Richard Whittaker

What's fundamentally uninteresting about Love and Thunder is Waititi's inability to recognize any character development over the last decade, or to move Thor forward.

There's a narrative of sorts in Mad God, but it's episodic and disconnected. It's less a story than an anthology built around exploration of an ecosystem.

Down With the King the album was a response to a rap scene that was leaving the originators behind: Down With the King the film is about a musician abdicating his throne, an existential crisis laid out with delicacy and insight.

It's the period details that really make The Black Phone ring. It's not the set dressing, or the costumes, or the hairstyles (although Jeremy Davies does sport a fantastic muttonchops-mullet merger as Gwen and Finney's alcoholic, abusive father). It's that grimy sense of the era, that way that kids felt left to their own devices. This is an Amblin adventure drenched in R-rated fear.

There's never a singular direction for the film and its sub-plots, but instead it's as if Daneskov strikes for a central mood, then lets each element wander a little away from it: not far enough to be disruptive, but never quite cohesive. Like the misguided men it follows, its charm is in its disorder.

Mid-Century may fit well into the zip code of architectural horror like 13 Ghosts and The Night House, but its unique design makes it well worth the visit.

In its funny, implausible, and heartwarming depiction of a ramshackle platonic friendship between two oddballs, Brian and Charles creates a complete and immersive world – rainier than, but not that far removed from, Kyle Mooney's equally idiosyncratic and endearing fantasy Brigsby Bear.

If Raiff's first film was about two neurotic characters learning to get out of their own heads, then Cha Cha Real Smooth is a tenderly bittersweet story about a couple learning to use theirs.

Somehow, there’s more than a little bit of fun to be had in this oddball little throwback, filled with mischievous glee and a sullied heart of gold.

Deep in the Heart is a reminder to everyone, whether they're raising cattle, walking through a state park, or just turning on a tap, that their actions have consequences for the state's beautiful biodiversity. It's an extraordinary document of the Lone Star State’s wildlife, and a remarkable call to action.

It's a film that inspires, that will make you want to try the silly, impossible, wonderful thing.

Coldly gorgeous and never less than enthralling, Watcher is undoubtedly worth watching.

Annie is a lot to handle, even for the truncated 77-minute run time, and maybe it would work better as a V/H/S 20-minute slot – but then you wouldn't get quite so amazingly infuriated by her. Dashcam, like few films, relies on your annoyance.

Crimes may lack the incisive wittiness of eXistenZ or the suppurating nightmares of The Fly, but even lesser Cronenbergian body horror is something to behold.

Just because you can shove a bunch of IPs together, should you? Especially when the motivation is a 90-minute joke about beloved TV series, with a lot of cheese-as-cocaine gags. Who is it for? People who still laugh at uncanny valley jokes. For those that don't, no reason to worry, because most of the references will be explained to you.

Lux Æterna is barely a film – even Noé has called it an essay – but then it's not meant to be complete. Created in five days on Yves Saint Laurent's franc (one has to wonder what they thought they were getting), it's a discussion, not a conclusion.

Nothing here really works. Even a surprisingly flat score from horror master John Carpenter (who was originally slated to direct the '84 version) can't save Firestarter from being a colossal misfire.

Scott subtly weaves those stories together by having every talking head be simply a voice, unified in their belief that this weekend was vital, an affirmation that it was OK to be young and broke.

What really drags it down is the wafer-thin script by Carol Chrest, which neither Sivertson nor a determined if sometimes overblown Ricci can pull past its messy metaphor and undeserved twists.

What Rana and Warin have also created is a quiet warning. As a new tide of fascism and monomaniacal cultural oppression looms on the horizon, they make Salomon’s story a tragic reminder that fleeing a nightmare may mean more than just keeping it in your rearview mirror.

With neither the grandiosity of pagan vision that illuminated The Green Knight, or the subversive forest horror of Ben Wheatley's In the Earth, Garland's Men is never quite a joke, but maybe that would have made it a more pointed parable.

The Duke may superficially seem like old hat, but in its comfortable ways there’s still a strong message.

Never less than enchanting, constantly surprisingly exciting, and with a burning sense of optimism that maybe, sometimes, hard work and vision can really win the day, Pompo: The Cinéphile is a tribute to everyone who colors within the lines but make those colors all their own.

By turns beautiful and ugly, occasionally infuriating in its obfuscation and disconnect, always slow and intriguing, King Crab is powered by the wild-eyed and soft-spoken charisma of Silli as the instinctually rebellious and disdainful Luciano.

Memory is better than some Neeson action flicks, worse than others, but, predictable as it is to say, you'll have trouble remembering it much longer than its run time.

This is Cage trying to find himself in all those messy decisions he’s made, trying to make amends while accepting and celebrating who he is.

9 Bullets just constantly misfires, and never gets better than the inadvertent comedy of Worthington pulling a gun on a dog as a negotiating tactic.

Paris, 13th District never quite provides a good enough reason to smoosh two of Tomine’s stories together.

Rookie Season feels like it started off as a standard fluff piece about a sports team with a little bit of money to burn, and it's undoubtedly race fans who'll get the most out of its personal depiction of life behind the wheel. But what it really delivers, hidden under the hood of a very stock story of a season, is much more driven by Lidell's story.

The Northman lives and breathes like the old epics; not Old Hollywood's cartoonish depictions of warriors with horned helmets, but the ancient tales to which he pays deep respect.

As the focus of the film, Navalny himself is a fascinating and complex figure, but Roher makes him explicable by focusing on his family, his recovery, his motivations and his growing realization that to change Russia for the better he has to risk his life.

Coast is undeniably empathetic towards the inner lives of kids living in the bland nothingness of California’s Central Coast, but it’s also not got a lot new to add.

Morbius does what it's supposed to, nothing more, and barely that. If only this living vampire had more of a pulse.

Just because 7 Days knows the beats of the classic rom-com, that doesn’t make it a cover version. Instead, it’s a delightfully new riff, one filled with cultural specificities and timeliness.

Truly, Everything Everywhere All at Once does one thing: exactly what the title promises.

Social anxiety abounds in velvet-black British college reunion comedy All My Friends Hate Me, a seething sneer of a satire that swirls around angst-plagued Pete (Stourton), the milquetoast member of a group of friends who come together to celebrate his birthday.

Chilling and unsettling, intimate yet monstrously vast in its cosmic horrors, Offseason is as dangerously welcoming as the island itself.

After Yang will resonate with anyone who has absorbed such emptiness into themselves, and found some comfort there.

What Riddler is doing is nakedly political, and there’s a risk that the audience may fall for his persuasive, butcherous way. Yet in the rebuttal to the Riddler’s conundrum, Reeves give this Bruce Wayne something more meaningful than an origin story: He gives him redemption.

King Knight is a weird delight, the kind of unlikely low-budget pleasure in which Ray Wise turns up as everybody’s favorite f*cking magician and delivers dancing lessons.

The Cursed may be a shaggy tale in places, but its bite is ultimately deep.

What I Want You Back really has going for it is Slate and Day. The set-up may be a Ryan deep cut, but their awkward energy, and shared ability to scattershot subtle one-liners without them getting buried by the sillier antics, harks back to another of her classics: When Harry Met Sally.

In its dour and often depressing depiction of environmental struggle, 1970s-set true-life pollution drama Minimata would pair well with Todd Haynes’ Dark Waters.

Any workplace drama (and that’s what it is, more than a sports film) must fit you for the shoes of the laborer, and that’s exactly what Jockey does. It makes you understand why riders would subject themselves to so much pain and poverty in search of what one calls “that one minute where you feel like the most important thing in the world.”

The Long Night may not be revolutionary, it's definitely got its own dark magic.

The Wolf and the Lion is deeply sweet, utterly predictable, and may well send a few unintentionally mixed messages about human relationships with large predators.

There’s a rumbling, inconsolable guilt at the heart of Clean, the latest from fascinatingly flexible writer/director Paul Solet.

Everyone has secrets, Hosoda posits, and the internet may play a role in our ability to process them, heal our wounds, and maybe find the person who can save us from ourselves. That he does that through a gorgeous SF-tinged version of a classic fairy tale is not simply a bonus (just those components would have made a memorable new version of Villeneuve's timeless story). It's a vital act of recontextualization, not ham-fisted revisionism.

It’s all too bland, the smooth-crotched erotic thriller equivalent of banging a G.I. Joe and a Barbie together.

While The Mitchells vs. the Machines has its points to make, it’s also deftly funny, and never didactic. You’ll care about the message because you’ll care about – and probably identify with – the Mitchells.

It’s a fittingly mediocre end to a franchise that has always been OK with being average.

It’s not just that it’s a great thriller. Its importance as a film is that it really weaves the lead character’s disability into the script, in a way that arguably wasn’t equaled in the subgenre until Mike Flanagan wrote a deaf heroine for Hush.

Ultimately, it’s an aspirational and inspirational tale of daring to reach for the stars even when authority figures tell you they don’t exist – and the value of having a friend who believes in you, even if they have an umbrella handle for a nose.

Ultimately, by placing everything within the online adventure, the real-world threats become secondary to the dungeon crawl. Hardened SAO fans may be fascinated by the tweaks in this remaster, but Aria of a Starless Night just feels like a repackaging.

Red Snow does a surprisingly good job of manipulating, and then subverting, your sympathies for these particular devils.

The strange and challengingly charming awkwardness of Alana and Gary, as well as the more entertaining anecdotes, will get you past the somewhat lumpen structure.

All the broad humor of the original film is gone, replaced by clunky and often tasteless gags, and the attempts to extract pathos from genuine tragedies vary from tacky to insulting.

Brimming with cornball humor and overt sentimentality, there’s something compelling within the film’s unyielding commitment to its own idiosyncrasies, not to mention the emotionally cogent backbone.

So often in these big multi-villain events, the hero gets swallowed up, but here he defines the film. If this really is Holland’s last outing, then he leaves having kept true to the spirit of his Spidey.

In a year when there's been great discussion about unlikable protagonists, Colman's creation of Leda as a living, breathing, deeply flawed character who can be both wounded and cruel – and the way Gyllenhaal sympathetically frames this unflattering portrait – is a fascinating reminder that not every film needs to leave us feeling comfortable.

I will admit, the fact that Oklahoma oddball Mickey Reece had recently become the cinematic flavor of the month left me cold and baffled, especially with his breakout festival hit Climate of the Hunter. Yet the excellence of religious chiller Agnes finally means you can mark me as a true believer.

It’s bleak and brutal, and Waugh’s cold tone (a definite throwback to Shot Caller) leaves no one with clean hands. But as a testament to the costs of a noble sacrifice in the face of institutional inhumanity, it’s as vital as any of his earlier films.

Superficially, Wolf may seem like an entry into the queer canon, and it's not hard to see superficial similarities between the facility and a gay conversion therapy facility, or to superimpose transphobia onto Jacob's diagnosis of species dysphoria.

It’s a slow document of stiff upper lips beginning to quiver, and while Knightley excels as the perfect Kensington upper-crust mummy, it’s Goode who personifies that desperate attempt to keep a veneer of control, even as his world is on the verge of devastation.

House of Gucci isn't aggressively bad, but it is undeniably tedious, threadbare, and unengaging.

That's where Kurt Vonnegut: Unstuck in Time is most fascinating, in its exploration of the blurred lines between what who writers (and filmmakers) are, and what they write, and why they write.

Ghostbusters: Afterlife may not change cinema in the way the original did, but it’s a worthy next generation.

Campion and her cast do an extraordinary job of bringing all these characters in midway through their own private traumas, and Dunst brings silent grace and sadness to a woman inherently doubting her own motivation.

The United States of Insanity is as much a portrait of a long-ignored, mocked, and lambasted band, and the subculture that surrounds it, as it is a trip into a deeply disturbing and Kafkaesque assault on civil liberties.

At heart, The Souvenir Part II is a film about filmmaking as art, industry, and identity.

Red Notice barely feels like a film, which is fine. It’s a series of set pieces flimsily bolted together with Reynolds doing the Reynolds thing, Johnson doing the Johnson thing, and Gadot doing the Gadot thing.

Wain's psychosis is shown from the inside, the Victoriana giving way to psychotronic visions that re-create Wain's futurism and dalliances with Cubism.

Sapochnik has delved into bleak futures before, with his 2010 brutal forced-organ-donation capitalist satire Repo Men, but Finch is much closer to last year’s The Midnight Sky, in which George Clooney stared at his own incoming invisible apocalypse.

There’s been an urge to excuse the director and blame the studio, arguing that Zhao just didn’t fit into the strictures of the MCU. Yet that doesn’t explain how weak the script she co-wrote is, or why it’s so insufferably long, or why it almost completely fails to tackle its own core conceits of blind loyalty, of the perils of immortality, of rebellion against faith.

The longer you are immersed in this exchange of stories, of hope dying against darkness but proving its value just by its glimmers, the more it enthralls.

This is definitely one My Hero Academia adventure that should go back to the classroom.

If Villeneuve's grand and epic take evokes any earlier cinematic vision of Dune, it would be the first failed take, which would have seen director David Lean and writer Robert Bolt cross similar wastelands as they did in Lawrence of Arabia.

Mass takes the high school shooting drama out of the exploitation rut into which it has fallen, and instead turned it back into a story of people. It's a simple achievement to name, but an extraordinary one in its impact.

Maybe Halloween Kills will make more sense when the finale of the trilogy, Halloween Ends, gives those themes some context. But as a sequel to the deliciously absurd 2018 resurrection, it’s a ponderous bore, far-too-intermittently broken up by spurts of the franchise’s signature gore.

While never taking credit away from the other rescuers who also risked life and limb, The Rescue comes back to the bunch of self-described oddballs who got the kids out.

It’s not frustrating, but then, it’s not quite that engaging. It may spark a little light self-recognition among filmmakers, and that’s all Hansen-Løve seems to aim for.

So often, romance subplots in Texas noir feel like afterthoughts, there to increase a little bit of tension. But South of Heaven’s most meaningful moments are in the interplay between Lilly and Sudeikis as the star-crossed lovers with time most definitely not on their side.

Even if it beat Videodrome to the screen by two years, it's not quite the same level of must-see programming. It's fascinating, but less coherent, less scathing, and far more meandering.

It's this overstuffed storytelling, mixed with lackluster pacing, that renders No Time to Die a torturous misfire, and an utterly disappointing exit for Craig's Bond. I hate to say it, but this is Bond's Rise of Skywalker.

It's Gillies' performance that raises Coming Home in the Dark from fascinating to utterly chilling, complimenting Matt Henley's cold, angular cinematography and John Gibson's score, all reed instruments and long, clean draws over strings, like an icy wind blowing slow through dead grass and bones.

The story Surgal tells is ultimately fascinating but dry, deep but limited, and a lesson more than an experience.

Ultimately, Prisoners of the Ghostland is an OK film by a great filmmaker who has made truly great films, most memorable for its cast and the fact Sono finally made an English-language movie. Yet, when what's noteworthy about a film is just that it exists, it's more a vapor than an actual phantom.

It’s almost like a “what I did on my vacation” essay assignment, only with an A-list of arthouse directors, and so it inevitably feels disjointed, switching from drama to tone poem to documentary to video diary.

The audience is thrown into Zed’s world (or rather, worlds), and it’s Ahmed’s astounding performance that provides the through line. It’s OK to be lost, because Zed is.

The further director Vicente Amorim pulls out, the more exciting the film becomes; but he never really takes advantage of the supernatural overtones that swim around the edges, or the unique cultural background of Brazil's massive Japanese diaspora.

Beyond surprising thematic depth, The Old Ways is an exercise in putting every cent on the screen, and hiding what you don't need.

Director Amber Sealey gives the last word to Hagmaier, not Bundy. It's subtle, and may not be enough for the growing group of critics and viewers that worry that the cinematic obsession with serial killers ends up lionizing them, but it makes Bundy what he always was: pathetic.

The golden era of slashers was defined by vicarious, often overblown pleasures, while the mood of Candyman is overwhelmingly dour and gloom-cloaked. No surprise, considering the weightiness of the issues at hand. Yet there are pointed discussions between Anthony and others in the art scene about the relative power of overt depictions of brutality and metaphor, something that somehow eludes this Candyman.

Shang-Chi doesn't just pull off a fun western xuanhuan, but makes it feel like a door being opened for future Marvel films. Where Shang-Chi stumbles is in the script.

PAW Patrol: The Movie is bigger and prettier than the TV show, but it's still PAW Patrol. What makes it worth the time investment for kids is that it's really about introducing the street-smart long-haired Dachshund Liberty (Martin) into the team, while giving a little drama to Chase's life as he processes some old trauma about being a stray in the big city.

Habit is so desperate to be edgy that it loops all the way back around to derivative, and wastes any potential Thorne might have brought to play.

That energy placed into making the audience look and listen out to the edges of the film makes Beth's central placement even more vital and enthralling; and by moving to The Night House, Hall is finally given the space that every previous performance has shown she deserves.

Sometimes the heartstrings need tugging to an old, established rhythm, played here with simple charm by Zhu, and given high notes by Hu's dedication to highlighting what being profoundly dyslexic can mean.