Nick Allen

It’s a well-made, purposefully ugly treatise of America as a broken-down theme park. But its charm wanes whenever it’s just not as funny, smart, or edgy as it thinks.

Leo can sometimes have a jolt of energy from its slapstick sequences or its bright color palette, in which Leo the lizard flies through the air, floats on a bubble, or meets other talking animals. But it's all defined by its assembly line animation, in which the spell of watching life-like characters and settings can be easily broken by looking at the backgrounds of shots for just a few seconds.

Thanksgiving is thrillingly pure in its nastiness and has more in common with ‘80s films like “Mother’s Day,” “Graduation Day,” and “New Year’s Evil” than its modern mainstream peers (the “Terrifier” blood bonanzas are an indie exception). Roth’s head-chopping whodunit doesn’t use “Grindhouse” aesthetics, but it’s a classic at heart.

Dream Scenario gets many cringing laughs, and yet its humor—easy shots at vapid capitalist-pawn influencers, cancel culture, Tucker Carlson, and other culture wars Mad Libs—is mostly about the cheap comic thrill of getting the reference.

America has long had its wildest forms of fantasy and comfort fueled by promises about things that are not of this world. Stuff we can’t confirm until we die. An afterlife, the pearly gates. After Death follows this tradition, with a cadre of talking heads who had incredibly traumatic physical instances that are bundled here as Near-Death Experiences that prove the existence of God and Heaven.

Here is a cornucopia of aesthetics, not for all but definitely for some, that will remind you that not every type of film has been made yet.

Instead of gradually winning over the viewer, The Mill tests your patience. And instead of achieving a poignant fury, the film's inspiration runs out of energy, long before Howery’s Joe decides that enough is enough.

Mister Organ gives good reason to think that Farrier has never encountered such a narcissist before, which makes this film significant as a ruthless cautionary portrait, however much it may be a visceral flashback for others. If you know anyone with Michael's aura, if someone makes you feel like this unforgettable movie does, this is your sign to run.

Unlike Hannah, this movie has a great relationship with its appendage—it knows when to use it for gross-out body horror humor or a bit of drama that cuts to the core.

Rhys Darby is perfectly cast as the wholesome, dopey time traveler in Relax, I’m From the Future, a sci-fi comedy with a modest sense of humor but tangled message to share with humankind.

Not dunking on social media teens is a refreshing angle, enough to make you want to care about their inevitable deaths. But the movie's by-the-numbers horror will make you feel otherwise.

You might find yourself forcing a laugh during one weak sequence to pretend this is all supposed to be fun.

Defa’s film aligns with the notion that it’s how a story is told--how it feels--and not just what it is about. And there is so much to feel from his take on dysfunction, including how it presents siblings who can sing and dance in unison but are not friends.

There are a few rushes in this movie’s incredibly calculated rendition of Mardenborough’s tale, thanks to Blomkamp. But Sony is transparent with this adaptation, which has no ambitions to make Gran Turismo any more challenging than gamer bait.

In this movie’s wise deconstruction of its characters, “Mutant Mayhem” does the seemingly impossible and makes the Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles cool again.

Even if this movie doesn’t achieve a great epiphany at the end of the darkest route, it offers a great showcase for Gallner in particular.

Whether or not we get more rounds with this hand of fate, Talk to Me lingers as a striking and confident directorial debut from the Philippous, whose penchant for hyper-active YouTube fight and prank vids is mostly evident in this movie's emotional carnage.

Director Ivy Meeropol (“Bully. Coward. Victim. The Story of Roy Cohn”) weaves an impressive tapestry of conflicting perspectives—man and animal—that's far more entertaining and insightful than your average Shark Week fare.

Stephen Curry: Underrated is the lightest feel-good sports entertainment possible in that it does have plenty of wins and losses from Curry's college and pro days, with the momentum of an underdog’s drive.

Take away the noise surrounding it, and Sound of Freedom has distinct cinematic ambitions: a non-graphic horror film with what could be called an art-house sensibility for muted rage and precise, striking shadows derived from an already bleak world. If “Sound of Freedom” were less concerned with being something "important," it could be more than a mood, it could be a movie.

Once Upon a Time in Uganda is the advocacy that Isaac’s auteurship and ideology need most—this doc helps one re-appreciate movie-making as a compulsive, creative odyssey, a shot-by-shot pursuit of elusive inner peace.

It has taken so long for a feature-length The Flash to finally hit theaters, and he’s too late. Barry is barely the lead character of his own movie.

Primed to be this June’s Horror Movie of the Month, The Boogeyman is packed with familiar beats and little personality, the horror equivalent of a rising music star making a fan-friendly Christmas album as their biggest project yet.

However chronologically jumbled, Victim/Suspect prevails with its many episodes of de Leon’s incisive reporting and dedication, and the insight we get from legal and policing experts about how this cycle continues.

It is a horror/fantasy that puts every bit of its imagination on the screen and constantly impresses with its DIY spectacle.

Perhaps worst of all, the movie is light on the laughs meant to come from trash-talking; the comedy just doesn’t have the crispiness it needs.

It’s all too passive, and lacking in incisiveness cleverness for its own good, barely served by Day’s nostalgia for better films and voluminous silent stars.

Everyone knows what a Disney+ movie like this can and can’t do with its young characters, but Alvarez and team push the limits just enough, giving “Crater” a sense of gravity that might just surprise viewers of all ages.

It’s playful but serious at the right moments and wistful, without being on the nose, about how growing up is the greatest adventure. Just like a bedtime story, Peter Pan & Wendy is poignant and fanciful, and it soars through its 103 minutes as if it can make time stand still.

While it has a personal touch of a love letter, this documentary is nonetheless the work of compassionate filmmakers who know any adventure when they see one.

Beau Is Afraid, an enveloping fantasy laced with mommy issues, is about being doomed from birth. It's Aster’s funniest movie yet.

Ross always preached that there were no mistakes, just happy accidents. A mess like Paint—all broad strokes and no point—proves that he wasn’t always right.

Chupa willfully becomes one of those family films that takes plenty from the toy box of cliches left before and hardly gives anything back.

The documentary is pushed mostly by a maudlin reverence from director Gianfranco Rosi, whose collaging approach does not produce the meditative experience it desires.

Money Shot: The Pornhub Story is a porn-positive documentary, and its ambition to discuss all ugly shades of the issues boldly makes it fascinating and anti-provocative.

Ruskin succeeds in paying tribute to Loretta McLaughlin and Jean Cole's hard work, but it's less successful in filling in the larger story.

As a horror and a comedy, Winnie-the-Pooh: Blood and Honey has no rhythm with either, and it's too dim to be worthy of a curious look.

80 for Brady displays how Marvin’s sensibilities about friendship are primed for a mass audience. He knows the audience and, more importantly, that no one will mistake what he’s aiming for here.

Attachment very much wants to set its horror within Jewish mythology and Ultra-Orthodox life, and yet this specific choice always creates an exposition overload, which has a more distancing than inclusive effect.

By trying to make a grand statement to a post-lockdown theatergoing audience about what they are willing to believe—but also about how far they are willing to go for others—Shyamalan trips over himself and neglects to give them much of a movie.

Plane rushes through its emotional and explosive beats so that it can get to the next crisis without having to fill out the previous one, and it wildly skims on the good stuff in the process.

A parody only by legal definition, The Mean One has no teeth as a naughty comedy or gory horror.

The editorial assembly and talking-head presentation of “Love, Charlie” is a bit too dry for my taste, struggling to build an intriguing pacing with and-then-this-happened storytelling. But the emotional power of the film benefits from its extensive archive, and how it displays it.

Lawrence’s latest is fine for its don’t-over-think-it standards, and while it’s glossier than it is deep, it’s at least charted through with a roller coaster’s engineering. There’s something comforting about a movie that has the true ease of a fantastical dream, and for “Slumberland” that fleeting excitement may be enough.

As a formal experimentation by an actor whose filmmaking talents are only the latest chapter in his Hollywood story, the documentary offers a touching reflection on Jonah Hill, The Star. Without specifically mentioning movie projects or other's names, he shares his sense of self during success, and how self-esteem remained elusive.

Spirited is one of those movies with numerous creative choices that feel inspired, not just by the holiday spirit in the lyrics but the desire to pull off a good show. When Spirited has so many of its ornate pieces in sync, it can be a joyous cinematic treat like very few others of past or present.

A pop music phantasmagoria that’s equally egoless and entertaining.

Slash/Back gains its greater power with its entertaining narrative of these Inuit heroes warding off invaders, trying to save their home while earning a deeper pride in that very place and its people. It’s sincerely sweet and entertaining, and its impact is felt even more as the black alien blood starts to fly.

When it should be jostling us in one way or another, "Piggy" feels like it's just killing time.

It doesn’t happen too often, especially from modern studio fare, but Parker Finn’s Smile is the kind of horror movie that earns the unique qualification of “genuinely scary.”

The romantic fantasies and the time travel plotting of “Meet Cute” are a total mismatch.

Pearl gets a little too close to letting you simply laugh at her. We know she wouldn’t like that.

With Clerks III, nostalgia is its own convenience for Smith. It’s cheap and fleeting, but it is comforting.

Writer/director Zach Cregger proves himself to be a bonafide jack-in-the-box horror filmmaker with "Barbarian," beginning with a nightmare that could happen to any of us—a double-booked Airbnb.

Another lifeless live-action adaptation from the factory that’s inside the Disney vault.

The anger within this movie becomes muted along with its thrills. Anvari has proven to be a roller coaster horror filmmaker who should flourish with such freedom, but he loses the momentum here by his own design.

Breaking is a tragedy that only opens like a thriller. From the beginning, Breaking is about justice.

This is a frustrating documentary, in that it honors the work of its subject with wide-screen cinematography and leaves-crunching sound design, but as a viewing experience cannot shake the overall feeling of a dirge.

The story might play out like a missed opportunity in some ways, as it’s staggering that a movie in which Jamie Foxx fights vampires can be so set on killing its fun with backstory. But while the worst parts of Day Shift want to be cute with all of this, Perry’s movie is saved by the inner bad-ass that comes out when it matters most.

I Love My Dad is the kind of story that doesn’t overthink what makes it so laugh-out-loud funny, but there’s a whole lot of ugly, extremely human things going on each time its comedy makes you cover your eyes.

The structure here is not about conventional pay-offs, and it does give Don’t Make Me Go its own distinct feeling, however familiar its pieces.

While it has too many familiar flourishes and jokes, this entertaining sequel is still a force for good, with enough visual ambition and heart in front of and behind the camera to stand on its own.

This movie, a forgettable indie aside from who directed it, offers sentiment, and its existence. That’s about it. Whether one is revolted or delighted by another C.K. production, Fourth of July is a dud.

Based on the book by Suzanne Allain, who also wrote the script, Mr. Malcolm’s List feels as choreographed as a dance, and that becomes a large part of its welcoming ease across two hours.

The Man from Toronto could have been sharper with much more care all around, but a glaring problem comes from how Hughes isn’t a funny filmmaker. He might have the self-awareness to slap his name on a food processing plant that hosts the movie’s climactic kill, but his sense of making an action scene comedic is seriously lacking.

Though it starts with promise, Spiderhead is pseudo-heady sci-fi stuff that treats its most intriguing elements like an afterthought, and misses the opportunity to be a memorable oddity aside from its disappointments.

Interceptor is about putting on a show, and Pataky has the muscular charisma to carry it.

Take away the cameos—in the recording booth, and animated on-screen—and you get something that's a little too close to the same old junk.

The Takedown works overtime to uphold the façade of heroic policing in the most generic way possible, for god knows what greater good.

It's ambitious, but with such hand-holding dramatic direction and a dreary visual palette that never creates terror out of random corn stalks, it couldn’t be more dull.

It is too touch-and-go, too speculative about her life and mysterious death, to be of any genuine purpose.

While this documentary from Alison Klayman can be insightful in taking us inside a phenomenon, its approach can be too broad, with filmmaking that relies on its own weaning sense of trendy.

Even though it’s more of a vision board of what it could be, the film introduces a nifty premise that recalls not just “A Nightmare on Elm Street” but how that series was able to make multiple irresistible sequels. Choose or Die is also the rare mid-budget Netflix movie that gets better and better as it goes along, owning its weirdness and not playing it easy.

Tony Hawk: Until the Wheels Fall Off shines brightest when it resembles something like the Alex Honnold free-climbing documentary "Free Solo," honing in on Hawk's episodes of hard-earned failure, of slamming his body to the ground countless times and getting back on the board.

With fascinating confidence, “See You Then” honors the gradual evolution of a long talk, so much that their literal pacing reads as its only unnatural flourish—they take several minutes to walk about two blocks. But that rhythm, of one step at a time, nearly takes on a hypnotic effect.

Moonshot is the kind of movie that’s frustrating because of what makes it endearing—there’s so much that makes you wish it were more original. No rom-com set in space should feel this ordinary.

7 Days has an overall sweetness that keeps it charismatic for its 85-minute runtime, with an agile directorial eye that makes sure the back-and-forth scenes of them talking have enough life in them.

They’ve shared home movies previously, but this documentary—meaningful in concept, but fleeting in its expression—puts them in close-up, with Gainsbourg behind the camera in her debut.

When this time travel story is at its best, it gives Reynolds space to convey the frustration one can have about their past, including when facing their younger self. The movie doesn’t fill out this concept with too much imagination about time travel or villains, but it does wind up with a powerful parable about healing.

While its minimalism can make for a mixed bag of surprises, “Killing Ground” director Damien Power ensures that No Exit has enough of his own striking signature.

Studio 666 is the kind of broad horror-comedy that could certainly stand to be a little scarier, a little funnier, and more clever overall. But then again, no other horror-comedy stars rock band the Foo Fighters as themselves, which is the main pull for this special Foovie event.

There’s so much going on in Three Months, so many emotional pieces in motion, but very little of it is particularly moving.

This movie has Jeunet doing “The Jetsons” while ruminating on what a robot uprising might inevitably look like, but that proves to be less exciting than one could ever imagine.

Jenny Slate and Charlie Day deserve better than “I Want You Back,” a leaden rom-com that gives them a shot at being funny, charming, and sweet, only to squander it scene by scene.

Co-written with Harald Kloser and Spencer Cohen, “Moonfall” is a lumbering, long locomotive of one cliche attached to another, making time pass slowly even though there is so much juggling of these different one-dimensional relationships.

The Wasteland is the unique case of a horror movie with a more robust visual sense than a lot of its contemporaries, but that still doesn’t create a larger terror. It’s more the stuff of directors' reels, not nightmares.

There’s incredible merit in the action seen in “The Matrix Resurrections,” but those aren’t the elements that free the mind of the medium like bold storytelling, like “The Matrix” preached and then became a game-changing classic, only to become a docket for satisfying shareholders. Blue pill or red pill? It doesn’t matter anymore; they’re both placebos.

As the overly long movie becomes about 130 minutes of his own propaganda, Washington romanticizes an ideal of man that has never actually existed, instead of a human being who did.

A disastrous movie, Don’t Look Up shows McKay as the most out of touch he’s ever been with what is clever, or how to get his audience to care.

The extremes uncovered in this film become revealing of what we accept as necessary, in what we as a nation rationalize as justice even without procedure. It is eye-opening, and yet also like Gibney’s best work, affirming in the worst ways.

Try Harder! is a charming dark comedy with a light touch, with part of its self-deprecating humor right there in the title.

8-Bit Christmas may have a more grounded approach to gamer culture than you'd expect, but it’s constantly beat by its own limited imagination.

There are endless horror movies out there in which a slow burn seems like it's just killing time before it's actually time to kill. But "The Feast" does well with that dread—it's the main course that proves to be the rip-off, however gory, indulgent, and horror-ready it is.

Mayor Pete has a compelling subject, but it's most gripping when it’s trying to secure your curiosity, not just your future vote.

With its coming-of-age and its historical context, Beans concerns ideas of pain and conflict, but it’s too timid to really engage those ideas, to honor their discomfort aside from how horrific discrimination is (a few scenes of the family being ambushed by racist Canadian citizens are upsetting, but played too directly for tears).

The thrills here, whether you want to believe what Hypnotic is hawking, are far too mild to be satisfying for even a mindless viewing.

There’s something to making a prequel just for the hell of it, and giving it to an actor/writer/director whose charisma has worldwide appeal, but Army of Thieves could have had much more fun with the assignment.

There's an overriding desire throughout Night Teeth for it to be an L.A. story, especially in how its context involves snide comments about how the bloodsuckers run Hollywood. But the movie becomes obnoxiously superficial itself, perhaps most obviously when it includes Megan Fox and Sydney Sweeney, its two biggest stars, for maybe five minutes of screen-time.