Richard Whittaker

There is enough of a sense of awe here, and enough scale, that it brightens up the big screen as it stares into the ebony black of space. And if one child is instilled with a sense of cosmic wonder and channels that into a career probing the mysteries and poetry of the night sky, then Elio will have truly reached the stars.

The Life of Chuck is not so much about raging at the dying of the light but about how we embrace the inevitability of death and the wonder of what comes before. It’s blockbuster metaphysics, a twinkle in the eye of the infinite.

Kids may come out of Karate Kid: Legends crane-kicking in excitement from the handful of fights, and older fans can relish the nostalgia, but for everyone else it’s wax on, nod off.

The film further establishes the Philippous as some of the best directors of young actors working today.

Tornado is an undeniable success as a slow-burn, blood-soaked historical tragedy, both mournful and amoral, but it’s also a quietly fascinating exploration of identity and reinvention.

It’s in the semi-improvised or captured moments, like the looks of desperation and abandonment on the faces of old men on the streets of a mining community, that Caught by the Tides is most striking.

Underneath the savage occult aspects of the story remains a constant exploration of what it means to see your loved ones as flawed, rounded humans, and ultimately as mortal.

If only Fight or Flight knew that what it does best is hectic mayhem then maybe it wouldn’t be such a bumpy ride.

The Thunderbolts may not be the Avengers, but they’re the heroes we need now.

Peeking its head out from this pile of trash is the ghost of one of the year’s most wildly entertaining movies.

The Shrouds is arguably Cronenberg’s most introspective film. His earlier work was driven by fascination, fetishization, and a puckish humor. All those elements are present here, but muted, restrained, and ultimately under an overwhelming sense of futility, as Karsh uses the shroud tech to retain a detachment from his grief.

The Legend of Ochi is a kids’ movie in all the best possible ways, all the most enriching, magical ways that a kids’ movie should be. It’s also educational, but not in a teaching, preachy fashion. Instead, it’s filled with wisdom and heart, a fabulous tale of the fantastical that will leave your children filled with a sense of wonder about the world.

Audiences wanting a more rounded discussion of the U.S. occupation of Iraq might find it too militaristic and Americentric, while flagwavers wanting raw jingoism may find its questioning too probing. But as a depiction of the futility of conflict from those who fought, Warfare is far from ambivalent.

Misericordia feels like a big metaphysical shrug, sluggish to the point of lethargy.

It’s hard to blame the actors for not grasping the tone when it seems to elude the filmmakers.

Under the gentle hand of Griffiths, The Ballad of Wallis Island is both hilarious and delicate, never even making the buffoonish Charles simply a figure of mockery.

For those of you who had your brain bent in real time by the ultimate superstar outsider of Eighties comedy, there’s still enough new here to make retreading his familiar career worthwhile.

Anyone just expecting a cutesy animal romp may be sorely disappointed, but that’s because this isn’t about the quietly expansive inner life of Juan Salvador.

From the moment Shula first appears in On Becoming a Guinea Fowl, director Rungano Nyoni lets the quiet charisma of actress Susan Chardy subtly dominate the screen.

That the audience for Ari Aster’s folk horror might find more pleasure in this Snow White than the average child is telling, since it’s almost impossible to work out who this version of the story is aimed at. Children will be bored, teens talked down to, and most adults will wonder where their Snow White is.

No one else could have made this version of The Monkey because of all those indefinable, immutable yet ethereal elements that make Perkins’ movies not just popcorn flicks but gourmet popcorn.

It's not simply about watching the destruction of lives and buildings, but of dreams and aspirations, and From Ground Zero quietly demands your empathy.

Even for its flaws, Captain America: Brave New World feels like the series may be finding its soul again.

No Other Land is inherently hopeful. Even as the bulldozers rumble, and soldiers take the safety off around kids, and goons point cameras in Abraham’s face and threaten Facebook-fueled revenge, there’s hope that the juggernaut of oppression can be stopped.

Broad, sharp, hysterical, witty, and perfect for everyone who likes their Valentine’s hearts with candy or carved, still beating out of their chest.

It seems that its depiction of institutional misogyny, police incompetence, and the continued strength of the caste system didn’t sit well with the censors. If nothing else, that’s a sign that it’s served its purpose by hitting the powerful uncomfortably close to the bone.

Its answers are uneasy and disquieting, and the true root of its horror.

It’s that rare film that truly tackles how people live within a bloody conflict.

Both Koepp and Soderbergh are to blame for the underdelivery of a pivotal, plot-defining, single line of dialogue that should have been a strand woven throughout the film.

There’s an element of synesthesia and a touch of religiosity to The Colors Within, but more importantly there’s Yamada’s welling compassion for the inner lives of young people.

Blanchart’s not reinventing any wheels – if anything, there’s a certain pleasure to be had from his decision not to follow the current trend of trying to simulate a real-time effect.

Even if One of Them Days does turn out to be a time capsule of an L.A. that has been incinerated, maybe time is the real test. After all, Friday wasn’t a big hit when it came out, gaining its cult status over time on home video. One of Them Days shares the same kind of comfy, goofy, undemanding rewatchability.

Las Vegas may demolish its own history, but The Last Showgirl will break your heart by showing you a woman clinging to the rubble of her life.

If anything, Ross’ work reminds us that the camera need not be God’s unblinking eye on a story. He has crafted an exceptional film driven by captivating performances.

Such an important and tender subject as assisted suicide deserves more than this mawkish, soapish nonsense.

Yet for all the bleakness, Better Man is one of the most visually inventive and uplifting films in recent years.

In his debut feature as a director, The Valhalla Murders creator Thordur Palsson lets the icy-blue pitilessness of the inhospitable Westfjords permeate every frame and every moment.

There’s an important message in here, especially when it comes to the financial inequality between men and women in sports. But rather than using the 17-year-old Shields’ pugnacious attitude to really explore how she landed body blows on the sexist establishment, The Fire Inside just ends up shadow boxing.

Even compared to his last film, the bifurcated dual character studies of In Our Day, A Traveler’s Needs feels less like a completed movie and more like an acting exercise.

There’s nothing erotic about this wheezing, rotting, carnivorous corpse, and Eggers rebuts the “sexy vampire” nonsense by depicting a supernatural abusive relationship. If you think that there’s anything sexy about how he rips the throats from babes, that’s on you.

In this brightly colored world, Trost makes images pop and vibrate, making this latest in the beloved series easy to watch in a way that seemingly evades most modern multiplex fare. Sadly, that’s one of the few areas of clarity in Sonic the Hedgehog 3.

Oppenheimer never quite embraces the absurdity and madness of his own proposition, and instead engages in a surprisingly flat tragicomedy of manners.

In the subtle subtext of having a solitary creature like a cat find companionship in a boat full of animals who have lost their pack, their flock, or their herd, we will find a tender story about knowing where we are meant to be.

In his three-acts-and-an-epilogue structure, Guadagnino inserts more story than Burroughs intended, and Queer becomes aimless.

There’s none of the visceral artfulness that Scott managed in the original. Quite simply, if you can’t make man-on-baboon hand-to-hand combat interesting, why do you think you can make a sword fight fun?

In George’s odyssey, McQueen attempts to emulate and skewer the classic British boys’ own adventures by juxtaposing it with social realism, but it ends up divided between the two instincts. Blitz is also burdened by a surprisingly leaden script filled with paper-thin Cockney stereotypes.

Fortunately, as directors Beck and Woods have become deviously adept at giving the audience what they want – rock-solid scares.

In this charming, funny, tear-inducing, and instantly recognizable world, and through the (in)actions of Grace, Elliot tells a gentle, touching, bitter-but-ultimately-sweet fable with a warming message: It’s OK to leave your shell behind.

This is an undeniable star-making performance for Madison, who finds the grace and charm and stupidity and selfishness and wild-eyed wonder of Mikey, a tough survivor who falls for the oldest fairy tale in the book.

As a trilogy capper, The Last Dance is barely a shuffle and a shimmy.

Crowley doesn’t blink at the cradle-to-grave graphic intimacy of Payne’s script, and in Garfield and Pugh he finds a duo who understand the deceptions and devotions of a beautifully flawed relationship. Watch ’em and weep, kids.

This is the antithesis of a sequel for sequel’s sake. Instead, it’s second verse, even catchier than the first.

Most importantly, Sherman and Abbasi deflate the myth that has dominated the last decade, that somehow Trump is some kind of aberration from the historical Republican Party, perverting it to his will.

Taken on its own fluff piece terms, Piece by Piece is an interesting sprint through three decades of cultural relevance and relatively scandal-free living. If Pharrell’s happy, then it seems we have to be too.

The Nightmare Before Christmas said that it’s all right to wrap a few scares up under the Christmas tree. Terrifier 3, the latest in the extreme gore franchise, sets fire to the decorations, cuts off your eyelids, and makes you watch the whole house burn.

Phillips sets the stage for a courtroom procedural – and then rolls a hand grenade into the middle of that weighty stage with a series of song and dance numbers.

Weaving, who excels at this kind of character-driven action-horror, plays perfectly with our empathy, wordlessly guiding us through this damned land.

The key to a great literary adaptation is not to slavishly replicate but to find a way to change everything for the new medium except the heart. The Wild Robot, the 49th animated feature from DreamWorks Animation, doesn’t just put a digital coating on that heart, but celebrates every vibrant beat.

Revenge proved that Fargeat can combine astonishing, lurid, hyperpsychosexualized visuals with incisive social commentary. Yet there’s a vibrant audaciousness to The Substance that’s matched and complemented by her cool examination of the cost of youth and beauty. She can swing between cerebral drama and body horror, but this is definitely not a Cronenberg knockoff.

Writer/director Megan Park follows up her debut feature, the South by Southwest award winning high school shooting drama The Fallout, with another look into the lives of teenagers. But whereas her first film took a suffocating dive into the emotional extremes of their inner lives, coming-of-age comedy My Old Ass is sweeter without being cloying.

It’s hard not to feel that Look Into My Eyes would pierce the veil with greater insight if Wilson wasn’t so credulous about everyone’s good intentions.

Burton and his writing team waste the opportunity of a sequel to fix the errors of the past, and instead double down on the most problematic elements of the original.

It’s as if Hot Fuzz was under the cultural and chemical influence of Sixties and Seventies psycho-pharmaceutical mind expansion conspiracy fantasies rather than Eighties action flicks and real ale.

This is a character study in extremis, built around the strengthening bond and rising tension between an aimless serial killer lover and her more driven but mysterious counterpart.

What makes The Front Room universal is that it’s ultimately about power, about who runs the house.

Vromen does make some efforts at re-creating the period. But what links 1992 to the era is that it feels like part of that wave of low-budget late-Nineties Heat knockoffs, all featuring a cast that can do better but hey, a paycheck is a paycheck. 1992 is just Hard Rain with the riots standing in for a storm.

If Slingshot leaned into that character study, rather than roughly gaffer-taping it to a deep space thriller, maybe it wouldn’t stall out on the launch pad so badly.

Too slight to be intriguing, too overstretched to be absorbing, too predictable to be surprising, L’autre Laurens doesn’t exactly waste its potential but does little with it.

At every point, Strange Darling is a grisly melding of deviously experimental form and terrifying function.

Art historian Thomas Negovan has excavated countless hours of rushes and raw footage from the archives to assemble a new film, hewing as close as possible to Vidal’s original story. In doing so, the debauchery, majesty, and brutality are finally revealed in all their unhinged glory.

Sirocco is structured like a children’s book, as a young person’s guide to grownup emotions. Yet it may well be grownups – who can use the story to look back at times in their lives when the word “awe” wasn’t preceded by “shock and” – who will take most from it.

Originality is what made Alvarez famous. If only he showed more of it here when it comes to storytelling, not just innovative jump scares.

My Penguin Friend is ultimately a charming story of quiet resilience and healing as much as it is about a man and a bird. May we all find such friends.

There are so many underdeveloped themes that it’s not hard to see what Singer was trying to achieve, and how short he falls.

Lackluster and slow even in its supposedly hi-octane chase sequences, much of the blame lies with director Doug Liman.

Dipping between English and Irish, and borrowing wholeheartedly from the fictional music doc/concert format of A Hard Day’s Night (hey, steal from the best), stylish musical comedy-drama Kneecap the movie is an accurate-ish biopic of the real Kneecap, with Dochartaigh, Annaidh, and Cairealláin playing themselves.

Dìdi, the debut narrative feature from award-winning documentarian Sean Wang, can be seen as a tale of code switching, but that could potentially just pigeonhole it as an immigrant story. It’s broader than that because it’s a more universal study of being a teenage boy, trying to find something like a sense of identity and working out which lies you can and can’t tell yourself.

So whether you’re here for obscure characters like Charles Xavier’s lost twin Cassandra Nova (Corrin), grisly sword vs. claw fights, queer comedy, MCU mythology, the cover of Uncanny X-Men #251, or just Jackman and Reynolds having a blast being hams, Deadpool & Wolverine has you covered.

Heavy-handed and stuffed with cardboard characters, everything about Twisters save for Powell feels like a pale imitation of what made the original such an unexpected smash of a disaster movie. Lightning definitely does not strike twice.

It’s not a grand landscape but a small portrait of wistfulness and wanting in the West, fluttering and touching.

The narrative is too flat, too drily filmed by César-nominated cinematographer Jeanne Lapoirie (8 Women) to induce much emotion or debate about Anne’s hypocrisy and abuse of power.

Perkins’ greatest and most stomach-churning achievement is in a slow shift of perspective, leading the audience from the bleak and eerie serial killer thriller of Harker’s world to the fiendish reality of Longlegs, and an enigmatic denouement that will be puzzled over and studied. Hell truly awaits.

The destination may seem inevitable, but the twists, turns, and merciless bloodshed make Kill a trip well worth taking.

The pleasures are in watching Maxine navigate through the bloodshed to the denouement she deserves, and watching West cut into the seductive allure of cinema.

The script by Mike White (who may have been locked in the writer’s room by Illumination Studios after working on the superior Migration) and series co-creator Ken Daurio feels like a stack of B-plots stapled together rather than a full story.

There’s an insufferable longwindedness to Kinds of Kindness, each installment dragging on beyond the point of patience. Watching becomes a chore, made heavier by Robbie Ryan’s often flat cinematography and the pacing created by Lanthimos’ longtime editor Yorgos Mavropsaridis.

The seated dance between Johnson and Penn is witty, earnest, honest, and overflowing with kindness, making Daddio a remarkable story of two strangers opening up to each other.

If you grew up in the 1990s post-hippie Massachusetts performance arts scene (as Baker did), Janet Planet may tug on your nostalgia, but you may not feel otherwise drawn to its ethereal qualities.

Squibb’s charm, her gutsiness, and her sharp, subtle humor fill the movie with warmth and veracity.

O’Sullivan’s script is also a remarkable document of community theatre: again, often a place for cheap laughs about hams and backstage romances, but it’s never played for comedy at the character’s expense.

Ultimately, and as is to be expected, In Our Day is not revelatory or revolutionary. It’s a film about being comfortable from a filmmaker who is comfortable with who he is.

It’s such a simple story but told with such grace, tenderness, compassion, and wonder, that all its strangeness seems familiar and welcome.

Director Scott Glosserman began his film as a found footage mockumentary before flipping into a conventional slasher for the final act as a deliberate, subversive plot point. Nash keeps his deliberate pacing to emphasize the grisliness.

It’s not that it’s unfunny or completely without charm: it’s that the script feels like an abandoned The Secret Life of Pets sequel into which Garfield has been crowbarred.

If you’re just along for the spectacular ride, then Furiosa is Miller at his nitro-fueled, chrome-covered, overblown best. But if you’re trying to make any sense of this, you’ll find it increasingly stalled out.

In a drama that depends on its organic structure, the constructed nature is a little too visible under the skin.

Taking its title from her second and final critically-acclaimed blockbuster album, music biopic Back to Black gives you all those details you’ll recognize – but not much beyond that.

Propper’s greatest success is that she doesn’t overdramatize tragedy and trauma. Awful things do occur, but in an organic way, so that the inevitable reaction is a sense of stunned shock. That’s why there’s no sense of judgement: Instead, there is just Propper’s overwhelming sense of empathy for what it is to be young right now.