Richard Lawson

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.

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.

What works best about Belfast is what Branagh doesn’t do.

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

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.

Mills makes this genre feel new and insightful, as if he’s one of only a few filmmakers who has tackled the complex dynamic between adult and child.

What keeps us invested is the cast’s invigorating performances.

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.

While the core narrative is plenty compelling in all its creeping dread and curiosity, The Power of the Dog is not too concerned with being about any one thing. The film’s secrets are revealed while new ones bloom into being. Life tumbles after life in the ecosystem of all of us, seething amid the dust clouds we can’t help but kick up.

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.

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.

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.

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

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 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.

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.

It’s an elusive film, in its plotting and allusions, but is still potent and immediate, as resonant as any of our own late-night quests toward the far reaches of our self-conception.

The film is best viewed as a tricky character study, one about the undulations and relentless demands of self-worth—and, of course, of money, which is always a focus of Baker’s films.

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.

Benedetta is full of surprising tones shrewdly introduced by Verhoeven, who keeps us leaning forward to suss out just what his film is trying to be and to say. Cloister drama gives way to steamy soft-core romance gives way to camp comedy gives way to apocalyptic horror.

Trier pulls a lot of stylistic tricks in the film, but they somehow never play like gimmicks, like adornments merely there to show off the talent of their creator. The film has a lilting, lively rhythm; the glimpses we see of months and years in Julie’s life ably provide a whole picture.

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.

Black Widow is a prequel of sorts, and an origin story, a robust and satisfying glimpse into a defining interlude in Black Widow’s life that almost, almost pulls off the trick of being wholly its own thing.

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.

Luca does, despite its vagueness, successfully pull off some of the usual Pixar tricks, provoking warm tears and weary sighs as one considers the familiar trajectories of life.

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.

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.

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.

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.

Basking in the film’s ceaseless swirl is as intoxicating a moviegoing experience as one could want these days, a burst of communal joy (and sorrow) that serves as an effusive welcome back to the world.

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

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

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.

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.

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

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.

Godzilla vs. Kong competently, efficiently does its job, which is really all you can ask of the fourth movie in a rickety franchise.

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.

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.

It’s a fun movie, packed with escapades and just-shy-of-cloying cutesy humor, but there is a resonant depth, too.

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.

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.

As it unspools, Minari becomes a study in sober compassion. Chung has worked through the conflicts of his upbringing—his father’s stubbornness, the family’s rural isolation—and arrived at the grace of understanding, and all the forgiveness, regret, and affection that comes with 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.

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).

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.

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.

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.

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

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 Little Things is somehow both lazy and overly adorned, a lugubrious movie that spends all its indulgence on the easiest, most obvious of tropes.

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.

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.

The pleasure of Let Them All Talk is in how it expands on the premise of an older lady hang movie, burrowing into darker corners and pausing to consider the ambient hum of life tumbling along. It’s a fun movie. It may also be profound.

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.

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.

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.

Mangrove is not a lecture, or a polemic. There’s a gracefulness to McQueen’s technique that gives the film a poetic lilt; even when the worst things are happening, or the biggest speeches are being made in court, McQueen manages to avoid the starchy stuff of so many political and legal dramas.

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

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.

His House is a grim and poetic lament about a boggling global tragedy.

Mank taps into a vein of feeling that reaches farther than mere family tribute. The film also serves as a political cri de coeur, one that inspires as much as it dismays. In making a film that’s sort of about the making of another film, Fincher has many metatextual layers to work with, which he does with trademark precision and unexpected gentility.

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

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.

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.

It’s a thrill to watch a film that so cogently, shrewdly renders its ideas. It’s a case of high concept, adeptly cracked.

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.

With weary humor, Blank details how hard it is to sustain an actual, decades-long career in the arts, when the twin forces of public appetite (and money) and personal obstacle conspire to derail or deaden what was once so exuberant, so teeming with possibility.

It’s not a demure film, by any measure, nor does it shy away from hard truths. What it does is allow the Riches the loveliness and grain of their individual being, and lets that be enough. The rest of the film’s mission, then, is what we in the audience do with what Bradley, and Rich, have graciously shown us. Time appeals to heart and mind. It also, hopefully, convinces us of their capacity for action.

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.

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.

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.

The Nest is a complex movie, despite its economical size.

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.

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.

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

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

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.

Boys State is a grim lesson—a painful allegory—in the realities of American politics, in who so often wins campaigns by running platforms built on red-meat shibboleths while ignoring or barely addressing the pertinent ills of the country.

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.

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.

Its moral identity aside, this is a staggering piece of filmmaking. The Rosses have a keen command of picture and motion; their film is riveting from the jump, swiftly and totally enveloping us in the bonhomie of Michael and his bleary company. Maybe the non-reality of it all isn’t worth fretting about.

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.

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.

Murphy animates Rita Kalnejais’s script—itself an inventive reimagining of cliché—with insistent artistry, announcing her arrival as an ascendant talent.

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.

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

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.

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.

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

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.

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.

As a dancer to Hargrave’s violent tune, Hemsworth acquits himself beautifully—he gets a grim and maybe irresponsible assignment done quite well.

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.

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.

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.

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.

It handles a tricky topic with so much persuasively unadorned compassion that it has the genuine potential to change hearts and minds about one of the country’s most contentious battles.

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.

The film is sturdy, galvanizing, the sort of movie that might help rouse people out of despair and into the good fight. The spirit of revolution—righteously angry yet full of bonhomie, demanding but generous in its reach—is alive and well in the film. As, one hopes, it is everywhere else.

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.

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.

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.

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

The Father is an act of understanding, radical in its toughness and its generous artistry.

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

Shirley is a relentless film, ceaselessly in motion. Its actors, then, must go chasing after it, with Moss leading the fearless charge. She brilliantly maneuvers the film, moving in fluid response to Decker’s stimuli.

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.

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.

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

Though premised on the slight pretenses of Twitter, the world of Bravo’s film is no fictionalized, seedily appealing underbelly. It’s simply America: often frightful, sometimes grimly amusing, and ever rattling along in its entropy.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

1917 is a rattling wonder of form, an audacious undertaking that nonetheless bobbles or cheats on a few occasions.

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.

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.

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

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.

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.

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.

I found myself reluctantly taken by the movie, and the way Scorsese uses it to maybe, just a little bit, atone for some of his own past blitheness about violence. In The Irishman, a merry darkness slowly becomes an elegy, ringed with guilt. And what could be more Irish than that?

Yes, it is the cool stripper-robber movie with the awesome cast. But it’s also a true movie for our era, teeming with the confusion and yearning and risk of life right now. It’s a deeply humane film, one that finds celebration, and illumination, in the dark spaces where so many grind.

There is something undeniably exciting about seeing a polished piece of studio-ish entertainment like this be cognizant of the world it exists in.

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.

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.

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

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.

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.

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.

While visually and aurally stunning, James Gray’s latest film doesn’t explore anything new.

For all its strife and sorrow, Marriage Story is a generous film. It sensitively acknowledges the ways people fail each other, and the ways they don’t. It’s well worth your time. Maybe don’t watch it with your spouse, though.

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.

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.

Its universality, if you want to call it that, can only be so headily conjured because The Farewell is about exactly what it’s about: this family and their city, their culture, and their complicated bonds. That’s where the film’s beautiful, affecting honesty is sourced: in its million grains of truth, generously offered up. What an honor it is that Wang has invited us in.

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.

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.

Midsommar is a shocking piece of filmmaking—unnervingly competent even when the film yaws into silliness, even when it risks tedium. This film will alienate a lot of people (much like Hereditary, its audience exit polling is likely going to be abysmal), but there’s a wonderfully audacious confidence to the way Midsommar is built.

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

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.

Toy Story 4 not only delivers plenty of gonzo-funny moments and genuine thrills, but also interrogates and complicates the series’s core themes.

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.

In Sciamma’s gifted hands, the film escapes cliché and becomes something glorious—a study of forbidden love that grandly highlights how much has been lost under the crush of hetero patriarchy.

There’s an anger at work in the film, but what’s more effective is its ruefulness—its ribbons of abiding hope, frayed and tattered but still there, somehow.

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.

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.

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

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.

This curious fairy tale may not be the truth, and it may prattle on too long. But when its stars align, and they let loose with their unmistakable shine, Hollywood movies do seem truly special again. And, sure, maybe TV does too.

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’s a host of great performances too, from Evans’s sad and weary nonagenarianism to Johansson’s watery mettle to Brolin’s lumbering and alluring villainy.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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 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.

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.

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.

The movie belongs wholly to Ronan, who at just 20 years old is such a remarkably poised and confident performer. She's a great actress to watch, and Brooklyn is a wonderful, if low-key, platform for her talents.

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.

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

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

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

For all of technology’s cold gleam, Ralph Breaks the Internet has real warmth, the kind born of compassionate, invested filmmakers. Who, yes, may be serving at the whims of a distressingly ever-expanding imperialist force, but have nonetheless done something rather nice under its watchful aegis.

Van Gogh’s struggle with the world was one of pushing it away, and trying to pull it close—all at once. At Eternity’s Gate is good at capturing that dizzying contradiction—and the poor soul at its center.

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 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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

Directed by documentarian Matthew Heineman, no stranger to war-torn lands himself, A Private War casts a bracingly intimate gaze, and yet sometimes has the tinny, expositional clank of based-on-a-true-story cinema.

It doesn’t wring its hands with grief and beatify its rumpled subjects. Instead, it arrives at a place of humble, true understanding. Which means more than mere forgiveness ever could.

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.

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.

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.

McQueen has made a film that’s sleek and muscular, a polished product that has a barb-wire ribbon of tenacious political fury running through it. It’s somehow both heavy and light, a giddy entertainment that still urges at deep social ills.

When it hits its highest, most resonant notes, Bradley Cooper’s remake of A Star Is Born—starring the director alongside pop icon Lady Gaga—achieves a triumphant, romantic ache that is often just what we want to experience at the movies.

The Favourite is a pleasure to watch. It’s weird without being alienating, dirty without being cheap. And you’d be hard-pressed to find a better acting trio this fall. What fun The Favourite is, while still striking a few resonantly melancholy chords here and there.

Beyond that interesting character profile, Free Solo also operates as a sort of meta criticism of this kind of documentary filmmaking. We see Chin and his crew, most of them friends or at least affectionate admirers of Honnold’s, grapple with the difficult realities—and the potential trauma—of what they’re doing.

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!”

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.

This period epic...is so full of dazzlingly intricate visual poetry, so teeming with sensory spirit, that trying to review it is a bit like trying to review all of life. Which may sound a bit grandiose, but Cuarón’s magnum opus provokes such turgid sentiment.

Mostly, the cat-and-mouse of Lowery’s film is just reason enough to contemplate the shuffling everydayness of life, of how we are ever aware of its finality while also tending to, seeking out, and appreciating the little joys, mercies, and adventures of it.

Not a single bit lands in The Happytime Murders.

Hawke and Byrne have a nice chemistry, handling an offbeat and initially epistolary romance with wary sweetness. Juliet, Naked is surprising in its emotional contours, hitting familiar beats from different angles or, occasionally, taking the story in wholly unexpected directions.

I wouldn’t call The Wife middling, exactly—but for all its soapy seriousness, it can’t match the genuine heft of Close’s craftwork.

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.

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

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.

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.

In ragged times, the sophisticated derring-do of Fallout is a welcome gift, a slick and studio-polished adventure that nonetheless has the undermining wink of transgression. The movie’s nerve and moxie successfully make us forget its corporate overlords, and all those other oligarchs grinding millions of American lives into nothing.

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.

Ant-Man and the Wasp is firmly on the B-movie end of the Marvel spectrum, a happy enough place to be: clacking along with all its bug friends, for the moment unfussed about Thanos and geopolitics. It seems pretty nice. Would that we could wrestle the rest of the world down to that same agreeable scale.

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

From a certain angle, Incredibles 2 looks a little too slavish to creaky conventions.

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.

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.

A more thoughtful and interesting film than its immediate predecessor.

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.

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.

Sauvage is often difficult viewing, and Leo tries our patience and compassion as anyone habitually treating themselves so poorly can. Nevertheless, the film achieves a sort of grace, in moments of sweetness and stillness, when the fullness of Leo’s being—be it ravaged and weary—is palpable and, finally, undeniable.

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.

Bergen is consistently the best part of Book Club: natural, dryly funny, and, in a non-pitying way, quietly heartbreaking.

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.

Lee uses Blaxploitation motifs playfully but with purpose, honoring an era of discourse and activism while urging for the necessity of a similar film language now. If we are not keen to the past, we’re likely to find ourselves mired in its ills again. We already are, of course.

I love the way Jia grapples with large social shifts in such metaphorical and yet still intimate ways, peering in on individual people caught in the churn of time and growth and framing them in the defining context of their surroundings.

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

I’ve seen the film twice now, and while I enjoyed it the first time, on second viewing I found it nearly profound.

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.

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.

Chappaquiddick isn’t a harangue against Kennedy, but it does take a hard look at a man who was a revered stalwart of the Democratic party for decades. The film works best as a character study, a profile of moral crisis, rather than any sort of true-crime exposé.

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.

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.)

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.

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.

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.

Garland is a breathtakingly talented filmmaker, one whose few second-film stumblings—the unwieldy scope of his ambitions, his scrambling for an ending—are forgivable. Annihilation murmurs and roars with ideas, a dense and sad and scary inquest into life and self. It’s a true cinematic experience.

Black Panther works best as a dynastic drama, and as a musing on global politics from a perspective we don’t often get. Despite familiar action-scene wobbliness, it’s easily the most engaging Marvel film in a long while. Because—finally!—it has something new to say.

Writer-director Ari Aster, making a promising feature debut, has created plenty of forbidding atmosphere; there’s almost no shot in the film that isn’t filled with creeping dread. But Hereditary ultimately engages on a more emotional and intellectual register than it does on the visceral.

What initially seems like another alienating P.T.A. outing reveals itself, in quiet but glorious bursts, to be a wry and heartfelt love poem.

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.

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.

The Force is, to me, still silly Star Wars mumbo jumbo, but Johnson finds a way to underscore it with humanity, with a classical Greek rumble of true pathos. On that front, The Last Jedi is a pure success, accessing the molten core of its drama and grappling with it in nuanced ways.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

Oldman does a wizardly bit of becoming, making all these changes in voice, bearing, and proportion without putting on too many actorly airs; for how complex it is, Oldman’s is a remarkably unfussy performance.

The movie’s messaging is solid and persuasive, and Spielberg’s finely honed filmmaking, his sense of movement and controlled spectacle, does not fail him here.

Granik works simply, but she doesn’t forego artistry. She’s made a film of grace and power, a story of people lost and found in America that often shows us at our noble and humble best. How rare and refreshing that is these days.

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.

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 a bracingly alive quality to The Tale, as if it’s sentient and thinking in real time, giving the piece a gripping immediacy.

I love how open and casual this film is about Colette’s budding queerness, how it eschews any awkward coming out or pains-of-the-closet stuff. Instead it simply revels in Colette’s sexual and romantic freedom, suggesting that it was just that looseness, that liberation that gave her writing such verve.

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.

Though all three sections of the film have didactic bits when big ideas are plainly stated, the bulk of Monsters and Men renders huge issues with a fluid understatement. But that disarming pensiveness and interiority doesn’t forget the anger and sadness of the story—instead, it somehow heightens it, affording these characters a grounded texture that casts their struggles in a piercingly humane light.