Richard Lawson

If the film feels awfully familiar as it glides along these narrative rails, that same-ness is enlivened and given polish by Manville.

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.

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 Old Guard is a naked attempt to kick off a franchise, but I wasn’t bothered by all those obvious table-setting mechanics because what they’re establishing is so tantalizing.

Materialists is successfully seductive, eventually revealing a few potential deal-breakers but otherwise proving an engaging date. I wanted to fall in love, as I had with Past Lives. But a diverting, heady fling will do too.

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

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

Joel Edgerton’s earnest, solidly made film will be most effective on, and maybe necessary for, those immediately suffering under the crush of anti-gay bigotry, and those perpetrating it.

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.

You can’t taste all the miraculous food the sorry men of The Trip to Greece are served. But you can, at least, relate to the feeling the film evokes. It’s the wonder of new experience giving even further gravity to all that’s come along and happened before—and will, on some dusty day in some impossible future, hopefully happen again.

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

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.

There are enough surprising one-liners and asides to make this romantic comedy actually funny, rather than something to mildly chuckle at on the way to the kissing.

Samuel, who is also a musician under the stage name The Bullitts, makes an auspicious debut as a feature filmmaker. He knows when to deliver the expected punch and when to add his unique flourishes. The Harder They Fall trots along with invigorating confidence, a vision keenly realized.

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.

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

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.

It’s a rare treat these days to see Latifah in a movie (you can see her on TV on The Equalizer); perhaps we have Sandler to thank for this welcome, if brief, return. I’d gladly watch the pair in another project together.

There are moments of high drama in Infinity War—between father and daughter, brother and brother, mentor and protégé, lover and lover—that these actors, as deep in this series as we are, deliver on with teary intensity. And there’s a haunting final sequence that is as grave and, I daresay, almost poetic as anything the film series has done.

My Friend Dahmer doesn’t present some rueful wish that, oh, young Jeffrey might have made it if only someone had reached out to him. But it does extend him some human compassion, letting us see how the tragedy of his loneliness, spurred by the horror of his dark compulsions, made pre-murderous Dahmer something of a victim himself.

How refreshingly nice it is to watch a summertime movie that lets us sit in our feelings and grim recollections this way, and figures that an adventure in its own right.

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

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.

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.

It’s a rousing and moving enough film that one is compelled to excuse the limits of its artistry.

It’s a shrewdly balanced film, a mix of flippant merriment and real dramatic stakes.

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.

Perhaps a new day of Cage has dawned. One in which he can get back to the business of acting, unburdened by all the constant, semi-loving demand that he just bug out his eyes and dance.