Nick Schager

Fine performances abound, including from Stanley Tucci and John Lithgow, but the film is ultimately at odds with itself, its handsome appearance and severe attitude clashing with its pulpy impulses.

There’s no mystery to Speak No Evil, and even less disquieting creepiness; instead, it’s a bludgeoning beast, epitomized by McAvoy’s Paddy.

As tender and somber as it is thrilling, The Return proves a sword-and-sandals saga rooted in life’s biggest issues, all of them written on the unforgettable countenance of its illustrious star.

Partnered with the always ridiculous Rudd, Robinson reconfirms his standing as the reigning master of discomfort. Together, they make "Friendship" the funniest movie of the year.

By choosing to reside in abstraction, it imparts only generic and empty truths.

Taut and mournful, it’s a lament for the mistakes made in anger, the wounds that fail to heal, and the past that never truly seems to be past at all.

Playfully mocking today’s always-online, virtual-signaling teen generation while simultaneously embracing its bevy of old-school tropes, it’s exactly the sort of crowd-pleaser designed to be seen in a theater, after dark, with a rowdy audience.

Never dull if also only intermittently surprising, it’s another of the director’s sturdy star-studded genre efforts.

Resembling a bonkers marriage of “Young Tully” and “Teen Wolf,” and led by a ferociously naked and unafraid performance by its star, it’s an amusingly incisive howl of maternal pain, frustration, disappointment, resentment, and feral strength.

Invigorates its well-worn formula through meticulous stewardship and an excellent performance from headliner Gustav Dyekjær Giese as a boxer who attempts to realize his dreams of glory in the most daringly illicit manner imaginable.

A film that’s as sweet as it is scary, and whose frights are the sort that come from all-too-relatable fears about being alone, being apart, and being unable to hold onto the people and memories that matter most.

Barry Keoghan is arguably the most electric actor working today, and he absolutely ignites Bird.

A shallow and slender tale of lousy dreams, worse decisions, and painful regrets, all of it predicated on a lead turn that’s too one-note to wow.

Pulling on the heartstrings with tug-of-war-grade might, it’s a carpe diem fable that elicits more exasperated eye rolls than tears or laughs.

If Abbasi’s film doesn’t say anything particularly novel about either, it still manages to damn the Don as he would his adversaries: with no restraint or remorse.

A pleasant and well-acted curio, and little more.

Despite a premise that begets one of the strangest lovemaking scenes in recent memory—a quasi-incestuous gender-bending head-spinner—the film is too frequently the epitome of pretentiousness.

[Its] genuine focus is the emotional turmoil that drives people to practice this profession as well as to patronize its “experts” in search of guidance and insights into the biggest questions of their lives.

Doesn’t ultimately put its star through the slam-bang paces often enough, but as a human weapon pushed to the limit, the actor proves ideally fit for such rugged genre environs.

A history lesson that compensates for a lack of breakneck thrills with ominous timeliness.

Regardless of how you feel about Ronald Reagan the president, most will be united in finding this biopic a preachy, plodding, graceless groaner.

A subpar exorcism movie that’s all the more depressing for being directed by Lee Daniels, whose distinctive flair is only sporadically spied amidst its shopworn clichés.

A thorough non-fiction recap of the rise and fall of the pint-sized phenom, whose mega-watt charm and expert comedic timing made him a sensation, and whose later years were marred by lawsuits, scandals, misery, and premature death at age 42.

Omits as much as it reveals, fixating so doggedly on its subject that it fails to dig into the various pertinent questions and dilemmas raised by his tale.

An electric thriller with blood on its hands, flesh in its mouth, and deviance on its mind.

A mediocre remix that, for all its familiar elements, fails to improve upon a single aspect of its trailblazing predecessor.

Most notable for excessively straining for R-rated credibility at every turn.

There’s nothing very unsettling about its eventual horrors, in large part because the film is too infatuated with its sleek style to get its hands dirty.