Shirley Li

Bugonia’s provocative premise doesn’t yield a sci-fi thriller. The film instead offers an intimate, unhurried exploration of human cruelty.

What J. B. has aced is clearly not the art of persuasion or thievery. His real specialty, The Mastermind suggests, is his ability to tune out everything but his own wants and needs.

Roofman deftly blends genres to create a low-key crowd-pleaser—one that avoids merely reveling in what made Manchester notorious in the first place.

The film never interrogates why the early pandemic led to so many ideological conflicts, but it suggests that the prognosis is bleak for those who continue to venture too far into the internet’s noxious rabbit holes. Being too online, in other words, can be its own kind of sickness.

Again and again, blood splatters onto the camera lens, producing gleefully gory images. It’s grimy, sometimes even ugly filmmaking, but it’s effectively disorienting. What’s most striking about 28 Years Later, though, is how it manages to hold together its freewheeling plot and tonal shifts.

Materialists falters most when it tries to mesh its competing aims: to deliver a throwback love story while also deconstructing the reality of modern dating. Instead, in the end, the film resembles the very world it tries to critique, offering a litany of observations about finding The One without ever substantially arguing for any of them.

The appeal of Flanagan’s take on The Life of Chuck rests on his understanding of this resonant quality of King’s writing; on-screen, as on the page, the story hums because it highlights the ordinary foundation upon which the supernatural can be built. Within the strange events is a core that is bittersweet and familiar.

It fearlessly—and wackily—reckons with how confounding people can be in their bid for one another’s approval: at work, at home, at their new friend’s house while dressed in their finest Ocean View Dining clothing.

Snow White chooses to be fearless. A studio can too—even if this one so rarely does.

The Electric State is so transparently eager to satisfy as many demographics of viewers as possible that it proves its own message: that a world dependent on business interests and technological optimization dulls artistic potential and human ingenuity. All that’s left is a wasteland of half-baked ideas searching for a home.

If Mickey’s life is suffocatingly bleak, Mickey 17 is anything but. Rather, it’s a wacky, satisfyingly strange romp that further reaffirms Bong Joon Ho as a singular filmmaker.

Hard Truths itself is astonishingly sensitive for a portrait of someone who often behaves monstrously.

September 5 is effective because it doesn’t claim to say anything original about the perils of reporting and consuming breaking news. It’s simply—and bluntly—showing how easily those familiar perils can be overlooked.

The film is, as a result, a portrait of how Rasoulof perceives the systematic oppression within his home country, from which he is now exiled. The government’s rejection of its citizens’ efforts for change is personal to him—as devastating and painful, the film suggests, as having a father turn against his own flesh and blood.

The resulting adaptation satisfyingly combines the grandiosity of a musical and the intimacy of filmmaking.

For all the fun it’s having, Gladiator II does require a working knowledge of its predecessor’s story to understand the stakes, which also means it magnifies the original film’s flaws.

Conclave also adds a few too many contrived twists in its quest for narrative drama, but the movie moves nimbly enough to avoid a collapse into pure fantasy.

The Apprentice could have delved into the Trump persona or explored how it calcified. But by trying to avoid how Trump’s past reflects his current approach to politics—his zero-sum relationship to power, his pettiness and egotism—while simultaneously winking at viewers’ knowledge of him, the film lands itself in a trap.

What [Coppola] ultimately created isn’t the realization of his aspirations; it’s an unfinished work, waiting for our reality to catch up to his fantasy.

A generic and plodding revenge thriller that’s nowhere near bold enough to justify the franchise’s resurrection.

Blink Twice is not about eating the rich or satirizing the one percent. It’s instead a stylish, if tonally uneven, exploration of how being in the orbit of powerful people can produce an insidious sense of powerlessness that easily curdles into self-deception.

Good One shows that growing up can begin with a single conversation that illuminates, for someone like Sam, how far she has left to go.

Dìdi exudes a special kind of empathy and warmth toward the kids who grew up in the age of Myspace, as well as their families. Many coming-of-age stories examine a child’s relationship with themselves and their parents, but Dìdi also tracks how those shifts were made more jarring and strange in the early days of social media.

With so many details pulled directly from history, along with scenes shot inside an intake prison that had housed the RTA alumni featured in Sing Sing, the film often plays like a documentary.

The film doesn’t offer much wisdom about how we should deal with our growing unreality, but it is a charming diversion. In a way, its very shallowness is the point: Sometimes, the film posits, what we want to see matters more than what we actually do.

The result is a stylish thriller that’s also a cathartic unleashing of Patel as a performer and storyteller. With Monkey Man, he asserts himself as someone who can break the boundaries Hollywood typically establishes for actors like him.

Girls State is much more than a gender-flipped version of the previous project. Instead, the film offers a sharp study of how a supposedly empowering environment can simultaneously inspire and limit aspiring female leaders.

Its spectacle is even duller than its story, which is already nonsensical.

Within Problemista is a heartfelt core conveying something profoundly human. It’s a marvelous mixture of surrealism and social satire that depicts the American dream as a nightmare of bureaucracy and phone calls to customer service. There’s nothing more absurd, the film argues, than the mundane.

As a film that attempts to honor its victims while simultaneously offering graphic details, it both improves upon previous iterations of the material and exposes the limits of the story itself. The result is a movie that wrestles with its very existence—and, perhaps, the existence of based-on-a-true-disaster tales.

This latest adaptation may not hit every note established by Walker’s text and Spielberg’s drama, but it tells Celie’s story sensitively. It understands, in other words, that she comes with a uniquely imperfect, profound rhythm.

May December begins grotesquely . . . It ends delicately, as a portrait of fragile, shattered human beings and the mundane entertainment they inspire.

It delivers many of the ingredients expected of a Marvel movie—cheer-worthy cameos; cute, fuzzy sidekicks courtesy of the catlike Flerkens, and a truly exciting mid-credits scene that’ll spawn countless speculative blog posts about the MCU’s future—while also keeping a keen focus on its characters.

For all its whimsy, Fingernails is delicately profound. Its characters aren’t making bold romantic moves; they’re interrogating their assumptions of what is ultimately an unknowable phenomenon.

Priscilla is more than a story of a young woman in a gilded cage; it’s also an examination of how adolescent beliefs can be hard to shake.

The result is a tasteless endeavor that transforms the prescription-drug crisis into a flashy cartoon—a purported dissection of a broken system that takes too lighthearted a tone.

Fair Play positions itself as a psychosexual thriller, but it’s neither truly provocative nor all that sexy.

With a shapeless plot that tediously unfolds, the film is uncomfortable to watch. Even Vardalos, who directs for the first time, seems to struggle with mustering actual interest in her own material.

The result is a mishmash of subgenres that, surprisingly, works.

The movie is, in the end, deeply unserious and completely mindless, but still strangely sweet.

An endearing look at creativity as well as a surprisingly poignant reminder that most artists succeed not through individual genius, but by being part of a community.

No Hard Feelings is not about to usher in a new era in mainstream sex comedies—it is, however, a delightful showcase for Lawrence’s movie-star verve.

Distance is key to the meditative magic of Past Lives. Song’s film is filled with space—the intangible kind between words, and the physical kind between characters.

Rye Lane may be the most unconventional conventional romantic comedy in years, delivering the genre’s trappings in such fizzy, gleefully inventive ways that even predictable beats feel new.

Like a frustrated player speeding up the falling blocks to end the game, the film haphazardly stacks ideas atop one another until, well, it’s a relief when it’s over.

It’s only right that a film about her challenges—and maybe even disturbs—its audience in turn.

Mike and Max’s relationship—in which she whisks him off to London so he can direct an all-male revue at the theater she owns—is the stuff of romance novels, but that’s the point: Last Dance is all wish fulfillment, seductive and surreal.

The result is a film that is slickly made but buggy in execution, like a premature software update.

Just as a war movie can encourage its audience to appreciate heroism and sacrifice, Women Talking reminds us of the value of language—its capacity for context, for constructive debate, and, in the end, for collective healing.

Despite a committed cast and often stunning cinematography, the film’s script is too blunt and the direction too ham-fisted to make Emancipation anything more than another rote—albeit expensive—entry in the slavery-movie genre.

De Clermont-Tonnerre understands that the lovers’ behavior and Lawrence’s social commentary no longer spur much pearl-clutching, so instead, she surprises viewers by adding uncanny elements to her most explicit scenes.

The film doesn’t just re-create the journalists’ day-to-day life; it also captures the book’s solemn and matter-of-fact tone.

Like the beachside wardrobe the cast dons for its sun-kissed retreat, the movie is colorful and breezy. Glass Onion is mayhem-filled fun, best enjoyed with a crowd.

Few modern true-crime movies and shows remind viewers that they have as much responsibility over their own choices as the people onscreen do. That message may be uncomfortable to absorb, but it’s far more productive than luxuriating in disturbing acts.

The spectacle of a fantasy world can do only so much; a beautiful setting can’t compensate for a superficial story line. Raya loses sight of its heroine’s own connection to the cultures that the filmmakers had put so much care into depicting authentically.

Like the trio of eccentric spell-casting divas at its center, this follow-up is bizarre, flashy, and chaotic. And yet, it’s also satisfying to take in.

If the erotic thrillers of the past explored the dangers of lust, Park Chan-wook explores the risks of longing. His take on the genre isn’t just sexy; it’s playful and mordant and convoluted—and it begs to be rewatched, for the electrifying performances and for every frame he composes. It’s the kind of film that, like an overpowering attraction, refuses to be ignored. The only relief comes from indulging it.

It’s bleak and brutal—and deeply affecting.

Bullet Train is stupid fun—all neon-drenched style over substance. It’s the kind of late-summer flick that coasts on nonsense, violence, and actors trying out questionable accents. The film is a solid showcase for hand-to-hand combat up until it devolves into CGI drudgery.

It is one of the most moving and mesmerizing films of the year, a meditation on the wonders of nature and human curiosity.

If the film leaned all the way into its melodrama, it could have been something different: the rare mainstream, studio-produced summer romance made for female audiences, with rich imagery worthy of the big screen. But its source material’s blemishes were always going to be hard to avoid.

To be clear, the Minions’s latest triumph is not unearned in artistic terms. The Rise of Gru’s story is instantly forgettable, but the film looks great, moves briskly, and boasts the vocal stylings of a cast that sounds like they’re having the time of their life.

The world was not built for the likes of Marcel, but he can help guide us through it.

Nicolas Cage, even after all the memes and all the ridicule, still knows exactly what to do with the weight of his unique intensity, including when to dial it back.

If the series were to fizzle out, that would be a relief. No amount of movie magic can save it now.

The film can be unrelenting: Several graphic scenes make it challenging to watch, and more than once, I caught myself holding my breath. As the story’s weeks stretch into months, you can see the tension gather in Anne’s piercing gaze. It’s as if her eyes might set the screen aflame with her frustration, fury, and—eventually—panic.

The spookiness of The Humans conveys a larger point about the intimacy of family life. The Blakes’ shaky dynamic—their passive-aggressive asides and nonchalant appraisals—could be considered normal, but by using filmmaking techniques usually reserved for ghost stories, Karam challenges that normalcy.

Hall seems to have grasped the story as a performer would, prioritizing the potency of the characters’ interior lives over the plot. And perhaps given her acting background, she draws from Thompson and Negga a pair of finely tuned and exquisite performances. In every scene they share, they radiate a tender but perilous chemistry.

In brewing such precise discomfort, Kranz forces the audience to concentrate deeply on what's being said and, more important, unsaid.

Zhao's delicate examination of her characters outshines Eternals' duller and more convoluted moments.

With Zola, however, the director Janicza Bravo has made a film that contends with the uneasy interplay between characters’ online and offline selves. And it posits that we use the internet to fool ourselves as much as to fool others.

The messy third act, and its insistence on making Natasha infallible, doesn’t ruin the film. But it does make Black Widow a missed opportunity; Natasha never gets to make the choices that could help her complete her portrait.

Sometimes Shang-Chi is a straightforward martial-arts drama, all fistfights and meticulous choreography. Other times it’s a high-fantasy epic, full of stunning scenery and complex lore.

The film is a visceral, ruminative, and emotionally satisfying epilogue in which the broken Jesse reconciles with his past and searches for the hope and humanity he’d lost—or, rather, been denied by Walt.