Richard Lawson

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

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

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

If that storytelling decision was made so there was more room for the intimate human factor, then it was an understandable one. She Said has a calmly insistent moral clarity, earned through its patient empathy, its quiet awe not at the insidiousness of what Weinstein did, but at the mettle and courage of the women who endured it—and then spoke out about it.

The movie is fun enough, and Waititi shows enough moxie and goofy wit throughout, that instead of feeling glad that he’d been hired to direct the movie, I felt a little sad that he had to bother at all. Meaning: hopefully, Ragnarok will be a big hit and will write Waititi a blank check to do whatever flight of prickly whimsy he wants to do next. For that, it was probably all worth it.

Bird is a puzzling film, but gradually draws us toward a significant catharsis.

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.

Fair Play is a film responsive to internet discourse but not acting in service of it. It’s a grim, dynamic thriller, one that sets workplace and home crashing into one another in a small symphony of beautiful disharmony.

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.

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

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

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.

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.

A chewy, handsomely staged novel of a movie, Sorry Angel (whose much better French title translates to Pleasure, Love, and Run Fast) contains moments of piercing intelligence and heartbreaking beauty. It’s an epic diptych look at two lives converging, one in many ways just beginning, the other faltering to a close. I was absolutely in love with it—until the very end.

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.

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.

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

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.

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

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

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

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.

The wonderful thing about Skate Kitchen is how inviting it is, welcoming you into its community and showing you around with cheery spunk. Skate Kitchen is a warm movie.

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

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

Promising Young Woman is not always surefooted in its style or substance, but Mulligan is consistently riveting throughout.

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 funny in ways anticipated and not, and there is enough suspense—or something like suspense—to balance out the coy winks to the audience. The irony isn’t overweening, the doll is equal parts creepy and yassified, and the human lead, Allison Williams, anchors things with an admirable commitment to the bit.