Matt Singer

It’s so many different kinds of movies crammed together; a paranoid thriller, a stoner adventure, an issues movie of the sort that used to be the Hollywood studios’ bread and butter but rarely get made today in the world of IP and risk-averse corporations. That’s one more reason to see it, and another reason to marvel at the fact that it exists at all.

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.

The Irishman doesn’t always go by that quickly. But those moments contemplating the end of everything are among the most moving of Scorsese’s career.

It is, from start to finish, one of Pixar’s best films.

However you write its title, Past Lives is a great romance, a great coming-of-age story, a great tale about the ways technology can bring people together (but only so far), a great New York City film, a great story about immigrants — and a great movie, period.

With infectious enthusiasm, charismatic leads, gorgeous songs, vibrant colors, and dazzling camerawork, La La Land restores the original movie musical to its former glory.

The Safdies have crafted a complete experience here: A pointed critique of the “American Dream,” a wry portrait of Jewish assimilation in the 21st century, a cautionary tale about gambling addiction (that also doesn’t shy away from showing how seductive sports betting can be), and an unflinching character study centered around the best performance of Adam Sandler’s career.

The Last Jedi checks off all the boxes you want from a Star Wars movie, including one of the coolest lightsaber fights in the series’ 40 years, but Johnson is also interested in exploring new territory, including a consideration of the shadings and nuances to the Light and Dark Sides of the Force.

If Anora does well and enables Baker to keep making quirky films about the lives of richly-detailed working-class people, that’s great news. His is one of the truly unique voices in American film today.

Of course, making food that looks effortless requires enormous effort. Menus-Plaisirs - Les Troisgros is a movie about that effort; about the hours and days and months and years of sweat, thought, choices, and practice required to produce something worthwhile — great food, certainly, but really any work of art.

Even though this is the fourth Mad Max, and it’s indebted to the style of the previous films, Fury Road stands alone. It’s better looking and more thrilling than any of the other installments. The color palette is vibrant and beautiful, and every inch of the frame is crammed with crazy, brilliant ideas.

Phantom Thread is classical and deliberate, with few of his former signatures like ostentatious flourishes of camera, editing, or music. That may frustrate some Anderson fans, but Phantom Thread’s luxurious but restrained aesthetic perfectly matches Reynolds Woodcock’s approach to design.

Those quibbles aside, Oppenheimer is intelligent non-IP-driven filmmaking on a scale we simply don’t see in movie theaters anymore — especially not in mid-July.

Killers of the Flower Moon earns its expansive presence. Not only is Scorsese trying to condense an epic of American history and true crime, its extravagant runtime emphasizes the staggering indifference — or, in some cases, deliberate neglect — by the Osage’s white neighbors to the acts of violence happening all around them, which allowed these crimes to continue for as long as they did.

You want to hate this guy for his arrogance and the way he repeatedly sabotages his own successful. But he’s played with such dynamic verve and genuine movie-star charisma by Timothée Chalamet that you can’t help but root for him anyway, especially as the stakes mount and he refuses his quest to become the world’s greatest table tennis player despite the mountain of evidence that he absolutely should.

When all is said and done, The Alto Knights imparts very little about these two men that couldn’t be gleaned by reading their respective Wikipedia pages, and it does it at a sluggish pace and with little visual flair. Some of the biggest and best names to ever work in gangster movies contributed to this film; De Niro and Pileggi, obviously, but also producer Irwin Winkler and director Barry Levinson. Despite their many contributions to this genre in the past, they’ve got nothing new to say here. And they provide zero evidence that casting De Niro in both lead roles is anything more than a gimmick.

It is a movie about how anger consumes and destroys, and how the only cure for that anger is empathy, something that’s in short supply these days but Three Billboards has in abundance.

There’s absolutely nothing wrong with Disney+’s Hamilton. The performers are at the top of their game and the material — music, lyrics, and book by Miranda, based on a Hamilton biography by Ron Chernow — is as powerful and catchy as its reputation. It would have been nice to see a movie version of that material that was as unique as the material itself. Perhaps someday, we’ll get one.

The surprise standout is Chris Pine. Maybe because he possesses unfairly good looks and outrageous charisma, Pine hasn’t received much recognition as an actor. He is outstanding in Hell or High Water.

At times, Napoleon is a costume drama. For long stretches, it is a bloody war film. And occasionally — in its best moments — it becomes a sordid and twisted love story about the unbreakable bond between two people: Napoleon Bonaparte, played by Joaquin Phoenix, and his wife Joséphine, played by Vanessa Kirby.

While many Marvel films, even some of the good ones, feel like small pieces of a larger story, Black Panther is an entire cinematic universe unto itself.

Like Saturday Night Live itself, there are too many great comedians involved for it not to be at least occasionally funny. But it’s surely not among Neville’s most insightful films. Michaels guards his secrets like someone in the Witness Protection Program.

After two decades, Fallout might be the finest film in the series. (To me, it’s a toss-up between this and Ghost Protocol.) Either way, Mission: Impossible is clearly the best ongoing action franchise in the world. And nothing else even comes close.

Into the Spider-Verse really is the ultimate Spider-Man film in a lot of ways, the one that crystallizes the character’s moral philosophy, his life lessons, his arachnid athleticism, and his quirky sense of humor into one hugely appealing package. It’s pure dorky fun.

It’s also much more about what it means to create something that rejects the notion that Peter Parker needs to be the central focus of every Spider-Man story, even in the face of intense opposition. It’s also about notion that every sequel needs to spoon-feed the audience more of the same stuff they liked the first time around.

One of the best things about The Big Sick is that the obstacles facing this relationship are real and relatable. It’s a funny movie, but it’s about really serious stuff.

It does what all great horror movies do: turn real-world anxieties into the stuff of nightmares.

Spielberg’s version improves upon the original in almost every way; the performances are stronger, the casting is better, the script is sharper, and the social commentary is more biting. He’s made a musical that feels like it was written about today, not the New York City of the 1950s — much less Renaissance Verona.

It takes the most popular G.I. Joe character and totally demystifies him until all that’s left is a blandly hunky dude with a sword.

The film’s structure — off-putting in the early going, irresistible by the end — is ingenious.

I hope Spielberg makes 20 more movies. But if this is the last one he ever directed, it would be the perfect career capper: An origin story, a thesis statement, a love letter, and a cautionary tale. Like life, it is hilarious at times, and pitifully sad at others. From the first scene to the last, it had me leaning forward in my seat like Sammy Fabelman at The Greatest Show on Earth.

The movie has an elegiac quality; it’s filled with passionate feeling about the fleeting nature of life and the magical permanence of cinema.

The way Coogler resolves Sinners’ central ideas within a traditional horror story framework is truly masterful. He plays the audience like a fiddle. Or a blues guitar.

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.

This film disturbed me way more than most conventional horror movies, because Lowery understands that the really frightening part of any haunted house tale isn’t the ghost or the demon or the everyday objects moving of their own accord. It’s the reminder that death is coming for us all, whether we’re ready for it or not.

When you have Carrie Coon, Elizabeth Olsen, and Natasha Lyonne as your central stars, some things don’t need to be said out loud.

At times, Soul is as heavy as it sounds, and invites all sorts of contemplation from viewers about our purpose on this planet, and whatever (and wherever) comes afterwards. At other times, it is uproariously funny, particularly after Joe and 22’s story takes a very unexpected turn in its second half. In typical Pixar fashion, it’s also visually stunning.

It’s one of those special movies where during your first viewing you already know there’s going to be a 100th viewing someday.

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.

All I can tell you is The Post is the first movie that ever made me cry about an abstract concept. And when it was over, I found myself particularly happy to see Meryl Streep’s name first in the closing credits.

The film offers at least one tangible piece of advice for dealing with this impossible, seemingly endless time: Keep your sense of humor about you. Palm Springs, which is billed as a “Lonely Island Production,” is consistently funny, from Samberg’s IDGAF attitude, to Milioti’s initial fury at her entrapment, to a deep roster of comic talents who bring hilarious variations to the numerous riffs through the same day.

This movie takes big risks, and many of them pay off. War for the Planet of the Apes proves that big movies aren’t incompatible with big ideas.

The frame is filled with observed but uncommented-upon details . . . The film seems to exist in a real world populated by fully dimensional people.

Even as it interrogates the traditional rules of its genre, Da 5 Bloods remains an outstanding war movie about the values at the core of most great films of its kind, like honor and brotherhood. And Da 5 Bloods is also a great heist movie about the values at the core of all great heist movies, like greed and distrust. The friction between those two genres generates incredible tension as the story progresses.

Even at its most comprehensible, there’s a lot Sicario deliberately leaves unsaid, and it builds to a crescendo of mayhem and moral rot worthy of a great film noir.

Ford’s memorable performance is just one of the many ways Blade Runner 2049 surpasses the original film. Its clever and compelling storyline is another. And then of course there are Deakins’ incredible images.

The first half of the film setting up the characters’ meager backstories and conflicts is boring. The second half is livelier but dumber, with the kaiju rising yet again from the depths of the Pacific to rampage through some extremely computer-generated cityscapes. There isn’t a single second where anything involving the jaegers or the kaiju looks real.

Arrival is a smart film, but it’s not a cold or clinical one. Both the first and last scene brought me to the verge of tears.

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

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

In general, Glass Onion is a much sharper comedy than Knives Out, with snappier dialogue, flashy cameos, and quirkier characters.

Mission: Impossible - Dead Reckoning Part One starts at iabsurd and only gets more bonkers from there. (The film openly jokes about how many times Ethan Hunt has gone rogue and still managed to keep his job as the world’s greatest spy.) But Dead Reckoning also passionately believes in those themes — and, above all, in Tom Cruise doing ridiculous things on camera for the amusement of his paying customers.

As in all of Wright’s films, the surface is just as satisfying as the subtext: hilarious comedy, compelling character drama, eye-popping visuals, and a juicy science-fiction story.

The good barely outweighs the bad here, at least enough for me to give The Flash a marginal recommendation. A lot of the reviews of The Flash from early screenings called it one of the greatest DC Comics movies ever made. Maybe in another universe that’s true. In this one, I thought it stumbled across the finish line.

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.

While Gray may have told basically this same story before, Ad Astra’s cosmic setting makes it even more poignant, because it puts into such sharp relief how small each of us is against the vastness of space, and how our time in that space is the most finite blip possible when compared with the totality of cosmic history.

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

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.

As this legitimately clever story begins to unfold it initially seems like director Steven Soderbergh made a talkier, smaller-scale spiritual sequel to his Ocean’s 11 heist films. And if The Christophers was just a straight-forward thriller, and it would have been a nifty little entertainment. But screenwriter Ed Solomon repeatedly surprises us with one plot twist after another. He and Soderbergh really invest in Sklar and Lori’s twinned biographies of artistic passion and pain, until the film becomes far richer than a simple crime story.

Whatever Demon’s autobiographical elements, this film feels incredibly personal; like a howl of pain ripped straight out of someone’s soul.

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.

It is a beautiful film, as all Fincher films are, and it contains several compelling performances. But if all that artifice and powerhouse acting add up to something particularly profound, I did not find it during my initial viewings of the movie.

It is tough, bleak, brutally intense, and genuinely scary - not in the cutesy cathartic way of most horror films, but in a way that makes you ponder the nature of existence and leaves you with a pit in your stomach.

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.

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.

It’s not boring and there are a few decent laughs. But it also does feel like exactly the movie you would expect a big Hollywood studio to make from this material.

Zendaya gives an incredibly rich performance as Chani . . . Her mostly silent performance in the movie’s final scenes is really remarkable — all the more so because it grounds this epic story in the emotions of this one person. Watching Paul through her eyes shifts Dune from a hero’s journey to a cautionary tale.

Despite the lack of conflict, Apollo 10 1/2 is a charming and engrossing 95 minutes, mostly because of the way Linklater blends his memories and dreams of that period, and filters both of them through the medium of Rotoscoped animation, which produces images that are somehow both surreal and hyper-real all at once.

The brilliance is all in the execution, which is just about perfect, from the score of hard-rocking music (and ear-piercing feedback) to the gritty cinematography by Sean Porter.

The best way I can think of to describe the experience of actually watching I’m Thinking of Ending Things is to imagine you’ve been asked to assemble a complicated piece of furniture without the instruction manual. All of the pieces are there; and you see how some of those individual parts connect and work together. You can admire the obvious intelligence and care that went into crafting those pieces. But the path to a coherent whole is not entirely clear — and often deeply frustrating.

Top Gun: Maverick has so much fun flexing the might of its practical effects that issues like logic go right out the window. That’s the magic of the movies for you.

Fifty Shades Darker is a very faithful sequel; a milquetoast continuation of a bland romance between two boring people.

This thing ain’t a “chapter.” It’s a whole damn book — a glorious, nightmarish, biblical compendium of all manners of asskickery.

Its unhurried pacing, complex themes, and magnificent visuals that must be seen on a big screen make it feel like an artifact from an era of big-budget filmmaking that has been rendered essentially extinct by the franchisification of Hollywood.

No matter what comes next from Marvel Studios, this Avengers is a gargantuan love letter to the equally enormous mythology that Stan Lee, Jack Kirby, Steve Ditko and the rest of their collaborators built — and to the generations of readers and moviegoers who truly believe in it.

The reason to see this Nosferatu anyway is its handsomely detailed production, which is soaked in gothic atmosphere thanks to incredible design, cinematography, and that creepy Skarsgard performance.

But the more I sat with the film, the more I found myself returning to the sequences that work (and I mean really work), and to the way all of Nope’s stories and characters collectively create a portrait of an uncaring entertainment business that’s constantly looking for new targets to chew up. It doesn’t even spit them out. Sometimes, it devours them whole.

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.

Favreau’s Jungle Book is at its best in moments of visual splendor; when his camera pulls back to admire the sweep of the CGI foliage or yet another dazzling computer creation wanders into frame. Those images have a clarity that the rest of the movie often lacks.

The’re not a lot of momentum to Hotel Transylvania 3; this is a children’s film after all. But the character and location designs are inventive and appealing, and there are several memorable set pieces, including a wordless scuba diving sequence that draws heavy inspiration from classic Warner Bros. cartoons.

This couple’s connection feels authentic and lived in — but I must confess that at a certain point I began to feel like an additional dimension was missing, some sort of tangible connection between Bernstein’s outward persona and his marital stresses, or between his sexuality (and the steps he took to hide it) and his musical output.

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.

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.

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.

Franco’s performance as Tommy Wiseau is a thing of beauty. Without ever inflating Tommy’s achievements or his talents, and while still having a great deal of fun with his peculiar behavior, he makes him into what he always wanted to be: A true cinematic hero.

Tickled is a fantastic film to watch and discuss but it’s almost impossible to write about it, because most of its pleasures come from following Farrier as he tries to find the powerful figure atop the Competitive Endurance Tickling league.

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.

If Iñárritu wanted to show how life on the frontier was miserable and monotonous he succeeded — by making a movie that is miserable and monotonous. Some of the greatest cinematography in history can’t change that fact.

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.

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.

Extraction might outdo Children of Men in some minor technical ways, but it can’t hold a candle to it as a whole. The movie comes alive around the 34-minute mark; it’s a bit of a slog until that point — one I confess I might have turned off long before its bravura centerpiece if not for professional commitments.

I sat watching Fyre in a state of amused disbelief (while, yes, occasionally taking the Lord’s name in vain). There’s not too many places to see this much madness, ego, greed, and full-on stupidity on display at the same time.

Fifty Shades Freed must set a record for the most subplots and supporting characters introduced and then abandoned in film history.

As showy as that makeup and voice is, and as big and boisterous as Churchill’s speeches are, Oldman finds nuances that few actors do in this sort of role. He’s not all fiery tirades and tearful monologues.

Still, the big finale redeems the middle section’s rocky patches with a very satisfying, very Raimi-esque conclusion.

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.

The many similarities between Raya and Mulan and Moana suggest that Disney’s honed in on a new formula for their fairy tales, one that emphasizes (to borrow a phrase from a television series that anticipated the appetite for these kinds of stories) warrior princesses. In this case, at least, the formula works.

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.