Richard Whittaker

Léger and Robichaud’s update is mostly successful in filtering the intent of the original for modern sensibilities, not least in the plentiful sex scenes.

As Bauman falls deeper and deeper into the mysteries of Bilberry Inn, McCarthy masterfully reminds us that a ghost can be real and a metaphor, as the scares demand.

The tonal disconnect between the subtext and the delivery leaves this Animal Farm wobbling like the first time Napoleon tries to walk on two legs.

Mārama is arguably at its most effective as a political text when it isn’t trying so hard to be part of the heritage that includes Hitchcock’s Rebecca and del Toro’s Crimson Peak.

It’s an adept translation that is in turns bloody and cruel, insightful and hilarious, and, under the plentiful gore and uproarious laughter, a surprisingly touching drama. Just one with slapstick bloodbath tendencies.

Lowery may have dealt with the uncanny in A Ghost Story, but the whole point of that film was the mundanity of the afterlife. This is a truly supernatural tale, and the storytelling transitions into his version of horror, abstract and oblique.

It may well be that Ozon has made the best possible conventional adaptation of the book. Yet maybe it requires a more unconventional touch to truly translate Camus’ point.

A few unforgivably heavy-handed nods to The Shining aside, [Kawamura] has created a fresh new addition to contemporary J-horror, one that deftly warps the characters around its own rules without rendering them merely props for the next shock.

Faces of Death is dull and thoughtless, its attempts to smash influencer culture into voyeurism feeling artificial.

For two filmmakers best known for their comedic scripts like the Jump Street films and The Lego Movie, they know when to pull back on the humor and instead embrace the spectacle, and find their perfect proxy in Gosling.

A testament to the adage that a good filmmaker can make anything out of nothing, Undertone should go in your playlist now.

There are flashes of greatness, especially when Gyllenhaal and cinematographer Lawrence Sher capture some of the film’s wilder set-pieces. But then the narrative messiness undercuts the beauty of those images.

It becomes a warm and insightful tribute to every kid that finds peace climbing up a tree, to every adult that realizes the value of the natural world, and to the ties that bind us to the world around us. You’ll laugh, you’ll cry, you’ll learn what a keystone species is.

The influence of the original Mad Max is undeniable – not the crazy biker bits, but the sense of a collapsing world, of the personal impacts and damage inflicted by the end of everything.

Like its bloodline kin, it’s a perfectly scathing glance at power, money, and how the love of both can curdle the soul.

The best moments are when Keery and Campbell get to be blue collar schlubs facing down these messy menaces. Maybe if there was more of their back-and-forth and less of Neeson and Torchia’s distant double act, or vice versa, then Cold Storage might balance between its gruesome and goofy aspects.

Onscreen, Lighton explores the imbalance between the two and gently leads the audience with sympathy and empathy to a perfect resolution that asks both to face their own dysfunction.

Nirvanna the Band the Show the Movie may not win over many or even any new fans, but devotees of the TV show, and even diehards from the single-n Nirvana web days will relish having their favorite gentle idiots back and hearing the same joke on a bigger stage.

For all of Elordi’s mutton-chopped brooding and Robbie’s vamping, there’s something shallow and glib about “Wuthering Heights.” Yet again, the psychosexual classic tragedy has been turned into a well-crafted mass-market potboiler.

It’s the same thrill as the Final Destination movies, which Egerton and Hardy have both noted as an influence: watching likable protagonists try and sometimes fail to evade death.

Call it what it is: Luc Besson’s Francis Ford Coppola’s Bram Stoker’s Dracula, a copy of a copy.

Making a movie about how annoyed you were that your label tried to force you to make a concert movie is just 103 minutes of Charli xcx relitigating an argument she already won, just with added product placement.

Its gentleness and incremental increases in weirdness are a feature, not a bug.

The result is something that feels like an adult’s idea of a sophisticated kids’ movie, its sense of adventure and imagination overruled and undercut by its tone of mature melancholy.

Raimi plays with the audience’s loyalties, making the insufferable Brad increasingly sympathetic and Linda more unhinged and despicable by the minute. Yet ultimately Send Help devolves into two awful people being awful to each other for two hours.

The plot and character development remains early-2000s video game level, a fact made even more disappointing because Gans added so much more to the first film.

In Cold Light is far better constructed and executed than its generic, straight-to-video title might imply, but it’s too monotonous – in the literal meaning of the word – to reach its aspirations or to really use its cast.

Seriously, audiences do not need another constant reminder that their lives are slipping away. Just watching Mercy will have them reconsidering their priorities.

Bennett’s true genius is not merely in his words – although few have ever achieved his flair for simplicity and wit. It’s in his compassion.

Prows lets all those subplots divert him from saying something meaningful about how even the best-intentioned of cops end up part of a nightmare machine. Luckily, the plentiful and creative gore splatters enough blood and ichor to provide camouflage disguising those shortcomings. Or rather, enough to make Night Patrol entertaining – just not enough to completely obfuscate what it could have been.

The Voice of Hind Rajab is not just a reminder of the crimes against humanity being committed in Gaza. It’s a reminder that the constant smears against human rights organizations and aid agencies are vile slanders by people who want this to happen again and again and again.

While there is undoubted visual spectacle to All You Need Is Kill, Kido’s rewriting of Rita and Kaiji as just ordinary people stuck in extraordinary circumstances is grounded in their mundanity.

Rather than this being some random moral crusade, Flaherty’s understated anger is about how the very rehab process that helped him so much has been perverted into a system indistinguishable from how street dealers operate. It’s his furious curiosity that informs the film, and gives it such devastating insight.

[DaCosta] may divert the series from its withering dissection of the green and pleasant land’s self-image, but her absurdist perspective on this inherently absurd franchise is still undeniably entertaining.

For all the effort that Van Sant and his team put into making Dead Man’s Wire look like 1970s Indianapolis, its ability to really summon the spirit of the era only goes skin deep.

Like the weeping sores that spread on Eli’s body, the bloody gouges that Ben carves into his thumb with nervous scratching, and the haunted look in Daddy Wags’ eyes, Polinger delivers a troubling and heart-stopping lesson that such childhood horrors will always leave a mark.

What truly enthralls the viewer is Bi Gan’s journey through the history of cinema.

We Bury the Dead is already too slow and mournful to pass as popcorn entertainment, and it’s rarely quite thoughtful enough to bring its art house horror aspirations to life.

At the end of the day, Brewer reminds us, it’s all about hands touching hands.

Chalamet clearly relishes this opportunity to play against his modern heartthrob persona. Win or lose, you’ll still kind of want Marty to take a punch to the schnozz. But at least you’ll understand why he’s that way.

By the time the final act slithers on the screen, Gormican has abandoned any sense of originality and just props the film up on nostalgia-manipulating cameos and clumsy, overused needle drops. Those moments barely cover some astoundingly inept filmmaking, from shot composition to editing, that will make you wish you were watching Anaconda 3: Offspring instead. OK, maybe it’s not that bad, but Anaconda – both this film and the whole franchise – should just slip back into the swamp.

If future films deliver similar spectacle and true, epic filmmaking, then this lengthy sequel can afford to be a prelude.

Acheson channels exploitation legend Sid Haig as Charlie, and it’s just delightful to see Nelson give one of the all-time “oh, it’s that guy” bit part specialists a truly memorable role. That it’s in that rare remake that successfully inverts an old favorite while staying true to its grisly inheritance makes it even more of a gift.

In its strange and successful mixing of genres, Dust Bunny is arguably everything that Mockingbird Lane, Fuller’s misguided attempt at an edgy take on The Munsters, was not.

Adapting the graphic novel The One Hundred Nights of Hero by Isabel Greenberg, writer/director Julia Jackman creates a fable that is still damningly important and relevant: that women are not allowed to control their own bodies or their own stories.

With Kill Bill: The Whole Bloody Affair, [Tarantino] finally gets to complete his own work of cinematic archeology, and what he exhumes springs to life like the first time it was projected. Viva Kill Bill!

The first film was both a fun and furry buddy cop romp and a gentle metaphor for acceptance and cohabitation. Zootopia 2 goes further down that path in a fashion that is unabashedly moralizing when it comes to how some groups are excised and othered in a community, and how gentrification can be a tool of oppression.

Johnson may need reminding that atheists aren’t just here to provide comfort to believers. That misstep aside, Wake Up Dead Man is a cunning and entertaining mystery, a return to form for the franchise.

Its open-ended nature, its calm ambiguity, and its captivating, self-contained world all come together to give a clear view into Oshii’s creative and spiritual obsessions – even if that view doesn’t really provide much insight.

The ending simply lacks the guts to remain committed to King’s sociopolitical fury, and what starts as Wright’s best post-Cornetto Trilogy film ends up as his weakest. But when it’s really up to speed, The Running Man laps the competition.

As much as The Carpenter’s Son threatens to swallow you whole, and as much as it probes the oft-ignored darkness inherent in the Bible even outside of the Apocrypha, its thesis remains a little too academic to move the soul.

The ninth film in the franchise, Predator: Badlands flips the whole Predator equation on its severed head from moment one by, for the first time, really concentrating on the Yautja rather than on humans.

What Stitch Head mostly aims for and generally achieves is a warmth of comedy and emotion that will sit well with young audiences.

It’s arguably Linklater’s best use of an ensemble – and that’s saying something. But great as each individual performance is, and broad as Linklater pulls his aspect ratio, Nouvelle Vague is really a close-up on Godard.

The air of fear that still pervades every frame of It Was Just an Accident is undeniable and institutionalized, to the point that cops take cash or cards for bakhshish, the customary bribes required just to live in public.

True, the odd quill may scratch the surface, but there’s nothing really penetrating.

Lean as a hellhound, Shelby Oaks doesn’t rely on jump scares, although there are plenty of those. Instead, its true terror is found in writer/director Chris Stuckmann’s ability to move effortlessly from adrenaline shocks to creeping psychological strain.

Much as Blue Moon is a eulogy for the death of a creative life, it’s also a testament to Linklater’s continued vitality as a filmmaker.

Black Phone 2 may be a power ballad to the original’s minor chord metal, but it still rocks.

The script, and Byrne’s suitably breathless, solipsistic reading of it, give the audience every reason to not simply dislike Linda but despise her.

Rønning doesn’t seem confident in his storytelling acumen, relying instead on running narration provided by real-life TV anchors cold-reading the least convincing announcements this side of a Fox News host talking about Portland.

Like Johnson’s Kerr, The Smashing Machine is a surprisingly gentle giant.

Unabashedly warped and horny, Morgan knows exactly when to set off the depth charges lurking in the waters of Bone Lake, making its big, filthy reveal feel like the inevitable result of the characters’ urges.

These digressions aren’t enough to build anything like a real conversation about the Austin-made classic. There needs to be something more.

When Day-Lewis and Bean are allowed to be real brothers in arms, Anemone truly blooms.

Anderson still directs with purpose, and while One Battle After Another is never as coherent as it is exciting, it avoids the tag of being “lesser Anderson.”

Eleanor the Great never quite grapples with the ethical dilemmas that it raises, either in Eleanor’s stories, Nina’s efforts to turn them into a news project, or Roger’s usurping of their wishes for a segment on their show. But if the narrative logic falls apart, at least its emotional core remains solid, much of it bound together by Squibb’s warmth and charm.

While Figgis gets this extraordinary and unrestricted access, there’s a real question about what he does with it. Coppola is infamous for finding his films in the edit, but it’s hard to see that Figgis found that much more than he had in the camera.

The story is both simplistic and telegraphed, which is handy because some startlingly inept filmmaking makes the action almost impossible to follow. There are multiple sequences that make no sense to the eye or brain, and basic design and costume decisions that make it nearly impossible to tell characters apart from each other. The only true horror here is that there’s another couple of hours of this still to come.

It feels like Glander was hoping to create something that all the former kids that grew up on Cartoon Network’s wild, weird era will gravitate towards. But the reality is that it’s not as bizarre, creative, transgressive, or even just plain entertaining as the average episode of The Amazing World of Gumball, and that was about a 12-year-old cat boy and his fish friend.

Attempted but abandoned by filmmakers from George A. Romero to King regular Frank Darabont, six decades after completion and 40 years after publication, now it crosses the finish line as one of the best King adaptations.

Liu’s adaptation of Atticus Lish’s PEN/Faulkner Award-winning 2014 novel wends its way through the contradictions and tragedies of love between two people who need more than just a bed warmed by another body. Preparation delicately brings them together and devastatingly gives every reason for them to fall apart.

Splitsville succeeds because it never seems fragmented. As a director, Covino dances between the sensual and the silly while constantly exploring the core thesis of the messiness of relationships.

Pulsing up and down the arterial route of the B train from Brooklyn to the Bronx, Caught Stealing is a portrait of NYC at its most grimily charming.

Don't let the big (but not that big) budget fool you: It's Troma, baby, just how you like it.

What Taylor illustrates in this version of Little Red Riding Hood is a sensitive portrait of guilt, of the difference between people who simply want to bury it and those that are consumed by it.

The greatest problem is the woeful miscasting of Qualley as Honey. The script by Coen and his wife and sometimes-film editor Tricia Cooke seems to position the gun-free P.I. as a melding of two great noir conventions – the cool gumshoe and the femme fatale – and the camera loves following Qualley in high heels and wrap dresses. Yet there’s nothing much going on beyond those visuals.

Luckily, Ne Zha II still retains the charm of the best parts of the original, with the young rapscallion Nezha still a hyperactive bundle of mischief, hand stuffed down his pants like Dennis the Menace, waddling through jade palaces as he defies his destiny. May he stay as chaotically endearing for the inevitable part III.

It’s the trippy sequences of Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas without the queasy self-loathing. It’s the video to “Smack My Bitch Up” by the Prodigy, complete with POV debauchery, running on repeat 20 times. It’s … boring.

There’s a ridiculous level of glee to how the Indonesian filmmaker orchestrates a good old-fashioned headshot, or a kick that sends a knee buckling the right way.

Weapons is such a deliriously twisted blast that, as soon as it’s complete, you’ll want to shake up the box and do it all again.

There’s a profound mournfulness to this elegiac portrait of the end of an era, given greater poignancy by Jones’ understated performance.

This The Naked Gun never tries to lampoon or merely copy the original beloved films. Instead, director Akiva Schaffer and his co-writers, Dan Gregor and Doug Mand, get to the heart of the humor in a non-ironic, non-revisionist fashion.

Everyone who has been in a long-term relationship has gone through that moment when they wonder where they end and their partner begins. Adult connection horror Together takes that inner fear and makes it physical.

While Pulse was a warning, Cloud seems more like a funeral bell, a despairing look at life on the online economic periphery.

It’s a bleak and introspective movie, interrupted by outbursts of bloody, senseless violence, made tragic by the interactions between Nathan and Polly.

AJ Goes to the Dog Park doesn’t feel like a movie so much as two creative friends getting together and having fun exploring a comedic person.

Collins and crew follow the well-worn tracks entertainingly enough, running up and down stairs and catching figures just at the corner of the shot and arguing about whether they should keep filming or not, but there’s nothing new.

At a time when everyone is complaining about superhero fatigue, it seems almost perverse to say that maybe the Fantastic Four should have had another film first. Instead, they rush to an ending that bolts them so neatly into the greater continuity.

America undoubtedly needs serious artists to explore the brain worms that the pandemic era gave the body politic, but Eddington most definitely ain’t it.

It’s rare to say about a contemporary film, but maybe it could gain from a little didacticism, a little lecturing, a little clarity to ensure that its muddied purpose becomes clearer. Instead, its idiosyncrasies obscure its insights.

Gunn’s script grasps two major aspects of the Superman mythology. One, that journalism done right will save the day as much as punching bad guys will, and two, that immigrants will often subscribe to the principles that Americans claim are so self-evident more than most Americans will. Corenswet embodies both in a way that no one since Christopher Reeve has, willing to be the gosh-darning nerd if that means doing the right thing.

Jurassic World Rebirth struggles to find a reason to exist, so composer Alexandre Desplat peppers in the original, wonderful Jurassic Park theme by John Williams just enough to remind you that you’re watching a sequel, not a rip-off.

The real engine that keeps the movie moving isn’t the cliched script or the spectacular race footage. It’s Pitt.

With M3GAN out of her recognizable body for most of the film, it becomes clear how much of the success of both films comes down to Davis’ delivery.

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.