Richard Lawson

Egerton tears into the material with an intensity that elevates Rocketman’s standard-issue tortured-artist drama.

It’s a curious film, messy in all its ambition but consistently transfixing, an earnest labor of love—and one about love.

For all of its piercing insight and arresting performances, its steamy sex, its devastating conclusions, the film operates at a remove, from behind a pane of glass. Perhaps because Haigh gives Adam so little tether to the realm of the real; so much of the film is lost in plaintive reverie.

It’s half mess, half triumph, and thrilling even in its failures.

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.

Blair keeps the strange comedy coming, but he also lets the film dip into moments of contemplative thought, into hardscrabble philosophy. The Shitheads simply becomes a far more interesting film — a suspenseful one, too.

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.

What remains engaging throughout are the carefully textured performances—MacKay’s study of repressed energy and Ingram’s mix of wariness and gratitude are particular highlights—and the film’s myriad aesthetic graces.

Written and directed by Scott Beck and Bryan Woods, Heretic is an alternately clever and silly horror-thriller that wants to have a kicky, pointed dialogue about faith vs. reason, free will vs. preordination. It maybe doesn’t arrive anywhere profound, but it has a good time laying out its thesis.

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.

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.

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.

I wish the movie was just a tad sharper, took a little more time to really clarify its stance on this whole social-sexual-commercial world of romantic aspirationalism, to make its commentary and its humor really sing—and sting.

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

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.

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.

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.

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.

The Suicide Squad walks about as far up to the line of the indecent as is perhaps possible for a film of this size right now, which makes portions of it genuinely exciting. But we get inured to its provocations too quickly, and then the movie tries to soften itself and add emotional dimensions that aren’t exactly earned.

The Invisible Man loses its personality as it tumbles into the third act, and with it goes a lot of the emotional fiber Moss has worked so hard to spin into something rich and memorable. She still holds her own as the movie crumbles around her, but her performance deserves better than what Whannell ultimately gives her.

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

Ocean’s 8 is fun. The sequel (of sorts) to Steven Soderbergh’s three Ocean’s films, this time with a mostly female cast of smooth criminals, is a lark and a laugh, an airy caper featuring a bunch of actors you love and a lot of great clothes. Who can argue with that, in June or any other time of year? In that way, Ocean’s 8 is a worthy continuation of a hallowed brand. So, breathe a sigh of relief. There’s no disaster here, no regrettable misfire to be chagrined about. Phew. That said, I do wish Ocean’s 8 were a little more than fun.

We can feel a richer idea tingling just beneath Sea Fever’s skin. But Hardiman never roots it out, opting instead for a restraint that is often admirable, but also dampens the film’s potential power.

Lucy in the Sky is an odd curio, a drama that’s forlornly funny, a comedy of social manners with a howling desperation fueling its engine. I admire the balance that Hawley tries to strike, between the mundane and the sublime.

The movie is compelling in the moment, but seems irresponsible with any afterthought.

If yet another Marvel movie is a little self-conscious about being yet another Marvel movie, does that excuse it from being, well, yet another Marvel movie? That’s the tricky territory that Spider-Man: Far From Home finds itself in.

If the film is uneven—with such an exuberant beginning and disappointingly rote climax—that may simply be because Kahiu wanted to communicate as many truths of her home country as she could.

The melodies are pleasant, the sentiments worthy, the verbiage dexterous. But it all blurs together into one ill-defined mass, nothing distinct enough (besides, I suppose, that opening number) to stick out.

With The Way Back, O’Connor works so hard to avoid sports movie cliché that he pares the film down to something unsustainably lean. Without Affleck’s gravity, The Way Back would just drift away.

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

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.

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.

There are indeed stretches of the film—particularly its gripping and just a little miserable opening sequence—when it soars (argh, sorry) to cinema heaven (ack, sorry again). But a lot of the movie has a curious drag, scenes repeating and repeating in slightly tweaked shapes until you just want to yell at the screen, “Get to the moon already!”

As much as Love, Simon’s winning, if slightly bowdlerized, coming-out story initially made me yearn for an altered youth, it’s since made me yearn even more for stories that reflect my gay life today, or my gay life as it might be years from now. (And your gay life, and your gay life, and your gay life.)

It’s a paean to the loving of a thing, rather than a movie that gives that thing an entirely new existence, free-standing and self-possessed in its own right, despite Gerwig’s narrative tinkering.

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 a movie full of ideas that are never quite unified into a thesis. A bunch of wild imagery and grim hypotheticals about what could become of us may be enough for some viewers. Others, like me, will be left prodding away, trying to locate more meat on all of these ornately assembled bones.

It’s a solid nature movie, not quite factual enough to be a true work of scientific observation, but engaging and persuasively conservationist in its subtle way.

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.

Had Tom Cruise not been in the cockpit, I suspect very little of that emotional component would be so effective. Maverick—loud and dumb and occasionally thrilling—is an act of arrogance, sure, a veteran movie star happily strutting onto the stage so lovingly set for him. (And which he helped design.) But that proves to be a clever reflection of the character he’s playing.

Triangle of Sadness needn’t be a fair film, nor one that readily delivers the simple righteousness of have-nots triumphing over have-lots. A more carefully shaped argument would have been appreciated, though. And one that didn’t dissolve so quickly into a juvenile snicker.

The movie is deliberately alienating, but Oldroyd has not done enough to earn our devotion before he pulls the rug out and flashes us a smirk. The movie is a provocative tease that doesn’t have the stuff to back up the joke, try as its game performers might to make it all mean something. I found myself wishing that Eileen was longer. Its fertile territory is woefully underdeveloped—so much of the film’s innate potential goes unutilized. At least there is Hathaway’s glowing star turn, both reminding us of what we knew she could do and introducing us to something new.

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.

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

In this grim reality, The Front Runner feels quaint, almost a hopeful thing, crafted in the old ways with a pitiable naïveté.

The reality is that there is probably nothing truly novel to be done with Batman at this point. He’s been thoroughly mined for both fun and pathos; try as Reeves and his co-screenwriter Peter Craig might, they can’t squeeze much higher-meaning blood out of a fatally depleted stone. Pattinson, moody and saturnine, does what he can, but he’s not afforded much beyond growling and scowling.

The sequel is epic in length and spectacle, but not in feeling.

As this process unfolds, Reijn and DeLappe manage some moments of shivery suspense. Reijn makes expressive use of the house, tearing up staircases and down shadowy corridors with giddy abandon. But narratively, the film grows awfully repetitive, some version of the same argument taking place in one dark room after another.

Eddington gradually shifts away from the hyper topical and into a despairing, bleakly amusing look at an America prone to violent fantasy and deed, entrenched in escalating conflict, caught in a terrible entropy. When Aster finally knuckles down and ramps up the action, Eddington takes strange flight.

Had the movie pitched itself on a one-way trip into the black, Deutch would no doubt have been up to the task. She’s a squirmy wonder in the film, loathsome and pitiable and, perhaps, grimly relatable. At times, Shephard overstates Danni’s detachment from polite society, but otherwise she and Deutch keep things in frightfully believable bounds.

Though the script, by Trevorrow and Emily Carmichael, does occasionally surprise with a little fugue of sharp writing, Dominion mostly seeks to drag us along for its indulgent 150-minute run in the hopes that it will exhaust us into thinking we’ve been served a rich, satisfying meal. There is at least some nice seasoning throughout.

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.

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.

In its best stretches—the first hour of the film, let’s say—WW84 sweetly revels in its old-school trappings, its hokey mystery, its goofy villain, its resourceful hero. The film is light on its feet, colorful and playful in a way not seen elsewhere in the DC Universe.

Maybe the few moments when Mountainhead does take on a chilling relevance—when it seems to pick at something nightmarishly real—are enough to justify the sillier stuff. And, we must sadly admit, that silly stuff may not actually be that silly.

Skywalkers might be the first of a new genre: extended vlog (or TikTok, or Instragram reel) as feature film, existing somewhere between fact and fiction and all in service of promoting a brand.

It’s a story of reinvention for an actor trying to do the same. It mostly works a treat. Lohan’s performance is perky and agreeable, a shimmer of that old Mean Girls (or, hell, Parent Trap) charm dancing around her for the first time in a while. I’d happily watch her in more after this—though preferably in something a bit meatier than a Hallmark knock-off.

If it hadn’t had someone of Álvarez’s care and attention at the helm, Romulus could certainly have been a lot worse.

What I will say is that director Jon Watts handles this grand convergence of properties old and current with enough verve to almost sustain the long run of the film. But there’s so much brand Frankensteining to be done that there’s really no time for quirk and texture; much of the bounce and sparkle of the past two Holland films is lost.

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.

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.

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.

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.

Meg 2 is confident in its schlock, piling on one ridiculous conceit after another at such a pace that the audience can’t help but be swept up in it. That is a harder needle to thread than many filmmakers seem to think—it’s not enough to just be stupid.

The film’s self-seriousness bogs down what should be a mad and skittering thing, jangling us with all its agonizing silence. We should be having more fun as we watch through our fingers.

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

There’s nothing wrong with a good soap opera—and when one looks as bespoke as this one, and has such fine actors in it, it should go down a treat. But Everybody Knows lumbers and frustrates as it goes.

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.

Perhaps if the film was more polished, and had some added depth, it might feel more substantial. As is, Hanging by a Wire is a gripping story not told thoroughly enough.

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.

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.

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

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.

There is a fine line between creating a laconic, closed-off character and simply not creating a character at all—a line that Causeway transgresses. Lynsey is a frustrating cipher, seemingly guided more by the beats of the script than by any internal impulse or logic.

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.

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.

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.

Jordan’s absence from this film leaves a big, leaping void at the center. We’re forced to root for marketing executives instead of the phenomenon being marketed. Without its raison d’etre, there is not enough juice to sustain the film. It all feels a bit silly by the heartstring-tugging end.

California Schemin’ is, in the end, a kindhearted film about integrity, about art for art’s sake, about embracing one’s roots.

Etzler manages some nasty comedy, sourced from the bracing jolt of watching teacher and student cruelly manipulate one another. And he shows a sturdy technical command throughout.

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.

Easy’s Waltz is a harmless, fleeting curio, a piece of ephemera that lilts by like a song that isn’t quite catchy enough to get stuck in your head — it has the decency to do its thing and then leave us alone.

Anderson rescues his film from oblivion in the end, closing out his story with a disarmingly sweet—and, in some ways, provocative—moral argument.

Phoenix has always been good at depicting this kind of pathetic tyranny, deftly (and swiftly) shifting from bratty, toothless insouciance to genuine menace. The actor seems to get both the joke and the seriousness of the film, though I wish Scott were better at communicating that tone to the audience.

It’s a handsomely mounted film, full of precise period detail, but is otherwise undistinguished from many solemn, exacting biopics that have come before it.

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.

The film offers a small bit of emotional rescue at its very end—a graceful tribute to the escapes of memory and fantasy—but by then the dourness of its conclusions has blotted out any rounder sense of meaning.

Elio is a spirited, engaging 98 minutes. But its tired attempts at the gentle profundity of old—that Wall-E wallop, that Up uplift—are emblematic of a studio that’s running out of ways to whimsically allegorize human experience. Alien experience, too.

Farrelly shows us the formative experience, but only a little of its consequence. Perhaps too much consideration of that would make the whole thing seem something less than great.

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?

There’s a sort of bell curve of tolerance; the film begins loud and over-egged, gradually settles into a sad and gnarly bildungsroman, and then burns itself out with an operatic finale. It’s an exhausting experience, which I realize may be the point.

There is some flair and wit to be found in Rebirth, and its performances are by and large likable and engaging. There are worse exercises in IP-extension out there in the marketplace. But it is hard to imagine what possible basis there could be for an eighth Jurassic film.

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.

I wish all of Tartt’s tender and moving allegory—the way she pours the density of growth and regret into a solid thing that can pass hands—had space to bloom in the film. It doesn’t, and I left the film appreciative of its style and strong performances, but not emotionally altered in any lingering way.

There’s some art to be found here, for sure. But there’s not nearly enough of the pop.

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.

The movie proves a cheery enough diversion, during a summer movie season leaden with underwhelming blockbuster offerings.

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

Unhinged is a nasty piece of work, jarringly rough but also, in fits and starts, bracing entertainment.

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.

Whatever the truth of Anning and Murchison’s time in Dorset together was, Ammonite could have done whatever it wanted. It chooses instead to do close to nothing, and leaves us, quite like its central pair, helplessly grasping for more.

Most vitally, the film has frightening, wiggly moments that ought to send young viewers happily scooting forward on the couch, or just as happily hiding under a throw pillow. The film, at its best, is gross and silly and amiably unsettling, which may be all that counts.

The film looks away from that pure artistry too often, turning instead to its limited, and far less satisfying, view of Swift’s complicated star profile.

It’s a lot of nervy construction built around very little substance. Driver and Cotillard are admirably committed, and the film does occasionally soar to giddily surreal, big-burst musical highs. Not near often enough, though.

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.

Though some zesty flair has been added—particularly a new heroine—this hyper-aggro spin-off of a beloved franchise over does it while under-delivering.

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.

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.

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.

On the whole, though, Mickey 17 tests our patience. While the dispensable clones premise is intriguing, and opens a door to the kind of socioeconomic commentary so signature to Bong, the film quickly grows distracted by other matters entirely.

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.

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

Madame Web is a muted affair—not outright terrible but certainly not good, neither inert nor as meme-worthy as hoped. It’s a strange movie whose tortured existence is the most compelling thing about it.

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.

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.

As answers to the film’s big questions begin arriving in slapdash fashion, one loses patience for Tuason’s evasive, cluttered storytelling.

Here is an opportunity for a wild and sorrowful confluence of gay dream and national nightmare. Alas, this Kiss of the Spider Woman gives us a competent but glancing rendering of the easier, more palatable aspects of a story that should be anything but.

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.

Though The Musical may lack a feeling of modernity, it could make up for that elsewhere: with tart humor, with unexpected plot developments, with compelling performances. But, alas, Bonilla and her actors can’t do much to leaven the leaden script they’ve been handed.

On occasion the film is wryly amusing. But too often the humor is strained, playing as meek attempt to laugh through the pain—for the characters, the movie itself, the entire franchise, even.

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.

To be fair, toward the end of the film, Vaughn does up the ante to stage one utterly ridiculous fight scene that teeters between amusing and embarrassing. At least he is trying for something there. Otherwise, Argylle lacks the inventive physics and gaudy flair we have come to expect from him.

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

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.

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.

The film is a mess, opaque in its argument and tiring in its effortful weirdness, and yet in its best moments has a hypnotic pull.

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.

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.

The film doesn’t do much to distinguish itself, or to retain audience interest. Jackman, dutiful thespian as always, gives it his all, but the specter his character is running after doesn’t have enough shape, or meaning.

I remain as curious as ever to see what Goddard does next. But this film, for all its canny presentation, is a mishmash of compelling narrative premises clumsily fused together. It manages to be both overwrought and under-developed, disappointing less for what it is than for what it could have been.

Lisa Frankenstein never gets its blood up, essentially playing as a casual mood piece rather than full-bodied horror or romance or comedy.

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.

The Killer is an experiment in economy whose results are lesser than the effort put in. Calculating efficiency is all well and good, but at least some life is required to make meaning of all of this killing.

There are a few laughs to be found in the film, little moments of wit or weirdness, but the film is otherwise a mirthless drag rescued only by its bright leads. Maybe let them make the movie next time.

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.

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.

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.

Free Guy has moments of dizzying action and offers up some intriguing sci-fi speculation, but it is decidedly not a cool movie.

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.

Glass is simply Shyamalan giving a book report on the basic structure of comic-caper narratives. There’s something endearing about his eagerness to explain these simple things, to show us what he knows. But Glass still suffers for that pedantic self-seriousness.

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.

Maria is the thinnest of the three, psychologically facile and overly mannered. There is something arbitrary, unspecific about the film.

Mostly, Tenet is a straightforward caper movie—maximally staged and very, very loud, but flimsy at its heart.

It’s an odd, lumbering patchwork of a film, occasionally fascinating but otherwise bloated and aimless.

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.

The new film This Is Me…Now is a passion project, about passion, that curiously lacks that essential quality.

Craig is certainly sent off in grand fashion, but it’s a grandiosity that isn’t quite fitting for his run of films.

Mitchell has made a stylish, occasionally intriguing film, by turns idiosyncratically funny and downright scary. But he says and shows a lot of bothersome things throughout, which I’m not quite sure how to approach.

The story’s themes—fear of death, societal atomization at the dawn of the information age—are clearly stated, but there’s little passion pulsing beneath the thesis. It’s a respectful, and respectable, film to a fault; it’s hard to locate the animating why of White Noise. Despite some alterations, the film seems to exist more as a recitation of the book than its own kind of invention.

Dumbo... makes a mishmash of less immediately cherished I.P. It’s corporatized sentiment from a director who seems caught between his own fading impulses and the surging ones of capital.

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.

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.

The film is so busy working through what it’s trying to say that it loses its specific pacing and texture, tumbling toward a finale that subverts its own rules and confuses its argument.

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.

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.

As was true of the stage production, the Dear Evan Hansen film wants to have it both ways, to see the awful lie at the center of Evan’s message of hope and to still have it play as hopeful.

Believer is in tortured dialogue with the original Exorcist, attempting to expand that film’s worldview while also paying reverent homage. It seems a bit guilty in its grave robbing—which is commendable, in a way—but it’s still doing the robbing.

The King of Staten Island is about growing and learning lessons—but not much is learned, and there’s little growth.

Mulan is not awful. It’s just inert, a lifeless bit of product that will probably neither satisfy die-hards nor enrapture an entire new generation of fans.

While I admire the movie’s attempt to more deeply mine the identities of sister-princesses Anna (sweet, non-magical) and Elsa (restless, can control snow and ice), its discoveries are rushed and are served up half-baked.

Hopefully the deceptively stern ideological stance of The Secret has been dampened enough by Tennant and his cast’s efforts (the great Celia Weston is also a standout as Miranda’s hovering, lightly nagging mother-in-law) that only the better, more wanly encouraging notes of its decidedly capitalist fantasy will linger in people’s minds.

The film is mostly just a rehash of Lord of the Flies set in space. It turns down all the expected corridors and leaves most of its chilling implications unexplored.

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

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.

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.

Second Act is a kitchen-sink drama that goes for surprise over real seriousness. It’s a Jennifer Lopez vehicle, and thus still worth a look. But Second Act’s second act proves pretty hard to follow.

The film is trying quite hard to be a bracing and immersive depiction of rehabilitation’s hard toil. But “Steve” is instead a pantomime, an offhanded approximation of work that fails to convincingly show us the actual work.

For the most part, the film’s offhanded, listless vibe feels like an insult to viewers, especially those who will pay actual money to see this thing.

It’s an impressive feat of technical film-making, which has now become a hallmark of DaCosta’s work. But she caves to baser impulses in reinterpreting an old and, some might say, crusty play.

Sure, it provides some summer work for talented people—director F. Gary Gray, stars Tessa Thompson and Chris Hemsworth—but beyond that, there’s no real justification for why the movie has to be here. And yet here it is, playing like a long trailer for a fuller movie that never arrives.

Lisbeth loses a bit of her individuality in her conversion to action star, becoming a more generic butt-kicker with plainer motivations.

Save for a few likable robots, The Electric State is charmless and curiously dull. It’s almost as if all the money and tech in the world are not sufficient replacements for imagination.

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.

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.

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.

There is simultaneously a beautiful movie and a good play hidden somewhere in Woody Allen’s new melodrama, Wonder Wheel, a slight and clunky period piece that offers teasing glimpses of something more rich and interesting.

The bulk of Rampage is, alas, a slog, as passionless as I’d imagine the fandom is for the I.P. the film is based on.

The Lost City has the bad tang of squandered potential, misusing its massively appealing stars and failing the possibility of its premise.

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.

A movie like this—about such a fiery, singular person—should not play like mere misty elegy, a brief recounting of happy memories and sad ones that amounts to a sentimental sketch of an artist. Where is the whir of the world as Winehouse saw it, the matrix of pleasure and heartbreak that so fascinated her? Where is the Winehouse who, in the full glare of her being, ought to be remembered?

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.

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.

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.

The Meg is bad, but only rarely in the fun way.

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.

The film may have just been a failed stab at inter-gender empathy, were it not for its wretched final act. This is where Men takes an abrupt turn into surreal horror, and when something bad starts glinting just beneath the surface of Garland’s apparent motivations.

The movie feels too late and too little, a minor work that’s perhaps too streamlined to be really messy, but nonetheless has an air of shambling inexactness.

Technically speaking, Dolittle is a film made for children. So we should probably mostly view it through that lens. In that regard, the movie is perfectly okay.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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

It’s an ugly stray who smells bad and should not be invited into your home, certainly. And yet it is its own kind of living creature, worthy of at least some basic compassion.

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.

Babylon is unfocussed and overeager, continuously distracted by the burst of a new idea. That could be read as an apt rendering of the manic thought of a cocaine binge, but there is something awfully studied in how Chazelle conjures up that nose-scratching, high-speed verve.

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.

What they’ve visually pulled off in Lightyear is stunning stuff. The story, sadly, does not rise up to meet that work.

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.

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.

Book Club’s four stars—and others like them—deserve material that’s specific, clever, surprising in some way. These plug-and-play movies have lost much of their charm at this point, feeling more like a slightly degrading duty than any kind of demographic triumph. Which may be overthinking it. But shouldn’t a movie about a book club feel at least a little bit literate?

Mortal Kombat is a disjointed, halfhearted trip to the past, where things probably should have been left finished for good.

It is the film’s bitterest irony that a story about a man controlled by a domineering force seems itself unwilling to give its subject true autonomy, lest that distract from its director’s aesthetic interests.

Perhaps the film’s thematic intentions are noble. But its execution is glib, never finding the right balance between compassion and leering.

There is, alas, nothing enriching about Capone. It offers none of the robust competence these dwindling-culture times are running low on. Perhaps more dismayingly, it’s not even entertaining. The film’s arresting oddity is fleeting, and then we’re just made to sit with it for another humid 90 minutes.

The film looks pallid and cheap, with pretty much zero nod to the style and panache of Wes Craven’s original. The jokes are heavily telegraphed as Clever Jokes, the references to cinema culture and film structure landing as obligation rather than organic bursts of analytical wit.

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.

The House That Jack Built is a tediously navel-gazing exercise in von Trier trying to explain, and make half-hearted atonement for, his “totally twisted, man,” worldview, an explication of his personal psychology that is almost heartbreaking in its conflicted self-regard.

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

Supernova, despite a title that suggests a bright and glorious burst of energy, is a ponderous movie, a story about the end of life so determined to be taken gravely that it doesn’t let anything actually live. It’s abstractly tragic, about a vague idea of something rather than anything or anyone specific. Dementia is scary and sad. That’s about as particular as Supernova gets.

What might have been a somber and carefully considered study of a lonely man grappling with his past becomes a posturing labor.

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

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.

Scoob! is a dumb movie, full of creaky topical references and jokes that are above kids’ heads but below adults’. It’s also pretty boring, because it makes no real effort to give the plot any sort of cinematic build.

What truly hampers Regretting You is its inescapable unoriginality, its plodding, uninventive, unthoughtful attempts at swoon and heartbreak.

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.

Very little happens beyond those walls, reducing the film to cramped psychodrama. It’s startlingly dull, a pointless procedural that seems to disdain its audience.

Best to move past Without Remorse. assured that Jordan will find another, more fitting star vehicle for himself. Maybe one that’s a bit hipper to the mores and styles of the present day, and is more willing to let its lead express something beyond the wordless violence of so much canned fury.

For all I know, A Big Bold Beautiful Journey actually takes place on the Holodeck of the Starship Enterprise, so phony is everything contained within it.

Brave New World is a bunch of characters wandering around in search of meaning, the Marvel machine creaking loudly as it tries to whip up some grand mythos around these B-tier figures.

As Shelby Oaks moves further away from its original conceit, it grows ever clunkier, ever more derivative. Stuckmann’s dialogue is stilted and generic; his storytelling and world-building even more so.

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.

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.

With its limp humor, canned sentiment, and over-egged efforts to gross us out, Beetlejuice Beetlejuice is a waste of a good cast and a defacement of a classic film’s legacy. Most galling of all, it was summoned willingly by people who should know better than to mess with what’s long been peacefully laid to rest.

Rather than honoring any specific place, or people, or mode of living, Where the Crawdads Sing cheaply develops its land. It’s a pre-fab oceanfront condo of a movie that prizes a pleasant view over all else.

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.

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.

It’s a mess of a movie, choppy and incoherent, a mishmash of tone that veers wildly from comedy to bloody drama, a gangster epic with no grounding in any people, place, or thing.

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.

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.

The film, directed by Zara Hayes and co-written by Hayes and Shane Atkinson, is an abject mess, a movie so poorly built it feels like every other scene is missing—as if after production was wrapped and the movie was in the can, some PA found boxes marked "character" and "plot" in a storage room and realized they forgot to use them during production.

Moonfall is all cobbled together financing and bad green screen, simulated locations weakly standing in for the real thing and a host of capable but wasted actors. What an accidental irony, that Moonfall should, after all that, prove so weightless.

All the arch gloss that McKay covers the film with isn’t earned, not when the movie’s foundation—intellectually, politically, artistically—is so rickety.

Halloween Ends is a bizarre hash of tones and theses, stitched together into a movie that’s neither fun nor frightful.

This is not a considered look at someone’s life; it’s a cash-in that just wants to get to the tragic end, hoping that the audience will convince themselves that they felt something along the way.

Red Notice is limp and dull, and does more to showcase the shortcomings of each of its marquee idols than it does to highlight their bankable charisma. A globe-trotting heist film that heavily relies on zippy banter, Red Notice never finds its groove, instead jerking around between familiar action sequences and humor that never lands.

The movie is a pallid, dull slog of bad acting and worse storytelling.

Not a single bit lands in The Happytime Murders.

The film is, plainly stated, terrible, and I’m sorry that everyone wasted their time and money making it—and that people are being asked to waste their time and money seeing it. I hate to be so blunt, but it simply must be said this time.

Ziegler has been handed a cursed, impossible task, forced to act so far outside of herself—with seemingly little of the right guidance coming from the grownups in the room—that Music becomes something ghastly. It often feels like a movie made decades ago, one of those smarmily well-intentioned Hollywood exercises in issue-peddling that demands the gratitude of an entire community of people.