Rodrigo Perez

Crafted with stillness, empathy, and clever drollness, “Fremont” is so striking it will simply and calmly demand your attention. So seemingly introverted, humble, and unassuming, it’ll force you to lean in, listen and heed all the humorous words of wisdom in its many little moments of providence.

Straight Outta Compton, while often entertaining and dynamic, ultimately feels as if its meant to act as a kind of cinematic trophy to rest on a pedestal that celebrates not only N.W.A., but the successful and trailblazing members who helped define hip hop outside of the group.

You may hate All The Money In The World, and you would be well within your rights to feel that way, but there’s no denying that the film is bold and ballsy.

Friendship is awe-inspiringly twisted by the end, a jaw-droppingly comical tale of tragedy, even. But it is masterfully rendered; the rare movie seemingly built from a sketch series turned into a genuinely riotously amusing and f*cked movie that still has the sense to comment on the dark and totally warped corners of the human condition.

Mordaunt’s eye indicates a thoughtful filmmaker able to listen to the winds of what a movie needs. Effortlessly natural, his workmanlike craft carries the capacity to keep an ear open to happenstance.

The good certainly outweighs the uneven. Dope is both intelligent and crowd-pleasing.

Overall, Cummings and McCabe’s film touches a raw nerve with sharp, funny, awkwardly prickly provocation.

A dark, but spirited fable about the pitilessness of the West, the meaning of home on the range and the worthwhile qualities of wicked, seemingly irredeemable men, “Slow West” is a terrific little parable, and a strong debut by John Maclean worth treasuring.

Admirable, ambitious and impressive, but ultimately aloof, Midsommar has its delights for sure, but it lacks the emotional depth to match the sharp insights it has into the evils of the ambivalent, wishy-washy relationship (run as fast as you can).

Ambitious, impressive, and genuine, with a great sense of vast scale and awe, as its title suggests, Society Of Snow is not only a three-dimensional cinematic feat of wonder, terror, and emotion-stirring courage but a deeply felt portrait of togetherness, brotherhood, and survival, poignantly commemorating the painful memory of indescribable loss and tragedy.

Is This Thing On? isn’t perfect. It stumbles where it should soar. But it’s alive with feeling, and that counts for something.

Ultimately, The Suicide Squad is a tale of beautiful losers discovering their humanity in a brief, inspired moment of convergence, finding hard-fought salvation in each other and the notion that all of us are always worthy of dignity.

Time Is Illmatic is comprehensive, even wisely holistic, but still feels as though something is missing; it’s as if in trying to cover the history, the music, the ecosystem, the upbringing and the man itself, each cancels out the other out, leaving only a surface exploration.

Delightfully twisted, Thirst Street takes the ideas of desire, romantic longing and desperation — desperation as the world’s worst cologne — and bathes it in a sheen of frosty colors, genuine vulnerability and sardonic unkindness.

The Imitation Game is entertaining and well-crafted, but one still can’t help but wish the drama had a bit more bite and nerve throughout.

Shang-Chi might get bogged down in the weight of water carrying -plot, legend, plenty of backstories, MCU connectivity, and the obligations of climatic superhero action that gets unwieldy, but in the end, it’s a winning film that’s likable and that quality goes a long way.

It’s a classic “Predator” film in many ways, subverting the paradigm slightly by featuring a new context: a Native American female warrior at its center, Naru (a persuasive Amber Midthunder, full of conviction). But as fresh as Prey does feel in this new warpaint on the surface, the film does feature a lot of inherent, built-in limitations.

Love+War doesn’t canonize Addario. It throws the audience into her contradiction: the duty to record history versus the duty to be present at home. It doesn’t answer whether those responsibilities can coexist, and that’s the point.

Spider-Man: No Way Home is maximalist, chock full of familiar characters and callbacks, and sometimes all that greatest-hits reminiscing is diverting and and entertaining. But it’s also not very necessary, making for a very regressive, fan-service-y ‘Spider-Man’ legacy-sequel that’s overly nostalgic for its heydays.

Holofcener knows human pathos, the melancholic, absurdist tragedy of it all, the laughter, the tears, the dark biting irony. She understands human behavior and her sharp, well-observed ‘Land Of Steady Habits’ is as lovely and near amazing as anything she’s made thus far.

Gemini is deliriously entertaining, an intriguing gem and as Katz graduates to the next level, his best film to date.

While its story is thin, its emotional undercurrent has a strong pull with poignantly topical notions of empathy, grief, and mercy.

As an experience, “A Quiet Place Part II” is still riveting and intense and should check all the boxes for most audiences, especially in the “I just wanna be gripped and entertained” post-pandemic age. For those looking for a little more depth and soul and a movie to fully coalesce in the end? Well, you might have to wait for the next chapter for some true thematic and emotional closure, but still, it’ll be hard to argue this won’t be an escapist thrill for most audiences in theaters, at least.

A curious, half-successful mutation in the “Predator” bloodline, ‘Badlands’ wants to transcend the franchise’s primal instincts. Instead, it proves that sometimes survival means knowing what not to evolve. Or at least, pushing the envelope with greater execution and story conviction.

While the documentary may not offer a startling new thesis, it still lands in its own subdued way. What lingers is not simply the ugliness of the rhetoric, but the banality of the scam.

The picture is often graphic and pulls no punches in its disturbing violence, but its unflinching nature gives it a memorable sear that won't soon be forgotten.

There’s probably just enough elevation by Pearce and Jarvis’ performances to overpower the novice inputs of Williams and Miller. Inside is mostly passable as a film about men and prisons that thinks – wait for it – inside the box.

The Walk is broadly written with two clunky first acts that are saved, arguably superseded entirely, by its nerve-wracking, majestic and spectacular finish.