Oliver Jones

Yes, it’s a bit helter-skelter, but it is also an adequately enjoyable and untaxing way to kill off a couple of hours.

There is a cool detachment to the presentation of the story that, while perhaps fitting for a movie about a crime so carefully calculated it defies imagination, nonetheless serves to undercut the film’s high stakes.

So which side of the movie finally prevails — the lackluster conventionality of its text or the breathtaking singularity of its visuals and action? The latter does, if just by the nose on Brad Pitt’s perfectly imperfect face. Combined with the film’s lavish technical achievements, his classic movie star sturdiness makes Ad Astra a memorable filmgoing experience even as the story it tells slips off into the ether.

Dual can occasionally feel like a one-joke film that never bothers to be funny, or where the comedy comes off as so arch that it lands as something else entirely.

Overall, it is the performers that give the story life and allow Arkansas to rise above some of its shallower instincts, which include a garish costume design that seems to posit the idea that people from the South dress like rodeo clowns. Hemsworth in particular brings a truth and measured heartbreak to his portrayal of someone who has been forced to glimpse how the world works and deeply wished he hadn’t.

Burton’s riff on the elephant that could fly and the circus freaks who love him is about as subversive as a Pottery Barn Kids fall catalog. Which is not to say it isn’t beautiful, and sometimes mesmerizingly so.

There are some forces, like Ford’s magnetic presence on screen and our affection for one of his most epoch-making characters, that remain undimmed by time.

Marvel's latest movie feels just as sanitized and safe as its other products, even with its killer cast and talented director Destin Daniel Cretton.

Øvredal also coaxes mostly strong performances from his young cast. This is especially true of Zoe Colletti (Showtime’s City on a Hill) as protagonist Stella.

Spider-Man: Across the Spider-Verse is as feverishly inventive in its visual presentation as it is slapdash and anemic in its storytelling.

You feel the late genius through the way Day carries her body, so lissome yet creaking with the weight of both her talent and addiction. The Rise Up singer not only matches our imagination’s version of Holiday, but somehow beats it: she seems so present yet ethereally sozzled in a manner that suggests she may be operating on another plane.

In its best moments, The King’s Man feels like you and your friends have just dumped out your great grandfather’s dusty crate of tin soldiers to create a game that has no rules whatsoever beyond doing something ridiculous. But the movie’s politics? Ugh. They are the cinematic equivalent of your British uncle complaining about cabbies with foreign accents or claiming that Brexit didn’t go nearly far enough.

The film itself plays like an extended riff on the famous scene where the Frankenstein monster befriends a little girl.

Instead, we just sort of soak in the despondency, like lukewarm water in a half-filled hot tub. While sometimes touching, the results of this noble experiment lack dynamism. Eventually whatever is fresh about the approach is undercut by a familiar will-the-man-child-finally-grow-up trope that has made some of Apatow’s lesser films feel insular and self-indulgent.

With its stunning John Ford-like vistas of a corpse laden Sahara and a vast Mediterranean Sea empty of aid vessels to help an immigrant ship overburdened with desperate and sick North Africans, Garrone has—on the surface—made a lush and monumentally disturbing feature-length commercial for staying home.

This dumpling and rocket-fueled contraption continues to employ the same seemingly unstoppable one-two punch: a steady drubbing of painterly and balletic cartoon violence and the unbounded—and increasingly turned out—enthusiasm of the series’ resident Zeus of Skadoosh, star Jack Black.

As he has shown in other directorial efforts—most especially 2007’s Gone Baby Gone—Affleck has a real knack for both building narrative momentum and attenuating a film’s emotions until they ascend into a satisfying catharsis.

They came in fleeting glances, befuddled smiles and odd-timed pauses that the iconic pair share with each other before the movie shuffles them from one frenzied and inconsequential story beat to the next. In such stolen moments, you sense the depth of a friendship so profoundly felt and so deeply comforting that you think to yourself, I would follow these guys anywhere.

Dream Scenario might have worked better as a character study, which is clearly what Cage wants it to be.

It is a doom-invoking, cathartic and strangely satisfying head-trip that’s also a bit ridiculous.

While Dauberman is still figuring out how to effectively build suspense (Daniela’s various forays into the Artifact Room seem to take as long as visits to the DMV), he does a good job of varying the types of scares he uses to shock his audience. He also leavens the tension with just the right amount of humor and does well with his recreation of the ’70s.

The series’ trademark blend of character comedy and absurdist sight gags is in full display, served up with just the proper amount of postmodern self-awareness that adds to the fun rather than detracts from it.

Too queer for some, not nearly queer enough for others, Uncle Frank is fated to become the green bean casserole of this holiday’s film streaming options: designed to appeal to everyone, but destined to remain uneaten.

The nostalgia is so thick in Saturday Night, Jason Reitman’s furiously busy paean to the nascent days of SNL, so unrelenting and potent, that eventually it unmoors from the film and begins swallowing its characters whole, like the titular alien in Steve McQueen’s The Blob.

What it lacks in textual depth, it makes up for with the genuine sympathy it evinces for characters that most films would dismiss as stupid, depraved and undeserving of our empathy and concern. Like Freud, Scheinert seems to understand that even people who commit unspeakable acts deserve our understanding.

The honesty of the actors and their commitment to each other bails the movie out. They manage to find truth in a highly manipulative situation, and that’s something even the least stardust-sprinkled among us can appreciate.

Unlike many of the other films of its ilk, The Rhythm Section never feels the need to move beyond Stephanie’s sadness and sense of loss. This is really a tragedy thriller more than it is a revenge thriller.

This is a movie that’s back-loaded to the extreme: all of its action takes place in the last 20 minutes. Not that Leigh would ever be confused with Tarantino, but it would have been considerably more engaging to have started with the main event and moved backwards to how we got there.