Richard Lawson

Shirley is a relentless film, ceaselessly in motion. Its actors, then, must go chasing after it, with Moss leading the fearless charge. She brilliantly maneuvers the film, moving in fluid response to Decker’s stimuli.

Directed by Wes Ball, Kingdom doesn’t reach the rattling grandeur of Dawn. But it's another worthy installment in a series that is pretty much unparalleled in contemporary times.

Those wary of McDonagh after the bulldozer that was Billboards should seek out this film; at its best, The Banshees of Inisherin whispers and laments and amuses the way McDonagh’s best stage writing does. And it offers the invaluable opportunity to see Farrell in his hangdog element, as Pádraic scrambles about trying to find purchase in the world, ever creaking and groaning in motion.

Oldman does a wizardly bit of becoming, making all these changes in voice, bearing, and proportion without putting on too many actorly airs; for how complex it is, Oldman’s is a remarkably unfussy performance.

With Dillane’s invaluable help, Urchin paints a sad and compelling portrait of someone lost in the fringes, a victim of an often indifferent system and of the complex wiring of his brain.

Writer-director Ari Aster, making a promising feature debut, has created plenty of forbidding atmosphere; there’s almost no shot in the film that isn’t filled with creeping dread. But Hereditary ultimately engages on a more emotional and intellectual register than it does on the visceral.

Poetic License is far from mere pastiche. It has a distinct, youthful sensibility and sources its comedy more from recognisably human behaviour than from profane, one-liner riffing.

Both goofy and edgy, the film may not land every punchline, but it satisfies in visceral, pleasurable ways that a more sophisticated comedy could not.

Though all three sections of the film have didactic bits when big ideas are plainly stated, the bulk of Monsters and Men renders huge issues with a fluid understatement. But that disarming pensiveness and interiority doesn’t forget the anger and sadness of the story—instead, it somehow heightens it, affording these characters a grounded texture that casts their struggles in a piercingly humane light.

It’s heady, strange stuff, perhaps not as emotionally resonant as TV Glow, but captivating in both its confusion and honesty.

While plenty of scenes in Maestro have their discrete power—teeming with insight and impressive artistry—it’s only in an appreciation of Mulligan and Cooper’s full-bodied work that the greater whole finds resonance. In them lies the film’s true majesty, its best and most convincing approximation of what it is to love and create and, in so doing, reveal something transcendent.

The film . . . is at once light and serious, a warm and sensitive tribute to the book’s themes that avoids any unnecessary updating. Fremon Craig, whose last film was the excellent teen dramedy The Edge of Seventeen, gives the material just the right spin, letting Margaret and her friends exist wholly in their age.

The film is sturdy, galvanizing, the sort of movie that might help rouse people out of despair and into the good fight. The spirit of revolution—righteously angry yet full of bonhomie, demanding but generous in its reach—is alive and well in the film. As, one hopes, it is everywhere else.

Sauvage is often difficult viewing, and Leo tries our patience and compassion as anyone habitually treating themselves so poorly can. Nevertheless, the film achieves a sort of grace, in moments of sweetness and stillness, when the fullness of Leo’s being—be it ravaged and weary—is palpable and, finally, undeniable.

Wicker is a warming, sometimes poignant pleasure, a film full of lively personality and possessed of a rather humane outlook on our petty foibles. It is not exactly forgiving, though; the movie has a harder, more merciless edge than one might expect.

Hawke and Byrne have a nice chemistry, handling an offbeat and initially epistolary romance with wary sweetness. Juliet, Naked is surprising in its emotional contours, hitting familiar beats from different angles or, occasionally, taking the story in wholly unexpected directions.

Bratton, though, is not solely interested in a litany of struggle. He fills The Inspection with style, with spiky humor and alluring edge. It’s a promising feature debut.

Lee uses Blaxploitation motifs playfully but with purpose, honoring an era of discourse and activism while urging for the necessity of a similar film language now. If we are not keen to the past, we’re likely to find ourselves mired in its ills again. We already are, of course.

Those in recovery, and those close to someone who is, ought to find something nourishing in The Outrun, a stirring reminder of the human capacity to regroup, to accept a bitter past and anticipate a better future.

The movie is not trying to make any grand statements or reinvent any wheels; it is only trying to entertain.

Not all memoir is generous. It can be intriguingly solipsistic, or maddeningly vain. But because there’s always been a curious blankness to Spielberg’s public persona—cheerful and engaged but never quite known—The Fabelmans does feel like something of a gift.

Garland is a breathtakingly talented filmmaker, one whose few second-film stumblings—the unwieldy scope of his ambitions, his scrambling for an ending—are forgivable. Annihilation murmurs and roars with ideas, a dense and sad and scary inquest into life and self. It’s a true cinematic experience.

Fresh is instead a grim slice of visceral entertainment, occasionally dressed up as something weightier. When the script indicates toward its intent—especially in the final climax, when a couple of clunky, theme-driven lines threaten to derail the whole thing—the cool flint of what’s come before loses a bit of its edge.

The film is best viewed as a tricky character study, one about the undulations and relentless demands of self-worth—and, of course, of money, which is always a focus of Baker’s films.

Vivid and bracing as the film’s swimming scenes are, Nyad crackles most when Nyad and Bonnie are grooving together on land. Bening and Foster have an inviting rapport, credibly playing old pals (and onetime lovers) who are in it for the long haul.

Ramsay’s jumble of pictures and sound is bound together by Lawrence’s confident, fearless gravity. It’s quite something to behold: a comedic performance that manages convincing notes of devastation, or a dramatic turn that is also screamingly funny. What a thrill to see Lawrence expanding her artistry like this, a movie star reclaiming the talent that her celebrity once nearly obscured.

Leviticus has a enough gore and jumpy moments to qualify it as a proper horror film. But its true scariness is of the forlorn kind.

Zhao is a good fit for the material. She, too, is a close observer of nature and of the many aching, yearning people passing through it. But she has previously not made anything as traditionally tailored and refined as this.

While we’ve seen that kind of portrait of an artist before—surely most of the greats have at least a dash of cruel vanity in them—Chalamet makes it fresh. To watch him is to feel what so many other characters in the film do: an affection and a curious sense of loss as he drifts away into the lonely mists of talent and fame.

From a certain angle, Incredibles 2 looks a little too slavish to creaky conventions.

This is a sad and frightening story about a family’s undoing, but Rasoulof ekes out some hope too.

Bros leans into the giddy little revolution of its own existence, inviting the audience into a good, gay time that hasn’t exactly happened, in this way, before.

With Creed III (opening in theaters March 3), Jordan takes full control of the reins, making his directorial debut in calm and confident fashion.

Wicked succeeds because of some unreproducible, lightning in a bottle convergences—of director, stars, craftspeople, and high-status material. But Wicked also makes a broader case for patience and careful thought, for grand ambition honed over the course of many years. In order to defy gravity, gravity must first be understood.

It’s homage and gentle parody at once, seeking to capture the energy of playing the game with friends rather than trying to seriously literalize an expansive world.

While the stunt work is impressive—and the film’s appreciation of it is, uh, appreciated—The Fall Guy is maybe even more successful as an ode to the increasingly elusive X-factor that is star power.

While the core narrative is plenty compelling in all its creeping dread and curiosity, The Power of the Dog is not too concerned with being about any one thing. The film’s secrets are revealed while new ones bloom into being. Life tumbles after life in the ecosystem of all of us, seething amid the dust clouds we can’t help but kick up.

Club Kid isn’t really a whitewashed vanity project. It’s a confident, exciting directorial debut, stylish in an unobtrusive way and agreeably paced.

Once the politics of food and gas and guns have finally been sorted, Furiosa revs its engines and goes chasing after the grandeur of its predecessor. It doesn’t quite catch up. But it comes close enough that we can at least glimpse Fury Road’s tail lights in the distance.

Shithouse is not some universal exploration of America’s youth, to be sure. But in its own narrow scale, it’s pretty effective. This is a discursive movie keenly sourced from individual experience.

The film is not aiming to depress its audience, though. It is instead cathartic and energizing to witness these dire topics chewed over and spun into delicate poetry. It’s an act of communion, really, Almodóvar drawing us in close to say that yes, yes he shares our same doleful worry.

American Fiction, a sharp and clever film, could be all the more so if it felt better connected to the present tense. As is, the reflection is a bit warped; contemporary subtleties are missing.

It’s a thrill to watch a film that so cogently, shrewdly renders its ideas. It’s a case of high concept, adeptly cracked.

At its best, this new Naked Gun is a dumb, loopy delight, a return to the kind of comedy that was woefully taken for granted in its heyday and now barely exists at all.

It’s a wild, profane blast. But Baker is also zooming in, very slowly, so that in the movie’s startling, disarming final scene we are forced to reconsider what we’ve just watched. Was it a raucous chase movie or a quiet tragedy?

The premise is so cute it’s surprising a movie hasn’t done it already. Eternity mines its compelling conceit for both peppery comedy and bleary sentiment.

That McQuarrie and Cruise are eventually able to get this hurtling, heavy plane level and pull off a rewarding climax is a testament to the fierceness of their commitment to these projects.

Eggers’s action sequences are swift and brutal, filled with the crunch of life extinguished and tossed into the bone pile of time. Skarsgård, hulking and seething, is a fine vessel for the film’s opulent menace. He’s a fearsome, yet elegant, creature of destruction as he hacks and slashes away.

The steadily accumulated emotional weight of the film dissipates rather quickly as it reaches its abrupt ending. Still, Blue Heron is an affecting, promising debut feature.

It’s a shrewdly balanced film, a mix of flippant merriment and real dramatic stakes.

Sinners is propulsive and stirring entertainment, messy but always compelling. The film’s fascinating array of genres and tropes and ideas swirls together in a way that is, I suppose, singularly American.

Wonka is, in fact, a lively, winsome pleasure, a film decidedly aimed at children that nonetheless incorporates some dark matter.

The Idea of You is glossy and smart, a cut above the slop so often served to its intended audience. It may force a neat ending, it may strain logic, it may leave some intriguing avenues unexplored, but The Idea of You is otherwise transporting, a fairy tale worthy of a big screen.

Rarely in Big Time Adolescence does anything feel canned or beyond the realm of the credible. All the characters in the film seem to have inner lives; we believe that they exist past the confines of the film. It’s a pleasure to be in their warm and appealing company, even as the proceedings take a turn for the mildly dire.

Whether 28 Years Later is a satisfying franchise followup, 18 years after the last entry, will have to be decided by the beholder. I found myself confused by the film’s unexpected tone, but also captivated by it.

There is also its nimble humor, its refreshingly frank and positive depictions of sex—perhaps we are finally turning a corner on that whole issue. And there is the remarkable Pugh, doing so much to deeply humanize a story of pretty people in pretty places and ever so slightly contrived circumstances.

Watching The Way of Water, one rolls their eyes only to realize they’re welling with tears. One stretches and shifts in their seat before accepting, with a resigned and happy plop, that they could watch yet another hour of Cameron’s preservationist epic. Lucky for us—lucky even for the culture, maybe—that at least a few more of those are on their way.

Ant-Man and the Wasp is firmly on the B-movie end of the Marvel spectrum, a happy enough place to be: clacking along with all its bug friends, for the moment unfussed about Thanos and geopolitics. It seems pretty nice. Would that we could wrestle the rest of the world down to that same agreeable scale.

Priscilla is not an emotional epic, nor is it a furious correction of the record. It is, instead, a convincing and humane sketch of a young woman caught up in something vast and eternally defining. She may as well be wandering Versailles.

The emotional punch of The Boy and the Heron is a heart-swelling assertion of cosmic purpose, even amidst sadness and ruin. But it’s delivered after a lot of digression, which can make this swan-song film seem like more a collection of Miyazaki’s disparate, previously unused ideas than a discrete film with a focused mission.

Its moral identity aside, this is a staggering piece of filmmaking. The Rosses have a keen command of picture and motion; their film is riveting from the jump, swiftly and totally enveloping us in the bonhomie of Michael and his bleary company. Maybe the non-reality of it all isn’t worth fretting about.

It’s a patchwork that doesn’t always stitch together neatly, but is compelling and wrenching as a whole. The film is also a mighty vision of chaos and fire, of music and movement, of a city churning to sustain itself.

It’s a lively, messy coming-of-age story which turns the clashing elements of its title into reflections of a certain youthful folly and daring, a penchant for base gross-out humor and big, revolutionary thinking.

If the film feels awfully familiar as it glides along these narrative rails, that same-ness is enlivened and given polish by Manville.

Midsommar is a shocking piece of filmmaking—unnervingly competent even when the film yaws into silliness, even when it risks tedium. This film will alienate a lot of people (much like Hereditary, its audience exit polling is likely going to be abysmal), but there’s a wonderfully audacious confidence to the way Midsommar is built.

It’s a freeing movie, not without its flaws and missteps, but wonderfully alive with all the looseness of new possibility.

Beckett moves through the film not as an invincible badass, but as a man who is tired and in a great deal of pain. And there is indeed no rest for the weary: when Beckett has a brief respite from his physical odyssey, the grief rushes back in. It’s all pretty difficult to watch, as it probably should be.

Rourke does enough to both honor and reshape the hallowed mold to keep things interesting. Working with a script from Beau Willimon—the House of Cards creator whose smart streak is sometimes undone by hammier impulses—she steers an interesting course through cliché, both upending and satisfying the royals fan’s hunger for repetition, for familiar tropes staged anew.

You can’t taste all the miraculous food the sorry men of The Trip to Greece are served. But you can, at least, relate to the feeling the film evokes. It’s the wonder of new experience giving even further gravity to all that’s come along and happened before—and will, on some dusty day in some impossible future, hopefully happen again.

How refreshingly nice it is to watch a summertime movie that lets us sit in our feelings and grim recollections this way, and figures that an adventure in its own right.

The Snyder of 2004 is utterly revived in Army of the Dead, a shrewdly mounted action film (as opposed to a horror one) that may be saying something about imperialism, or may just be a bloody, satisfying entertainment devoid of allegory.

My Friend Dahmer doesn’t present some rueful wish that, oh, young Jeffrey might have made it if only someone had reached out to him. But it does extend him some human compassion, letting us see how the tragedy of his loneliness, spurred by the horror of his dark compulsions, made pre-murderous Dahmer something of a victim himself.

Perhaps a new day of Cage has dawned. One in which he can get back to the business of acting, unburdened by all the constant, semi-loving demand that he just bug out his eyes and dance.

Despite a wildly uneven “Americarrr” accent (through which the voice of Queen Elizabeth sometimes shines), Foy is excellent in the film, rigid poise giving way to feral anger in always convincing shades.

I love how open and casual this film is about Colette’s budding queerness, how it eschews any awkward coming out or pains-of-the-closet stuff. Instead it simply revels in Colette’s sexual and romantic freedom, suggesting that it was just that looseness, that liberation that gave her writing such verve.

Black Widow is a prequel of sorts, and an origin story, a robust and satisfying glimpse into a defining interlude in Black Widow’s life that almost, almost pulls off the trick of being wholly its own thing.

It’s a genial, funny movie, not a mile-a-minute behind-the-cameras gag-fest (hyphens!) like 30 Rock, but an amiable workplace comedy that finds personal definition in its influences.

The ending of the film stuck with me for days, pushing me into a kind of melancholy existential funk that proved distressingly hard to shake.

It’s a rare treat these days to see Latifah in a movie (you can see her on TV on The Equalizer); perhaps we have Sandler to thank for this welcome, if brief, return. I’d gladly watch the pair in another project together.

The High Note isn’t an ecstatic, tenuously held burst; instead, it’s a mellow pleasure, sleekly directed by Ganatra, who turns Flora Greeson’s occasionally programmatic script into something of smooth, sensual warmth. It is, above all else, an inviting opportunity for two likable actors, Dakota Johnson and Tracee Ellis Ross, to simply exist on screen together, fluid in their casual appeal and gracefully bringing a sappy, aspirational story to mostly credible life.

Decision to Leave no doubt deserves a repeat viewing. Even if the finale is still a slightly hard to parse bummer, there is all the other meticulous craftwork to appreciate and discover anew. In this instance, maybe there is no getting too close to the case.

The film shows—and says plainly, at one point—that people with extreme wealth are so divorced from reality that they become almost another species. Yet it doesn’t fully explore the weirdness of that, the chilling tragedy of it. Instead, Scott has made simply a competent thriller that dazzles only in the ingeniousness of its lightning-quick and proficient re-staging.

The Map of Tiny Perfect Things knows its limits. It’s careful about when to be twee, when to strive for profundity, and when to hold back. The film has an agreeably modest scale, despite its lofty considerations of physics and the makeup of existence.

Godzilla vs. Kong competently, efficiently does its job, which is really all you can ask of the fourth movie in a rickety franchise.

The film somehow gets more interesting as it goes, swirling up into a climax that is mordant and corny and monster-movie fantastical.

Jon M. Chu’s film certainly delivers on the lavish trappings of the former interpretation, but if the latter is meant to be the mood of the film, it falls a little short. I wanted things to be a little crazier, I guess, wild high-society intrigue staged with the satisfying bite of mean, wicked satire.

We’re served both the galvanization and the despair, the victories eked out bit by painful bit and the looming defeat, as an implacable monolith dismisses puny mortal concerns like so many gnats. It’s tough stuff, but it’s worthy stuff too.

A New Era really, really should be the end of Downton Abbey, but I’d happily watch these freaks stumbling through the 1930s if they were so inclined to let me.

But the real star of this thing is Clemons, so natural and expressive, whether speaking or singing.

The film has a sneaky momentum.

The film is a winning reminder of the pleasures of the midrange movie, one stylish enough to feel distinct but not too caught up in an effort to sell some startling, singular vision. It’s proudly genre and fills its allotted space with humor and detail.

It Ends With Us is a tearjerker that indulges in its red-meat drama, but then gives it the grace of shading and complexity—and rare humanity.

It’s a fun movie, packed with escapades and just-shy-of-cloying cutesy humor, but there is a resonant depth, too.

Eurovision has its clunky stretches—Ferrell’s script, written with Andrew Steele, could be a little tighter, a little sharper, and still keep its rambling appeal—but the film is routinely rescued by a deftly staged music number or an invigoratingly off-color joke.

Joel Edgerton’s earnest, solidly made film will be most effective on, and maybe necessary for, those immediately suffering under the crush of anti-gay bigotry, and those perpetrating it.

As is, The Bikeriders plays as if a longer, more robust version disappeared somewhere in the editing room. But a spell is lightly cast nonetheless, enough to make it sting when things start to go sour for Johnny and Benny and the rest.

Luca does, despite its vagueness, successfully pull off some of the usual Pixar tricks, provoking warm tears and weary sighs as one considers the familiar trajectories of life.

There are moments of high drama in Infinity War—between father and daughter, brother and brother, mentor and protégé, lover and lover—that these actors, as deep in this series as we are, deliver on with teary intensity. And there’s a haunting final sequence that is as grave and, I daresay, almost poetic as anything the film series has done.