Richard Lawson

Chasing Summer often plays as the most peculiar Hallmark movie ever made. I want that to be a good thing, but it unfortunately is not.

While grandly moving at the close, too much of this Color Purple relies on memories of Color Purples past.

Eighth Grade is an exciting directorial debut for Burnham, a precocious teen phenomenon who seems to have grown into a thoughtful adult—one who intimately knows of what he speaks. He’s made an alarmingly perceptive film that only rarely goes for the easy joke or verges toward cliché

Judas and the Black Messiah is missing that deeper personal aspect, some sense of the emotional force yoking O’Neal and Hampton together, dragging them toward ruin. The film is resonant regardless. Still, there’s such an opportunity presented here—to see these two sterling actors really working in harmony—that goes frustratingly unseized. As is, Judas and the Black Messiah is richer and more engaging than a standard biopic, but is not quite the Shakespearean tragedy of double allegiances and backstabbing that it could have been.

There needn’t be some deeper theme or intent behind a movie like this, but The Lighthouse is an awfully trying experience to end with such a sneering shrug of the shoulders. I couldn’t shake the feeling that The Lighthouse is simply an exercise, an overeager writing class project from a guy who’s just read Sartre, Beckett, and, I dunno, Stephen King.

Little clarity can actually be wrestled out of Cooper’s dank creation, a shallow, dour film that pays rote adherence to the mandate that horror must and should offer profound personal or social commentary.

While it certainly stimulated and overwhelmed my senses, Blade Runner 2049 rarely got my mind whirring the way one always hopes this kind of artful, serious-minded sci-fi will.

It pains me to say this. I spent a good deal of Us straining to like it, to get on its slightly preening wavelength, to be nourished by its heady stew of tropes. I couldn’t get there, though. As loaded up on stuff as Us is, there’s not enough to grab onto; it’s an alienating idea piece that lumbers away just as it’s about to reveal its true nature.

Without the Shakespearean language, this is just an ahistorical story about a king and a battle. ... But it’s nothing fancy, really, nothing newfangled or inventive. This is a pretty straight-down-the-middle period war-king film, a true Boy Movie of respectable pedigree but no real distinction.

Overall, there is so little texture to these character arcs that the actors are mostly just working in service of a blandly uplifting message. It’s as if they’ve all been commissioned by a well-funded science museum to lend their bodies and voices to the cause of slickly comestible up-with-people infotainment.

Dano shows technical promise as a director, but I hope his taste in material has a bit more range. Now that he’s gotten a rather passionless passion project out of his system, hopefully he’ll lift his gaze up in search of other, more vibrant lives—out there in the vastness, hungry for perfect lighting.

A too-close-to-the-case ardor for the material does the film a disservice, as can sometimes happen when a cherished object is adapted.

Nosferatu is a sensory pleasure. But on a story level, it leaves much to be desired.

Rising to challenge viewers’ qualms about the movie’s existence is Deadwyler, whose stirring performance may be reason enough to see the film.

As Nope swerves and reels, it often seems distracted by itself, unable to hold its focus on any one thing long enough for deeper meaning, or feeling, to coalesce.

Horror movies need not have wholly logical explanations—shivers of ambiguity or contradiction are often appreciated—but Longlegs hurtles past compelling murkiness and lands in the realm of dull nonsense.

Polley admirably allows her fine performers ample space to bring Women Talking to life. But there are also the bigger needs of the film to be considered—sometimes Polley’s actorly generosity comes at a cost, when the film turns stage-y for a minute and we’re snapped out of its enveloping spell.

It is a proper movie, one that probably would have fared decently in theatrical release. I believe there was genuine artistic intent put into the making of the film, which distinguishes Disenchanted from HP2 and so many other chintzy streaming endeavors.

Watching Love Lies Bleeding becomes a trial of patience, as the viewer waits for the plot to rise to meet the film’s good looks, or for those stylish aspects to blossom further into elegant abstraction. Instead, the film hobbles along, revealing ever more contrivances.

I appreciate that Manners and Battye are trying to add some extra flair to what is otherwise a fairly conventional growing-pains narrative, but too often Extra Geography seems located outside any map of the real world.

An action-drama sourced from history (while riffing considerably on that history), The Woman King is a sturdy testament to how renewed a staid form can feel when it’s stretched to include different narratives.

The film—structured as an issue of a New Yorker-esque magazine—is fussy and ornately detailed and difficult to grasp. Where Anderson’s past elaborate worlds have invited us in with all their cozy detail, The French Dispatch’s seems to haughtily sniff in our direction; it doesn’t much care if we get it.

Garland didn’t decide to make this particular movie on an un-sourced whim; its very existence is a response to something hanging in the air. Yet he refuses to connect Civil War with that obvious context—which feels more like a cop out than high-minded restraint or elegant equanimity.

Blindspotting never settles into a consistent cadence. This isn’t exactly a problem, in theory—movies can contain multitudes, of course—but in this trio’s overeager execution, all that chaos renders the movie curiously inert.

Bones and All has its merits, but the film is only a decent side dish at the feast of Guadagnino. You’ll likely leave the theater still feeling hungry.

With Dune, Villeneuve has the chance to right the wrongs of David Lynch’s 1984 misfire (a misfire according to some, anyway) and truly honor Herbert’s text. But Villenueve can’t help but lacquer it all up into something hyper polished and hard to the touch.

There’s great stuff in Joy Ride, the jumbled atoms of a classic comedy all waiting to be gathered into a cohesive whole. If they didn’t quite get it together on this outing, they certainly prove their potential.

The film never achieves lift-off, drifting instead through a series of scenes that repeat and repeat the movie’s few, basic themes before sputtering to a too easily resolved—and patly rendered—conclusion.