Richard Whittaker

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.