Siddhant Adlakha

An otherwise plain film about an unlikely friendship between a returned soldier and a mechanic, Causeway is worth watching for Jennifer Lawrence’s best performance in years.

The film often does too much, reaching for too many different sources for its attempted thrills and chills, which results in a mostly scattered experience. However, it has a couple of notable strengths. The first is its handful of tense moments.

Corner Office is a just-okay office satire saved by Jon Hamm playing the anti-Jon Hamm.

Although it eventually leans into traditional genre hallmarks, its introductory musings are novel, taking the form of a one-woman performance showcase that makes ingenious use of visual and auditory negative space.

While both its lampooning of U.S. militarism and its central character drama lack follow-through, the film contains bright comedic sparks in its keen observations about American media.

John David Washington falls short of the story’s emotional demands, but he brings a desperate physicality as a man on the run, which makes the film just about worth watching.

Riz Ahmed makes for a vigorous lead in Aneil Karia’s contemporary British-Indian Hamlet, which loses its emotional clarity beneath an intriguing exterior. Its use of silence and intimacy grants it a fascinating texture, but the film never challenges or re-invigorates Shakespeare’s greatest work, ensuring that it ends up somewhere in the middle of a lengthy pile of adaptations.

While it’s hard not to be moved by footage of Robert Downey’s final days, the film is more informative than emotional. It contains hints of an intimate story, but mostly flattens a strange and exotic career into a series of light observations.

Spy x Family Code: White is far more chuckle-worthy than laugh-out-loud funny, but there’s an innocent, adolescent charm to even its jokes that miss the mark.

Thankfully, its surreal allure — buoyed by a sense of tragic longing — is powerful enough to echo throughout its runtime.

Leave the World Behind has a worthwhile cast, but its paranoid thrills quickly fizzle out en route to a baffling final scene.

It can’t decide whether it wants to tell the real-life story of respected mob boss Frank Costello and his comrade-turned-scheming-enemy Vito Genovese, or if it wants to skewer the entire genre of films they helped inspire. However, with Robert De Niro in both leading roles, there’s always something interesting to watch, even if it’s buried by mountains of repetitive dialogue.

A tale of miserable spouses plotting each other’s demise, it doesn’t always work, but its action comedy stylings are enough to keep it entertaining even when it swerves into ugly excess or extraneous subplots.

Real-life tragic romance Spoiler Alert is kneecapped by the plainness of its storytelling, and only marginally saved by its performances.

More distancing than disgusting, Crimes of the Future strings together great body horror ideas but does little with them.

A movie that’ll just about keep young viewers’ attention, Smurfs is part Rihanna jukebox musical, and part flimsy attempt to give the little blue critters an identity that’ll stick.

Any romantic notions the film might have are swiftly undone when it starts to explain the disappointing method behind its sleight of hand — until this explanation becomes the magic trick itself.

The story soon gets away from Kandhari, leading to a film that enraptures and delights in its first hour but gets so locked in to a singular approach by its second that it’s practically consumed by its own style, rendering it unable to keep pace with the bold ideas at play.

The Lost City is a decent action-comedy that coasts on the presence of its stars.

A scattered but intimate drama about a queer immigrant left adrift, Marco Calvani’s High Tide boasts an impeccable leading performance that buoys the movie even at its weakest.

Anyone watching the film is likely to learn something, though whether its lessons will stick, or claw their way beneath one’s skin, is less likely.

A film with sights and sounds you’ve never seen or heard, it’s an intriguing watch with catchy, energetic numbers, even if it doesn’t always land emotionally.

The film is full of potent human drama (largely coming from Gourav’s performance), but as an examination of the world’s intersection with modern India, it usually lands on the wrong side of inauthentic.

Writer-director Elijah Bynum fills the screen with some impressive imagery, but it’s all in service of an ugliness that Magazine Dreams cops out on depicting.

Unfortunately, the piece ends up laid low by a climax that peters out by taking itself too seriously, but the film’s totality is still made worthwhile by its central performances.

Clocking in at nearly two hours, Peter Strickland’s sound-and-food odyssey Flux Gourmet is only ever alluring when its made-up artform (“sonic catering”) is front and center during surreal vignettes. Otherwise, it falls back on rote observations and explanations about what compels its characters to create — a far less engaging experience than actually witnessing that creation.

The movie is largely entertaining, despite being pulled constantly in two directions: as a predecessor to an iconic work and as a distinct beast, with its own gripes against patriarchal norms.

DC League of Super-Pets may have thoughtful filmmaking on its side, but what it doesn’t have is a voice cast that can lend life and personality to its characters.