Nick Schager

In an age of bland, unimaginative cookie-cutter blockbusters, there’s something refreshing about a movie that puts a premium on looking and sounding badass.

Buoyed by a superb cast headlined by Adam Driver and Cate Blanchett, it’s a film of quiet, droll grace, even if it’s delicateness occasionally veers into slightness.

[Its] vignettes are uneven and occasionally repetitive and yet, at their best, deliver the sort of macabre mood and mayhem that make the series an enduring spooky-season pleasure.

With an aesthetic ingenuity to match its pooch’s impressively expressive performance, it’s a thriller that ably justifies its central gimmick.

While its humor often sticks, its mayhem fails to land.

Mistakenly assumes that the woe-is-me routines of the rich and famous are the stuff of great drama.

A timely cautionary tale whose overwhelming suspense is apt to leave viewers sick with dread.

Though its daring gestures don’t always pay off, it’s a tale of internal and external brutality, of fathers, sons and clans scarred by violence, that serves as a sturdy showcase for its exceptional star.

Affords Julia Roberts with her best part in years as a professor whose role in a burgeoning scandal threatens to expose her deep, dark (related) secrets. She’s not enough, however, to make this wannabe-conversation starter coherent, much less insightful.

Saying little but speaking volumes about American disaffection, apathy, self-interest, and foolishness, [O’Connor’s] performance bolsters this askew heist film and cements his status as cinema’s most magnetic new leading man.

It builds to revelations that speak emphatically to social shallowness, pressures and prejudices—even if, in the end, its bombshells resonate as less surprising than inevitable.

A misguided wannabe-uplifting saga about grief, forgiveness, and keeping important memories alive.

A B-movie of unholy bombast and absurdity.

A look at Coppola’s creative process that proves significantly more illuminating and entertaining than the director’s finished product.

Electrified by virtuoso filmmaking, its enraged message comes through loud and clear.

This wannabe winsome fairy tale about confronting fears, atoning for sins, and forgiving oneself is a pile-up of preciousness.

Casts itself as a frightening saga about tyranny’s capacity to acclimate its subjects to slaughter and slavery, and to coerce them into performing (and celebrating) self-destruction under the guise of unity, strength, and progress.

Hermanus’ latest establishes him as a filmmaker of uncanny grace and Mescal and O’Connor as two of Hollywood’s finest young stars.

A prototypical example of talking, ceaselessly and crudely, at the audience.

Both a nail-biting thriller and a messy moral drama, rife with tensions between justice and vengeance, healing and suffering, and reality and fantasy.

Stylized to the hilt but empty inside, it faithfully echoes the harried shallowness of its protagonist, whose desperate search for one big score to reverse his fortunes is all surface, no substance—the cinematic equivalent of a knock-off Rolex.

The film around her never quite comes together, but Foster is more than enough reason to embark on this off-kilter investigation.

A collision of agony and ecstasy that approaches the divine even as it reveals piousness to be an outgrowth of, and justification for, earthly suffering, it’s like nothing the genre has seen before.

Blending horror and humor, sweetness and scares, and fantasy and family melodrama, it shoots for the moon—and, more often than not, scores a bullseye.

With nothing lurking beneath his character’s brawny exterior, and even less to his up-and-down tale, Johnson proves merely an adequate contender in his bid for dramatic credibility.

A refreshingly eccentric spin on the staid biopic.

A beguiling psychodrama about familial fractures, slippery identity, and the difficult means by which people move on from tragedy.

A reimagining that’s thrillingly, monstrously alive.