Oli Welsh

Hit Man could have been a lot of different movies, and part of the joy of the film is in how playfully it gestures toward all those different potential versions of itself. But ultimately, that one perfect scene defines it as a great romantic comedy with a delicious bite.

In a way, Monkey Man’s lack of composure is the point, and after it’s over, it’s easy to see Patel as an action star, but hard to picture him slipping into the role of a smooth agent of the colonial order. Maybe Bond’s not what he should be doing after all.

With a patient, compassionate, but penetrating gaze, How to Have Sex maps out the dangerous, murky territory of teenage sexuality and friendships.

In its creation of a hushed, lonely idyll at the end of the world, disturbed by techno-biblical visions of disaster, what it recalls more than anything else is Lost. And like Lost, it’s most assured when it isn’t explaining itself or looking for climax or resolution, neither of which it really finds.

Carried by a typically strong Blunt performance, Pain Hustlers is both watchable and eye-opening, even though its dramatic impulses do kind of cancel each other out.

Roth and Scorsese carefully seed Killers of the Flower Moon’s script with context, texture, and detail, even when they’re avoiding exposition and making sure every scene has a dramatic point. It’s an incredibly lived-in movie.

Nolan is not one to let any member of the audience miss his point, and the film’s final scene does ram it home. But first, he builds out the web of ambition, compromise, dreams, politics, jealousy, and inspiration — in a word, humanity — that unleashed the forces he stands in awe of. In Oppenheimer, man is the most dreadful machine of all.

In Glass Onion, made amid the dissociation of COVID, [Johnson] just lashes out left and right at a series of easy targets: the utopian fantasies of Big Tech, the hypocrisy of liberal politics, the fatuousness of online image-making. It’s muddled stuff, embodied in a gaggle of callow caricatures that he struggles to establish a natural kinship between.

Director Nora Twomey (The Breadwinner, The Secret of Kells) and screenwriter Meg LeFauve (Pixar’s Inside Out) have rebuilt the Gannetts’ fragmented, surreal little parable into something that’s more like a conventionally structured kids’ movie, but they’ve also made it more exciting and resonant. It’s a lovely film.

See How They Run is neither as clever as the creators think it is, nor as stupid as it sometimes pretends to be. It doesn’t have much to say about whodunits other than “Wouldn’t it be funny if they existed inside their own world?” And yes, it turns out, it would

It’s a slavish tribute to the first Top Gun. But it’s also a better film, and perhaps more importantly, a much nicer one: more grown-up, more generous, and more lighthearted, in line with its more mature star.

The warmth and tenderness with which the film explores the relationship between Brian and his creation are real.

It’s stupid, exciting, unruly (with a 136-minute run time), and strangely refreshing.