Trace Sauveur

Even for the most adventurous viewers, it may prove taxing. But to embrace its strange singularity yields a thought-provoking experience, and perhaps even a transformative one.

Every laugh-out-loud line is punctuated by an ever-present sense of both despair and unpredictability.

If the drama feels occasionally slight, read it as a way in which the film is asking you to understand the perspective of its central character — for Margaret, it’s momentous. And for me, the twentysomething guy in a Bride of the Monster T-shirt and Dr. Martens seeing this movie solo, well, I left choked up seeing something so assiduously warm and sincere.

Greg Kwedar’s sensitive, joyous Sing Sing does more than simply dramatize the workings of the RTA program, it incorporates participants into the very fabric of the film’s DNA.

This is far from the first movie about the perpetual struggle of relating to other people; it’s not even Mills’ first stab at it. But C’mon C’mon is so lovingly assembled and insightful in its thematic concerns that it feels like he could keep returning to that well and find something just as essential there every time.

Though undeniably sincere and crafted with a sturdy visual sense from cinematographer Erik Messerschmidt, there’s as much rote storytelling here as there is surprisingly thoughtful character work.

It’s blunt but not grating, a result of Johnson’s deft touch as a filmmaker. He toes a line of getting too gratuitous, with maybe one too many celebrity cameos, but there’s an infectious quality to the worlds he builds onscreen.

Even at 163 minutes, there’s so much crammed in that threatens to make Dead Reckoning Part One feel at once overstuffed and overfamiliar. So it’s a credit to the film that, even as the third- or fourth-best of the series, it’s such an exceptional piece of entertainment, one to serve as a reminder that we can and should expect more from our ultra expensive tentpole franchises.

After the fact, The Flash feels like the ultimate case in point as to why James Gunn and Peter Safran have been brought in to course-correct the trajectory of the DC enterprise. According to them, this has been retrofitted to be the first of a few transitory films as we exit the DCEU and move into a newly established DC Universe. Here’s hoping they pull it off, because I don’t know how many more of these I can take.

For a mystery, Wake Up Dead Man is surprisingly bad at making its ensemble feel essential to the stakes.

Anchored at the center is such a warm, tenderhearted personality and worldview that sends you out of the other side with a rejuvenated and healed spirit.

It may feel somewhat slight when it’s all said and done, but Apollo is packed with Linklater’s unique voice and breezy attitude that makes you feel right at home.

This is the ideal example of a big summer blockbuster and one of the best legacy sequels we’ve ever gotten: a movie that knows how to move along and give you what you came for.

Karam manages an incredible feat of genre-bending, as neither the comedy nor horror impairs the other. Each is built so naturally within the drama: The laughs are the result of simply having well-realized characters and the scares an existential manifestation of their contentions.

Schrader remains committed to his late-style cold moodiness, with scenes shot in a sterile plainness and lines delivered in a frank matter-of-fact tone that to some may appear stilted but effectively accompanies his main character’s harsh view of his surroundings.

Scary, funny, brutal, smart, and perverse – this is the stuff that future classic horror midnighters are made of.

Del Toro’s fables are always beautiful but sometimes irregular in connecting their artistry to fully cogent characters and themes. With Frankenstein, he has the freedom to reconstruct a story and motifs he knows by heart into a movie that’s intimately familiar with the soul of the original material, but reaches the conclusions on its own terms.

As is typical by now, Baker (along with cinematographer Drew Daniels) captures the ethos and texture of America on the fringes in a way not many others do.

Looking at the world around us, this is the perfect summer drama for a society that continually proves itself more and more obsessed with controlling women.

The screenplay by Keenan Coogler and Zach Baylin springboards off these ideas to make a no-frills sports melodrama that excels because of everyone’s commitment to making a great one.

Nanny isn’t able to follow through on all of its ideas, but those ideas are pretty undeniable.

It’s a crowded subgenre but among all of its haunted/psycho-killer doll forebears and contemporaries, M3GAN is still brisk, fresh, and delightfully compelling.

It’s an erotic thriller set-up matched with the sort of morally dubious character that would have De Palma’s ears perked, but it plays like more of a farce in practice.

Late Night With the Devil is able to mine plenty of effective and fun ideas out of its premise, and it works as a potent examination of the price of success.

In a film that inevitably asks its lead to shoulder some heavy weight for it to work at all, Ridley takes on the task with an assured capability. May other films take this one’s lead in giving her some real, meaty work.

As it stands, there’s a healthy amount to admire and for some it may be enough to scratch a certain itch. But much of Old Henry feels a lot like its protagonist: worn-out, weathered, and old.

If you like your affected character dramas with a healthy dose of weird insanity, you may just find yourself head over hooves.

Indeed, Smile, at its best, is a bit weirder and more left-field than you may expect. Following the recent release of Barbarian, it’s continuing this year’s trend of seemingly well-polished, potentially anonymous studio horrors having much more inspired, hidden ambitions than other high-profile contemporaries.