Richard Lawson

The film prizes style, but has no higher ambition than to entertain, with an economy of means and no fussy pretension. That’s a noble mission, especially in this time of auteur worship, when so many genre movies seem determined to be something more.

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

No Hard Feelings is a nice comedy, courting taboo here and there but largely rounded out with sweetness. It’s an amiable time at the movies—but I was hoping for more of a shock.

Lizzie isn’t a bad film, but it doesn’t accomplish all that it wants to—and all I wanted it to. We’re never as immersed in its psychological swirl as we should be, and every character in it is either such a creep or a flinching headcase that it’s hard to get our emotional hooks in any of them.

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.

The Drama is a handsomely made, sharply performed letdown. It is yet another example of a far too common occurrence: a kicky logline premise having no real structure behind it.

Chastain pulls focus whenever she can, operating as one of the film’s main resources of levity and acerbic bite. I wish the movie had more of that energy—McDonagh keeps the proceedings oddly muted given the circumstances—but at least Chastain is there, pepping things up a bit.

Those Who Wish Me Dead is missing an act, maybe, some of kind bridge between its drawn-out beginning and its hurried climax. What’s in the film is staged shrewdly by Sheridan, but there’s little sense of cumulative build.

One happily trots along with Ballerina as it ventures into absurdity. Its silliness is, at least, compellingly rendered. It helps immensely that de Armas is such a limber, confident action performer.

The movie is, for a good stretch, a troubling and arresting character study, one done with nervy conviction. Eventually, though, Phillips has to more tightly attach this downward spiral to the larger Gotham mythology, which is where the provocative ambivalence of the film gives way to veneration.

Cruella is yet another act of co-opting by the biggest entertainment company in the world, an attempt to graft a cheap rebel spirit onto a naked exercise in I.P. synergy.

F9’s attempts at classical drama, all its reckoning with dynastic sin, do weigh the thing down quite a bit. Those going to the theater simply for the kicky, bad-joke, MacGuffin charms of F&F may find themselves a little bored and distracted, as I was, by all the turgidity.

What a welcome rarity Boston Strangler is, even in its limits: a sturdy, thoughtfully constructed movie featuring a compelling story and host of great actors.

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.

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.

Only 92 minutes long, Work It could use more space to move around in: to let these performers really strut their stuff, and to allow the movie to develop a bit more idiosyncratic texture. As is, Work It is an agreeable enough pastiche, clearly aware of its influences and not trying to pretend that it’s come up with these steps all on its own.

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.

For roughly its first half, Hotel Artemis glides nicely on all of Pearce’s world-building and the cast’s confident performances. But as the power flickers at the Artemis and dangerous foes close in, the movie starts to wobble. Pearce has maybe put too many variables in play and has trouble connecting them into a unified narrative.

Now 80 years old, Ford still glows with that unique charisma. It’s a shame, then, that Dial of Destiny doesn’t do right by its heroes—both Ford and Dr. Henry Jones, archeologist adventurer.

I’m a pretty easy scare, but I sat through this Pet Sematary mostly unbothered. Which is certainly not the takeaway one should have from an adaptation of a Stephen King novel, let alone the one that King has said frightens him more than anything else he’s written. In this new film, you almost can’t see what he was so afraid of.

The movie goes all over the place, attempting to map the world of this thing but really just chasing its idea into abstraction. Which is the opposite direction of where it should be going.

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.

Much of the movie’s charm rests on its lead. Gyllenhaal doesn’t have the same warm twinkle in his eye that Swayze always used to such lovely effect, but he makes do with the rest of his elastic face.

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.

The studio has stumbled into what may be the worst film yet in its long line of spectaculars, an erratic and fatally dull morass of limp jokes and aimless plotting. The magic is decidedly gone, and the film left me wondering, on a more macro scale, if this whole cinematic universe machine has any idea where it’s headed.

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.

There is genuine familial chemistry between Hanks and Landry Jones, effervescing even through the layer of computer wizardry that led to Jeff’s final form.

It’s all pleasingly robust and cinematic, if fleeting.

As a dancer to Hargrave’s violent tune, Hemsworth acquits himself beautifully—he gets a grim and maybe irresponsible assignment done quite well.

It would be easy to get lost in all that technical detail, to figure the impression—both physical and vocal—is enough. But Chastain digs deeper than the aesthetics, and locates something crucial in Tammy Faye. It’s a genuine, deep-seated, perhaps ruinously naive compassion, which Chastain illustrates with great care.

The film’s gaze is narrow and insider-y, but it somehow kind of works. Deadpool & Wolverine is an amusing reflection on the recent cultural past, and a half-cynical, half-hopeful musing on what its future might be.

In some ways, the film is hallmark Denis, flinty and strange and sometimes inscrutable. But it is also a disappointment, a leaden film whose points Denis has made more convincingly elsewhere.

Intricately crafted as it is, Campos’s film is downright simple. It’s sloppy pulp packaged as prestige, which makes the meanness of its condescending gaze that much meaner.

Ambulance is a visual ordeal, but deliberately so. Bay wants us to feel the exhausted tension of his characters

There’s a joy to the film’s ornate beauty, a loving craftsmanship that rescues Aquaman from the branded synergy that so haunts and chokes it elsewhere.

With more patience, and a little rigor, Military Wives could have been a massive crowd-pleaser. As is, it’s only fleetingly charming.

The Prom is a shellacked lump of Hollywood product, all canned fabulousness—including Corden’s noxious mugging—and none of the difficult, awe-inspiring technicality that makes musical performance truly snap and sing with theater’s scrappy magic.

Iñárritu has a lot on his mind here, weighing the sins and graces of personal and public history, and attempting to atone for some of it. But as Bardo stretches on and on and on, the film narrows into something solipsistic and meta.

While Michael Fimognari’s film does have some heart-fluttery moments—chiefly the first reappearance of heartthrob Peter (Noah Centineo), framed in a doorway and blessed with a nice winter jacket and a crooked smile—what’s more arresting is its gentle wisdom about all the stuff that happens after the swoon.

Watching Snyder’s intermittently rewarding epic—if nothing else a spectacle of completed vision—stirred up surprising emotions. Not about what happens to the people (and aliens) in the film, but about what happened to its maker, and to the course of human events while Justice League 2.0 wrestled its way into being.

Good Joe Bell could have been schmaltzy, simplistic, too hungry for uplift. Green, though—and McMurtry and Ossana and, gulp, Wahlberg—keep the film in check. They don’t lose sight of what is really being spoken about here.

Huppert and Jordan are certainly capable of turning up the volume, but for whatever reason they pull back in Greta, getting stuck somewhere between shlockly art and arty schlock. That’s not a good place to be, even if it is a Greta one.

Lister-Jones has a lot of good ideas that are given short shrift in this film. The potency of their implications is sapped by, among other things, the film’s seemingly hyper-conscious worry that it might put a foot wrong, especially within such a limited run time. Which may actually be The Craft: Legacy’s most modern dimension: it probably should have been a Netflix series.

Songbirds is the rare intelligent, useful prequel; its origin story (or, really, stories) actually do better elucidate what we’ve already seen.

The Little Things is somehow both lazy and overly adorned, a lugubrious movie that spends all its indulgence on the easiest, most obvious of tropes.

What I found uniquely depressing about Dark Fate, though, is how resigned it is to the reality of its title. How it organizes itself as a paean to tireless scramble and triage, to the fight not for something better but for less of something worse. It’s a bitterly pessimistic film. It may be a realistic one, too.

Whatever Mendes’s connection to the material, he’s made something humane and nourishing, a picture of rare thoughtfulness and decency.

By its muddled and probably intentionally frustrating conclusion, I’d lost the thread of Jarmusch’s argument (or arguments). The movie ends with the sting of unrealized potential, Jarmusch flippantly kicking at fertile terrain and then shuffling off.

DuVernay can’t seem to settle on a consistent visual or narrative cadence. Her camera is all over the place, hurtling in for woozy close-ups and then rearing back to reveal what is meant to be vast splendor but is often just bland C.G.I. prettiness.

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.

Bergen is consistently the best part of Book Club: natural, dryly funny, and, in a non-pitying way, quietly heartbreaking.

There is a chance that much more of Aline is played for comedy than I realize; perhaps the jolts of revulsion and fascination are meant to resolve into a giddy laugh. But the film doesn’t really wink to let us in on the joke, except perhaps for one scene that puts a full, slo-mo view on the results of this experiment.

It’s a turgid rush toward a conclusion I don’t think anyone wanted, not the people upset about whatever they’re upset about with The Last Jedi (I feel like it has something to do with Luke being depressed, and with women having any real agency in this story) nor any of the more chill franchise devotees who just want to see something engaging.

Fuqua’s chosen technique only undermines his solemn intentions, rather than using starkness to make a salient point. Emancipation is overthought to its increasing detriment.

The film doesn’t actually show character growth so much as it tells you it’s happening.

You maybe have to be fully on board with the Charli xcx circus to really appreciate what a movie about it is trying to do. For the more casual viewer, The Moment is entertaining enough, for a while.

If you’re uninitiated like me, Detective Pikachu isn’t an actively unpleasant experience; Letterman gives us lots of nice and interesting things to look at, plus Bill Nighy shows up. But it’s maybe a little boring. There’s not quite enough texture for the non-followers to grab onto.

Lawrence (that’s Lawrence the director, not star Jennifer Lawrence) skirts the edges of the world of cruel, leering exploitation, but doesn’t go all the way. The film stays sober and clear-eyed, showing us all this unflinching violence not to titillate, I don’t think, but to alarm.

Reptile has a sense of tone and texture, elevating its clichés into something of distinction.

If all we’re really taking from a movie about a man who murdered 30-plus women is “Zac Efron sure is surprising,” then I don’t think that movie has earned its existence. Yes, it is all shockingly wicked and evil and vile. Shouldn’t we maybe just leave it at that?

Shyamalan can’t settle on a tone; he turns the comedy and tension and drama knobs seemingly at random. Trap is jumble of moods and textures that never cohere into the taught little thriller that the trailers advertise. The film is instead paunchy and meandering, a slog of pat psychology and limp cultural analysis.

Christie’s cool flint is swapped out for tearful ruminations on lost love in Death on the Nile, an intermittently entertaining but otherwise tiresomely lugubrious trip down crocodile-filled waters.

In Day’s magnetism, the film does enough justice to Holiday’s memory that its shagginess is almost forgiven. The rest of the orchestra could use a tune up, but Day, at least, makes for an exciting solo act.

Murder on the Orient Express isn’t a bore, exactly. It’s just not what it might have been had simplicity won the day instead of big intentions.

A part-clever, part-misshapen global caper, Charlie’s Angels—like Stewart—connects a few solid kicks in all its flailing.

Anyone but You is undoubtedly a cut above most rom-coms we’ve been served in recent years, and its many efforts to feel big and luxe do not go unnoticed. But it’s curiously unromantic and is only clever in fits and starts. If the movie were to approach me at a coffee shop, smug grin gleaming away, I’d probably only commit to a fling.

Scattered, confusing, and haunted by past grandeur, Crimes of Grindelwald perhaps marks the landmark moment when, alas, the magic finally flickers out.

80 for Brady is a loosely structured hang movie, albeit one that culminates in a curiously affecting emotional climax.

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.

I Wanna Dance with Somebody is a mighty testament to Houston’s catalog, the cathedral highs and sultry lows of her singular voice. Those songs, at least, are eternal. If a movie that simply presses play on the mix tape is what it takes to remind us of Houston’s special power, then that’s reason enough for the film to exist. But the story behind the songs probably deserves more, and better.

A more thoughtful and interesting film than its immediate predecessor.

The film is somehow both glancing and melodramatic, a strange and underwhelming cocktail of blasé Euro sleekness and TV-movie drama. Ah well. At least the clothes are nice.

There’s Bullock, doing something good and interesting. Though it does ultimately prove frustrating and sad, watching her so desperately grasp for a finer film—one that lies just beyond what Bird Box allows us to see.

Project Power has a nicely saturated, jittery visual language, an aesthetic that operates in concert with Tomlin’s surprisingly discursive script, giving the film an actual grain of place-and-time texture. Project Power often has a pleasing specificity to it, even when it’s thrashing around in violent special-effects hullabaloo.

It’s chiefly a diversion put on for the sake of air-conditioning, an inelegant but efficient excuse to leave the swelter of our lives behind for a little under two hours. Johnson knows why we’re there, and he performs his heaving acrobatics with dutiful grace. How wondrously uncomplicated and giving he can be. Daddy really does love us, doesn’t he.

All of this is not bad, exactly; it just takes no time to be good. World Tour is barely a movie. It’s a jumble of half-length animated music videos stitched together with the thinnest of throughlines.

The Gentlemen is a homecoming film, reuniting Ritchie with his once-signature style of narrative jumble and jocular menace. Watching it, I felt the calm of familiarity wash over me, the dim feeling like I’d somehow folded back into a time simpler only for having already happened.

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.

Last Christmas is not good. It’s not terrible, exactly, but it has the dismaying, tinny rattle of a thing not living up to its potential.

Hillbilly Elegy is both witless cosplay and a failure to interrogate any of the book’s controversial insinuations. I can’t imagine the film will satisfy those who agree with Vance or those who want to tangle with him—let alone those just looking for an engrossing family saga.

Those who feel that this Snow White is unnecessary or even worse should know that it is not the total disaster they were fearing. There’s some value to the film, even if that value will mostly be found by younger audiences

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.

Jungle Cruise is a two-hour movie that has far less consequence than a ride that’s a small fraction of that length. The experience the film more accurately simulates is the standing in line: all that tedious waiting in the heat for the fun to start.

My Policeman is studied and plodding in its period-piece solemnity, a dirge of a movie about reckless people that is never warmed by their implied inner fire.

Blonde is a film partly about exploitation that might be exploitative itself. If the film is aware of that meta function, then there’s something interesting happening in it. If not, and Dominik thinks he is genuinely ennobling Monroe and expressing some kind of radical pity for her, then Blonde is a little perverse.

The real trouble of the film is that it is stuck, like a spirit, between spaces. It’s cramped in the liminal room between “prestige horror” and something more slick, squalid, and satisfying. The balance is off, for which a strong cast—Rhea Seehorn is particularly sharp as a colleague of George’s—and stately aesthetics can’t make up.

Where Don’t Look Up finds its strength is in its lead performances, which can’t be undone even by the film’s exhausting, rapid-fire editing and McKay’s aggressive indicating toward his own punchlines.

Your Place or Mine occasionally gives off a glimmer of something interesting, but all too quickly snaps back to the featureless drudgery that has, sadly, come to define its genre.

Every actor, bless them, works hard to sell the movie’s overweening moxie, leaning into the mannered quirk with admirable, if ultimately doomed, commitment. Pitt and Taylor-Johnson are perhaps best suited to the movie’s patter; they manage to give some actual fizz to leaden material. But those moments are short lived, and then it’s back to the awkward squirm of watching talented actors debase themselves for laughs that never come.

Downhill is a clever movie when it could have been profound, had, perhaps, Faxon and Rash been willing—or capable—of digging deeper.

Let There Be Carnage tries to recreate the first film’s giddy shock while also upping the ante, taking what audiences liked and slopping more of that onto their plates.

The writing and direction is so erratic and confused that it’s near impossible to figure out who several characters are, let alone what they are seeking to accomplish.

The film may be a vessel for some noxious, platitudinous cynicism, but there’s nevertheless something still quaint about it. It mostly just wants you to have a nice time, it insists; to feel cheered and uplifted as a big, lumbering elephant carries us off a cliff.

Mothers’ Instinct is fun, in a throwback sort of a way. The performances are big and appealing; the period stylings are relatively lush for a lower-budget movie. Sure, there’s some silly stuff, overheated moments that merit guffaws—but that’s part of the mission of movies like this.

The movie is as engaging as it is sinisterly ridiculous. Its costumery is luxe and eye-popping, its courtly intrigue pleasingly low-stakes. The looming Revolution is only mentioned, in somber tones, in voiceover at the very end. Otherwise, Jeanne du Barry wants you to feel the fantasy.

The Gallerist is not without its occasional charms. There’s a chuckle to be had here and there, bits of zinging dialogue that actually find the right notes. Enough so that one roots for the movie despite its many missteps. The problem, ultimately, is that Yan chose a poor subject for her film, an environment that is an incredibly hard target to nail.

That the film has such a strong, timely moral argument makes one reconsider its creative merits.

Director Olivia Wilde has made an obvious and intermittently entertaining sci-thriller, one that borrows heavily from many better things but uses those pilfered parts effectively enough. For a while, anyway.