Richard Whittaker

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.

The joy and grace of Weathering With You is in how Hina and Hodaka don't reject a world that rejects them.

It's less an examination of the psyche of one man than a PSA about manipulators. As a judge is quoted as saying: If you see Michael Organ coming, run.

The Outwaters stumbles because it fails to clear the second hurdle of any found footage movie: not simply answering why would the camera stay on (that's the easy part), but why would anyone edit what's been recovered in this way?

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.

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

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

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.

Honor Among Thieves is a big, bright, iridescent gem of a heist movie in a spectacular, vibrant, and fantastical world.

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.

It’s an inevitable problem with the screenlife format, to find a way to keep this deluge of pop-ups and cutaways all interesting without the audience’s POV ever leaving a desktop screen.

The Dark and the Wicked pulls no punches, either in its sense of perpetual unease, its occasional moments of understated yet truly stomach-churning gore, or in its emotional heft.

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

Suicide Squad just never quite has the heart of Guardians.

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 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.

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.

It does not reinvent the wheel (or, more aptly, sled runner) but it's a tale that survives the retelling.

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.

Somehow All My Life seems oddly lacking in stakes, which is so weird considering the story (the main symptoms of onscreen Chau’s deadly but photogenic disease seem to be a little tiredness and sweatiness).

If it wasn't for Thorp, this would be intolerable, but as Signe she creates a fascinatingly off-putting character study of a menace to society. There's no redemptive third act here, yet she still creates a rounded depiction of a singularly minded bully.

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.

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.

Director Dan Trachtenberg proved deft at re-envisioning franchise when he dumped the kaiju found footage gimmick of Cloverfield in favor of character-driven survivalist paranoia for 10 Cloverfield Lane and Prey is no less of a worthy twist of the garrote.

Soup to nuts, The Menu is satisfying and rich, yet lean and cutting.

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

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.

Gorgeously animated in 3D in Daxiong's signature, hyperdetailed/hyperstylized artwork, Eternal Spring is a chronicle of dissidence, and Daxiong's attempts to come to terms with how the movement got to this point of non-violent resistance - an act with which he disagreed because of the backlash.