Scott Tobias

The more Frankel and McKenna acknowledge that their fresh-out-of-college heroine is now a seasoned editor in her 40s, the better The Devil Wears Prada 2 gets, not least because it doesn’t have to jettison the upscale fantasies and juicy machinations of Miranda's world entirely. Like Miranda herself at one point in the movie, it’s healthy to spend a little time flying in coach.

The words these characters say to each other are mostly boring and obscure, and it’s a mad scramble to figure out what’s making them so agitated. Keeping up with the film becomes as hard as it is to care.

While Blue Heron has an experimental quality that might encourage you to intellectualize the way film processes memory, its payoff is as personal and emotional as movies get. It’s one from the head and the heart.

The Mummy takes its silliness far too seriously.

It’s a piece of escapism that can’t escape from itself.

The Christophers is a slippery customer, an ingenious and twisty two-hander that shifts in tone as Lori and Julian get their hooks into each other. Coel and McKellen prove to be a combustible pair, two actors of contrasting generations, genders, and race who parry in darkly funny sessions that morph in complexity as their characters continue to try to outflank each other.

Though it always feels like Emma and Charlie (and the movie) are one productive conversation away from putting the entire matter to bed, The Drama doesn’t let anyone off the line until the last possible moment. It’s a productively excruciating experience.

It’s a testament to the beauty of Chomet’s visual style that the picture book images of Paris and Marseille in the mid-20th century are transporting enough to make A Magnificent Life a comfortable sit. But Pagnol deserves better than this limp eulogy.

The secondhand guilt that comes from watching a conscientious woman reckon with her role in an institutional sin is immense and it’s a credit to Jude that he’s so willing to make his audience uncomfortable.

The satirical promise of Ready or Not 2 leads to few comic payoffs—or even much resembling a joke, despite the film’s irreverent tone—and the snippiness between Grace and Faith seems forced after they’ve been taking fire together for so much of the film. Here’s hoping that Ready or Not 3: Olly Olly Oxen Free better meets the moment.

The true puzzle here is grief, that nebulous process where there’s no clear answer or road map, just behaviors and rituals that feel distinctly removed from the flow of everyday life. Petzold and his cast spend time in that stream, and it’s an alluring feeling to drift along with them.

Reminders of Him is a disciplined mediocrity, sticking to picture postcard images and a happy ending that’s so much easier to achieve than the story allows. Next time, please have the courtesy to be crazier.

Chong seems to intend for an escalating series of comic events that get more giddily absurd as it approaches the climax, but the film loses its soul in the process. Hoppers longs for the quiet beatitude of nature, but it’s just another noisemaker.

Aside from a lively stretch toward the end of the film where Jennifer and Fernando wrestle on equal footing, literally as well as figuratively, Dreams is blunt in its intentions and programmatic in its plotting.

While there are surely gags and references that are for-fans-only in the film, which exists in part to pay off longstanding support, Nirvanna the Band the Show the Movie is shambling and sweet, loaded with hilarious standalone bits that are held together by the duo’s warm camaraderie and intimate connection to the city of Toronto.

Layton is a confident storyteller and the various subplots in Winslow’s pulpy scenario converge elegantly, even if they’re a bit secondhand.

It’s odd to see a romance that commences with rough trade in an alleyway end up feeling like a spiritual descendent of Bend It Like Beckham.

Besson seems more at home making pop art than gothic tragedy, but the neither-here-nor-there quality of Dracula makes it chintzy and unsatisfying on both fronts. In a word, it sucks.

To want Statham to appear like he cares about any of it is to ask too much.

Only a scene where Helen defends her hunting trips with Mabel as “an honest encounter with death” suggests the tougher, more provocative movie that might have been. This one is mostly a genteel therapy arc.

Dead Man’s Wire is a curious shrug of a movie, especially from a director like Gus Van Sant, who has picked up some ho-hum work-for-hire assignments in the past, such as Finding Forrester or Promised Land, but usually puts some more spin on the ball.

It can be a bit of a slog, frankly, but Schilinski’s command over the look and feel of the film, from the evocative Academy-format images to the unnerving rumble of the soundtrack, sinks into your bones. The more it shimmers with uncanny horror, the better.

Polinger tracks the escalation of danger and violence with startling intensity—the first third of Full Metal Jacket also appears to be an influence—but there’s nuance to the way Ben chooses to handle this situation.

The Testament of Ann Lee suggests a bigger story than Fastvold has the time or resources to tell, but it stays close to Seyfried’s hip and allows the purity of Ann’s vision to carry the day.

The performances, particularly Seyfried’s, keep the film popping, along with some energetic rug-pulling from Feig, who treats the material like a deadly telenovela. But at an exhausting 131 minutes, it’s an indulgent feast on empty calories.

Safdie stirs the pot expertly. With a soundtrack that bursts with anachronistic ‘80s New Wave songs—Tears For Fears’ “Change” is a jarring yet energizing curtain-raiser for ’50s New York—Marty Supreme has the burning-ulcer intensity of Uncut Gems, along with a sense of spontaneity that comes from Marty having to feverishly negotiate every moment of his life.

Though he still doles out kills in a thin broth, Nelson puts enough craft and spin on the material to make it better than it has any right to be. Making the best Silent Night, Deadly Night is the very definition of a modest achievement.

A little of this stuff goes a long way with Cattet and Forzani, who have always seemed more immersed in image-making than in the tedious business of telling a story with a mind toward pace and characterization. To experience their films is to toggle between exhilaration and enervation, and hope the balance tips the right way in the end, which it ultimately does with Reflection in a Dead Diamond.

The Secret Agent has a warm affinity for communities like the one that adopts Armando—Dona’s apartment building echoes the lo-fi resistance of Baktan Cross in One Battle After Another—but it doesn’t sugarcoat the immense loss that history can deliver.

As usual with the Knives Out series, Johnson stays well out ahead of his audience, and Craig gets more than one delightful drawing-room moment when he pulls together the elusive facts of the case.

Die My Love is ultimately a more insightful film about motherhood than marriage, but the sheer force of Ramsay and Lawrence’s collaboration turn Grace into an essential woman under the influence.

The sturdiness of Elphaba and Glinda’s bond throughout these tragic miscues—and Erivo and Grande’s fine dramatic and vocal performances—give this rickety enterprise a solid foundation.

Predator: Badlands may be formulaic and a little cutesy, but its relentless crowd-pleasing instincts wear down your defenses. You feel like the Dek to its Thia.

It’s fitfully inspired in stretches, as Jude runs various creative scenarios through a mirthless AI generator, but as a viewer, being inundated with crap still hurts, even when there’s a satirical purpose.

Cooper leans toward a chronicle of Springsteen’s depression, which makes sense given his emotional state at the time, but too much of the film is explained when it’s better dramatized. The act of turning angst into music is more dynamic than finding every source for it.

Derrickson’s instinct to lean on a low-res, Super 8-style camerawork in the film’s frequent dream sequences is fitfully effective, rendering nightmares like spools of home movies that have been decaying in the attic. But here, he’s having to reanimate a dead property.

It is shocking in its revelations, thrilling in its possibilities.

The cast does well to make the button-pushing read like complexity—Stuhlbarg, the secret MVP of Call Me By Your Name, acquits himself best here, too— but it all looks a bit like Guadagnino is pleading for mercy for adults who should know better. No, thanks.

Turning Manchester’s story into more of a drama than a comedy feels counterintuitive, and Roofman can feel a little slow and gloppy for missing the laughs. Yet Tatum and Dunst are deeply invested in their roles, and Cianfrance loads up on ace character actors.

Portraits of maternal ambivalence are rare in cinema and Bronstein pushes it to the limit, turning motherhood into a white-knuckle experience with the highest of stakes.

The true audacity of The Mastermind may be Reichardt’s conception of J.B. himself, who not only lacks nobility or competence, but possesses a compelling vacancy that’s harder to unpack.

The best scenes in Spinal Tap II are either solid improvisational sessions between the three leads as the band tries to recover its long chemistry or sidebars with Nigel.

The Long Walk has an impressively sober understanding of what rebellion looks like in a nation that’s fully smothered by an oppressive regime.

Apart from anything else, Predators is a clinic in documentary ethics, but Osit’s intellect doesn’t mute his pain, sensitivity and outrage. It’s a film for the heart and the head.

The film indulges in the Speed-like fantasy that a skilled and intrepid bus driver can blow through the inferno, but that’s Hollywood. The Lost Bus is convincing enough to expose its own nonsense.

There’s great comedy in the adventures of a washed radical forced back to life, but One Battle After Another is a serious film, too, about the true multicultural fabric of America and its resiliency under duress.

Vin Diesel et al return for an overstuffed Fast and Furious chapter that delivers giddily effective action but an outsized and silly villain.

It functions elegantly as both a victory lap for longtime fans and a belated introduction to the Belchers, a family of lovable misfits and cranks that’s as genuinely close as any on television.

Told with the stark simplicity of a fairy tale, Sansho The Bailiff demonstrates how compassion can overcome the forces of hatred and oppression, and shows how trying it is to remain decent and humane in an inhospitable world.

The film is a powerful reminder never to underestimate the historical evils that have been, and could again be, unleashed.

Its whimsical touches, along with a reverence for creative young minds, gives the film a warmth that counterbalances its shocks.

Sun and Chiang strike a tricky balance between a high-stakes making-of documentary and an intimate, observational family portrait, but Maleonn is such a thoughtful, sensitive, brilliant subject that the film is compelling no matter where on the creative spectrum they find him.

The film remains an exemplary piece of popular entertainment, full of vibrancy and wit, with unforgettable characters and a delicate, bittersweet tone that considers their emotions in balance.

The overall effect of Heise’s work is mesmeric, persuasive and cumulatively powerful, as each piece of the puzzle falls into place and he lands on overarching insights into a German century and what it portends for the future.

The film can feel worked-over and schematic, as if Bonello was too preoccupied with serving the thesis to trust his peerless intuition.

Natali whips up an atmospheric frenzy in kind, but every new addition is a subtraction. Two characters condemned to an eternal game of “Marco Polo” is scary enough on its own.

While it was ultimately the songs—You Can Get It If You Really Want, Many Rivers To Cross, Pressure Drop, and the title track, among other classics—that carried the day, The Harder They Come remains a powerful testament to their meaning.

It’s a fatally old-fashioned and lugubrious historical drama, muting the emotional payoff it labors so hard to deliver.

Shin’s film gets tangled up in its own web. ... His film leaves a vivid impression without quite leaving a mark.

There’s no denying the emotional pull of Victoria Stone and Mark Deeble’s storytelling or the vivid rapture of the images, but “The Elephant Queen” adheres too closely to the parameters of family-friendly nature docs, and the formula doesn’t always serve it well.

Schindel is more interested in suspense gamesmanship for its own sake, and all other provocations fade from the canvas.

Lavant’s performance as a wordless, deranged, bloodthirsty cult leader is the one note of genuine eccentricity and menace in a film that’s mostly devoted to slapstick comedy and decapitation.

While it falls short of its predecessors, the film is generally more confident and inventive than any of the non-Toy Story Pixar sequels.

Trobisch has made a drama of tragic accommodation — limited not to one woman’s sexual assault, but to the everyday interactions that all women must navigate carefully.

Pritzker and Rothschild’s script feels like such a composite of jazz biopics that its only in the performance sequences, parceled out stingily amid the misery, in which Bolden really comes alive.

The Silence posits a grand evolutionary struggle between mankind and its winged tormentors, but every moment feels like regression.

Shot on three mobile phones, Fazili’s Midnight Traveler is a documentary that feels like a modern-day message in a bottle, an urgent appeal for help from a family that’s still searching for a home.

The message here is that there’s no one-size-fits-all formula for adulthood, but the film doesn’t bear it out.

Claire Denis’ grotesque, mesmerizing, one-of-a-kind new science fiction movie.

Zelker’s three-ring circus of digital and social-media content needs a compelling main event, and this movie seems unlikely to inspire many to check out the supplementary materials.

The dynamic between Sam and Micah shifts the film into romantic melodrama, as lifeless and as chaste as the windswept apocalypse that surrounds them.

First-time director Tom Volf plainly adores Callas — sometimes to a fault — but his film stands as a necessary corrective to decades of bad press. It’s an unalloyed tribute to her as a musical genius who gave all of herself to the public.

Amandla Stenberg carries the magnetism she brought to her breakthrough role in the YA romance “Everything, Everything,” but she’s betrayed by a stilted rendering of a rarely illuminated piece of history.

Tartakovsky’s instincts are to keep the action moving quickly and let one piece of kid-friendly slapstick tumble into the next, but when the jokes are this consistently uninspired, it doesn’t matter how fast they’re dispensed.

Compared to the CGI chaos that tends to engulf DCEU and MCU movies, especially in crossover teamups, the clean zip of Pixar animation feels exhilaratingly rare, like a lost language rediscovered.

Newton has made a beautiful little film about sacrifice and redemption, and he earns it one tiny brushstroke at a time.

Nothing this absurd should be this boring.

It doesn’t matter what’s real and not real in The Rider. What matters is that it’s true.

Chrisoulakis and screenwriter Guy J. Jackson attempt a violent, moody neo-noir about Tinseltown fringe-dwellers, but their conceit is flimsy and under-realized, grafting a boilerplate heist story onto a bitter commentary about the corrupting forces of the film industry.

Jed Rothstein’s wildly entertaining documentary The China Hustle blows the lid off another multibillion-dollar heist built on complex financial instruments and a whole lot of smoke and mirrors.

Oenophiles may swoon over the delicious native varietals that tease Quinn’s palate, but Railsback’s thin and disorganized documentary doesn’t go down so smoothly.

Vikander doesn’t do much with a character whose chief attribute is earnestness, but Tomb Raider improves once it gets to the island and lets the derring-do take over.

1:54 intends to be a straight-shooting social drama about the multifaceted problem of bullying in the digital age, but it’s out of touch with how real teenagers think and act and communicate. It’s a modern film that feels like a relic.

Shirkers isn’t about Cardona, but about Tan reclaiming the film and the story that he had taken away from her. Her energized, rough-hewn documentary style doesn’t seem that far removed from her lost debut, but she and her friends have enough perspective to look back at that period in their lives with touching fondness and good humor.

It’s an ideal showcase for the four leads, who are given the latitude to create fully human characters.

Part metaphysical thriller, part inquiry into scientific ethics and the morality of revenge, the sci-fi indie Curvature wants to get the heart racing and the mind bending simultaneously, but flatlines in both departments.

When its many secrets spill out in the finale, “The Housemaid” has to cheat a little to pull off a humdinger of a twist, but it’s enormously satisfying anyway, if only for bringing the core historical conflict back to the fore.

The Final Year clings to a precooked thesis about the Obama Doctrine that misses the behind-the-scenes drama and candor of superior political documentaries like “The War Room” or “Weiner.”

So little has been done to update or refresh “The Intouchables” for American culture or a new audience that The Upside has no integrity as a separate piece of work. The casting alone is all that’s keeping it from sinking into a cynical act of franchise burnishing.

A few of the gags land, most of them don’t, but the overall rhythm is stilted and rudderless, flattened further by d.p. Paul Suderman’s point-and-shoot camerawork.

A Skyjacker’s Tale is all in the telling, and Jamie Kastner’s haphazard documentary misses the opportunity to get it right, despite having access to Ali and an impressive assembly of major players from his past.

Had Smit developed his themes as scrupulously as his visual effects, Kill Switch might have been the next “Primer” or “District 9,” but instead it feels like a demo reel for a game that nobody can play.

Crowley’s thinly conceived debut feature only has one big joke, and everything around it is either long-winded setup or deflating letdown.

Genre clichés catch up with Schultz just as surely as the past catches up with his characters and the sweet, redemptive possibilities of their relationship gets washed away in the tide of gratuitous bloodshed.

Epperlein offers Karl Marx City as her own act of painful transparency, an essential warning about what happens to societies when ordinary citizens are being watched.

the film thrums with an urgency that’s both asset and liability, at once invested with deep feeling and undone by a barrage of flashbacks, allusions, and counterintuitive bits of wisdom.

With the conceptual rigor and emotional directness associated with the best of Iranian cinema, Oskouei simply listens to the stories of those who have never been listened to before. Their shattering testimony, elegantly harmonized in a chorus of stolen childhood, has universal appeal.