Richard Lawson

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

Adapted from Rumaan Alam’s bestselling novel, Sam Esmail’s film is a dreary, harrowing sit—and all the more invigorating for it.

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

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

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.

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.

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

Funny and rueful, The Holdovers seems beamed in from another time in cinema history, when wordy and thoughtful little movies like this were in healthier supply.

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.

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

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.

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

Hit Man is determined to be fun above all else, and it largely succeeds in that honorable, populist mission. It entertains, and generously pushes two game performers closer toward the movie-star pantheon.

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

The 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.

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.

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

At its best, the film is indeed piercingly clever, proud of its peculiarity to a degree just shy of smugness. Though, the 140-minute film does begin to wear out its welcome in the last third, when the jokes have mostly all been made before and the only fresh additions are cumbersome matters of plot.

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.

Mann’s film is all the more pleasurable for its thoughtfulness and restraint.

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’.

It’s a piercing and often very funny character piece, a study of narcissism masked, at least in part, by bourgeois, Millennial understandings of progressive coupling. But Sachs, who is in his 50s, has not made some condemnatory thinkpiece about what’s wrong with a generation. The people of Passages could, in some senses, be from any time; mercurial partners have existed forever.

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

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.

No matter its broader effect, Oppenheimer is a mainstream offering of uncommon resonance, sending the viewer out of the theater head-spun and itchy-eyed, ears ringing from all its sophisticated, voluble explosion.

There is plenty in Barbie to be delighted by, even moved by. I have no doubt that the film will be a massive hit, cheered for turning a cynical I.P. project into a loopy treatise on being. But the movie could maybe have been stickier, more probing and indelible, if it had reined in some of its erratic energy and really figured out what it wanted to say.

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.