Oliver Jones

Between its recreation of that Greenwich Village apartment, its use of archival audio recordings of telephone conversations and its fuzzed-out cutaways to vintage TV clips, One to One...often feels more like a museum installation than journalism. But its subject and its music would reward either.

A carefully considered mix of humor and melancholy glows in the fragile sunshine that bathes an isolated Welsh coastline in The Ballad of Wallis Island, a wan yet affecting consideration of lost love, forgotten bands and the odd ways those entities manifest themselves in our hearts and on our turntables.

Bob Trevino Likes It, the feature film debut from award-winning short film and web series director Tracie Laymon, wistfully and powerfully recaptures a more guileless era in our digital lives—which the Facebook interface and the lead character’s cracked second-gen iPhone put at around 2010.

The enterprise snaps to life only sporadically, primarily when its well-chosen character actors manage to steal moments of vitality away from the profound indifference that surrounds them.

It’s a movie that is not only worth returning to again and again, but one you will be grateful to have walking alongside you for years to come.

That sense of history grabbing you by the throat was still there—it’s all but impossible to drain that quality out of any iteration of the plays in Wilson’s towering Pittsburgh Cycle—but the grip on your windpipe was not nearly as tight as it should be.

Heretic’s fatal flaw lies in its very conceit. The film seems to have forgotten that when playing cat-and-mouse games, the cat, at least, is meant to be having fun. Here no one is—not Grant and least of all, not us.

Admittedly, A Real Pain is an acquired taste; like a top-flight IPA, it is at once overly aggressive and serenely balanced.

While Berger’s film should be applauded for envisioning a way forward for the profoundly troubled and still deeply corrupt organization, by not more completely and honestly reckoning with the crimes of its past, its optimism for the future—while both deeply felt and dramatically conveyed—ultimately rings hollow.

By crisscrossing time frames, Crowley, working from a script by playwright Nick Payne, halts his film’s momentum and lessens the overall impact of the central romance.

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.

All of this furious, empty noise keeps reminding you that you’re watching a cheesy horror film that is not confident enough in the story it’s telling to avoid succumbing to old tricks.

More than anything, Daughters—along with Greg Kwedar’s remarkable current release Sing Sing—speaks to the absolute societal and spiritual imperative of investing in rehabilitation, within prisons and outside their walls.

By centering on the start of the film and its conclusion, you realize Wang possesses not only a preternatural feel for the emotional jumble of boyhood, but also an astute understanding of both film structure and how to mine many layers of unforced truth from his troupe of talented actors.

It is a difficult and painful subject to consider, talk about, and confront both in life and in the movies. But Kormákur’s quiet little film reminds us that when we do—and however we do it—the process can remind us what it is like to be human.

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.

The first of Kevin Costner’s monumentally ambitious four-part western cycle, Horizon: An American Saga, Chapter One is a vivid reminder of how rousing an experience it is to see a grandly produced epic in that most American of all genres, while falling well short of actually being that experience.

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.

[Adlon] has crafted a film that is at once sophisticated and aggressively sophomoric, profoundly romantic and deeply cynical, and as feminist as a barbecue at Gloria Steinem’s house and yet seemingly apolitical enough to appeal to your average Entourage fan.

The latest jacked up, action extravaganza from stunt man turned director David Leitch (his last film, the not-very-good Bullet Train, is still leagues ahead of this movie in terms of imagination and execution), teems with contempt for the audience it is desperate to win over.

A kitchen-sink directorial debut from actor Dev Patel, Monkey Man is a knife-through-the-throat revenge thriller, a diatribe against institutional injustice and wealth inequality, an ode to both ancient and modern Indian culture and folklore, and a portfolio that proudly displays the action hero bona fides of its prodigiously muscled leading man— who just so happens to be the director himself.

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.

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.

While it is done well enough, the more complicated family story it eschews feels rarer and more valuable.

This time, Godzilla is a powerful symbol of the addictive pull of destruction, and how once unleashed, weapons of mass destruction can never again be contained.

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

The Killer is a simultaneously hollow and profound meditation on the numerous ways identity has been swallowed up and voided by the various demands of commerce and brand.

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

When it’s over, the chill it leaves in your spine is destined to last nearly as long as the smile on your face.

Like a stack of silver dollar pancakes at IHOP, Bad Dads is more a collection of episodic situations — one at a school fundraiser, the next at a desert casino — rather than a traditional movie. It’s a structure that reinforces the feeling that you are watching a sitcom that has been fused together rather than a movie.

What the film does effectively is revitalize Welles’ work by viewing it through the lens of media consolidation, government repression of art and leftist thinkers, and social justice.

Like many third iterations, this one shows signs of the creative team growing bored with what made the story worth telling in the first place.

The sense of joy that emanates from nearly every frame of Theater Camp, a film that arrived like a burst of July sunshine in the January frost of this year’s Sundance, is as palpable as grease paint and every bit as sweet as bug juice.

By presenting this crucial cultural phenomenon in a staid documentary form and in the reverent tone of a hushed docent, The League has the unintentional impact of making Black baseball seem like ancient rather than living history.

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.

Pixar’s Elemental is a movie about failing infrastructure, though that may make it sound more interesting than it actually is.

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

Song has crafted a deliriously honest romantic drama that is utterly singular even while it calls to mind everything from Richard Linklater to Wong Kar-wai to David Lean’s Brief Encounter. This is a movie that flows over with patience, forgiveness, and tender wisdom — qualities all the more wondrous for their relative absence from modern society and its movies.

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.

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.

Ostensibly a middling programmer meant to satiate our cinematic bloodlust during the lull between John Wick 4 and The Equalizer 3, this period neck-snapper from Finnish filmmaker Jalmari Helander may not only surpass both those films, it could end up taking the gore-splattered crown as the most satisfying, over-the-top violent action movie of the summer.

While the subject of her film used his flamboyant nature, church-rooted vocals, and percussive piano to invent something completely fresh, Cortés has stuck to the tried and true.

As a self-serious horror drama that fictionalizes the real-life exploits of the late author and Catholic priest Father Gabriele Amorth into an absurdly plotted, blood-drenched haunted house movie, The Pope’s Exorcist arrives in theaters Friday the 14 with all the vitality and vivaciousness of a 15th century corpse.

How to Blow Up a Pipeline both fully embraces its agitprop roots while also transcending them.

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.

Landing in multiplexes more than a year late after some business reshuffling and rewrites (not a good idea for your bad guys to be Ukrainian gangsters at this moment in history), Operation Fortune: Ruse de Guerre is a slick and empty-headed spy thriller that is almost instantly forgettable.

The extent to which the film fails to deliver on the B-movie promise of its title is staggering and, given the high-quality cast and crafts people stooping to concur on behalf of the film’s high-wire and harebrained premise, it is borderline tragic.

The movie exists between prestige and genre (or two genres, really, as it morphs in its final third from an escaped fugitive picture to a war movie), yet it can’t quite grasp either the elevated emotion of prestige or the snap of the genre.

EO is a successful attempt by 84-year-old Polish filmmaker and sometimes actor Jerzy Skolimowski to both update and add color to the cinematic conversation about despair, purpose, and braying that Bresson started more than a half century ago.

To be successful in confronting, understanding and dismantling the institutional homophobia that continues to be a cancer in American life requires depth, perspective, and a sense of inquiry—three qualities in short supply in The Inspection.

James Gray’s Armageddon Time is the kind of movie you get when a talented filmmaker thinks back upon the painful moments of his childhood and then, after close reflection, decides to remake The 400 Blows.

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.

The ability of Kammerer and his young castmates to convey the bone-deep dread of artillery bombardments and tanks rolling overhead is matched only by Berger’s complete command of the machinery of war and propulsion of narrative.

Murder mystery, romance, farce, war movie, political polemic with everything from racism to veterans’ care to American fascism in its sights — David O. Russell’s Amsterdam is a whiplash smorgasbord of a period piece that’s sure to draw the ire of People for the Ethical Treatment of Taylor Swift.

We may never completely know the answers to all of Cavett’s questions, but Morgen’s film shows definitively that the sound and vision Bowie left behind, when writ large and loud on the silver screen, makes for an otherworldly journey of beauty, mystery, and transformation.

An equally dreamlike and urgent act of radical archiving, Sierra Pettengill’s Riotsville, USA traces the origin of America’s militarized dismantling of social justice movements to a specific time and place.

Things really have to be precisely calibrated for comedy to work amidst all of this vicious violence—blood pours from eye sockets, gushes from neck arteries, and spouts from nearly decapitated heads—but no such luck. Instead, a talented ensemble of actors must stumble their way through chaotic tone shifts and declarations of irony that feel both uninspired and cruel.

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.

Is it all too cute? Almost, but not quite. Fire of Love is saved by the joy of film craft that pours forth both from the Kraffts and Dosa.

In the end, Pixar has made essentially a gritty prison movie for kids disguised as a large sci-fi spectacle.

Trevorrow does not add one fresh idea to this franchise. We are simply too far along in this technological revolution to think that the computer generated creatures themselves are enough, no matter how artfully they are arranged.

A gentle yet high-caliber mash-up of Sartre and Wes Anderson’s Bottle Rocket, Carmichael’s film is irreverent, serious, and heartrendingly sad in ways so crushingly honest that the unlikely outcome is spiritual uplift.

Every good magician knows that the real trick is making the audience care. For all of Doctor Strange in the Multiverse of Madness’s mind-bending universe jumping, that particular magic never manages to arrive in the theater.

It is an absurd premise, one made even more so by its execution, which at the hands of veteran Hollywood thriller director Martin Campbell (the one-time director of Bond films who has been in movie jail since 2011’s Green Lantern) is often lackluster and, on occasion, shockingly inept.

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 movie spends the bulk of its largely inert runtime painfully unaware that it is an example of the self-indulgent narcissism it’s intended to send up.

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.

Stan’s trip to the moon may fade into the ether, but his ride down the highway with his brothers and sisters, all of them unsecured on the flatbed of a pickup truck is so brimming with immediacy that it won’t even matter.

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.

The pace is always zippy but rarely hyper, and there is just enough space for the film’s many emotional beats to resonate.

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.

It’s diluted, a little flat, but sweet and familiar enough to evoke long ago memories, if not quite strong enough to give you a reason to bother to remember.

It is true that with Ghostbusters: Afterlife, Jason has entered the unofficial family business of trying and failing to recreate the inexplicable magic that made the original Ghostbusters such a frothy delight.

Zhao keeps these far-reaching propositions grounded through the laser-like focus of her vision and the precision of the images dreamed up by her and veteran MCU lensman Ben Davis. For once in a movie like this, ocean waves and cloudscapes carry as much weight as the ultra-choreographed battles between intergalactic interlopers.

Rarely will you see a more soul-numbingly empty product of this tragic operation than Halloween Kills, a film that so completely sucks the vitality out of John Carpenter’s and Debra Hill’s original vision that one would be tempted to call it a desecration if that didn’t make it sound like more fun than it actually is.

So much of Eastwood’s career over the last two decades has proven that his age and experience has incredible cinematic value when he holds himself to the high standards he set for himself years ago. When he doesn’t, which is sadly the case with Cry Macho, the uninspired results leave you with wistful memories of what once was.

It’s not for everybody, and it’s far from perfect, but you’ll be hard-pressed to find a more thrillingly necessary use of the filmmaking form this year.

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.

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

Even the film’s copious weaknesses are a reason to smile, taking us back to both the series’ B-movie roots and to less fraught periods in our lives.

By the time Wright’s somewhat exhaustive film concluded, every moment of it propelled by a high-octane geeky affection that felt like a newly discovered alternative fuel, I was in the strange duo’s thrall.

By shining the light on Stone, Agrelo’s movie rightfully makes a national hero out of a historical footnote.

For a movie that pulses with joyful expressiveness and brims with possibility, there is a tragic undertone to Ailey.

There’s little weight, not much style and even less sense to the psychological terror The Woman in the Window attempts to inflict.

Without the grounding of richly drawn characters and burdened by ideas that reflect Pentagon policy papers of the late 1980s rather than our current world, Without Remorse has the feeling of product rather than cinema — just another polished, consumer-facing, slightly stale gizmo scooting down the virtual Amazon assembly line.

It will more than likely meet fans’ expectations for what they want in a Mortal Kombat movie but will fall short of exceeding them.

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

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

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.

The strength of Judas and the Black Messiah is that it moves well beyond rhetoric, or even historic reconstruction for that matter. Letting his talented cast lead the way, King has made a film centered on roiled emotions and relationships that are at once fractured and loving.

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.

Even when the larger world that surrounds them is fuzzily rendered, when Wilson, Wolfe, Davis, Boseman and all those fabulous actors past and present are serving as our guides, gaining entrance into such uneasy places feels like a true gift.

Every thing about Fincher’s film—from his resurrection of his late father Jack’s script to his exacting recreation of a Hollywood in the midst of a creative explosion that it wouldn’t experience again for another 30 years or so—is a call to arms.

While the film proudly remains a chamber piece very much in keeping with its roots in the theater, King opens it up in ways that show an innate knack for visual storytelling.

Instead, by reshaping this charged moment culled from somewhat recent American history in his own image, Sorkin has made The Trial of the Chicago 7 about something else entirely: himself.

The real issue undermining Durkin’s sophomore effort is central to the weaving of the film’s conceit. It looks like a horror movie, swims like a horror movie, and quacks like a horror movie, but it isn’t a horror movie. So then what the hell is it? Good question. After a long, slow build-up, The Nest winds up being as vacant as the Surrey country house of the title, and leaves the viewers feeling every bit as empty.

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.

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.

It’s also the kind of storyline that gives quite a bit of cover to the film’s lesser attributes—namely its general small-mindedness and squishy moral logic.

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

All of this unvarnished evil is depicted with haunting beauty and uncompromising artistry. Shot in 35mm black-and-white by master Czech cinematographer Vladimír Smutný, every shot is breathtaking to behold.

They have made a film absent of time that could not possibly be more of the moment.

The result is a film—Kore-eda’s first outside of his native country and language—that feels almost aggressively low-key, low stakes and notably less urgent than the filmmaker’s earlier works.

Shockingly un-cinematic and utterly devoid of dynamism, the film lacks anything resembling the well-researched insights or sharp-edged comedy that you have come to associate with the former host of The Daily Show.

What results is a messy, ambitious, deeply emotional film that sometimes falls victim to the tropes of the genres it attempts to remix but never loses its power to move us.

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.

There is an immediacy to the film so rare in period biopics and such a tactile physicality to its intellectual gymnastics. By the time Shirley draws to a close, you end up feeling pleasingly spent, like you just stayed up all night drinking a bottle of Canadian Club while discussing literary theory with a dear old confidant you hadn’t seen in years. Some friends just tire you out like that, and they are almost always the best kind.

The High Note is a wholly unexpected and utterly enchanting summer movie throwback.

It would be easy to put the blame here on the two stars; expect a lot of misguided chatter about Nanjiani and Rae’s lack of chemistry. But if they deserve blame, it is in their capacity as co-executive producers who approved production on the anemic and half-baked script.

Inheritance has not one iota of the thematic intensity of Bong’s film, nor any of the dynamic relationships that make Succession’s twists and turns impactful. Instead, there is nothing much on Inheritance’s mind, and the relationships end up as underdeveloped as the film’s cliché-ridden dialogue.

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.

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.

Cole’s overarching theme of time drifting, folding inward and ultimately dooming the fathers, sons, mothers and daughters of All Day and a Night is hugely aided by the manner in which he frames these ideas visually.

The movie shows that, true or not, in the right hands and with the right actors, this oft-told tale—like the Western genre itself—can course with the kind of venturesomeness that makes cinema so exciting no matter the circumstances under which we watch it.

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 Banker is a sadly facile and largely surface level rendering of a profoundly complex problem that deserves more attention.

When Whannell’s movie is at its best, the audience is not just a witness to the terror; we are part of the machinery that inflicts it. Which is not to say that — when it works — this remake of James Whale’s 1933 classic is a success born of camera placement, special effects, or even conceptual daring.

Despite its title, Onward is a regressive film, sometimes painfully so.

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.

In what is something of a movie miracle or at the very least an unexpected surprise, this adaptation of the much-loved Sega video game franchise launched nearly 30 years ago as a direct assault on Nintendo’s leaping plumber Mario, largely presses the all the right buttons—and even does so in the right order.

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.

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.

The best thing about reviewing the new PG-13 horror movie The Turning is that you don’t have to worry about spoiling the ending because it doesn’t have one. It just, sort of, stops.

This is a movie where the charming guys fire holes into the un-charming guys while blowing stuff up and telling mildly funny jokes. Its story is absurd, most of the dialogue not spoken by one of the two leads is laughable, and save for a draggy middle section when the plot mechanics keep the bad boys separated, it’s a lot of fun.

Words are generally a problem for Dolittle—a fatal flaw when your picture is about talking animals. While the words are abundant, most are either perfunctory exposition or anachronistic jokes that fall flatter than the state of Nebraska.

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 Safdies’ film is a cinematically expressive tightrope walk that seems designed to leave your blood pressure permanently spiked. It can be relentless and hard to take, but it is brimming with surprise and a vivacity that radiates off the screen.

It also happens to be the best ending of a movie this year and the work of a filmmaker completely attuned to both her craft and the inner lives of her characters. Moreover, the shot is the final act of passion and precision in a film that is teeming with both, a work of art whose flame will continue to smolder in your mind and heart well after you have left the theater.

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.

This is a movie where the characters utter the word “weird” enough times to fill an Advent calendar; in truth, the only thing that’s actually weird about it is how middle-of-the-road and mild it is.

Indeed, considering its trippy visuals and leaden dialog, Maleficent: Mistress of Evil would work much better with the sound turned off (the music is as ubiquitous as it is unremarkable) and Dark Side of the Moon or a bootleg of a Dead show blasting on the stereo.

In a masterful bit of cinematic sleight of hand, Bong, the writer and director behind 2013’s "Snowpiercer" and 2017’s "Okja," harnesses the precise anxieties everyone of us is currently sharing — top of that list, the growing income gap and the crumbling planet — and uses them to make every scene in this blackhearted comic thriller crackle with energy and purpose.

Portman’s delicate and damaged portrayal is mesmerizing.

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.

After awhile, Last Blood feels less like a new Rambo movie than the latest installment of "Texas Chainsaw Massacre."

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.

We end up spending way too much time running over the same old ground. What have we found? The same old fear.

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.

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

It is the Oscar winner’s most affected performance to date, which is truly saying something when you consider that she has already played both Katherine Hepburn and Bob Dylan.

Like that dash across the freeway, the dirty jokes, bad language and bursts of violence end up being something that we have to grit our teeth to endure to get a glimpse of the inner lives of these boys, which are far richer than we typically see from a Hollywood comedy.

It’s far from subtle, more than a little sudsy, but also pleasingly direct and full of heart. Most significantly though, its timing is perfect.

The truth is, the film represents a troubling trend in films today, where production and marketing types think they can get by providing shallow examples of things that are popular in the social justice zeitgeist — women being tough-as-nails lead characters, for example — and act like that’s enough. It’s not. Give us real characters; give us good writing; give us a compelling story. Otherwise, don’t bother.

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.

If he weren’t voiced by a mellow and serene Kevin Costner, Enzo would sound like Martin Short’s old Ed Grimley character, only with Formula One replacing Pat Sajak and Wheel of Fortune as his object of obsession.

No one was expecting Midnight Run level repartee from Hobbs and Shaw, but is it too much to ask for a bit more than the who-has-a-bigger-penis stuff we get here?

The result is a well-intentioned but ultimately torpid film, one that feels much more concerned with saying something important than it is the far more noble task of conveying a compelling story worth telling.

While the man in the title may have played a part in ushering us towards this unfortunate state, Mike Wallace Is Here is nonetheless a refreshing return to a more promising era when a swashbuckling, nicotine-huffing newsman made powerful people sweat for our collective edification.

When violence does befall Clare and her family, it is far more devastating than anything she could possibly have imagined. It’s also as shocking and difficult to watch as any I have seen in a lifetime of watching violent movies.

Produced by Cameron Crowe, who interviewed Crosby as a young journalist for Rolling Stone in 1974, the film spins a powerful and enlightening fable about the ultimate cost of survival. It’s about what happens when the most reckless and bridge-burning among us ends up being rock’s Harry Potter — i.e. the boy who lives — and must sift through the guilt and wreckage of all the relationships left in his wake.

The best of what The Lion King offers is a somewhat technically up-to-date and generally well-voiced reworking of the familiar, but nothing surprising or vital. There is certainly nothing in the least bit urgent about director Jon Favreau’s new telling.

Awkwafina’s true skill as a remarkably sensitive collaborator has only recently been revealed—last year doing broad comedy in "Crazy Rich Asians" and now here, where every scene requires a deft shading of sadness and guilt.

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.

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.

Like the metropolis that sprawls out far below the rooms she cleans, the film quietly pulses with life. And like Eve, we are left hoping she has a larger part to play in that world beyond smoothing blankets and folding toilet paper ends into perfect little triangles.

What is the meaning of life? When that question is posited in a deeply moving post-credits scene, the answer is like the film you just watched: incredibly funny and devastatingly true.

The main issue is the script. The tale it tells is shopworn.

Which points us to the real issue with this film and so many like it. These super heroic and super histrionic spectacles are multiplying so rapidly that they are recycling their own tropes at such a rate that it is almost impossible to be surprised anymore.

Godzilla: King of Monsters is a film that seems to paint with sound — sometimes Pop Art, but more often large canvas Jackson Pollock splatter.

The movie has nary a thought in its red-hooded head, only a lot of blood.

The new film never lags and some of the sturdiest elements from the original — namely the catchy and descriptive tunes by Alan Menken, Howard Ashman and Tim Rice — remain every bit as strong as they were in 1992.

As a result, The Souvenir, Hogg’s fourth film, is an extraordinary rumination on memory and privilege while also being one of the most incisive movies ever to directly address — in moral, philosophical and personal terms — what it means to be a filmmaker.

This is a movie that talks endlessly about emotion but displays none of it — and the same can be said for all that destiny chatter.

Buried beneath its furious, catch-as-catch-can approach to humor (Wine Country never met a joke it didn’t like), the film is a moving and nuanced portrayal of how difficult it is to be open and vulnerable even to those who love us utterly and without apology.

While it was a little disappointing to see the film relegate the other candidates to backup singers to Representative Ocasio-Cortez’s leading lady, that doesn’t make their contributions to the movement that elected her any less significant. Nor does it dull the emotional impact of her remarkable achievement.

Most filmgoers will come away only mildly convinced of Bolden’s place as jazz’s inventor and even less sure that the movie they just saw spun a coherent or compelling narrative.

Add to the long-winded title of this film, “…and completely unnecessary.”

It is so uncannily adroit at balancing humor and pathos that the two complement rather than detract from each other.

This is not simply one of the finest films to explore the unique challenges that beset women in rural parts of the country where men outnumber them two-to-one. It is also one of the only to illustrate the devastating social impact of the war against women and their reproductive rights that has been waged by statehouses across the nation.

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.

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.

While it is good that a director as versed on the subject of consent as Schwartzman is bringing her unwavering eye to the problem, it makes it all the more painful that we seem even further away from solving the issue then we were on that fateful August night in Ohio seven years ago.

By the end, Shazam! feels like a corporate product that’s so thirsty for approval from all quadrants that it never ends up figuring out what it is.

While The Hummingbird Project may not be reap the benefits of a 13-episode season, at times, watching this dramatically flaccid tale of late-cycle capitalism run amok feels that long to get through.

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.

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.

Rarely if ever has a film ostensibly about and informed by cinema been so thoroughly un-cinematic...And un-emotional: that spark of love is also missing in action. Perhaps this is why the film chose to drop the question mark from its title. If it had been posed as a query, the answer would have been, no, not nearly enough.

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.

The manner in which Mikkelsen, the former Danish gymnast and dancer we chiefly know for his suave villains in 2006’s "Casino Royale" and the NBC series "Hannibal," plays off his largely mute charge is simply extraordinary.

With her sweet face, alert eyes, and a tail that forever waves in the air like a maestro’s baton, this is a dog worth following, no matter the breed.

Forget all of it being true; I would have settled for some of it being interesting.

The experience is simultaneously intimate and stirring; the film brings its audience to a thrillingly colorful and utterly relevant world of its own at a time when the primary purpose of other superhero movies seems to be to tease future installments and fill corporate coffers.

While the presence of both Law and Depp is a little distracting — the film could also be called "The Proxy War of the Long in the Tooth Former Hotties" — the acting is generally strong. But here the film’s best assets are also criminally underused.

While there’s something dispiriting and cynical about this conflation of product placement and pop commentary, it does give the film a kitchen sink quality: there is literally something for everyone.

Remarkable film.

Not simply a worthy addition to David Fincher’s vastly under-appreciated "The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo" franchise (they’re calling it a “soft reboot,” but there’s nothing soft about it), The Girl in the Spider’s Web is also a top-shelf Batman movie. For good measure, it kicks the butt of the last few Bourne installments too.

Some of the visual horror will no doubt be of interest to genre fans, but even there the appeal is limited. In an age when we are awash in efficient and involving horror movies — from "Halloween" to "A Quiet Place" to even "The Nun" (which is not that great but is at least short) — Suspiria comes off as bloated and disconnected.

The intimacy and honesty of the family rapport, the razor sharp dialogue and—most unexpectedly—its deeply grounded humor keep the film and its slight and compassionate story utterly engaging.

Fortunately, it is a nuanced, intense and utterly involving look at how racist policies shape judicial and economic outcomes for families like the Carters, and it doesn’t dumb things down one bit.

It’s a little long and leisurely. However, fueled by Rachel and Richard’s baby mania, it never drags.

The humans in the film are blandly generic. But the yetis, while individually distinct, all share a much larger, troubling problem: they don’t have noses.

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.

Along with Dickey’s equally feral and vulnerable performance, what stands out most in Blaze is just how fully formed and realized Hawke’s vision is as a filmmaker.

Rich in atmosphere but bereft of new ideas about how to scare an audience, The Nun is like being stuck inside a club with cool decor where the DJ keeps playing the same song over and over again.

Phil is the only puppet character that registers at all, which is one of the countless ways that the movies falls short of the legacy it is meant to expand and subvert.

This bold new film not only shatters comedy’s cold streak, but also serves as a powerful reminder of the vitality of the genre as both social commentary and shared experience.

Music video director Director X, making his feature debut, presents it all in a compelling and often intoxicating manner. There is something narcotic and languid about his pacing and camera work that feels purposeful and stylistic when the script is focused but comes off as stumbling and haphazard when the story looses momentum, which is often.

This is the rare sequel that packs constant surprises while still delivering on expectations.