Russ Fischer

Striking and consistently engaging, the Russos deftly craft compelling blockbuster entertainment out of a a moral and emotional conflict, and that’s more impressive than any overblown display of loud and vulgar power.

Through Cage, the film’s straightforward revenge plot becomes a King Crimson album played at half speed and twice normal volume; a bizarre and bloody outing with a strong heart beneath the surface.

David Lowery‘s ease with actors and command of tone make Pete’s Dragon one of the best remakes in recent years.

Crafted as a kaleidoscope of color and nightclub sparkle, The Lure's glitter does not distract from the fact that this is a technically confident and often quite accomplished piece of filmmaking, with a rare ability to dance intuitively between linear plotting and phantasmagoric fantasy.

Heder's direction shines, shaping the film around the cast as each woman plays out their own specific nuances of loss and insecurity, and, occasionally, optimism. Tallulah is an impressive feature debut, and a welcome showcase for the talents of Page, Janney, and Blanchard.

In script and performance, the film is an articulate howl of anguish and rage given depth by a discerning comprehension of the ways various communities can rely on faith for very different means.

The Intervention may not offer many new experiences, but its combination of tart and sweet is satisfying.

Shazam! is carried aloft by an exuberant performance by Zachary Levi as the title character, all muscles and wide-eyed naïveté.

Morris From America shines a deserved spotlight on Markees Christmas, who will hopefully be given more opportunities to command the screen, and it allows Craig Robinson a framework in which to deliver a career-best performance.

The Greasy Strangler is utterly honest, to the point of purity. For all its idiosyncrasies and blank lack of comprehension with respect to any taboo, this film believes in its corrosively yearning inhabitants, their unrefined desires and untrained bodies.

This gentle comedy is more interested in doing justice to the spirit of his achievement and the style of late-'80s comedy than the details of his life, but the resulting confection is sweet and simple.

Abrams makes big decisions and takes chances that command respect, especially in the very safe current tentpole film industry, but he doesn’t always quite sell them as he could. Still, as this new chapter props the franchise back up on sturdy legs, the Force seems to be in capable hands with a fresh forward direction.

The star’s transformation from nebbishy office kid to a frankly imposing skinhead street soldier is unsettling and impressive.

While [Chloe Sevigny's] work is commanding and a dedicated set of tough, engaged performances from the ensemble add life to the odd legend, awkward structural choices bleed away the film’s emotional punch long before the credits roll.

Moreso than any other movie in the back half of Marvel’s first decade, it’s tough to shake the feeling that Captain Marvel is an extended prologue to a story that is still off on the horizon. This character has the potential to be Marvel’s answer to Superman, with all the questions about power and ethics that implies, but her story is rushed here, and sometimes forced.

The strikingly realistic scenery is dappled with color, light and shadow to create dramatic stages for masterful character animations— if only the story played out on this impeccably-realized fantasy had the same persuasive command.

Restraint is a good impulse when dealing with such a simple story of grief, and Curran’s approach does lead to good incidental visions of each character’s devastated state. Yet Five Nights in Maine is as frustrating as it is mannered; we never see these characters truly engaging the pain they clearly feel.

This is ninety minutes of comic actors having a genial go at middle-of-the-road material. It doesn’t have any guts, but that doesn’t mean it isn’t funny.

In the end Piercing seems more interested in aesthetic playfulness than getting the most out of these characters. Playing towards comedy helps some of the more freaky scenes go down, but that’s not a substitute for substance.

McCarthy has a great knack for vicious verbiage, and in combination with her supreme physical control there's pleasure in seeing Darnell tear an opponent to shreds, even (or especially) when she's in the wrong.

Bay's overwrought tendencies simultaneously lead to the film's most compelling sequences of tense, bloody battle even as they forestall the more nuanced storytelling that would be crucial to truly unpacking the attacks. Bay may see the film as a cry of truth; muffled by his own predilections it's only a whisper.

The film is never as savage as the first-act anarchy suggests it might be, and its best ideas are subsumed into familiar thriller concepts. Good craftsmanship elevates the result above workaday thriller territory, but ultimately Money Monster never rages in the “mad as hell” mode that’s always kept just out of reach

As it fritters away character work and ideas about faith and devotion, this is a film clever enough to scare us but not smart enough to accomplish anything more.

In the end there's nothing surprising in Sisters, except for the fact that it isn't anything more than a party movie.

Warcraft may provide grand, thunderous spectacle as it transforms human actors into hulking Orcs, but when trying to perform the alchemy of transmuting genre archetypes into characters with soul, the magic fizzles out.

The Rise of Skywalker; is as much metafiction as Johnson’s film was. Rather than asking questions about what we really want from a series like “Star Wars,” and whether we’re ready to allow our childhood fictions to grow with us, J.J. Abrams and crew decide to lean on the emotional warmth of reunions, friendships, redemptions, and goodbyes. There is some heartfelt value here, or at least, some of it does admittedly produce some anthemic feels, but it doesn’t hold much weight.

Even flashy, grumpy Jones can’t act like a defibrillator powerful enough to crank this generic movie into competition for Statham’s better solo outings.

Captain Fantastic uses bleak but gentle comedy to pinpoint the variety of ways we wrestle with grief, but the film undermines Mortensen's performance and its own thematic ambitions by presenting the character as little more than an idealized fantasy figure.