Vince Mancini

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.

Candyman is certainly elevated in terms of acting and of composition (with fittingly spooky shots of the Chicago skyline), it was just hard to appreciate much of the action on a visceral level.

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

Miss Juneteenth is a promising debut feature in a lot of ways, but like a lot of tweener indies, it has trouble transcending its own pitch.

There’s a lot of beauty in First Cow, I just wish I could turn the volume up a little.

Gleefully crafted and full of memorable shots.

The vague title is a tell. There’s the general tone of uncovering something shocking and nefarious, but Bad Education is far more interesting when it’s sympathetic toward its stated villains.

Ever the canny salesman, The Fabelmans is mostly a clever mix of things the audience has seen and expects, with enough new to tantalize without scaring anyone off. It’s nice to see Spielberg finally giving us a bit of himself, even if it could be more.

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.

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.

Probably the most notable thing Infinity Pool does is solidify Mia Goth’s position as the undisputed scream queen of arthouse horror. Goth could never be accused of not “going for it,” and just like in Pearl, she consistently steals scenes in freaky and unexpected ways, sans visible eyebrows. It’s not quite enough to make Infinity Pool anything approaching great, but it’s enough to make it watchable.

The Protege‘s stunts are actually pretty good.

A pleasant enough and consistently chuckle-worthy comedy while it lasts that could maybe use one or two more ingredients.

It ends up being pleasant enough and occasionally pretty funny but not quite a romp.

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.

Mile 22 is such a freakish chimera of disparate genre influences that it’s kind of fascinating.

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.

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.

This is a movie that’s just good enough at a handful of things without really being great at any one. The who’s-going-to-live, who’s-going-to-die of it is compelling enough, though never quite white knuckle intense. And while there is some thematic heft, it’s never explored quite deeply enough to leave you thinking about it after you leave the theater. The acting is solid from top to bottom, if never quite delicious.

What started as this slightly subversive send-up eventually descends into the usual convoluted savin’-the-world nonsense.

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.

This movie is the product of truly deranged minds. It’s a must-see.

While I cannot resist an hour plus of delightful Sam Jacksonian shit talk, neither can I in good conscience recommend you staying for the entirety of this film.

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

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

“Fred Durst and John Travolta team up to ineptly recreate Big Fan” is a compelling pitch, perhaps the most compelling pitch, and the movie itself mostly delivers on the kind of train wreck absurdism that it promises.

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.

Just when you think Barbarian can’t get any sillier or further from the promise of its intriguing premise, it does, in a way I had to sort of begrudgingly respect. It feels like Zach Cregger really had something here and couldn’t quite figure out what to do with it and then just started flailing. But that flailing is so transparent and unabashed that it’s almost a kind of performance art.