Oliver Jones

If Spider-Man Far from Home is a triumph, as many will argue and its box office will undoubtedly confirm, it is a triumph of capitalism, not art. It is the film’s fervent hope that we, as consumers, are starting to lose our ability to tell the difference.

The often-stilted dialogue of the teenage protagonists doesn’t fare much better. As a result, many of the performances from the seemingly talented cast come off as stiff and stagey.

The beating heart of the film, this performance is further evidence of what a gift Foxx’s late career shift to supporting parts has been for filmgoers.

The perfect actor with the perfect part at an ideal moment in his career, Domingo doesn’t simply embody Rustin, he liberates him.

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.

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.

It is a visually enthralling, high-gloss commercial for state power and repressive constructs. This is a product precisely tooled to be what the global marketplace demands of entertainment that is this expensive to make—a win for capitalism that will leave many filmgoers who found a powerful reflection of themselves in the original film feeling like they’ve lost something important and essential.

Holy Spider, a grungy Persian noir from Tehran-born and Copenhagen-based filmmaker Ali Abbasi, celebrates the humanity of that killer’s victims, and of Iranian women in general. It also shines a harsh and unforgiving light on a patriarchal society that refuses to do the same.

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.

While Vengeance doesn’t always rise to the level of its ambitions, it is admirable to see Novak spit acid towards the privilege systems that make careers like his possible...But by repeating the same reductive and representational mistakes of the media it so pointedly criticizes, Novak’s film unwittingly becomes yet another part of the problem.

It’s not just emotion and creative innovation that feels MIA in this installment. The film acts as though it’s edgy, but lacks real bite.

Both the songs (once again written by two-time Oscar-winners Kristen Anderson-Lopez and Robert Lopez) and the relationships between the characters — strong points of the original film — register with less energy and originality this time around.

The truth is, this flawed but still entertaining film’s chief asset is its representation of a young woman who has spent her life following orders but is now finally crafting an identity of her own in a shifting moral landscape.

To its credit, the latest and seemingly last Guardians installment— which at times can feel like a Spotify playlist in search of a movie— mostly manages to drown out the corporate exhaustion of its parent company with copious and often inspired needle drops, even more hit-or-miss one-liners, and a visual playfulness that recalls actual comic books.

The filmmakers’ attempts to play around with the concept of the unlikely action hero are only moderately successful.

Lanthimos is so sure-handed and masterful in his craftsmanship, his cast so able and willing to crawl into whatever strange corner that he leads them to, that you cannot help but respect the man and his bizarre creation, even while resenting its obtuseness and self-regarding nature.

Despite the lofty and even admirable aspirations of this particular entrant to the ever-growing genre, what it has to offer bears little difference from all the rest: namely, a couple of really bad nights in a very bad house.

From its gas-passing piranha (voiced by In the Heights’ Anthony Ramos) to its reliance on phrases like “butt rock” and “grumpy pants” that seem grown in a lab to make the 12-and-under set giggle, the movie plays its target audience like a fiddle.

The story Hood’s film tells is a vital one to revisit, not just because the deceptions it illuminates inform so much of the political and international morass affecting our daily lives, but also shows the power of a single act of moral courage, and it does so while being blisteringly entertaining cinema.

Master Gardener fits as snuggly in writer-director Paul Schrader’s legacy of films about obsessive and isolated men as do pruning shears in the calloused hand of the film’s title character.

The net effect of all this techno-philosophic yackety-yak is the not altogether pleasant feeling that you are simultaneously watching a movie while being trapped in an elevator with someone desperate to explain what it’s all about and why you should like it.

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.

All of it combines into not only a profoundly romantic experience, but also an exploration of a number of different kinds of love and connection.

Exhaustion of every sort pervades Beverly Hills Cop: Axel F. You see it in its dearth of ideas, as the film recycles structure, set pieces and even music cues from the original.

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.

A film that is part infidelity drama and part slasher film while never fully committing to either idea.

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.

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.