Matt Singer

Like The LEGO Movie before it, The LEGO Batman Movie is far more entertaining than a giant piece of crass commercialism has any right to be.

The themes introduced in the early scenes are explored in the second act, further expressed through the chases and fights, and resolved in the conclusion. This might sound like rudimentary stuff. But it’s sometimes shocking how few blockbusters successfully pull off the rudimentary stuff.

Like HBO’s new Watchmen series, Flanagan’s Doctor Sleep doesn’t simply rehash its source material, and instead uses its characters, setting, and themes in smart and novel ways.

With Tom Hagen and a different Mary, The Godfather Coda could actually rise to the level of the first two Godfather movies. Without them, it’s still a fairly good sequel, a sad story about guilt, with an endless supply of memorably dialogue from Coppola and Mario Puzo (“The higher I go, the crookeder it becomes.”) and an underrated Al Pacino performance.

Stoller cooked up a solid premise, assembled a funny cast, gave them some good scenes to play and lines to deliver, and let them do their thing.

Spider-Man: Homecoming is a return to form, featuring an incredibly likable cast, a compelling and complicated villain, and a irrepressibly charming Spider-Man. Welcome home, Peter.

But that’s Spider-Man in a nutshell. He’s the guy who perpetually breaks stuff, then has to patch it all back together. (Good thing he’s got those webs.) No Way Home, with its use of the old characters from previous Spider-Man movies, really gets that idea. Power and responsibility are important. Seeing something through after you mess it up? That’s the mark of a genuine hero.

F1 never quite says “It’s not the car, it’s the driver” — but it comes awfully close on several occasions. And it makes it clear that when it comes to action movies, it’s not the subject, it’s the director. That strikes me as a pretty old fashioned notion, and a good one.

Although Teen Titans Go! to the Movies is ostensibly about spoofing superheroes and their hoariest clichés, the film is loaded from top to bottom with loving Easter eggs from DC Comics history.... As a result, it’s actually a far more affectionate portrait of comic books — and a more persuasive argument in favor of their escapist pleasures — than any of the so-called “serious” DC movies.

The cast was the original’s greatest asset, and every single character of note is back, along with the original film’s mordant sense of humor and surprisingly charming sentimentality. Best of all, 2U weaponizes your knowledge of the original — your confidence that you have seen this all before and you know what’s going to happen — and uses it against you.

Dunkirk would have been even better, though, if any of the characters seemed as fully realized as the aerial and naval warfare. Without that, it works best as pure sensory experience; incredible visuals, intense battles. In the rare quiet moments, we’re invited to observe an unusual instrument featured in Hans Zimmer’s score: The ticking of a clock, a reminder that while Nolan can change the march of time, his heroes cannot.

Yes, 28 Years Later is gory and violent and the zombie kills with that jerky Bullet Time iPhone rig are cool. But the film is also thoughtful, even contemplative at times.

In an earlier era, Babygirl might feel less novel, and its unwillingness to push its story into truly uncomfortable territory might be a bigger issue. These days, when Hollywood has pretty much abandoned sexuality as a topic of serious discussion, the film can easily lay claim to the title of top dog.

Even though Walker is still present, his absence is already felt. It is strange to watch a movie that is this much fun and this sad all at the same time.

In another franchise, it would stand as a significant achievement. In this franchise, it almost qualifies as a disappointment.

Prisoners is too nuanced to dismiss, but too silly to take seriously.

Superficially, the movie looks a lot like past Phillips comedies about men behaving badly, with dirty jokes and wacky hijinks galore. But War Dogs is more critical of its protagonists’ behavior, and there’s plenty of sad commentary about the state of modern America.

It’s a mature consideration of the ideas underpinning its comic-book motifs. It’s also easily the best Wolverine movie of the three, and an impressive sendoff for Jackman’s version of the character.

Durkin, a self-described wrestling fan from childhood, has managed to stuff a moving tribute to the art form and its practitioners into a two-hour feature. There’s just so much story to tell here.

I can (and have) defended each of the later Terminator sequels, but there’s no question Dark Fate is the best of the bunch.

The characters and their relationships are strong and the dialogue is sharp, but the whole thing feels like a minor installment in an ongoing series.

On the whole, Inside Out 2 lacks the structural elegance of the first film, and it holds far fewer surprises for viewers on a narrative level. Still, whether you call them anxieties or fears, Inside Out 2’s depiction of tween insecurities is right on the money.

Onward’s ups and downs suggest these probably are less magical times at Pixar. But that doesn’t mean with enough hard work or concentration — or maybe just following your gut — that the magic can’t come back, if only for a little while.

At its best, Days Of Future Past feels not just like an X-Men comic book, but like an X-Men comic-book crossover... Like Days Of Future Past, crossovers in comics tend to be light on character development. But when they’re good, the huge stakes and epic scale of the action make them hard to put down.

As a director, Berg is known for his brutal action scenes, and while Deepwater Horizon’s second half is full of intense sequences, the film’s first half is just as exciting thanks to the wonderfully uncomfortable dynamics between Wahlberg, Russell, and Malkovich.

Creed II is very much a Rocky sequel. It’s bigger, louder, and more over the top than its predecessor, with a more formulaic story and more absurd boxing matches. It’s satisfying as a pop confection, but it’s not as special or as rich as its predecessor.

Even if it falls a little short as a character study, the fact that it’s both hugely weird and hugely watchable is impressive.

Surrounded by so many bloated, unsatisfying movies, The Shallows is as refreshing as a quick dip on a hot summer day — preferably in a pool, not the ocean. They tend to be safer and less shark-infested.

A few clunky lines of dialogue aside, the movie mirrors the honorable thief at its center: Methodical, cool, and effective.

The era Enter the Clones of Bruce chronicles wasn’t that long ago, and yet it feels entirely alien to our own.

The Hitman’s Bodyguard is not the best movie of the summer, but it is easily its most pleasant surprise. An unapologetically violent and vulgar buddy action comedy, it updates the template set forth by Lethal Weapon and particularly Midnight Run for a new era.

Back in the day, the endless comparisons between Shyamalan and Hitchcock felt like a bit of a trap themselves. With Trap, though, there’s no point trying to escape them.

I believe Mangold directed the Dylan movie he wanted to, and in some ways A Complete Unknown is interesting precisely because it is a willfully withholding portrait of an enigmatic star. Then again, it's hard to make a completely satisfying movie about a subject that its director seems to believe cannot be understood.

The film isn’t about catastrophe; it’s about the beauty of what happens when everyone works together to solve a problem.

The film works effectively on its own terms as a new variation on a timeless subgenre, and as a warning to people who share their lives freely online.

There were times I wished Freaky was a little bit bolder and more surprising. Still, it’s an entertaining showcase for Vaughn and Newton, and a solid entry in the body-swap canon. In other words, it’s exactly what you think it is, inside and out.

Incredibles 2 is kind of like Jack-Jack; relatively small, extremely smart, bursting with potential, and capable of mutating into a new form in a matter of seconds.

Wright and co-writer Krysty Wilson-Cairns screenplay falters a little in the third act; it relies on a couple of twists that are either too poorly established or too obvious to properly land. (They might also undermine the film’s themes, although that’s debatable.) Still, even when the story stumbles, the cinematography by Chung-hoon Chung is absolutely gorgeous.

I wound up walking out of The Batman with a bit of a sour taste in my mouth. The more I thought about it, though, the more I appreciated Reeves’ ambitions and his willingness to do something that wasn’t just more of the same old Batman. He really did make you see the character in a new way. Even the stuff in the shadows.

Popstar feels a bit like elite military snipers shooting fish in a barrel. Their aim is true, but the targets are almost too easy — not to mention awfully familiar.

Bill & Ted Face the Music breezes by for 95 minutes, cruising along with the same chill energy that Bill and Ted bring to every room they enter. It’s admittedly very slight, and the ending is way too abrupt. Still, Matheson and Solomon managed to make a movie about how life’s accumulating failures can turn people cynical without making Bill and Ted into cynics themselves.

All told, Barbie is a fascinating movie, even if it is occasionally a little frustrating and often more fun to look at than it is laugh-out-loud funny. I think my daughters will probably enjoy it quite a bit — when they watch it when they’re a few years older.

The film is almost as messy as its characters’ love lives, and the early scenes, which take a long time establishing the various subplots, play less like a dramedy than a comedy that could have used more jokes. But the movie gets more earnest and impassioned (not to mention better) as it goes along.

The fate of the world, and Project Mary as a whole, ultimately rests on Ryan Gosling’s hunky shoulders. The movie might eventually evolve into a two-hander about a pair of mismatched scientists, but one of the buddies here doesn’t even have hands, and Gosling is the only human face on screen for half the runtime. That he manages to hold the audience’s attention, and occasionally makes them laugh and even cry when he has nothing and no one to play off of is a testament to his enormous star power and charisma.

Never Go Back could have used a bit more personality in the bad guy department, and the middle section sags a bit before the inevitable (and satisfying) denouement. But everyone involved seems to understand exactly what kind of movie they’re trying to make, and they deliver on just about every promise made by the title Jack Reacher: Never Go Back.

If you're looking for something lean and unpretentious, you should be pretty satisfied.

So many blockbusters these days are designed to comfort viewers with the familiar; giving them exactly what they expect in narcotizing doses of beloved intellectual properties. While Mutant Mayhem obviously originated from the same commercial impulse, it adds a lot of novel wrinkles to the old Ninja Turtles formula.

Even at their most bewildering, the raw imagination and distinctive imagery on display are always thrilling.

In my mind, there’s no question Toy Story 4 is the weakest movie in the series. But it’s also the riskiest and the most pleasantly unpredictable.

Though the plot is predictable, individual scenes (and individual targets) are anything but. In the film’s best moments, it’s more than funny; it’s exciting, and almost as daring as its indomitable lead actor.

Lee has already made another movie in high frame rate, and seems to have a solid handle on how to use it to his advantage. “HFR” makes water and cityscapes look spectacular, and Gemini Man has plenty of both. And it makes action scenes even more visceral, especially ones that utilize long takes to allow for a lot of movement through the frame towards and away from the camera. There’s a long take of Smith’s character riding a motorcycle in Colombia that will go down in history as one of the coolest bike stunts ever.

While The Lighthouse didn’t hit me as deeply or as sharply as The Witch, the fact that such a strange feature can still be produced with so few concessions to the mainstream, and that it’s coming to theaters, feels like a breath of fresh air — albeit one cut with at least a few Willem Dafoe farts.

While this movie may not reach the heights of Pixar’s finest achievements, it certainly stands as not only the best Cars, but the most mature one as well.

If The Finest Hours is light on surprises it’s still heavy on suspense, as the script by Scott Silver, Paul Tamasy, and Eric Johnson treats each new obstacle in Bernie and Ray’s paths as a new brainteasing puzzle with an impossible solution.

All of Wicked’s best moments are still the ones from the stage. There are a lot of those great moments, though; certainly more than I expected. When Erivo’s Elphaba hits the soaring high notes in Wicked’s signature song, “Defying Gravity,” it’s enough to make you wish the wait for the second half of the film was only 15 minutes, instead of an entire year.

Between the two, I greatly prefer Wuthering Heights, which looks and sounds fantastic, peppers its torrid love story with a few moments of absurd humor — did I mention the veiny, fleshy wallpaper? — and carries itself with the assured confidence of its Byronic hero. (I’m a philistine, but I’m not a dummy.)

Although Star Wars has always been about the past, The Force Awakens is ironically at its best when it looks the future.

Like another of the year’s very entertaining action movies, RRR, it uses real events as a jumping-off point to tell an invented tale flecked with real history supported by fanciful storytelling. In other words, it’s a movie, not a documentary. And a fairly exciting one at that.

Dory is an entertaining and heartfelt sequel, but it never quite shakes the feeling that Pixar, a studio known for breaking new ground in animation, is retracing its steps this time out.

Washington and Rocky’s scenes are flat-out electric. Even when they’re just talking over the phone, there’s an intensity to their scenes sorely lacking from everything that precedes them. In fact, Rocky brings so much passion to his scenes that Washington actually has to level up his own game up to keep pace. The pair’s confrontations prove to be Highest 2 Lowest’s high points.

The thing that carries The Matrix Resurrections through some of those rough patches instead is Wachowski’s obvious affection for the characters, and the actors’ reciprocal love for this world and its endless intellectual curiosities.

Wonder Woman is exciting, romantic, funny — and my favorite DC Extended Universe movie to date. With her courage and strength, Diana sets an example for everyone she meets, and she holds fast to her ideals even under great pressure. With any luck, she’ll provide similar inspiration to the directors of the DC Extended Universe in the years ahead.

In a way, though, Robinson’s less-edgy aesthetic is even more subversive than graphic sexuality. By treating the Marstons’ lovemaking the same way arthouse movies have treated heterosexual couples for decades, she refuses to portray them as aberrant or abnormal.

Chu’s Crazy Rich Asians is good, though, even if it is a little overcrowded.

Even in its slightly rambling, Spielberg-less form, Raiders! moved me in ways I did not anticipate. Zala and Strompolos’ Raiders: The Adaptation remains an incredible piece of fan appreciation, and a true work of art in its own right.

You can’t say The Way of Water doesn’t give you your money’s worth, especially in the visual department. This thing’s got enough eye candy to give you ocular diabetes.

So maybe Lightyear isn’t the kind of movie that Hollywood would have made in 1995. As a 2022 movie, it works just fine.

At 137 minutes, The King of Staten Island is a long movie, but not too long. I never got bored or wanted Apatow to wrap things up. If anything I wanted to spend more time with some of the supporting characters, particularly Bel Powley as Scott’s longtime friend (turned occasional hookup partner) Kelsey.

Very cute and very sweet. There was that part of me, though, that kept thinking about the first LEGO Movie, and how much of a genuine Hollywood aberration it seemed — if not a flat-out miracle. The Second Part is fine, but even its title suggests it’s more cog in the machine than disrupter.

The edges are certainly rough; the sound quality changes from line to line and occasionally from word to word. But a lot of that works into the film’s mixed-media approach, and to its overall mood of a life that is rapidly falling apart, held together by a thread that is unraveling before our very eyes.

Despite its own lineage, Devil Wears Prada 2 still manages to be a surprisingly clear-eyed portrayal of the fight to make things of genuine value in a world dominated by corporate greed.

It’s as if remaking a John Woo movie finally gave John Woo permission to make a true John Woo movie again.

Ralph 2 does offer the action, racing, and goofy pop cultures jokes expected of this kind of Disney animated feature. It’s just that along the way it also has a very heartfelt theme about the complexities of longterm friendship, and a timely message about what happens when seemingly strong men begin to feel weak and threatened.

To my surprise, those moments in this silly, busy blockbuster moved me. That’s what’s so great about Sam Raimi; it’s not just that he believes in these characters, he makes you believe in them too.

Even though the film’s overall impact is blunted by Wheatley’s frequently inscrutable plotting (co-written with Amy Jump), Rose’s images...speak louder than words.

There are an obscene number of funny people in this movie — though Mascots is not as obscenely funny as that Murderers’ Row of comedy talent would suggest.

Hoppers director and co-writer Daniel Chong throws a lot of ingredients in the pot here, but I’m not sure they all blend together into a coherent stew. The film has a couple fun gags, an uplifting theme, and a touching subplot about Mabel and her grandmother (Karen Huie). Still, as a story it’s a bit of a jumble, as if someone took a nature doc and hopped it into a mystery movie that was hopped into a broad comedy.

Novocaine belongs to the same cinemasochistic tradition as movies like Evil Dead II and Crank, where the audience is invited to derive twisted pleasure from watching a heroic leading man get the crap beaten out of him in inventive ways. It’s not as good as those movies. But on its own terms, it’s painless enough. Pleasurable even.

This is a much better comedy than it is an action movie.

Assassin’s Creed makes you actively work for its pleasures, and it’s heartening to see a film of this scale that’s strange and ambitious and doesn’t spoon-feed viewers every little detail.

What’s here isn’t necessarily boring or bad, but it represents a back-to-basics approach for Alien that feels like a betrayal of something central to the Xenomorph’s toxic DNA, which is forever mutating into another deadly creature.

For long stretches, Zack Snyder’s Justice League feels more like a rough assembly than a director’s cut. It appears to include every single shred of footage Snyder shot, no matter how superfluous to the story. It will absolutely delight the hardest of hardcore Snyder heads. I’m not sure how more casual viewers will react to a longer and bleaker version of the same movie they already saw and dislike.

Even as it takes Fast and Furious to literal new heights (and marks a significant improvement from The Fate of the Furious), F9 never tops the franchise’s best entries. It’s simply too complicated and too long to surpass something like Fast Five.

The lead performers bring a lot of energy to the material, and for a while Tetris hums along as part The Social Network and part Ocean’s 11, at least until a final act that collapses under the weight of an action sequence so ludicrous it feels like it belongs in a parody of bad Hollywood biopics.

Black Widow functions less as a showcase for the title character and more as a sneaky introduction for Pugh, who is drolly hilarious as the deeply cynical Yelena.

It takes way too long — nearly an hour of a 105-minute movie — for Beetlejuice Beetlejuice’s actual story to emerge and for Keaton to take center stage again. Once he shows up, though, Beetlejuice Beetlejuice springs to life. Er, make that afterlife.

It’s nice to see Reiner, McKean, Guest, and Shearer acknowledge their age and have some fun again, even if they never come close to matching the invention and creativity of the old Spinal Tap.

The biggest problem with Draft Day is that even as it shows Sonny sticking to his guns, its absurd, saccharine third act suggests Reitman didn’t stick to his, and allowed his latest celebration of free-spirited mavericks to get co-opted by the very kind of system they were created to criticize.

The best performance in the film actually comes from Gillian Anderson as Julian’s overbearing mother.

Murphy is really on his game; way more than I expected after 30 years. This is not Eddie Murphy in a Detroit Lions jacket sleepwalking his way through a big Netflix paycheck; it’s Axel Foley improvising his way through one crisis after another. And that’s fun.

With his mastery of composition, editing, and music, Scorsese has made some of the most engaging movies in history, experiences that express fascinating ideas through gripping stories, compelling characters, and unparalleled craft. Here, all of those elements seem sublimated to the larger points Scorsese wants to make.

Felix isn’t On the Rocks’ main character, but he is its most interesting one, the one who seems to have the most to say and the most to hide; the one that writer/director Sofia Coppola gives her strongest comedic material and saddest monologues; the one who’s played by Bill Murray in yet another performance that feels so tossed off and yet so finely tuned

The whole production just works. Steinfeld, Lendeborg, and Cena are extremely likable leads, and there’s a soul and an innocence to Bumblebee that was never present in any of the previous Transformers.

If Suicide Squad felt like Warner Bros.’ deliberate attempt to replicate the quirky fun of Guardians of the Galaxy, Birds of Prey is its stab — and there is a lot of stabbing in it — at making DC’s Deadpool.

If you think quarantine life is tough, just wait until you see what happens in a biosphere.

Even with Frozen II’s problems, the ending affected me. Because some things do change. Even if they always remain Frozen.

Ultimately, the best creative argument in favor of making two Wicked movies is that it let the audience spend even more time with the story’s characters and the two lead performers, who really are terrific together.