and Sweeney in Anyone But You is that they mostly have the good sense to move the plot quickly and then let the stars sparkle.

The two creative engines of the series might seem like strange bedfellows — the brainy Soderbergh and the brawny Tatum — but the duo brings out the best in each other. The director appreciates the earnestness of his leading man and finds ways to deepen that charm through quick-witted humor.

There’s a good movie about therapy and PTSD inside Jay Duplass’ See You When I See You. The trouble is, it’s buried in a so-so family ensemble film about shared grief and recovery.

The American Society of Magical Negroes is a gracious work that both shows and critiques the very nature of humility.

The material’s dualities trap Ford between continents, not to mention genres and tones.

The drama in Downtown Owl often feels stilted and too locked in to Klosterman’s observations instead of the character’s actions.

A need for speed works for Sonic the character, not “Sonic The Hedgehog” the franchise itself. The film never feels like it’s thinking beyond the next laugh line. It’s so caught up in the adrenaline rush of the present moment that Sonic The Hedgehog 2 completely loses sight of the endgame.

The film is in fact so busy introducing characters and churning through plot points that there’s not really even time to let animation powerhouse Illumination give it a spin of inspired silliness that made the “Despicable Me” franchise such an unexpected hit.

They/Them lacks an overarching perspective on the very nature of conversion therapy practitioners, perhaps because it is so straight-jacketed by the Blumhouse house style. In search of topicality for its audience, it sacrifices authenticity to itself.

There’s enough humanity from the story and performers alike that cuts to the soul and mostly offsets the uninspired direction. But “The Son” should shine at least a little brighter through the dark material given these participants and their previous triumphs.

Fleischer channels the tenor of the influences his film wears on its sleeve: the manipulative music demanding awe, the lighthearted spirit of the action, the smirking star-power needed to sell quippy banter. But his tonal fidelity cannot entirely cover the seams of this sloppily assembled script.

Hamm can be a stealth comedic force in any project, adding a slight escalation or modulation of the energy level to alter the stakes. He has a unique talent for somehow fusing the comic man and straight man personas into one. Yet Maggie Moore(s) gives him no chance to play either because Slattery cannot decide if his “Mad Men” co-star is the lead of a romantic drama or a heist flick.

The film has no answers because Lin plays it more like a heist film—where the bounty is the purity of the unexposed North Sentinelese—than a sincere human drama about faith and identity. Lin entertains as a result but struggles to enlighten.

Let this film with no bite serve as rock bottom for the IP era.

Rise of the Beasts proves that Bayhem is still strong within the series. Worse, the parts that linger are not the visual signature of sweaty, sun-streaked bedlam. It’s the noisy, nonsensical insistence that submission to sensory overload should outrank any other storytelling consideration.

Guns Akimbo glides on the strength of Radcliffe’s work, which is equally committed to selling a self-deprecating verbal barb as it is to executing an extended bit of physical humor.

There's good reason to be excited for how Green will bring this all to a head in his grand finale. Halloween Kills manages to put a playful but petrifying spin on mythology without resorting to cheap self-referentiality.

There’s more to recommend than not here, thanks to Nathan’s keen visual eye and Jupe’s complex interpretation of a figure often flattened into a neat function.

Call it “naïve-core,” perhaps, as the film so thoroughly loses touch with reality by avoiding conflict of any kind. His empty platitudes like “humans help humans” are rendered useless and risible inside a work that seems to lack even a basic understanding of humanity in 2008, 2025, or any time at all.

Like a Spider-Man pointing meme doomed to continue eternally, ‘Dominion’ points to the terrifying possibility that nostalgia might serve as a renewable resource for Hollywood. (Ironic, given the fossil-fueled power of ‘Jurassic.’) Trevorrow gives audiences what they want – or, at the very least, what the studio bosses at Universal think they want. But at what cost?

Argylle proves hollow from the inside out.

It’s unclear if Steffen & Flip believe in a hell for their characters. But their 85-minute torture device disguised as a movie proves they believe in one for their viewers. Not even cheese ‘n’ rice can save this dismal enterprise from doom.