Tasha Robinson

It’s essentially a stroll through a fantastically detailed pastel world, in which the plot is little more than an excuse for Miyazaki to dive into a world teeming with colorful (and sometimes prehistoric) life.

Inside Out has a rich, unpackable story. But like all Pixar’s best films, it’s fleet and accessible, trusting the audience to keep up with an adventure that unfolds at a breakneck pace.

A technically groundbreaking collaborative work with humor, heart, and talent showing through in every carefully chosen line.

While the scenes don't always fit together thematically or tonally, each one is its own polished gem.

The pacing is expansive rather than draggy; Berri is in no rush to tear through his story, but the dialogue is generally meaningful and story-critical, and very little goes on that isn't directly relevant to the story's ultimate ends.

For Kaige, The Promise can't exactly be called a return to form--it's more a return to "Hero" and "House Of Flying Daggers" director Zhang Yimou's form. Either way, it's still glorious.

Like so many of the most memorable, most surprising horror movies, Backrooms winds up feeling ripe for sequels and spin-offs. The only question is whether more movies in this vein could maintain the mysteries hanging over the Backrooms. Horror sequels tend to overexplain and overdevelop, answering questions that shouldn’t really be answered. Here’s hoping we never fully find out what the Backrooms are, or exactly why they make the hair on the back of our collective necks stand on end.

It's a wildly exciting ride, the fastest-moving, most enthusiastically kinetic kids' action film since "The Incredibles."

The King's perception of religion is hardly friendly, but it's only one aspect of a terrific drama, one that ultimately admits that people can be as much of a terrifying mystery as their creator.

It's dizzying and tremendously sad, but simultaneously exhilarating due to Nemes' complete control of his environment, and complete merging of his narrative and compositional elements. It isn't just a unique story, it's a unique execution.

It's typical Hitchcock: taut, morbid, stylish, and determined to confound expectations all the way up to the final shot.

The results are nothing short of magical.

It's Pixar's most daring experiment to date, but it still fits neatly into the studio's pantheon: Made with as much focus on heart as on visual quality, it's a sheer joy.

Mary and the Witch’s Flower doesn’t just borrow elements from Ghibli, it feels like a complete continuation of the studio’s work. It’s a welcome relief for every animation fan who thought that particular era of Japanese animation had, after 30 years, quietly come to a close.

Everything Everywhere’s multiverse is a remarkably flexible metaphor. It’s equally suitable for expressing some common frustrations the audience may relate to, about botched choices and wasted opportunity. But it’s just as suited for setting up a series of ridiculously kickass action sequences where literally anything is possible, because the characters aren’t bound by reality or causality.

Challengers is a sharp and snappy movie, full of big emotions expressed through fast-paced dialogue in some scenes and through silent, sensual physicality in others, all shot with creative verve and aggressively in-your-face energy. Everyone in this movie is chasing sex and success, and conflating those things with each other in unashamedly provocative ways.

All the beats proceed exactly as expected, but they hit with admirably precise timing, amid a strikingly beautiful landscape where every leaf is rendered with loving clarity. The humor, the wonder, and the awwww moments all hit home comfortably. This is such a perfect execution of the Disney formula, it feels like the movie the studio has been trying to make since Snow White.

It’s an out-and-out triumph, an adrenaline blast of pure action and emotion that lives up to its predecessors and ably forwards the MCU story in memorable and even touching ways.

Like so much of Key & Peele’s comedy, Get Out is refreshing in its naked, frank aggression about confronting racial issues, with comedy, drama, and sharp, unsparing insight.

What the film lacks in specificity and interest in taking sides, it makes up for in style, authentic emotion, and terrific performances.

Slumdog Millionaire features the simplest story Boyle has ever told, which may explain why its many pleasures are so pure.

War Witch is a remarkably mature portrait that trusts its audience to have their own reactions to its material; it doesn’t yank at the heartstrings so much as expertly strum them.

Its complete lack of restraint, cynicism, or self-consciousness invites viewers to drop their own reservations and just feel the big, broad, simple emotions as they're played out on-screen, through memorable songs and elaborate fantasy sequences.

Yet another celebrity-voiced animal adventure, but it stands out from the crowd of similar films with its lightning wit and whirlwind brio.

It's the most glorious, wonderful mess put onscreen since Terry Gilliam's "Brazil."

The performances are winning, the story is surprising without relying on unlikely twists, and the relationships are the richest and most nuanced since Leigh's "Secrets & Lies."

The Wicker Man ultimately succeeds on the strength of its powerful imagery, its increasingly chilling tone, and its final, sudden shock.

A landmark production that can be watched with equal satisfaction as a metaphorical psychodrama or as a sheer visual spectacular.

It's an ambitious premise and a risky approach, but Cahill and his cast execute it beautifully.

The larger messages about spirituality often seem forced, and it's more compelling to focus on Lee's visceral cinematic experience than on the larger, fuzzier messages Martel's story conveys about humanity's connection with God.

Soul feels like the best Pixar movies used to feel — deeply humanistic, with both silly, kid-friendly humor and a sincere solemnity that feels entirely adult. Docter and Powers weaponize all of this in a story that literally and directly questions the meaning of life.

The characters are simply rendered, but when it comes to capturing cities and scenes, the cinematography takes on the color and detail of a Mexican street mural.

The playful performances haven't aged, and it still finds all the carefree thrills of being young, dumb, in love with life, and ready for death.

A compelling, well-researched, beautifully assembled document.

Schnabel's sleepy, drifty, at times morbidly funny film tackles something more ambitious, by getting into the head of someone who's trying to get out of there himself.

When it's funny, it's hilarious; when it's serious, it's powerful; and either way, it's an endless pleasant surprise.

Fireflies makes its doomed subjects seem utterly human, with the wealth of personal details and believable characterizations common to Studio Ghibli's peerless animated films.

Filmed in long, quiet takes across gorgeous, all-but-empty landscapes, Mountain Patrol feels more like Gus Van Sant's "Gerry" than like the cops-and-robbers thriller its plotline suggests.

It acknowledges grief, horror, and loss, but never lets it get in the way of a big, bright laugh.

Too many films that rely on secrets stop being compelling once those secrets emerge. Marrowbone just becomes more compelling. It’s one of the year’s most immaculately crafted movies, and it’s the kind of story that keeps dodging convention right up to the final shot. It fits neatly into the Gothic genre, but it innovates within it at the same time.

The film unravels a bit in the last few moments, amid unanswered story questions and a simplistic climax, but until that moment, Redbelt is Mamet's richest film of the decade.

Tattoo is as much mood piece as mystery, and the mood is almost always disturbing.

Plenty of films give the viewers far more information and still wind up feeling opaque and distanced from the characters' lives. But The Fits is all about the experience of the moment, and it winds up feeling remarkably immersive and lyrical.

Kross and Winslet's intense performances and Daldry's deliberately placid control of tone make the material work as a love (and hate) story as well as a metaphor.

The Informant! chooses to earn its exclamation point with giggles as well as shock, and the results are thoroughly entertaining.

For all its goodhearted cheer, Pom Poko is a glum indictment of modern Japan's disjunction from the natural and spiritual world. But it strikes a positive final note by implying that those worlds still exist, just out of sight, waiting and flourishing.

Even when making movies for small children, Studio Ghibli produces stories that are more emotionally sophisticated, and less philosophically polarized, than most adult fare.

Bird and his co-writers leave room for quiet moments and gentle morals, but for the most part, they send visual gags and verbal punchlines tearing past at an enjoyably demanding speed, whipping up the film's energy at every turn.

Over The Hedge stands out as genuinely witty and even a little barbed. Its chipper, sneering outsider's look at suburban sprawl and conformity isn't going to change the world, but it's still self-aware enough to be reasonably smart.

A surprisingly intimate behind-the-scenes documentary.

An indie version of Gondry's "Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind," albeit with none of the star power, a quarter of the budget, half the angst, and twice the charm.

It's a gorgeously rendered marvel that pulls out all the stops to wow its viewers, but in spite of its crowd-pleasing ploys, it holds onto its integrity with a smart and surprisingly deep story.

It is, in short, a strange and unrepeatable success, driven by its own uniqueness as much as anything else.

Riveting, eye-opening issue film.

Like all Burton's best work, it takes place in a distorted, vividly colored, meticulously crafted world where whimsy and gleeful ghoulishness mix freely.

It’s a hell of an achievement, and the rare case where a remake feels like an act of fervent fandom.

The most tremendous thing about Starred Up is exactly how simple it keeps things, and what a richly nuanced story emerges in the process.

One of the many things that makes Boys State entertaining as well as relevant is the way Moss and McBaine capture these kids’ different facets, and track how their combined ambition and naïveté play into the big picture.

Ernest & Celestine isn’t just cute or thrilling, though: It’s openly funny, in a wry, unpredictable way.

The superbly edited original version of Amadeus used overlapping sound cues for a lively flow between scenes, and the new version breaks up some of that flow with lengthy, talky interludes. Still, Ondricek's breathtaking images and Forman's essential craft are best appreciated on the big screen, and another theatrical run for Amadeus is a welcome gift, no matter how much this edition unnecessarily gilds what's already a near-perfect lily. [2002 Director's Cut]

A wonderful encore, marked by the painstaking attention to detail and artful balance between terror and joy that make Miyazak's work unique.

It’s a movie designed for people who like their future-fiction thoughtful and relevant, and for people who enjoy the runaway-train feeling of having no idea where a given story could possibly go next.

The Searchers is more a look at American genocide and racism, and the poison of revenge-obsession, than it is an adventure movie, and it feels like one of the wisest and most mature Westerns on the classics docket.

Revisiting Saks’ screen version nearly 50 years later is like a class in how comedy and storytelling evolve, and how some aspects of a story endure over time, while others get sloughed away.

While the procedural story takes up a fair bit of screen time, the emotional story is the center of the film, and the one that’s likely to stick with audiences longest and most clearly. As a story, it lacks the verve and dynamism of his early action films. As a portrait of obsession and regret, it’s remarkably sophisticated and satisfying.

Most musicals translate emotion into song. This one takes that a step further, translating emotion into a daring central gimmick. It’s experimental and explosive.

The miracle of Weiner is that like the complicated man at its center, it's open to interpretation. Schadenfreude seekers who just want to see Weiner sweat and suffer will get their money's worth. But so will curious viewers who show up in a spirit of inquiry, looking for the full story. They'll get more than one.

Foster's daringly different comedy is more interested with observing its well-drawn characters, and what it takes to change them on a fundamental level. It's easy to see it as a drama that fails to fully address America's shortcomings. It's actually something better: an insightful comedy about human perspective.

With this project, Rugna breaks plenty of horror rules and literally writes his own, turning his film into 2023’s most unnerving horror release — and a welcome revival for a subgenre that seemed like it was on its last spindly, clawed, wall-climbing legs.

Inside Out 2 is full of passion and empathy, letting the audience in on Riley’s inner struggle without always painting her as the hero, even in her own story.

For all Thompson's talent and promise, King Jack still rests most on the actors, and the way they suggest inner worlds deep enough to get lost in, without pushing or forcing the point.

Street Gang certainly doesn’t tell the whole story of Sesame Street’s early years — it can’t begin to. But it’s an absorbing, nostalgia-courting start, and for people with fond memories of the show, it’s an unbeatable chance to approach it as an adult, and understand their own childhoods a little better in the process.

It's a rousing, thrilling adventure, beautifully animated in rich, deep hues with a look that meets neatly between the flow of hand-drawn cels and the smoothness of digital animation. But it's also a powerfully emotional piece, about family and friendship, about betrayal and disappointment, and about first love and old enmities.

For all the methodical pacing and old archetypes, Hell or High Water is a thoroughly contemporary action film, complete with fast chases and flashes of dark comedy. But like the classic Westerns, it invites viewers to evaluate, one more time, the myth of the American outlaw, and the idea of criminals as heroes.

Moonlight is hypnotic not just as a character study, or as a coming-of-age story. It's hypnotic as a performance piece, full of flawless portrayals of a kid figuring out who he is, not just in relation to other people, but in relation to himself.

Wonder Woman represents a number of delicate balancing acts: between humor and gravitas; angst and adventure; full-blown, unvarnished superhero fantasy and the DCEU’s usual unpacking of what those fantasies mean.

For those capable of falling into the spell del Toro is casting, The Shape of Water is a breathless film, anchored by Hawkins’ visible, ardent longing for connection, and her fierce defiance when the things she loves are threatened.

No matter how excessively the legitimate scares pile up, they’re startling and convincing. The editing and music are impressively tuned for maximum impact whenever the slow-burning tension resolves with an abrupt, ugly surprise. All of which makes Smile an efficient ride, if an unusually unrelenting one.

Brigsby Bear holds together because it’s so flawlessly navigated and so utterly sincere. James has his ups and downs, but they aren’t manipulative, cheap, or calculated.

It lacks Hitchcockian tension or Christie-level dignity, but it’s funny, surprising, and intriguing in the way it flips the usual murder-mystery script.

It isn’t what those people will think it is. It’s something better, more timely, and more thrilling — a thoroughly engaging war drama that’s more about people than about politics.

Hereditary is a hell of an intense ride, made for a crowd that enjoys heart-clutching adrenaline spikes. The cast is unerringly terrific.

The sharp editing turns the film into a comedy about how wickedly successful the Temple’s trolling is, and how humorless and easily riled their opponents are.

In a world packed with information, it’s outright exciting to know so little about where a story is going, or how far it’s willing to go to get there.

A film that so perfectly reveals its characters both through the way they charge past calamity, and the way they subtly reflect their own pasts.

For once, fans’ “Did they do the book justice?” anxieties are misplaced: The movie version of Project Hail Mary is funny, strange, heartening, and completely satisfying.

It’s rare to see an anime story that solely focuses on adults navigating the issues of maturity, personal development, and a stymied future. It’s even rarer to see anime that simultaneously tackles those ideas, and wraps them in such an extravagant visual fantasia.

The movie’s strongest moments come when the action gets so ridiculous that the audience almost has to laugh, even as they’re wondering who’s going to die next.

McKay's film is coated in sugar to make it go down easy, but at its center, it's a bitter pill to swallow.

Peele directs Us with a masterful collection of horror-movie tricks — jump scares that actually pay off, a cat-and-mouse game in an isolated place filled with bright lights and deep pools of impenetrable shadow, a throat-closing Michael Abels score full of intense drumming and choral chanting that elevates the action to operatic levels of drama. But his greatest asset is the performances, which turn an already creepy premise into something endlessly inhuman and unnerving.

This isn’t a movie about car chases and explosions, it’s about the squirmy but satisfying feeling of watching justice done, and it’s a pleasure to watch the pieces fall into place.

It’s a lot to take in, but it’s joyously and creatively rendered, a fantasy epic brought to life in vivid color and with all the visual creativity a fantasy fan could want.

Endgame was never designed to stand on its own as a single well-crafted movie, and it was never designed to follow the MCU formula. It was designed to cap a decade of buildup around a single gigantic story.... In that sense, it’s certainly a triumph: it’s ambitious, towering, and above all, daring in its difference.

This movie is drawing on some old, old tropes and familiar ideas. But it does it in a way that makes them feel as new, fresh, and exhilarating as young love itself.

The Blackening is a strange movie, and often a very silly one. But the creators can at least boast that they’ve put something on screen that horror fans don’t see often, and won’t be expecting.

It's a cynical look not just at society and its structures and strictures, but at love itself. But it's still mesmerizing in its oddity, and it's exceptionally daring.

The Summit of the Gods isn’t a joyous film, and it isn’t a dreamy one. But it does feel like a remarkably insightful meditation, both about what it would really be like to fight your way up Mount Everest, and about why people keep taking up the challenge

Lightyear is so clearly calibrated to be something more: a thoughtful meditation on the passage of time. And on that level, the film never hits as hard as it’s meant to.

In terms of narrative ambition, and giving meaningful screen time to an ever-growing stable of onscreen characters, Civil War rivals Joss Whedon's MCU standout The Avengers. And in terms of sheer thrill, it surpasses Avengers — at least for fans who come prestocked with an emotional investment in these characters.

For the first time in years, it feels like Disney has done its namesake proud.

Anyone already planning on seeing Stoker, the English-language film debut of Oldboy and Thirst director Park Chan-wook, shouldn’t read this review. Or watch a trailer. Or read anything about it at all, really...It’s best taken one tense, exhilarating moment at a time, without anticipation or expectation.

So polished that it might pass for a scripted narrative feature, but that's not a bad thing. They found a remarkable spokesman in Bolivian teenager Basilio Vargas, and while his cogent, organized descriptions of his life, beliefs, history, and ambitions sometimes seem too calculated, at least they're calculated to communicate efficiently and appealingly.

Plenty of horror movies are willing to settle for making audiences jump. Mama is more ambitious by far: It makes sure viewers are emotionally committed even when they aren't clutching their armrests or covering their eyes.

It walks a fascinating line between morbid humor and outright horror, and it consistently defies expectations by resetting them at every possible step.

Svankmajer's nihilistic story isn't for everyone, but he skillfully manages its disturbing execution in ways no one else could, and he brings it across in a darkly comedic way that encourages simultaneous laughter, horror, and thought. If that isn't art, what is?

In a real sort of way, Gilliam IS Parnassus, carrying his tatterdemalion show forward from year to year and trying to get people to pay attention, and the mingled sense of bitterness and hope in his story makes this whole crazed fantasy into something far more real.

The story is a standard fairy-tale concoction, but the New Agey philosophy about healing and heroism makes for a classic Henson story, all heart and rapturous wonder at the world's incredible possibilities.

The occasional missteps (some overly precious symbolism, the grimy DV look) rarely get in the way of the film’s many winces, gasps, and breathless, cringing anticipation.

This is the most epic of the Harry Potter movies, the one that finally dispenses with side-quests and open-ended plotlines and offers up all the final payoffs.

As with the Wallace & Gromit films, most of the fun is in the deft characterizations, the zippy banter, and the joyous sight gags.

This is Csupo's feature directorial debut, but as creator, producer, and writer of "Rugrats" and "The Wild Thornberrys," among several other series, he's had a long career in animation, and he handles the CGI setpieces masterfully.

Powell and Loy's light, witty, unflappable characterizations became the unwavering backbone of a terrific series.

It's a beautifully shot, beautifully acted piece of fluff.

Annihilation is a portentous movie, and a cerebral one. It’s gorgeous and immersive, but distancing. It’s exciting more in its sheer ambition and its distinctiveness than in its actual action.

While the film doesn't dig deep, or hit particularly hard, it neatly achieves its modest goals: presenting a real-life heroine in real-life terms. A film this fictionalized rarely feels this much like fact.

Though Prometheus follows "Alien's" story beats, it's a looser and less satisfying story, more intellectual than visceral, and not fully satisfying on either level. But in part, that's because it's trying to do so much more.

Up is challenging, emotionally and narratively, but it trusts viewers to keep up; Pixar has never been interested in talking down to children or their parents.

What keeps the story fresh isn't so much Guadagnino's swooning sense-reveries, which sometimes flow with dreamlike wonder and sometimes just drag; instead, most of the power comes from Swinton, who always makes the most of characters imbued by passion, but straitjacketed by expectations.

It might be considered admirable how firmly Titley sticks to the facts, rather than trying to draw out a moral from the entire situation. But it leaves the story feeling more like a quirky, isolated human-interest story than a watershed moment in the development of exploitative, stunt-driven reality television.

Attempts to address grief frankly, gently, and without didacticism, and it largely succeeds.

Maybe Stiller just seems stilted because he's the only one here who isn't playing to the rafters.

The film bounces along on cheap but entertaining Mel Brooks-worthy audio and visual gags, like the live-chicken-throwing fight, or the sequence where the camera discreetly pans away from Dujardin and a partner making out on his hotel bed--only to focus on a full-length mirror in which they're still fully visible.

While In Darkness sticks to formula, it brings across that formula effectively.

The story should be a standard mismatched-couple-falls-in-love tale, but the script and the sprightly directing give the story plenty of snap and humor, and the animation is so luminously beautiful that even a falling-in-love sequence cribbed in part from The Little Mermaid is overwhelmingly magical.

It's an accomplished potboiler entertainment, as calculated and clever as the stories Irving spins to stay afloat in the growing sea of his own lies.

The moody tone and carefully balanced drama turn a grubby premise into something unexpectedly elegant.

Like the best claustrophobic thrillers, the film keeps finding clever new ways to complicate what initially seems like a limited setting with limited story options.

Disney’s triumphant return to hand-drawn 2-D animation still holds an awful lot of familiar, comfort-food charm.

The King's Speech is admirably free of easy answers and simple, happy endings; it's a skewed, awards-ready version of history, but one polished to a fine, satisfying shine.

It’s a gorgeous, visually ambitious film, full of show-offy setpieces reportedly inspired by the work of Hayao Miyazaki.

It's a daring, even mildly challenging mixture for a superhero film, and while the pieces don't entirely add up, the puzzle is at least original.

Audiences will likely come away from The Last Jedi with a lot of complaints and questions. But they’re at least likely to feel they’re in the hands of someone who cares about the series as much as they do, someone who loves its history, but sees the wide-open future ahead of it as well.

Only Washington stands out; he's charming, intense, and charismatic as ever.

Spider-Man: Homecoming brings the character back to his basics. In the process, it shows why he’s always been such a popular draw, and it makes a strong argument for a branch of the MCU / Sony heroverse that operates on a smaller scale than the rest of the world.

Mermin presents all this without editorial comment, and her film would be worth watching if only for its look at a profound culture-clash. But it goes one better, and delves into one of those clashing cultures, capturing it in a moment of change that goes far beyond one beauty academy's superficial concerns.

While it's essentially just another slick Spielberg action machine, it's operating effectively on all cylinders throughout.

This caper film possesses Miyazaki's usual good-hearted charm, but he injects a manically energetic humor that his more sedate children's films never quite achieve.

The film has any number of chances to exploit the setting and Butterfield's wide-eyed innocence, but instead, it mines a vast, eerie tension by keeping both boys in the dark.

At its best, Micmacs is a robust, enjoyably lunatic game. It's social commentary by way of a good Looney Tune.

Anyone who's been closely involved with a wedding knows exactly how these beleaguered schmucks feel. Those who haven't may just take Confetti as a lighthearted but convincing argument for elopement.

A film so joyfully insane that it feels like Kon is overcompensating.

Public Enemy openly raises the question of why officers of the law hated Mesrine so much that they were willing to turn his death into a block party.

It’s a dark, grim, suffocating story that only missteps by overplaying its hand, making the larger message about prostitution increasingly overt.

After Yang is intensely internal and personal, as grief so often is, which guarantees it won’t connect with a wide audience. But as a collection of images and moods, all gently nudging at that central question of what defines a person, it’s gravely hypnotic. It’s an old question, asked in a new way, with deepest gravity and respect.

It’s a daringly weird debut, executed with real style and vision.

The whole film is too reliant on action-movie cuts and zooms, plus James Horner's insistent score, but it's beautifully rendered and convincingly exciting.

Mangold delivers a taut modern take on a lesser classic, preserving the "High Noon" themes about doing the right thing against all odds, and injecting a more modern pacing and urgency without going overboard. His film isn't Leonard's classic, but it's a solid, genre-respecting Western in its own right.

The surreality is distancing, but authentic, believable performances and a low-key affect keep Running From Scissors from turning shrill.

What is surprising is how he (Darabont) rebounds from his weak, awkwardly compressed opening to produce one of the scariest King films since Stanley Kubrick's "The Shining."

This is the kind of film where viewers can let themselves flow with the film’s emotion, or entirely ignore the action and just get lost in the beauty of the imagination. Either way, it’s a luscious trip to take.

There's nothing wrong with animation aimed at adults, but this may be the first kids' movie that throws fewer bones to its supposed intended viewers than to their parents.

Nair's film is a joyous triumph in the way it makes the story accessible, without losing sight of the specifics that make it not just a true story, but a complete and real one.

The film moves effortlessly, with plenty of tense thrills and surprise reveals. It’s relentless, but rarely rushed. The action is terse, and in one unexpected case, breathless and terrifying.

Cars is a fine example of the formula, with pleasant chemistry, the patented Pixar cleverness, and the usual sweetly melancholy nostalgia courtesy of songwriter Randy Newman.

For a film about suicide, Wristcutters is agreeably loopy and game. Dukic is bitterly funny rather than maudlin, and his carefully plotted grunge chic, in addition to being cheap, lends the film a great deal of Jim Jarmusch grime to go with its unmistakable Jim Jarmusch quirk.

Has its heartbreaking moments and its surprise giggles, particularly thanks to Ron Hewat's minor role as a former hockey play-by-play announcer now narrating his nursing-home life.

It’s colorful and charming, and it’s certainly unique in its story specifics. But it also feels safe, simple, and soft-edged compared to Pixar’s wilder swings for the outfield.

It’s depressing, in more ways than one, given its cynical take on what makes life worthwhile, and what we have to do to preserve it. But it’s also refreshing to see science fiction this aware of how actively we’re careening toward a terrible future, and how our response to it is likely to be specific, personal, and just as selfish as the behavior that gets us there in the first place.

For all the eye-popping battles and fast-moving action, it’s an emotional story that takes the time to explore what its protagonist really wants out of life, and why god-tier power may be as much of a burden as a benefit.

Ghostbusters is a lively, hilarious crowd-pleaser, which is all that's really required of a big summer action comedy.

Men is nearly unique as a horror movie in Harper’s specific response to the threats she faces. But even as she parts ways with the usual wailing victim image, the film still holds onto its sense of the uncanny and horrific. Even seasoned body-horror fans may be shaken by where this film goes in terms of its bloody physicality.

It’s no wonder that every part of Across the Spider-Verse is an attempt to outdo the first movie. The idea of growing, of surpassing and ignoring everyone else’s limits, is the heart of this series’ heroes and their individual journeys. It looks like the movies themselves are designed to follow suit.

The story of The Vast of Night is nothing particularly special. The storytelling, though, is spectacular.

Good horror-comedy is hard to pull off, but Hsu finds his balance by steering hard into the comedy, while pouring on the fake blood.

Presence is more intellectual than visceral, more engaged with raising questions than pinning viewers to their seats.

Vogt makes deliberate, thoughtful choices that amp up the story’s drama and horror without ever turning it into the kind of action-centric special-effects showcase Americans have come to expect even from their low-budget superpower stories.

Dystopian sci-fi has rarely been as delicately and beautifully detailed as Kristina Buozyte and Bruno Samper’s new film.

It unfolds with a fascinating specificity that goes well beyond the Batman details, and unlocks a lot of conversation-starting thoughts about the various ways and reasons people associate with different fandoms.

This is a film about the wilds — internal and external — and Saulnier shoots both the natural and the human side of the story with his usual sharp instincts for startling and engaging images.

Watching it is a cheer-along experience.

The Founder’s biggest strength is that it doesn’t lose the story or the characters in the larger metaphor about the gap between creation and exploitation.

The weight of graphic, grotesque violence hangs over the entire movie. But the daring emotional violence lingers longer, well after the lights go down on the final shot.

Given how much of the film is spent on watching tiny items grow to improbable size, and huge objects shrink down to the scale of toys, it seems only appropriate that Ant-Man and the Wasp neatly balances its big, serious concerns with its little petty ones. It’s a movie that understands all the variances of scale, and takes the audience along for the ride as they constantly change.

The film packs in so much material that it's bound to have dead ends and weak spots, but its confidence in its provocations is compelling.

In the end, it doesn’t feel like Jonathan fully commits to its own premise.

The sheer dynamism and energy of the movie are compelling, even when the character drama isn’t.

It’s a heightened, sometimes stagey take on a trashy exploitation flick, but it is mesmerizing.

The subjects of Girls State are trying to express their confidence about their power and impact in the world, while simultaneously watching their country deny them rights over their own bodies and emphasize their powerlessness. There’s a particularly uncomfortable irony in watching them working to piece together their own political beliefs and futures while their government is shutting down their options.

For viewers who are still impressed by CGI destruction and thrilled by the sight of realistic mechas in action, Uprising is yet another escalation in scale, staged creatively and with apparent love for the old-school kaiju genre.

Incredibles 2 is a lighter and more incident-packed adventure. The same characters are running through some of the same emotions but with much less of a sense of weight and impact.

The sequel actually slows down the story a bit, with a lower jokes-per-second rate and a little more time for contemplation. But instead of making the new film smaller or duller, it leaves room for a little more sophistication. The sequel’s best gag isn’t a one-liner or a one-off, it’s subtly and fundamentally built into the story.

The film’s eye-candy is endlessly impressive and a worthy reason to see the film in a theater, but it’s never as memorable as authentic, unique story moments like Hiccup’s first connection with Toothless in the series’s first installment.

The movie is packed with deep colors, glorious texture, and striking sequences, plus plenty of drone footage showcasing unspoiled, rough wilderness. Apex’s narrative simplicity (and the fact that it’s a Netflix movie) might lend itself to second-screen viewing, but anyone who lets their attention wander to their phone is going to miss some beautiful footage that makes this story seem a lot bigger than it is.

Let The Fire Burn is a fascinating look at official overreaction, government overreach, and the corrupting effects of prejudice on powerful institutions.

The story of America's first successful class-action sexual-harassment lawsuit may sound dull, but Caro ratchets up the intensity until every flung epithet and threat stings. The approach is sometimes shrill, but it's effective.

While The Fault In Our Stars is more pastel watercolor than hard-edged drama, it’s still hugely warm and winning, thanks in large part to Boone’s unfussy, wistful direction.

Nimród Antal's terrific feature debut Kontroll takes some time to get up to speed--but once it's fully underway, it develops a heady momentum and a devastating impact.

Along the way, Murderball surpasses the typical who-will-win sports-film dynamic and becomes a fascinating and personal exploration of quadriplegia.

Whenever it hits its stride, it's a well-acted, vividly executed, full-speed-ahead special-effects extravaganza that puts as much bang as possible into every remaining scene.

It's a patient film, and it requires some patience from its audience. But its rewards are gentle and winning, and for once, a cinematic history lesson doesn't feel artificial and processed in every pore.

The doc never feels propulsive, or even particularly informative, and it never has to. For people who remotely enjoy the existence of dogs, Well Groomed is one of the most wholesome, joyous, purely enjoyable documentaries in the streaming world, and Stern doesn’t aspire to anything more.

Generations of readers have found The Lion, The Witch And The Wardrobe to be a gripping adventure that reaches well beyond its religious underpinnings, and this robust version respects both aspects and finds the same winning balance of excitement and meaning.

Carney’s emphasis is more on performance than craftsmanship. His camera lovingly covers the actual act of bringing music to life, and he makes being in the middle of a band look like the most revitalizing and rewarding place on Earth.

It’s a quiet film of modest narrative ambitions and simple shifts. But its technical and visual ambitions couldn’t be higher. It’s as if Ghibli is still trying to raise its own bar, so that even if it’s going out, it’s reminding viewers what they’d be missing.

The beginning of the film is purposefully surprising in many little ways, but the rest of the film is a gorgeously shot, heart-in-throat wait to see whether the payoff can dodge expectations nearly as well. The journey is more important than the destination, but Wladyka makes enough daring choices to make both worthwhile.

It’s the work of a director deeply enamored of his source material, and determined to do right by it, even if it means frightening kids, baffling parents, and embracing whatever style works in the moment.

Deserted Station plays out like a dream, but Raisian moves comfortably between fantasy and nightmare, real and surreal.

The humor edges against absurdism, but stays self-aware and witty, with that mild-mannered optimism presiding.

What makes Human Capital a worthwhile experience is the way [Virzí] focuses on understanding his characters’ desires, rather than deriding them as unworthy.

Compare any of this to the grinding series of vicious gags from, say, pretty much any Ben Stiller movie post-Flirting With Disaster, and Fast Times starts looking like a tame jokefest even grandma can enjoy. There's no crotch damage, no humorously dead animals, no pie-fucking, and no menstrual-blood-on-the-pants jokes, either. At its most graphic, it's got a little good-natured pot humor...It's just pure, lighthearted, relatively respectful fun. With boobs.

Slow West often feels like the Coen brothers’ rendition of True Grit, if they’d brought Wes Anderson in as a collaborator. It’s a shaggy-dog story full of colorful characters and aimless but diverting narrative byways, all delivered with Andersonian solemnity, against a backdrop of deeply saturated colors and meticulously dressed sets.

The rote hero/villain face-offs are exciting, but the film is in no hurry to fast-forward to them. DeBlois seems to have a real passion for this world, and like Hiccup, he seems much more interested in soaring through the clouds than in fighting on the ground.

Boxtrolls’ world is fantastically detailed and physical, with every frame crammed with complicated machinery, hand-painted textures and handcrafted props, and a sense of vast and focused attention.

Serenity is still taut, immersive, and alternately hilarious and heartbreaking, a well-balanced blend of whooping Wild West action and space opera.

While the style may outpace the substance, that doesn't make the style any less magnificent. And when it comes to sheer customer satisfaction, The Revenant checks nearly every box, up to and including the man vs. wild throwdown. It just makes a jarring, memorable statement about how often the wild is likely to win that uneven fight.

Steamboy adds a touch of innocent wonder to the formula through Ray's eyes, resulting in Otomo's most human film to date, but humanity rarely seems to be among Otomo's priorities. His films seem far more concerned with the spectacle he manages like no one else in animation.

Culkin’s terrifically effective performance and Howe’s pitch-perfect writing and directing make Gabriel the kind of insightful, empathetic project that makes cineastes feel good about feeling bad.

Miyazaki's animated adaptation of Jones' book is a charming and thoroughly absorbing treat.

On the lighthearted end of the Miyazaki spectrum, but it features more dashing adventure.

What ultimately makes Tootsie linger past the giggles is its immense affection toward everyone on the screen.

A warm and enjoyable small-scale film.

Its crowd-pleasing, action-packed brand of frenetic parody promises to spread Chow's mythos even further.

In the Earth is an immersive portrait of tribalism and madness, angst and survivalism. And in spite of the somewhat predictable narrative, the film builds to an unshakably tense, unsettlingly eerie conclusion.

Detailed and memorable, with attention given to the many personalities and agendas involved, but while it finds sympathy for the men who feel pushed to cheat for money, it offers just as much sympathy for the fans who love the sport, and can’t figure out why their beloved players would betray them.

Like The Daily Show, Rosewater makes uncomfortable political realities into wry but uproarious jokes.

Kirikou is a wonder because it’s such a familiar kind of story, told in such an unusual way.

A feverishly compelling film that doesn't force-feed its ideals to its audience.

The film’s symbolism is never subtle, but that doesn’t make it any less effective.

While it’s less playful and less giddily, enjoyably excessive than The Guard, it explores similar ground, as a good-hearted man largely abandoned by his community attempts to do the right thing as he sees it. But it brings in much more complicated matters of religion and morality, asking what it means to be a man of faith in an age of doubt.

It’s a formulaic story that takes full advantage of these broad, familiar formulas to win viewers, but finds enough unique detail to retain its own identity.

Scare Me plays some thoughtful games with the idea of horror-comedy, and eventually, Ruben uses the self-aware humor to sharpen the shocks.

One of Arnold's greatest accomplishments in American Honey is in illustrating, with a loose and comfortable storytelling style, how these misfits build a form of easy intimacy without really opening up to each other, or getting attached.

It’s still an immensely satisfying and entertaining watch, because it spends so much time just watching Williams throw all his energy into whatever he does.

For people who specifically prize meticulous story-craft and the ability to dodge broad genre clichés, I See You is a rare gift.

Timid viewers who are normally averse to horror aren’t going to find much comfort or safety in this movie. But for longtime horror buffs, this feels like something fresh: a simple story, told in the rawest and most startling way, and given a face out of nightmares.

It’s a pleasant enough hangout movie, and someday it may be held up as a slanted portrait of what mid-2020 felt like for people privileged enough to ignore politics. But it still feels like a minor movie in the face of a major catastrophe.

First Love is the kind of film that’s designed for seen-it-all genre fans who know these tropes (the scheming criminal, the dewy ingenues, the cold-hearted lady assassin, and so on) and appreciate seeing them tweaked in new directions, and treated with an air of fond familiarity rather than dour airlessness.

Wheatley's past films —€” the dark comedy Sightseers, the genre-defying slasher Kill List, the weird black-and-white micro-project A Field In England —€” come together in this film, which is crazed and violent, strange and appalling, image-driven and a moral lesson, and just plain strange. But Hiddleston's combination of placid calm and seething, hidden rage gives it all an anchor.

Outlaw King has plenty of the right pieces in play to make this kind of personally enriched story possible, but compared to Mackenzie’s best work, it’s plodding and artless.

It’s hypnotic just how horrifying Arthur’s existence is, just as Phoenix’s performance is hypnotic as he spirals from fragile hope into increasingly outsized and confident acts of destruction.

This movie is its own kind of Frankenstein’s monster, stitched together from a thousand different parts and lurching into disturbing life. The Bride! seems like it was meant to be discussed, analyzed, and unpacked at length, with different fans seizing on different elements as the key to the whole shambling creature. But like so many of the Frankensteinian creatures that preceded it onto the screen, it’s a bit of an unwieldy monster.

Unlike Fisher’s book, the film is warm and comforting, occasionally sad but more often giddy and gleeful. It’s a melancholy final visit in light of the recent death of both its subjects. But it’s still a rare chance for viewers to sneak behind those weird, eccentric compound gates, and hang out as if they were part of the family.

There’s some knuckle-biting tension as viewers wait to see how it’ll all play out, but Mylod and the writers also suggest that it’s worth chuckling a little at everyone involved, whether they’re serving up fancy versions of mayhem or just paying through the nose for it.

At its best, it’s a reminder that King’s biggest strengths lie in his unparalleled ability to build tension, create atmosphere, and tell a direct and brutal story, not in his ability to launch profitable many-branched franchises.

This is a movie where the craft dominates the experience, which is thrilling for people watching for the artistry, but less convincing for viewers focused on the story.

While the characters are distinctive and charming, and the dialogue is often pretty funny, The Nice Guys is a large step down on the ambition scale from Kiss Kiss. Having deconstructed his favorite genre so perfectly, Black has a harder time reconstructing it without leaving out some pieces.

Weapons that send an enemy into a dream state or a phantasmagorical world give director Zhao all the opportunity he needs to radically change animation styles, or fill the screen with wild fantasy images. This is a movie worth seeing on the biggest screen available.

It’s a strange and memorable film with a unique voice and a unique perspective, and that alone makes it worth seeking out. But just as Stearns’ characters seem to be constantly suppressing a shriek of dismay or despair or defiance, viewers may come out of this one suppressing the urge to go yell at Stearns and demand a satisfaction that the movie isn’t about to offer.

The siblings address their family through a Wes Anderson lens, with a tone so playful and visually poetic that it drops into surrealism. It feels like a fresh new approach to an old genre — a willingness to not just embrace the subjectivity of family documentaries, but to charge into it full-bore.

It’s a movie that may look a lot better in the rearview mirror than it does in the moment.

For the serious fans who this series is meant for, the promise of at least six more hours of Fantastic Beasts action likely means a lot more thrilling beasts, barriers, and beats to explore. Everyone else may find that all the little personal bits of character business and frantic complications aren’t much of a substitute for a clear and compelling plot with a single meaningful protagonist.

Biographies of great artists often try to define their subjects via grand dramas and dark, defining moments. A Magnificent Life’s perspective is right there in the title: Even in its darkest moments, it’s a hopeful, comforting success story, framed in a way that encourages viewers to look back to their own childhoods, and confront their own wistfully ambitious ghosts.

It’s a sleek and effective thriller, often scary and usually visually impressive. But too often, its reasons for doing absolutely anything amount to “because this is the way Alien did it.”

Elvis & Nixon is at its best when it sticks to what-if whimsy and the enjoyable fantasy of worlds colliding, with all the outlandish possibilities that crossover stories suggest.

The Cursed has its own mythology and some unnerving, bloody innovations around what’s basically a werewolf story, but Ellis gets a lot of his mileage around the standard creature-feature horror-story things he doesn’t do.

Its statements about gender, violence, trauma, and entitlement are blaring and blatant, with little room for ambiguity or interpretation. And that absolutely seems to be the movie’s primary point.

This is a rom-com, formulaic and comforting and breezy, with some action trappings, but with no expectations that anyone needs to care about the results of that action.

Radius is a puzzle story built around a series of reveals. The script is tight and propulsive; the writer-directors have a talent for not over-explaining the implications of each development, and for giving the audience space to figure things out for themselves. That makes the developments hit harder and feel smarter.

Hail, Caesar! is immensely entertaining, but it's also frustratingly discursive, with so many incomplete sidelines and distractions that it suggests an overcrowded but exciting TV pilot more than a self-contained film.

It’s highly competent throughout, and outright brilliant at times, but it lacks the necessary level of connection with the real world. And by the end, it’s lost track even of its own hard-earned but fragile sense of emotion.

John Wick: Chapter 2 is an enjoyable enough expansion on the first film. But its final-act setup for John Wick: Chapter 3 is more trying than promising.

Peters periodically relaxes into moments of pure art, with the camera studying faces, skateboarders on the move, a young couple kissing, or whatever else catches his eye. Give Me Future is a remarkably dense portrait of a place and a moment.

The film's merry, enthusiastic tone--set largely by Robert De Niro, playing a giddy transvestite sky-pirate to the hilt--is hard to beat.

This movie does one thing, and does it well, via methods that escalate to nearly cartoonish proportions. And it’s clear in absolutely every grim, gory, gutting-it-out scene that Helander and Tommila know exactly who they’re making this movie for.

The results are scattershot but entertaining, and occasionally eye-opening.

Win Win is less quirky than "The Station Agent" and less soulful (and political) than "The Visitor," but it still does little to buck the trend.

Once the plot finally kicks into gear, director D.J. Caruso (Taking Lives) effectively cranks up the tension.

Ultimately, Amigo is as much about Iraq and Afghanistan as it is about a century-old chapter of history - and it's as much about human nature as it is about either era.

The Hateful Eight is a feature-length battle between thoughtful sophistication and the filmmaker's sloppiest and most self-indulgent instincts.

Goes from sleepily hypnotic to riveting over the course of 90 minutes.

If this is a documentary, it's a profoundly embarrassing one, in which Affleck has exposed Phoenix's soul and found it shallow and damaged. If it's a mockumentary, though, its greatest value is in pointing out the media's gullibility, and reminding audiences that even in an age of limited privacy, they still have to question what they're told and even what they witness themselves. It's cruel either way, but riveting nonetheless.

War Machine hits all the right spots for this kind of movie. It’s lean and propulsive. The practical stunts are impressive and immersive. And Ritchson, even playing a man so throttled by his own past that he doesn’t want to feel anything, is a compelling screen presence.

At its best, Brave accesses all the complicated feelings involved between a parent and a rebellious adolescent: the mutual frustration, the lack of communication, the way conflicting desires can mask love without weakening it.

The film makes a strong argument for the value of artistry in horror. Stark colors and an active camera, chasing or leading the characters, give the whole film a sense of intensity and dynamism.

Chicago 10 is a lot of fun, but it could stand to take its subjects a little more seriously, if only because they themselves are so frequently goofy that mocking them is complete overkill.

Until the "creep + orphans = happy family" formula starts demanding abrupt, unconvincing character mutations, Despicable Me is a giddy joy.

Not every joke works, on paper or on screen. But Fey and Poehler at least look like they're having fun, and they make it easy to get pulled along for the ride, no matter how awkward it gets.