Stephanie Zacharek

Minions: The Rise of Gru is hardly the best of the Despicable Me movies or spinoffs...But the ridiculousness quotient of The Rise of Gru—directed by Kyle Balda, Brad Ableson and Jonathan del Val—is still high enough to spark at least mild rejuvenation. And whether you have one eye or two, six hairs sprouting from your pate or none at all, you could probably use a little of that right now.

Beauty ends before it has really dug into anything of consequence. Its heroine, whom we know is headed for trouble, is left stranded in the middle of her own story.

The Man From Toronto, a Netflix action-comedy starring Woody Harrelson and Kevin Hart, is the kind of movie you forget almost the minute the end credits have rolled, two hours of moderate laughs rolled up in a tissue-thin plot that just barely qualifies as a distraction from the dreariness of life.

There’s nothing jarring or upsetting about Marcel the Shell With Shoes On; it deals very gently with the realities of death and loss. But its quiet tenderness feels expansive regardless, proof that good things really do come in small exoskeletons.

The joy of Beavis and Butt-Head Do the Universe is that these two haven’t gotten the memo.

Good Luck To You, Leo Grande—from Australian director Sophie Hyde, with a script by Katy Brand—is the first great movie, in a long time, for the invisibles.

All three actors are clearly having a blast with this satire of actorly egos and vanity projects, but it’s Cruz who truly dazzles.

The small details are what give this Father of the Bride its gentle glow.

While Buzz strides through every scene with plodding virility, Sox pads along breezily, minding his own business unless he’s called upon to save the day, which is often. Sox is the secret star of Lightyear. But not even he is a great enough creation to warrant his own spinoff.

Jurassic World Dominion is the biggest, most excessive Jurassic Park–franchise film yet. But what good is a movie that leaves you feeling more flattened than entertained? That rumble you hear is the sound of millions of disgruntled, long-dead dinosaurs, rolling in their fossilized graves.

Hustle works its smooth moves scene after scene and ends with a satisfying whoosh, something like the sound of a ball sweeping through the net after circling the hoop for a suspenseful second or two.

Luhrmann and his co-writers Sam Bromell and Craig Pearce use the story of Elvis’ supremely crooked manager, Colonel Tom Parker (Tom Hanks, lurking beneath prosthetic jowls), to frame the larger, more glorious and more tragic story of Elvis.

You might not call this picture a major achievement—it’s both elegant and rather silly—but you can’t fault it for lack of vision.

Even if [Garland] offers no clear solutions to this crisis, he throws his full weight into exploring it. Just be warned that the path he cuts is a thorny one.

You could compare Armageddon Time to autobiographical reflections like Alfonso Cuaron’s Roma or, to a lesser extent, Kenneth Branagh’s Belfast, both stories in which kids’ eyes are suddenly opened to the unfairness of the world. But for all its tenderness, this isn’t a movie that allows you to make peace with yourself, or with our highly imperfect world.

The highest purpose of movies is to give us more than what we think we want, and even though Three Thousand Years of Longing offers plenty of rapturous imagery, the arrow it shoots from its mighty bow just doesn’t pierce as it should.

Downton Abbey: A New Era goes down as easy as a Nice sunset.

Top Gun: Maverick, directed by Joseph Kosinski, is a much better film than its predecessor was, and much better than it needs to be overall.

Aside from the fact that Operation Mincemeat features not one but two former Mr. Darcys (one from the much-loved 1995 Pride and Prejudice mini-series, the other from Joe Wright’s similarly marvelous 2005 film adaptation), and works beautifully as a romance, it’s also a cracking espionage caper.

It’s an unyielding picture in some ways; you might long for a sliver of optimism tucked amid its layers of grim truth. But then, all its hope lies in Anne’s face, as uncompromising as an early crocus. This is the face of a woman who deserves much more respect—for her body, for her very life—than her society affords her.

The best thing you can say about the moderately entertaining, if predictably excessive, Doctor Strange in the Multiverse of Madness is that if you squint and concentrate really hard, you can tell it’s a Sam Raimi movie.

So much of Vortex is stirring, compelling, upsetting. But a greater share is merely numbing in its depressive showiness.

The Northman, whether you approach it as legitimate folklore or as a testosterone-fueled Saturday-afternoon lark, speaks to the 10-year-old boy in all of us, with a loud and mighty Viking burp.

Unfortunately, The Unbearable Weight of Massive Talent, a meta-comedy of ostensibly epic proportions, is not nearly grand enough to embrace those multitudes.

For a surprisingly solid stretch, Ambulance is great fun.

Everything Everywhere is fringey and wayward, too often frenetic only for craziness’ sake. But Yeoh anchors it. When the story around her flails, she gives you plenty to hang onto.

Memoria is moody and perplexing, even in the context of Weerasethakul’s others, and if you’re a neophyte, it may not be the best one to start with. But even so, its circuitous, misty trails of logic leave you feeling as if you’ve been entrusted with some kind of nebulous treasure; it’s easy to become pleasurably lost in speculation about what it all means.

If the premise sounds tired, what’s surprising—or perhaps not—about The Contractor is how well Pine carries it.

How you feel about Morbius will probably depend on how much you have invested in the Sony-Marvel pie slice, and on your feelings about Leto, who perhaps isn’t so much a serious actor as one who takes himself very seriously. Still, his performance here has a quietly vibrating vulnerability; he seems to have made at least a small emotional investment in this film, as if to keep it from sliding into total special-effects-laden soullessness.

Breezy, silly, possibly quickly forgettable—but if you need to lose yourself for an hour or two, it could be just the thing.

The picture is a bit arty and decorous; it could do with fewer swimmy camera moves. But Young vests it with a fascinating, flinty grace.

At the center of this clever pinwheel of a story—Moore co-wrote the script with Johnathan McClain—is Rylance, whose economy of motion and emotion is a marvel.

Deep Water comes dressed up as an ‘80s-style erotic thriller, a genre that I, for one, would love to see revived. But it’s so tepid, so lacking in heat or even a pulse, that it’s about as sexy as a clogged artery.

The Adam Project should be fun, but it’s sabotaged by its unwieldy ambitions. Forget the complexities of time travel, of wormholes and the laws of physics. This movie can barely get from point A to point B without tripping over itself.

After Yang invites us to think about big questions that might normally invite melancholy. Yet somehow, Kogonada pulls off the opposite effect. His movie makes us feel less alone, part of a network we can’t fully comprehend from our place on Earth.

The Batman is a moderately well-made film, with some appealing performances, most notably from its star, Robert Pattinson, and from its cryptically glamorous Catwoman, Zoë Kravitz. And it looks like a movie, which used to be something you didn’t even have to say: The Batman may be dark, literally—its doomy, underlit ambience comes courtesy of cinematographer Greig Fraser—but at least it’s pleasurably cinematic, a picture that creeps to the edges of the big screen with an operatic flourish.

Big Gold Brick may be a bit too enamored with its own quirkiness, but everything Garcia does, no matter how outlandish, feels perfectly natural.

Joe Wright’s well-intentioned adaptation of Erica Schmidt’s stage musical (itself drawn from Edmond Rostand’s 1897 play Cyrano de Bergerac) can’t survive its own petulant, self-centered love object, Roxanne (Haley Bennett).

Even if you’ve never had the pleasure of eating in an Automat, Hurwitz brings the experience to life.

Not everything in Dog works—you can sometimes see its directors scrambling to find the right tone, and not quite succeeding. And the movie is not wholly free of hokum. But watching Tatum is pure pleasure.

There’s nothing cuddly about the were-creatures of The Cursed. But there’s no question that they get the job done.

When did everything, including our expectations, get shrunk so small? We can ask more of romantic comedies, and there’s no shame in yearning for spectacle and glamour, too: J. Lo rising from a foamy faux ocean like a showbiz deep-sea goddess, anyone?

The Worst Person in the World is a comedy, not a drama. But it’s ruthless in the way the best comedies can be.

I’d argue that the Jackass movies, including this one, are mostly filled with joy.

This is a film made with tenderness, more an exploration than a definitive statement, and a reminder that awkward sex isn’t necessarily bad sex: if anything, it’s the ultimate proof of our bewildering, imperfect humanness.

If the movie is handsome in an oak-paneled-office way, there’s life in it too. You feel there’s something at stake for the two young would-be heroes, as there is for the world.

As usual for Farhadi’s films, A Hero is beautiful to look at. Even the interior scenes are brushed with a golden light, and sometimes that light feels like a benediction. But as humanist works go, A Hero demands extra measures of patience on the viewer’s part.

The spies in The 355 approach their work, and the work of being a woman, with grim determination. Rarely has a spy thriller so much resembled a pile of ironing.

To see this movie in the theater is a special, shuddering pleasure, a tilting-at-windmills affirmation of what movies, seen big, can mean. This is movie as black magic. To give yourself over to it feels a little dangerous. It also feels great.

The Hand of God is a lovely film, occasionally oddball in the best way, and astute in the way it handles tragedy and loss.

This an unnervingly compassionate portrait of a truly bad egg.

The Tender Bar is generally a sweet, affectionate film, it deflates whenever J.R. isn’t in Manhasset—because that means there’s no Ben Affleck.

At its best, it’s a chronicle of how a great team made a great show—and proof that the “behind every great man is a great woman” aphorism can work the other way around, too.

Red Rocket isn’t the warmest of Baker’s films; it has a flinty edge that makes it hard to embrace. But as movie characters go, Rex’s Mikey, a magnetic egomaniac, is an extraordinary creation.

McKay keeps piling on the sardonic observations, and the outlandishly ill-behaved characters, long after the movie has crumpled under their weight.

This, possibly, is the best kind of movie, the stealth achievement that has been hiding in plain sight all along.

Licorice Pizza feels pleased with how casual and effortless it is, which is the exact opposite of being casual and effortless.

The movie is tender like a rainstorm: only in the aftermath, after you’ve allowed time for its ideas to settle, does its full picture become clear. It’s the kind of movie that makes everything feel washed clean, a gentle nudge of encouragement suggesting that no matter how tired you feel, you can move on in the world.

No matter how she got there, Gaga’s performance in House of Gucci is both tremendous fun and ultimately touching, likely despite any technique rather than because of it.

Ghostbusters: Afterlife is less about zapping ghoulies than it is about Family, Reconnection and Forgiveness, which by now should be trademarked entities like Pepsi, Saran Wrap and Legos. Never funny or disreputable, Ghostbusters: Afterlife feels fully parent-approved—and where’s the fun in that?

Going into C’mon C’mon, you may think you know exactly what it’s going to be. Coming out, you’ll probably see that you were mostly right, but that you also got a million little firefly flashes of feeling you weren’t expecting. And that right there is the Mike Mills touch.

It’s one of those crowd-pleasing movies that doesn’t make you feel embarrassed to be part of the crowd—you feel buoyed rather than talked down to.

It’s both intimate and almost comically egotistical—yet Branagh has clearly poured so much love into it that you can’t be too hard on him. It’s hard to resist the movie’s affectionate energy.

Though there are patches that are sad to watch, it is for the most part a delight, a biopic that brings its subject to life in a way that’s both respectful and open-hearted.

A Mouthful of Air makes it past those potential flaws on the strength of Seyfried’s performance. To look at her face—to watch as her delight in her son shifts almost imperceptibly into a private hell—is enough.

Though beautifully made and acted, The Souvenir had the sad, chilly pallor of a centuries-old miniature portrait, a bit of the past you could hold in your hand and yet never fully grasp. The Souvenir Part II puts the earlier film in a bigger, more detailed frame, rushing in with swirls of context, color and perspective.

The French Dispatch is high Andersonia, an elaborate movie contraption with a million tiny parts moving in concert, and depending on your threshold, it might all just be too much.

Movies about artists trying to make art might be deadly, but movies about people living are where it’s at. And in the end, there’s more living than writing going on in Bergman Island.

Halloween Kills is scattershot and febrile, a confused film in which people spend a lot of time milling around, figuring out what to do next.

The Harder They Fall is fueled by Tarantino-style energy and grim wit, and if nothing else, it’s a spectacle—those glossy, muscular horses, and the gorgeous people riding them, are almost enough to carry a movie by themselves. But this picture works so hard at entertaining us that it strips its own gears; its churning style can’t quite keep the story going.

Titane only makes you think it’s revving you up—until you realize there’s nothing going on beneath the hood.

Gyllenhaal’s Baylor is a man on the edge of time, reckoning with a deed he can’t take back and a possible future built on lies. Few actors can put this kind of raw yet strangely companionable self-loathing onscreen—and make you glad you didn’t avert your eyes, no matter how much you wanted to.

With his fifth movie as 007, Craig is so extraordinary he leaves only scorched earth behind. There will be other Bonds for those who want them. For everyone else, there’s Craig.

I’m Your Man is funny in such a gentle way that you may not realize how piercing it is until after the credits have rolled.

This is a movie that repeatedly calls out a dead kid just to make its points. If that’s your idea of entertainment—or even just adequate message-based filmmaking—run, don’t walk, to see Dear Evan Hansen.

This is potentially moving dramatic stuff—or at least bracing melodramatic stuff—but Showalter’s dramatization has a glazed, glassy-eyed surface, like a Pee-wee Herman movie without any of Paul Rubens’ surreptitiously sophisticated kindergarten wit.

The story is almost embarrassingly simple. But the picture slides by pleasantly enough like a stream in a Budd Boetticher movie, a calm place to take off your boots and set a spell as you reflect on the true meaning of manhood, the necessity of overcoming hidden heartache and the pleasures of finally, in your sunset years, succumbing to the love of a good woman.

To call The Lost Daughter an assured debut is to do it a slight disservice—assurance suggests that a filmmaker knows everything going in. What we see in The Lost Daughter is something greater: the act of discovery—of the gifts actors can bring to a story, of how to hold a complex narrative together—in progress.

Villeneuve lays it out before us without smirking or winking; his go-for-broke earnestness feels honest and clean. And the effects, while lavish, also have a tasteful, polished quality.

Stewart gives her all, as she always does. But she plays Diana as a mannered doe—all wrong, given that does are the most unmannered creatures on Earth. Her performance is clearly stylized, but it’s also packed with calculation and guile. Larraín turns this Diana into exactly the thing the royal family accused the real-life Diana of being, a willful and pouty constant complainer.

Last Night in Soho soars at the beginning, only to crash in the end. It’s a broken promise.

The Card Counter, with Isaac’s superb performance at its heart, might be the movie you didn’t know you were wishing for, coming at a time when wishing for life to restart has become a consuming preoccupation.

This is a movie as big as the open sky, but one where human emotions are still distinctly visible, as fine and sharp as a blade of grass.

Parallel Mothers is a movie of infinite tenderness, that rare ode to motherhood that acknowledges mothers as women first and mothers second.

Candyman is a work held together by thoughtful choices, and it has a lot to say. Genre conventions are themselves like urban legends, a framework that each new generation adds to and builds upon. Candyman is just one reason we continue to believe in them.

Hall strives to carry The Night House on her more-than-capable shoulders, but she can’t quite compensate for the moments when the movie is outright silly or, worse, boring.

There is no sadder genre than the tedious thriller, a movie that works hard to entice us with suspense, rough and tumble action, maybe even alluring locales, only to fizzle out far from the finish line.

Free Guy is a little like Ready Player One jumbled with The Truman Show, with some Sleeping Beauty and The Velveteen Rabbit mixed in. It is, admittedly, a lot of movie, probably too much. But Reynolds makes the most of Guy’s elation at finally busting out.

Respect honors the utilitarian nature of songwriting, and of making art in general. But the movie honors subtler elements of Franklin’s nature, too—as much as we can know of it—most notably her guardedness, born of necessity.

Annette is an extravagant-looking and often inventive film, but it’s not a great one.

The story becomes unpleasantly bitter and asks us to buy certain behaviors that don’t make much sense, and that we’re not quite sure a character would be capable of. Yet even after the movie makes that sharp zigzag, its one constant is Damon, who’s turning out to be one of those great, casual American actors we didn’t know we had anymore.

Lowery (A Ghost Story, The Old Man & the Gun), in addition to fleshing out the story, puts his stamp all over it so confidently that the results could be annoying, if they weren’t so enchanting.

Val is a portrait of an actor who poured his all into his work. Only now can he see what it amounts to, and find some vindication in the truth that it was worth defending all along.

Even when the story falters, or becomes astonishingly silly, there’s still plenty to keep you gazing at the surface.

The possibilities are rich. But Old is just dumb.

Roadrunner is lively, comprehensive, moving and troubling, as well as suitably joyous, capturing everything about why viewers loved Bourdain, while also reminding us that even those very close to him couldn’t always fully understand him.

This is primo Nicolas Cage dialogue, inquisitive and soul-deep, the kind of stuff he was born to say. To hear and watch him in this movie is like greeting an old friend. Pig seems to have come out of nowhere, but we’re lucky to have it.

Even if you don’t care much about whales, or don’t think you do, Joshua Zeman’s enthusiastic documentary The Loneliest Whale: The Search for 52 might make you care about people who care about whales.