Richard Lawson

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

Freaky is a pure pleasure, an absurd thriller that cuts through descending autumn gloom with a surprisingly bespoke prop knife.

Accepting the wild ambition of Final Reckoning, embracing its maudlin amassing of all M:I lore into one turgid act of nostalgia, is the best way to enjoy it.

Wright, Angela Bassett, Lupita Nyong’o, Danai Gurira, and others are commanding presences, standing proud and formidable in Ruth Carter’s glorious costumery. The film’s lush visuals—its rendering of bustling old-town Wakanda, of a mysterious city under the sea, of gleaming tech and natural landscapes—are sumptuous and considered. There is much to be admired here, a care for craft and detail on a higher plane than other Marvel fare.

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.

Colangelo grapples with all that is unfixed in this story with wise consideration. Worth finds its ultimate value in accepting what the film, and we, cannot ever determine for certain.

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.

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.

It’s a good time, but it maybe could have been a great one. Which I suppose is true of so many nights meant to deliver us from the doldrums of settled life. I don’t think that meta-ness is a deliberate feature of Game Night. But with all the sharpness Daley and Goldstein show us here, I’m not ruling it out, either.

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

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 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.

Dumb Money is a sturdy entry into the developing canon of docufiction that seeks to be lively and lucid and informative about the rotten state of the American dream. It’s often as crassly effective as Roaring Kitty and his cohort were in those wild months two years ago, when greed was good for the many instead of the few.

It is a true star vehicle that asserts Faist and O’Connor as new leading men and gives further dimension to Zendaya’s already well-established profile. The humble ambition here is to charm and entertain, to arouse and amuse. This is, in that way, a refreshingly sincere and uncynical movie. Challengers may tire toward the end, but it’s scored enough points by then that a few double faults probably don’t matter.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

Pike has been nominated for a Golden Globe for the performance, but don’t let that turn you off. She is, once again, a stealthy marvel in this movie, cruel and clever. The rest of the film might not meet the heights of its star, but it is still a sleek and compelling standout in an erratic season, anchored by one of the great performances of the year (so far, anyway).

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.

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

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.

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

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

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 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.

Who knows what, if any, instructive value a film like Magazine Dreams has in this day and age. Maybe it needn’t have any of that—a gruesome movie can just be a gruesome movie. But I suspect Bynum is trying for more than just a gnarly couple of hours. I’ll have to mull over his film, and maybe force myself to watch it again, to get a grasp on what I think Magazine Dreams is really doing and how well it succeeds in that endeavor.

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.

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.

Sharper is sinewy and clever, a keenly acted and written B-picture of the sort that were once myriad but now only come around once every few years.

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.

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

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.

Captain Marvel feels as substantial as any of the other standalone Marvel Cinematic Universe films, even if it does things at a more relaxed pitch. The movie’s pioneer status is gestured toward some in the film, but mostly Boden and Fleck are focused on competently telling a tale that fits into the larger machine. It does, just fine.

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

The shivery crazy moments land, and a surprisingly emotional beat at the close of the film does, too. As nutty and off-the-wall as Suspiria is, it has a firm sense of control and proportion. It’s a loose and rambly thing that’s also tightly made, somehow.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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

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.

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

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.

Kinds of Kindness is clever and a bit snide, a curio cabinet not designed for beauty.

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.

Greyhound has texture—it’s carefully, credibly mounted and subtly performed—but doesn’t do much with it. There’s nothing wrong with a fleet little chase movie, but the Battle of the Atlantic had real sprawl, both in terms of its geography and its crucial effect on the outcome of the war. That scope is only gestured toward in Greyhound, undermining any possibility that the film might take on an epic shape.

At times, Hermanus’s style is effective, selling us on the film’s lonely, years-spanning heartsickness. But too often the film’s muted emotion feels more gimmicky than credible to Lionel and David’s circumstances, particularly because Hermanus is so demure about sex; we barely even see the men kissing.

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.

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.

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

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.

The riskiness of that—the way Knock at the Cabin, accidentally or not, courts and even invites sympathy to one of the right’s most dangerous shibboleths—gives the film a surprising, alarming, but not unwelcome edge.

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.

Much of Master Gardener is disarmingly placid. It’s a warmer, more optimistic film than one might expect, even if it does at times creak with the antiquated perspective of a stalwart septuagenarian filmmaker unwilling to shake off some of the past’s bad habits.

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.

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.

Let Him Go is a swift entertainment, claustrophobic and anxious in its depiction of an impossible, frustrating situation, and satisfying in its gnarly climax.

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

Whatever LuPone is doing, it’s undeniable. Here, long into a meandering and fitfully rewarding film, is something worthy of fear—or maybe it’s awe.

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.

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.

Trite as it may sound, we gradually accept that the beautiful boy of the title is not some innocent child, lost to the past, but rather the real and imperfect young man hunched before us. It’s Chalamet’s great accomplishment, and the film’s, that we feel that so keenly.

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.

The familiarity of RW&RB’s obnoxious indulgences are, in some ways, its greatest triumph: its version of storybook love is allowed to be just as annoying, in the same ways, as the heteros’.

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.

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.

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

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.

Jim Queen is a crass, profane, giddily stupid romp through a heap of stereotypes about gay life in Paris. It’s teeming with jokes about prostate orgasms, about tops and bottoms, about fetishes and bodily fluids and G’d out party bois. It comes as a welcome shock to the system here at this august, black-tie film festival. I just wish the movie was funnier and fresher than it is.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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

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

There’s something sweetly clumsy about how Stargirl invites us back in time, to twenty years ago, when such a made-up person might have surprised and delighted us. Stargirl is a strange but not unwelcome reminder of that fact. How quaint of us. How quirky, really.

Stylish and intriguing, Saltburn proves an engaging sit for the majority of its run, and thus a stumble—even a big one—can mostly be forgiven. If anything, the film makes me curious to see what Fennell might do with another classic novel.

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

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

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

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

The film has a sneaky momentum.

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.

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.

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

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

All the conversational ramble and social intimacy of Matthias & Maxime has the murmur of truth. It’s textured and specific; it slows and quickens with the cadence of real life.

From one vantage point, Stillwater may just be a sentimental and lurid riff on the infamous Amanda Knox case. But I think McCarthy has something bigger in mind, which he pokes at intriguingly throughout his movie’s considerable sprawl.

Pooh and his animal pals are wonderfully subtle feats of animation, textured so carefully that you can almost smell the cozy, woodsy mustiness of their matted fur.

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.

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.

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

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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

The pleasures of Ol Parker’s film are simple and sensual, its riot of color and sweet, nostalgic songs proving wholly agreeable even without much of a plot to hold it all together.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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

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

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.

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.

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?

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.

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

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.

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.

Fantasies like this can satisfy even in creaky packaging. All it takes, really, is some nice scenery and a pair of actors who can sell their chemistry. Lonely Planet checks those boxes, even if it makes one yearn for a more elegant vehicle for Dern—one in which her romantic adventure might prove genuinely inspiring.

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.

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.

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.

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.

The movie is fun, which could be all we need right now. Let’s do it again next summer.

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.

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

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

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.

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?

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.

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.

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.

Locked Down is a grating yank into a nasty headspace, a pompous sort of fury. There is no empathy for the common cause of quarantine in the film, only spittle and outrage and corny existential angst.

Bad Education (which honestly isn’t a great title for this movie) is an arresting, nuanced depiction of insatiable want, of the bitter fact that reaching for things is often more instinctual, more human, than holding on to what we’ve already got.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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

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.

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.

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

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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

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.

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 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.

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.

For several weird stretches, though, Venom is a bouncy good time. The movie doesn’t seem to care if you’re laughing with it, at it, or whatever. Just as long as you’re engaged, rollicking along as it doles out fan-service while still making a gleeful hash of so many serious franchise movies about very silly things.

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.

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 curious fun of Daniel Espinosa’s film is in how it embraces the gothic mythology that inspired it. Morbius does eventually become a cluttered slugfest, as all things must. But for much of its run it is a stylish, intriguingly toned story of a man trying to thwart mortality.

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

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.

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.

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.

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.

Not a single bit lands in The Happytime Murders.

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.