Nick Schager

Come for the healthy servings of capuzzelle, zeppole, and scungilli, but prepare to choke on the stale and squishy platitudes about family and tradition.

A mesmerizing film about the sweep and swirl of life, love, and the relationship between yesterday and today.

[Its] staginess is offset by their blistering investigation of morality, manipulation, individual and social responsibility, and masculine power.

If its fondness for stock formulas and scares means that it’s not shocking, it also knows how to play the hits—and, of course, to deliver on its promise of killer clowns in cornfields.

Amusing, energetic, and just clever enough to sustain its brief runtime, it serves up a boisterous and bruising brand of B-movie bedlam.

Cage makes a meal of it, attuning himself to director Lorcan Finnegan’s wacked-out frequency to deliver another tour-de-force of grief, regret, anguish, and seriously psychotic fury.

Rehashing clichés with formal polish but little novelty, this oater is a dour affair made all the grimmer by the fact that there isn’t a second of its 139 minutes that isn’t colored, in some way, by the on-set shooting that made it notable, and notorious, in the first place.

With Florence Pugh as the intensely magnetic center of this ramshackle maelstrom, and despite a couple of familiar Marvel shortcomings, it’s a protean superhero saga that stands on its own—regardless of its title’s qualifying asterisk.

Even in a genre that’s long indulged in excessiveness, this is the ruthless over-the-top carnage aficionados covet.

Lacks any sense of internal logic and is even lighter on surprising scares, dispensing only clichés that are as moldy as the haunted house in which his characters are confined.

A brutal buddy film pairing Affleck’s killer with his equally murderous brother, it locates the humor in its mayhem and, for it, proves a superior sequel in every respect.

If the spell it casts is somewhat familiar, it’s nonetheless enlivened by surefooted atmosphere, excellent puppetry, and charismatically outsized performances from Emily Watson and Willem Dafoe.

Mordantly, head-spinningly convoluted, it’s a unique take on the director’s favorite themes, laced with bleak wit and encased in an icy chill that’s fitting for a tale fixated on the grave.

Never coherently articulates (or draws connections between) its various concerns, proving a handsomely horrific vampire bloodbath that, ahem, bites off more than it can chew.

Gracefully balancing its lighter and darker concerns, it’s a witty ride whose poignancy—like adulthood itself—sneaks up on you.

A canny cautionary tale about the perils of looking for Mr. Right—and of keeping your phone powered on at dinner.

A taut and terrifying portrait of courage under fire.

Part Die Hard, part wish-fulfillment saga for a post-2024 present that didn’t come to pass, it’s a fantasy of feminist and U.S. might that’s chockablock with implausibilities.

Unsurprising from start to finish and yet proficiently executed thanks to its impressive cast, it’s the definition of serviceable.

Energized by Ariella Mastroianni’s disoriented and frazzled lead performance, it begins unnervingly and ends, like all such sagas should, with haunting bleakness.

Block-headed from start to finish, it’s cinema in service of nothing more than IP exploitation.

Even at a brisk 85 minutes, it’s a bigger slog than a day spent mowing the grass.

Unlike its unique and fantastical title creature, it’s a commonplace monster mash which serves up only frenzied commotion and tired social commentary.

A macho fantasy about a dad acting out his daughter-saving fantasy by rescuing a surrogate child, with Statham talking tough and acting tougher in typically forthright fashion.

A compassionate portrait of mourning and the bonds that keep us united.

A hypnotic star child of out-there wonder and internal corruption and chaos.

No Magic Mirror is needed to identify it as the lamest Mouse House re-do of them all.

An ignominious tour-de-force for the esteemed headliner, who gets to indulge in just about every caricatured mannerism and colloquialism in the stale La Cosa Nostra cookbook.