Michael Phillips

Some of Cregger’s swings between straight-up horror, missing children mystery and deliriously gory comedy may lead to mass audience whiplash. But it’s pretty gripping, fiercely well-acted and — paradoxically, given its devotion to pitch-black cold creeps — one of the bright lights of a generally disappointing movie summer.

Even when Shanks hits the primary theme of his movie a little too insistently, the actors are vivid throughout. Brie, especially, is spectacularly effective in every emotional register, in the keys of D (Distress), E (Eh what’s going on with our suction-lips?) and C (Commitment is all).

It’s not bad. The reboot of The Naked Gun tosses off a few sharp and/or stupidly effective gags of the hit-and-run variety, nice and quick.

It’s not great superhero cinema — the verdict is out on whether that’s even possible in the Marvel Phase 6 stage of our lives — but good is good enough for “The Fantastic Four.”

Fleifel’s film favors well-paced if slightly schematic prose, though the actors are more than good enough to keep you with these people every fraught minute.

When Aster lays off the easy comic despair in favor of more ambiguous and dimensional feelings, interactions and moments, Eddington becomes the movie he wanted. His script has a million problems with clarity, coincidence and the nagging drag of a protagonist set up for a long, grisly comeuppance, yet Eddington is probably Aster’s strongest film visually.

It’s nicely packed and quite funny, when it isn’t giving into Gunn’s trademark air of merry depravity.

There are flashes and occasional whole sequences when Edwards’ directorial eye snaps into focus.

Without exposition dumps or pressurized contrivance, Friedland reveals facets of Ruth’s life, scene by scene, in the 85 minutes of screen time.

F1 is a pretty decent summer picture, and if it were half as crisp off the track as it is on the track, we’d really have something.

Without playing with anyone’s life, A Photographic Memory makes beautiful sense of the connections between mother and daughter, work and love and other mysteries.

It may make true love look all too Hollywood-easy in the end, but en route it’s still a Celine Song film.

The remake is just like the original, but there’s more of it. And less.

After the persuasively strange first chapter’s over, “The Life of Chuck” is a duller kind of strange.

A beautiful mixed bag, let’s say, all told. But I’ll see The Phoenician Scheme a second time sometime for Cera, who will surely return to the Anderson fold.

The new “John Wick” spinoff Ballerina is recommendable, -ish, primarily for the way Anjelica Huston, as the Russian mob boss, makes a meal out of a single-syllable word near the end, delivered after a pause so unerringly timed it’s almost too good for this world.

Piani did the right thing in casting Rutherford, whose physical embodiment of Agathe suggests a tall, gangly, striking woman trying not to be seen. The actress leans into the character’s unsettled, often sullen side, though not at the expense of the comic tropes.

The saving graces are Agudong and Kealoha. Their characters’ sibling relationship, fractious but loving, keeps at least five toes in the real world and in real feelings, thanks to the actors.

The climax of “Final Reckoning” is likewise impressive and scenic, but paced and edited less for the good of the overall movie and more for risk-verification purposes. That said, this franchise has class.

Besides being super-duper gory, of course, the new movie is jaunty, good-looking and full of what you might call esprit de corpses.

The teaming of Robinson and Rudd periodically gets Friendship in gear. But the film’s primary comic impulse equates to the sound of gears grinding, in an attempt to shift from second to third.

It works, even when the material’s routine, because Pugh’s forceful yet subtle characterization of a heavy-hearted killing machine with an awful childhood feels like something’s at stake. She and the reliably witty Harbour work well together.

The movie is tightly packed with incident, maybe overpacked, but Saxon’s fairy tale is an intense, lived-in experience, its centuries-old folkloric atmosphere dotted with all the usual intrusive elements of progress.

Given its premise, you wouldn’t expect The Accountant 2 to go for quite so much buddy comedy, but life is full of surprises.

It’s consistently, thoughtfully engaging. And, yes, often very funny in its open-hearted embrace of the DIY spirit, legal or otherwise.

Sinners is all over the place yet somehow all of a piece. Its themes aren’t new, but the variations feel fresh.

The rhythm and plotting of Misericordia subverts expectations, not with story twists but with a tonal game of three-card monte.

The film may be a silly thing, with manic swings from intimate (and pretty rough) violence to abrupt comic relief. But Fahy and Sklenar provide the glue.

It’s a specific sort of achievement, without the full dimension or larger resonance of a classic. That’s a lot to ask of any film, especially one that does so much so rigorously and well.

Just when movie theaters don’t need another one, The Amateur comes along to join the roster of 2025 releases that lack the knack, the juice and exciting reasons for theatergoers to theater-go.

Contrivances come, and go, but The Ballad of Wallis Island rolls along, with just enough casual wit to buoy the story.

Writer and director Alex Sharfman’s splurchy dark comedy carves itself into halves, a clever first half followed by a more routine second one. Yet it’s a feature film debut signaling a filmmaker of actual wit. So you go with it — I did, anyway, most of it, more or less — even when its sense of tone and direction goes sideways.

The movie’s a rom-com at heart, but there is no other one like it.

Places come; places go. Every human being deals with loss differently. “Eephus” acknowledges that, but it’s a sweet, sidewinding paradox of a sports movie: sentimental in a quietly unsentimental and offhandedly comic fashion.

Director Marc Webb moves it along, with a rock-solid lead, very well sung, courtesy of Rachel Zegler.

This is a poetic-realist vision with grace notes of wit and surrealism. It is a calm, visually assured statement of shared rage.

Black Bag may be modest, and frivolous, but it’s sharp-witted. Every performance feels right.

Opus has its moments. But even the surprises aren’t especially surprising.

By the end of Novocaine, it’s as if the filmmakers — who have talent, and who are now off and running in a commercial sense — forgot how their movie started: with Quaid and Midthunder getting the material and the screen time needed to hook an audience’s interest, before the jocular sadism commenced in earnest.

It’s a lot. Seyfried, who has worked with writer-director Egoyan before on the super-ripe erotic drama “Chloe” (2009), finesses some zig-zaggy tonal swerves confidently and well. The writing, however, wobbles.

Even a first-rate director can get a little lost in the tone management and narrative streamlining process.

While I hope Perkins doesn’t lean into jokey sadism as a dominant creative impulse — we have too many jokey sadists with movie deals as is — The Monkey asserts his stealth versatility as well as his confident technique.

Rounding, named after the hospital rounds medical students conduct with their mentors, casts enough of an atmospheric spell in its tale of psychological demons haunting a young medical student to linger in your psyche a while.

The movie wouldn’t feel human at all, really, if not for the convincing emotion bond established between Mackie and Carl Lumbly as Isaiah.

It’s such a drag to see Ke Huy Quan undermined so persistently by the script and the role handing him his first lead in a movie.

It’s a riveting and humane experience pulled from the rubble of a never-ending war.

If You’re Cordially Invited strains to bring its amped-up, often wearying feud to a satisfying conclusion, the stars give it their best shot, while the ringers do their thing with blithe assurance.

Torres is one of those screen veterans with a surgically precise relationship to the camera, never pushing, always searching for emotions expressed even as they’re being hidden, or held in check, because someone’s watching.

The movie operates with a nicely unpredictable rhythm, both short and longer shots ending abruptly, sometimes comically, popping us into the next one.

What’s missing, even at its trim, tidy run time, is the sort of glancing realism and true nuance of a Paul Greengrass docudrama such as “Bloody Sunday.” What’s there, though, is enough for a consistently absorbing version of what the media did right and what it did wrong.

The results are equal parts marital crisis, sins-of-the-father psychodrama and visceral body horror. They’re also a bit of a plod — especially in the second half, when whatever kind of horror film you’re making should not, you know, plod.

Palmer delivers an on-the-fly masterclass in overlapping comic skills, sometimes heightened (I love her eyeblink-quick, frozen-statue reaction to the good-looking, possibly homicidal hunk named Maniac, played by Patrick Cage), sometimes subtle and heartfelt.

The results in this, Coppola’s third feature, are roughly half-good, half-less. The good comes when the director, working with cinematographer Autumn Durald Arkapaw, focuses on evocative silent footage serving as interludes and visual grace notes capturing Shelly, primarily, in moments of reflection. The dialogue and the dramaturgy, in contrast, strain for jokes and over-ladle the pathos.

The Brutalist is many things: some blunt, others loose and dangling, still others richly provocative, most of them remarkable.

Nickel Boys is a subtly radical act of adaptation, with a striking intuitive and meticulous visual strategy, and the result is fully equal to Whitehead’s achievement but in a new direction.

The actors, by and large, are first-rate. And the songs don’t hurt.

Kidman rises to the occasion, and while one-note mediocrities like “The Substance” offer gallons of fake blood where the provocations should be, Reijn’s film — seen the second time, at least – only needs its nerve and its interest in what Kidman can do, which is more than I even realized.

It’s solid craft, but it’s craft wedded to a style of filmmaking that feels wholly impersonal, even with a top-flight director at the helm.

Taylor-Johnson is a solid actor, but on the page and in performance, Kraven’s barely there and too cool to care about what’s happening. Which makes it hard for moviegoers to care.

Gere remains a unique camera object, with a stunning mastery of filling a close-up with an unblinking stillness conveying feelings easier left behind.

At its best, Nightbitch is many things at once: funny, unruly, bizarre, tender.

We know where The Order is going; the actors ensure our interest en route.

Moana 2 is more of an action movie with a few accidental musical numbers of varying quality.

This is sublime work, with poetry and prose in unerring balance, thanks to writer-director Payal Kapadia.

Truly, this is a movie dependent on managed expectations and a forgiving attitude toward its tendency to overserve.

Too often, though, the magic in Wicked remains stubbornly unmagical. And whenever Erivo isn’t around to make us believe, and take the mechanics of Wicked to heart, Part I reveals what’s behind the curtain, an adequate set-up for next November’s second act.

Red One is the holiday fantasy built on retribution, punishment and crushed hopes we deserve right now.

A Real Pain, shadowed by the Holocaust and the grandmother we never see, may be a modestly scaled second feature, but Eisenberg makes an enormous leap forward, coming off his promising directorial debut, “When You Finish Saving the World.”

Cross-cutting between son and mother, and their constant efforts to reunite among the carnage, flames and rubble before it’s too late, director McQueen keeps the screws tight, blowing past realism for a trickier realm of historically grounded but highly stylized imagination.

It’s one of his good ones. Small, modest, a little stodgy. But good, and even a little brave in its courtroom-drama willingness to dunk the audience in the main character’s soup of anxiety almost immediately.

The book’s melancholy spareness has been replaced by a “Here” existing somewhere in a pristine, remote suburb we’ll call Uncanny Valley Falls, a few miles away from real life.

It’s not perfect, but Anora is a touching comic and dramatic odyssey, driven by a terrific performance by Mikey Madison in the title role.

Sleek, confident and peppered with delicious portraits in pursuit, deceit and evasion, the carnival of papal intrigue known as “Conclave” works like gangbusters.

Smile 2 goes in a newish direction, to frustrating mixed results — but it’s a mixed bag you can respect because it’s not hackwork and it’s trying new things.

Super/Man should introduce many people, young and older, to a fine actor’s work and, more importantly, to what Reeve accomplished for himself and so many others in the life he was dealt.

It’s an actual, conflicted and sporadically insightful film, dramatizing what made Trump Trump at an especially impressionable period in his rise.

Recently making its world premiere at the Toronto International Film Festival, The Wild Robot already has been pumped up into the contradictory “instant classic” stratosphere. I understand the enthusiasm, or most of it, I guess, especially given the mellow, less photorealistic, more painterly visual landscapes, and Sanders’ assured tear-duct massage technique.

Saoirse Ronan does subtly spectacular work in every phase of this character’s odyssey.

In 2024 a movie about a live-TV countdown to destiny, once upon a time in ’75, needs more than moderately skillful reverence, and reaction shots of people cracking up at colleagues, to show us what it might’ve been like to be there.

So who’s up for a strange, disarming musical? As much as I hated the first one, this one works for me.

With a crucial performance from Adam Pearson to complement Stan’s fine work, the film is well worth seeing. It is, in fact, a serious joke about the act of seeing.

A lot happens, some of it life-changing, some of it heartrending, parts of it (in story terms) a bit rushed or on-the-nose. The actors, unerringly well-cast, more or less take care of those last parts.

The script’s conflicts and obstacles get their tidy share of the available 90 minutes. I’d love to see a two-hour version of Rose’s film, aired out to some degree, with a more unpredictable rhythm and some conversations allowing us to hang out with these people without worrying about advancing the story.

Naive, decadent, sluggish, dazzling, touchingly sincere in its belief that “a vital conversation” about the state of our nation can save us, even with barbarians at the gates: There’s something to vex everyone in Megalopolis.

Does it matter that Wolfs is about literally nothing except itself and its star packaging? Maybe not. On the other hand, Watts hasn’t written a single fleshed-out character. It’s about genre tropes, distilled to minimalist quipping amid maximalist mayhem.

[Moore's] gripping in ways the rest of the picture is not, transcending the thesis points and comic exaggerations simply by playing against the comic extremes and holding a card or two, always, in reserve. She reminds us here how good, and tough, she is at her best, when she gets half a chance.

The actors put it over, and Watkins is a genre filmmaker who believes in using his actors as more than pieces of plot in human clothing. That, I appreciate, with no reservations whatsoever.

What’s missing is not simply surprise, or the pleasurable shock of a new kind of ghost comedy. It’s the near-complete absence of verbal wit, all the more frustrating since Keaton is ready to play, and he’s hardly alone.

Mountains does what it sets out to do with grace, and a sure instinct for music, color, faces and moments of decision regarding where we’ve come.

As an actor (not onscreen here), Kravitz is so effortless, you rarely detect any overt planning or determination in her performances. Her movie’s a different case: a precise visual telling of a tale heading somewhere awful, but also cathartic.

The movie doesn’t quite stick the landing, piling on while lingering at the gate for an extra 10 minutes or so. The gore level may not be a shock to fans of Alvarez’s previous features, but for the casual franchise fan, well, it’s gory. But the best of Alien: Romulus reminds us that some franchises are more open to a variety of directorial approaches than others.

The Instigators isn’t that bad, but it’s lazy, low-stakes stuff. Everyone on screen has done and been better.

If Kneecap has a somewhat pushy sense of broad comedy or, in the final third, some predictable dramatic beats, its visual invention wins the day, because it’s so comfortably allied with the songs of protest and release.

Good, bad or middling, very little of Shyamalan’s works can be described as tightly plotted, well-sprung suspense.

Sing Sing exerts a strong pull on the heartstrings — but without the hard sell or the crafty, manipulative exertion.

This is an elegant and eloquent love letter from one master filmmaker to two of his prized idols.

Reynolds retains his skittery comic timing, and Jackman (while tonally a little lost here) certainly put in his time with a personal trainer. But there isn’t a single shot in Levy’s film that flows excitingly into the next one.

The biggest distinction between the first “Twister” and the new “Twisters” is one of conscience: This time, Kate, Javi and Tyler wrestle to varying degrees with how much of their time should be spent on their own pursuits versus helping tornado victims clean up after the latest round of misery.