Vince Mancini

A few sour notes aside, Hustle is a solidly compelling, surprisingly watchable basketball movie.

I Think We’re Alone Now is compelling from start to finish, yet somehow not entirely satisfying. Not because there’s anything wrong with it, simply because I wish there was more.

No Time To Die belatedly reveals that what we were watching wasn’t an action thriller or a kooky spy caper at all, but a melodrama, a kind of massive budget telenovela about an incorrigible heartbreaker finally allowing himself to be vulnerable and find true love.

Just Mercy is a “true story” encased in amber. Its politics are inert. The story only works as escapism, where we clap at hearing the least dangerous of truths spoken aloud and once again entertain the delusion that one man calling bullshit on a corrupt system is enough to defeat it. These days that only seems to work in superhero movies.

It’s a technological grand slam and a thematic sacrifice bunt.

Halloween is tasteful and clever and understands its source material enough to appeal to leave the superfans cheering (I should know, I sat next to one). But I couldn’t help thinking that it sells the original better than it sells itself. Which is just fine.

It’s silly without being stupid, smart without being dull, and broad without being corny. It’s a hell of a feature debut for Mimi Cave and a solid sophomore effort for Lauryn Kahn.

Apatow’s movies are always notoriously too long, but this time it isn’t self-indulgence that’s keeping The King Of Staten Island over two hours (137 minutes, to be exact) it’s more a failure to choose between four or five different stock storylines.

Almereyda making a show of himself as storyteller takes away from his story, and seems to betray a lack of confidence in it.

Don’t Worry, He Won’t Get Far On Foot is a straightforward biopic about an interesting guy, starring one of our best actors. It’s a story of adversity, self-discovery, and redemption. It’s not the kind of story we’ve never seen, but it’s a perfect showcase for Gus Van Sant’s skill.

It’s certainly fair that Creed II would be about fathers and legacies and trying to avenge the family name, but without political context, the big fight is no longer a clash of ideas.

It’s true, North Hollywood‘s story isn’t quite as affecting as its style. As such, it’d be easy to label it “all style, no substance.” But as North Hollywood proves, when you do it well enough, style is substance.

It’s scholarly to the point that it’s bloodless, a dowdy tweed jacket of a film.

The Report has just enough humor and absurdity and Adam Driver to cut through its justified righteous indignation. It doesn’t sacrifice importance for entertainment, or vice versa.

Cyrano is gorgeous to look at and periodically to listen to, but narratively it’s a lazy take on the material, combining Victorian ideas of purity with Love Actually clichés prizing impotent schoolboy pining over actual connection. In spirit it’s a lot more like the boring, beautiful Christian than it is the audacious homely Cyrano.

It’s hard to say Game Night is entirely bad. I laughed a lot and its creators are clearly capable of crafting a joke. Yet they seem to have either an incomplete or an incredibly cynical conception of what a movie is.

Pieces Of A Woman, is proof that arthouse filmmakers still haven’t tired of exploring grief.

Having been conceived by a lawyer, Marshall feels designed to present the case that Thurgood Marshall was a great man, without letting too much nuance cloud the issue. Depth, complexity, moral gradations — these are dangerous notions in a story you’re presenting before a fickle jury. Marshall takes the same approach.

Is Deadpool 2 obnoxious? Is it needlessly self-aware? Is it drunk on its own fairly tame naughtiness? Is it so stuffed full of unrelated pop culture references that it sort of feels like a meme shirt come to life? The answer to all those questions is a resounding yes, but it’s also, weirdly, refreshing.

In The Way Back, Gavin O’Connor has made another reasonably entertaining sports movie.

The frustrating thing about Mary Poppins Returns is that it’s constantly teasing us with something more.

Vengeance may have a sort of old-fashioned setup, but its takes are razor sharp, such that when the comedy starts to turn earnest, and the story begins to evolve from fish-out-of-water comedy into more straight-up potboiler (Jason Blum having produced it and whatnot), it doesn’t feel like an apology or a digression. It feels like a deepening of themes.

Like The Art of Self-Defense as a whole, it’s glib and obvious in a way that leaves me a little cold.

Mottola still shows a clear flair for the humanistic, good-natured comedy of Superbad and Adventureland, and most of the joke writing in Confess, Fletch is sharp, to the point of being exceptionally so.

It’s the concept we need right now, with an execution that’s sometimes lacking. Like slaying the rich with a rusty guillotine.

Elvis – in so many ways a sort of kitsch-art earnest version of Walk Hard – is to the traditional musician biopic what Las Vegas is to a traditional city. An idealized reality so manically constructed that it becomes a sort of grotesque, like an absurd parody of Americana rendered in pastel Formica and crushed velvet. It’s real sicko shit, and in that sense it’s hard not to love it.

Low Tide is wonderfully shot and acted, and compelling for most of its run time. It’s a shame that it goes out on its least compelling beat.

Nobody shoehorns Odenkirk into a stock action movie with no real regard for, and without especially utilizing, any of his particular skills.

In spite of how visually dazzling and legitimately entertaining it is, Ready Player One is at its heart, a celebration of the gormless rube. It is a paean to the schmuck. To celebrate it uncritically is to become one.

Greyhound is an exciting, non-stop battle scene from start to finish. Which might be enough to make us watch it, but is not enough to make us love it.

It’s more competent than inspired, however, with skillfully shot action but not much in the way of bold choices. It’s compelling enough while it lasts, but all but guaranteed to vanish from memory the instant the credits roll.

As great as Triangle Of Sadness always looks, Östlund has a frustrating tendency to go more broad when you expect him to get more pointed. The film is meant to explore the relationship between beauty and power, which it does, in a broad sense, but I’m also not entirely sure what to make of certain scenes.

The humor is stylized but sharply-structured, slightly shticky but well-timed and mostly gentle in tone.

Finland is a weird little place, and Dual is a weird little movie.

Gleefully crafted and full of memorable shots.

Plane perfect movie for Gerard Butler solidify Gerard Butler brand action movie. Everyone know Gerard Butler not Daniel Day-Lewis, he even maybe not Bruce Willis, but Gerard Butler Gerard Butler, and sometimes Gerard Butler good.

Perhaps Kusama was trying to bring a greater authenticity to the self-destructive detective trope, and fine, that’s a reasonable goal, but the movie around it isn’t quite grounded enough to pull it off.

It seems to attempt both schlocky fun gore and disturbingly realistic gore, which feels like an uneasy mix. Whatever line there is between fun, cathartic gore and enervating, off-putting, borderline mean-spirited gore, Apostle crosses it, at least for me. Not exactly a fun time by the end, and it was hard to divine a higher purpose for it (something about religion, I guess?). Hell of a premise, cast, and setting though. And points for boldness.

Mostly, everything in it seems designed to build and maintain suspense that carries us from scene to scene, a task it more than accomplishes.

Babylon is a movie that absolutely shouldn’t work, but objectively does, three hours and nine minutes that didn’t bore me for a single second. Instead, it sails, on the crest of a glorious wave of blood, sweat, tears, tits, shit, vomit, and piss. Damien Chazelle elevates Cinema by dragging it back to the gutter.

Dog attempts and mostly does a solid job walking a perilous line, being honest about and sympathetic to the concerns and inside jokes of veterans without licking boots or justifying endless war.

McKay’s style is both frustrating and refreshing, doing things other filmmakers should’ve done a long time ago but in his own, idiosyncratic manner.

The central flaw of Ocean’s 8 is that “people looking cool” isn’t much of a story. It’s a poster, maybe even a trailer, but not a story, and not a movie.

The Angel is funny as hell, outrageous without feeling sensational, visually beautiful, and immensely enjoyable as unpredictable eye candy. It’s one of those movies that’s so fun that it ends up feeling much shorter than it actually is.

To its credit, When You Finish Saving The World is only 85 minutes long, so even if it doesn’t exactly set the world on fire at least it doesn’t overstay its welcome. There was maybe something here but it feels a little undercooked.

It’s a wild concept, that offers both big laughs and big cringe in almost equal measure. I don’t know that I’ve ever seen a film vacillate so wildly between borderline unwatchable and irresistibly watchable.

As a storytelling exercise, Birds of Prey is mostly pretty bad, but aside from a sneaky wit and committed Margot Robbie, what it does have going for it is consistently spectacular stunts.

In Doctor Strange In The Multiverse Of Madness, Raimi seems to only be granted occasional cubes of autonomy, within which to shoot charmingly out-there set pieces with a characteristically bombastic score, and periodically remind us that he’s the guy who made Drag Me To Hell and Army Of Darkness.

Mary Queen of Scot’s characterizations are confused, its themes murky. Such that when we leave the theater our dominant impression is “boy, that sure was a story, huh?” Which is to say, a tale in which a lot of wild things happened but we’re not entirely sure what they meant.

That Goddard is so conversant with pop cinema tropes is both his greatest strength and his weakness.

It’s not that Hobbs & Shaw attracts dumbness so much as inspires it. You watch it with your mouth dangling half-open, chuckling like Beavis And Butthead, and that’s part of the appeal. Spectacle doesn’t need to be smart.

We seem to be doing the same old Aaron Sorkin thing, and in the absence of any meaningful expansion of his skill set, that thing has become defined by increasingly diminishing returns.

Mom And Dad feels like a concept that got pitched, sold, and shot without ever getting written. It’s premise and pantomime. It’s set-up, an hour of running and yelling, and the end.

Judy and Punch may not be as thought-provoking as it wants to be, but what it lacks in cultural critique it more than makes up for in escapism, eccentricity, and eye candy. It’s transporting, in every sense of the word, and it comes along just when we most seem to need it.

Godzilla Vs. Kong is entertainingly preposterous, but also overstuffed with plots that seem designed to involve an entire sub-universe of past and future monsters.

The Forgiven is the rare adult drama that doesn’t feel like a museum piece. It lives and breathes, it teases and provokes, the kind of movie that seems designed to be discussed and fought over — in a world where adults might still do such things.

It’s a film that seems to go to great pains describing the very specific niche that each character occupies, carefully crafted anecdotes defining attributes ultimately signifying nothing. Detailed information is given, then discarded. It’s almost an anti-movie.

Joker is a beautifully shot, wonderfully compelling movie that ends in horrific manner. That it’s initially so easy to love is exactly what makes it so capable of disturbing and nauseating us in the end; we couldn’t be queasy if we weren’t invested.

For the most part, Operation Finale is a good story, well told. Yet something about it isn’t entirely satisfying either. It deftly eschews the most simplistic takes, but what it offers in return — the banality of evil, essentially — isn’t quite groundbreaking either. Still, it’s more than worth it to watch Ben Kingsley and Oscar Isaac spar for a bit.

It Chapter 2 is like this rumbling ball of smooshed together fiction tropes — kids on bikes! bullies vs outcasts! conquering your fears! scary clowns! bad guys who drool! — that rapidly disintegrates as it speeds toward an ending. It’s the disintegration that makes it interesting (well, that and the competent staging and acting).

Waititi spends so much energy trying to convince us that this story is universal that he often loses what made it novel in the first place.

Pet Sematary is beautifully acted, suspensefully paced, competently staged, and overall is pretty successful at delivering that chilling sense of unease and redolent grossness that the best adaptations of Stephen King’s horror stories do. Yet its departures from the source material and from the previous, 1989 adaptation are lateral moves at best, and its capacity to ultimately deliver on the promise of its premise is middling — though not any more so than in the book or the previous adaptation.

The Laundromat doesn’t do a good enough job tying threads together.

It’s weird more in a desperate, humanity-pushed-to-its-breaking-point kind of way, like it had so many commercial requirements pressing on its artistic sensibilities that the whole thing popped like a zit.

To be fair, Cold Pursuit is rarely boring. You’re never particularly invested, but its shrill unpredictability is like a circus performance. It’s impressive the sheer amount of calories being burned despite the lack of believable characters or compelling situations.

Finch feels downright innovative, boldly trusting that Tom Hanks training a robot to take care of his dog in a post-cataclysm Earth is a sentiment sweet and humane enough to carry an entire movie.

Tag never transcends the basic fact of being the kind of movie with a slow-motion rap walk scene, and even when it’s decently funny and reasonably entertaining (which it usually is!), it remains ever constrained by the basic shticky irreality of the format.

The Devil All The Time is a lovingly-constructed quilt of interlocking insanity, about how the simple life is anything but simple and salt-of-the-earth folk are every bit as screwed up as debauched debutantes. You want to reminisce about the good ol’ days, kid? Well then, let’s peel away the postcard facade. The Devil All The Time is a masterpiece of dark Americana.

Yesterday isn’t really about the Beatles. It isn’t about art, or career, or cultural context, or the music business, and it’s only about “love” inasmuch as Hallmark cards and McMansion word art are about love. It isn’t really about anything.

Exploitation has always been Bay’s foremost skill, and in this era when movies have begun to seem chintzy and distinctly unglorious, Bay’s talents as a hype man and product pornographer seem oddly refreshing. If anyone was going to make a mid-budget action movie feel like the biggest, coolest, sexiest thing in the world, it was Michael Bay.

Where gangster and mafioso stories so often seem epic, taking the shape of classic rise-and-fall narratives, Arkansas is elusive and ephemeral. Its characters struggle to survive against a universe that doesn’t really care about them. It’s not the most escapist quarantine content, but there’s a simple beauty to it.

Double Tap isn’t a worthwhile sequel, especially after a decade, but it’s certainly a number two.

This Lion King remake isn’t a bad movie, it’s just… why? To paraphrase Dolly Parton, it took a lot of money to look this cheap.

It’s a toe-tapper, and Levy excels at this kind of upbeat, PG-friendly action rendered in major key. It looks great, and you can tell what’s happening — a bar most action movies fail to clear these days, including the most recent one, The Batman.

The “social commentary” feels exactly as derivative as the rest of the film, like someone artlessly smushing together imagery they’ve seen, a sort of uncanny Muzak of hip provocation written by a less coherent Bret Easton Ellis.

Beast feels slapdash and detached to the point of being disdainful. It offers the barest idea of a movie about Idris Elba fighting a lion and nothing more.

The film morphs into an action thriller in the final act, but by then I’d lost interest. It didn’t feel thrilling, it felt like a way to bring some resolution to a story that never quite finds its reason for existing.

God willing, this will be the last ever superhero team-up movie. I wouldn’t count on it though. Even when it’s a relative improvement over its predecessor, it’s still pop-culture slurry for babies.

Historical analysis aside, even if you’d parachuted into the theater from the early aughts and knew nothing of politics or the future, 12 Strong still wouldn’t be very good. In fact, the closest thing it has to a redeeming quality is that you can hate it irrespective of politics; it’s objectively bad.

It’s snappy, looks pretty, and moves along affably enough.

The idea of a movie about an Asian-American basketball prospect is compelling enough, but Boogie is also saddled with the baggage of seemingly everything writer/director Eddie Huang thinks is cool. Some of it fits, some of it doesn’t, and lots of times his attempts at a fresh angle come off achingly corny.

Despite some interesting wrinkles and a few jokes here and there, Dark Fate is what all Terminators since T2 have been to some extent: a little too reverent to T2 — not only about time travel but an attempt to perform it.

I can’t think of many less valuable experiences than sitting through some bored rich guy’s extended series of inside jokes and half-baked complaints about smartphones.

If anything, the trouble with Wrinkle is that you never really get a sense of DuVernay’s personal touch. In fact, it feels a lot like Brad Bird’s big budget, equally smarmy 2015 Disney film, Tomorrowland. Both attempt to be so broad and universal that they feel disconnected from anything human.

Generation Wealth is, as Greenfield surely intended, a valuable and necessary work of cultural anthropology, that entertains even as it horrifies. It’s an important watch that never feels like homework.

It’s incredibly difficult to pull off, this delicate dance between grounded enough but not mundane, yet Long Weekend, the unlikeliest of movies, does it shockingly well. The ending is satisfying but ambiguous enough to dream, ultimately ephemeral but with an enduring sense memory.

Halle Berry seems to have discovered that there are lots of stories in the world of MMA. Sadly it seems no one could convince her not to try to tell all of them at once.

Extremely Wicked‘s portrayal yawns with a sense of incompleteness.

Overall, there’s very little to complain about in Coming 2 America, a worthy sequel that does justice to the original without trying to recreate everything about it. It’s a winning, maximalist musical extravaganza.

Eternals is hard not to recommend solely on the grounds that it’s so flailingly bizarre. It’s odd to a degree that’s impossible to convey without spoilers. I need you to see it so I know that I’m not hallucinating.

Greed is solidly entertaining throughout, but its attempt to mix comedy, tragedy, reality, absurdity, exposé, and mockumentary… is maybe biting off a little more than it can chew.

The beauty of 80 for Brady is that it manages to communicate, entirely through construction and subtext, that Fonda, Tomlin, Moreno, and the gang, actually are too good for this.

The Spy Who Dumped Me‘s action is just so big and loud that it obliterates any quiet character moments or clever wordplay.

it’s a silly action comedy where the action is actually fun, the jokes mostly land, and neither detracts from the other. All in all a reasonably fun streamer.

It’s A-actors in a B-movie shot by competent craftsmen. Amazing what holding the camera steady can do, isn’t it? Simple pleasures delivered simply — there’s nothing wrong with that.

In the past, this kind of character, who abhors swear words but kills with obvious relish, would’ve been positioned as an interesting contrast. In The Equalizer 2 it just feels like unexamined orthodoxy. It feels like the symptom of a very American kind of brain sickness.

The strength of Eurovision is that it’s well-written enough that it might work even if it was neither a Will Ferrell vehicle nor a comedy, which isn’t normally true of Ferrell vehicles.

My Policeman does precious little exploring of the joyful side of this unconventional three-way relationship and lots of wallowing in the sadness of it all. And if I’m going to wallow, I’d at least like to have it feel like a fresh wallow. I never like to repeat a wallow. And My Policeman feels decidedly like an echo of wallows past.