Vince Mancini

There’s a gulf between Pacifiction‘s promise and the crushing burden it is to actually sit through — which is numbing and banal in a way that doesn’t inspire flowery prose. It mostly inspires curmudgeonly grumbling (foreshadowing…).

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 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 Son plays disturbingly like an obtuse memoir written by a deadbeat dad who, try as he might, can’t figure out why his clinically depressed son’s vibes are so bad.

The Hatchet Wielding Hitchhiker was smart to explore this subject and in many ways is a good start, but as it stands feels frustratingly incomplete. Sometimes maybe competing doc projects are a good thing.

M3GAN is a pretty pitch-perfect satire, of both parenting in the age of predatory technology, and of the tech industry itself. Both of which tend to pit convenience and luxury against mental health and a right to privacy.

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.

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 a technological grand slam and a thematic sacrifice bunt.

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.

Empire of Light, by and large, strikes me as one of those stories that maybe started out as a bit of a corny idea, the kernel of it something like this monologue, but in the course of writing it, the characters became real enough that they sort of took on a life of their own. Which is exactly what’s supposed to happen, at that point you can throw out the initial pitch. Empire of Light creates this beautiful relationship that defies all categorization.

It’s an imagery-first kind of film, and it delivers quite a few that are probably going to stick with me for a while.

It’s a perfectly-cooked cheeseburger of a movie, which isn’t trying to be foie gras seared on a hot rock over a bed of foraged botanicals, but in which every element — bun, patty, cheese, veg — is lovingly prepared, perfectly executed, and working together in perfect harmony.

The movie glows. And yet, something about this coming-of-age tale feels transparently self-preserving, trapped in an adolescent’s point of view. It offers a story about race where everyone gets off too easily, where it seems the most important thing a white person can do is to acknowledge that racism exists while carrying on.

If 1917 (and to some extent, War Horse) were stories of survival, gussied up with big technical gimmicks, All Quiet On The Western Front is an even more visually beautiful film that never lets you forget the main point about The Great War: that it was A Bad Idea That Ended Badly. Berger drives this point home studiously, meticulously, poetically, and by the end, a little repetitively.

Weird is constantly riding that line between too-stupid-to-be-funny and so-stupid-it’s-hilarious.

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.

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.

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.

It’s not that I especially expect my superhero movies to have coherent messages or good politics (though Black Adam does dangle that possibility, tantalizingly) it’s that Black Adam’s ambiguous function in the story feels not only un-crowd-pleasing but kind of cowardly.

The movie shouts things that should be subtext so loudly that what’s actually happening tends to get drowned out.

Amsterdam goes from wacky farce to preachy allegory before finally coming to rest as a sneakily profound riff on finding personal edification, just when it matters.

The cinematography looks great and the cast (Pugh, Styles, Pine, Nick Kroll, Kate Berlant, Kiki Lane…) are mostly acting their butts off. It’s all very alluring and sexy and intriguing right up until the point when it reveals that it has nothing to say.

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.

Marilyn Monroe was a confusing, alluring contradiction, and so, necessarily is Blonde, over reductive when it isn’t inscrutably impressionistic. But it’s also mesmerizing, hard to watch and impossible not to watch almost in equal measure, a somewhat guilty pleasure, compelling in spite of, partly because of, the fact that you don’t quite understand.

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

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.

Sure, the characters fight a lot (it is an action movie directed by a stunt guy, after all), and the fight work is consistently above average and sporadically funny, but they spend so much time talking about why they’re fighting, and whether they should fight that Bullet Train often times feels more like a yak-fest than an action movie

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.

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.

90% of the jokes in Me Time are just Kevin Hart doing an excessive act-out for a C+ bit, which will occasionally go on so long that they will, Baba Booey-like, circle around to being funny again through sheer commitment to tedium.

Usually when you overtly acknowledge the tropes and standard story beats in a movie like this, it’s for some purpose, some comment about what we like about or what it means to be a comic book movie. Samaritan is really none of that, it’s more like discount comic book movie slurry.

A lot of movies are funny, but very few are funny on a cellular level. Few announce themselves as something different from the very first frames. Even most good comedies are mostly built from familiar situations and people, but Funny Pages is that rare breed; bewildering and strange before its characters even begin speaking and projecting its inherent twistedness with every aspect of its construction.

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.

Beavis and Butt-Head Do The Universe feels not only like logical product, but something that should exist. In a weird way, Beavis and Butt-Head Do The Universe feels even more timely than their last movie. If that was a way to capitalize on the cartoon while its popularity was peaking, Mike Judge’s latest effort is a reminder of how comedy can be.

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.

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 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.

If you always had a vague sense of Wes Anderson’s real-life inspirations, watching Fire Of Love is like seeing them suddenly rack into focus. It’s like the Kraffts sprung directly from his psyche. And if Anderson’s twee bullshit never worked on you before, this time it just might, because this eccentric love story with the bittersweet ending is more than just a style choice.

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.

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

In Men, Garland has a lot of great little ideas, with brilliant performances and viscerally compelling imagery, but lacks one big idea to tie them all together.

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.

The Northman is Shakespeare, but it’s also a movie about muscular shirtless men growling at each other. For me, it was near to perfect.

What makes Everything Everywhere work is not that it’s zany, it’s that it actually finds a purpose for its zaniness, or least tries to. The Daniels are provocateurs, brilliant technical filmmakers. More importantly, they actually strive not to be full of shit. God bless them.

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.

Father Stu is exactly this kind of intriguing mix, of illuminating religious philosophy and utterly baffling narrative choices. It’s vaguely inspiring, slightly tedious to sit through, and ultimately unknowable, like any good Catholic sermon.

Deep Water is not only a refreshing throwback to the days of mid-budget thrillers aimed at adults, but perfect for at-home binging.

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.

Turning Red is fun and sweet and strange, and really, what more could you ask of it?

The Batman wants so badly to be hard boiled, to be “a vibe,” but it attempts to squeeze in so much that it feels frantic.

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.

Shut In is boring, inconsistent, imbued with some kind of inscrutable code, and above all lazy, a perfect reflection of the rightwing media ecosystem.

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.

Blacklight’s filmmakers seem to have spent a lot time trying to figure out why Neeson would have to bonk some heads, and not nearly enough time storyboarding and staging elaborate, gloriously executed head bonks.

Home Team is one of the most conceptually-strange cinematic ventures I’ve ever seen, an image management exercise disguised as a scruffy kids comedy.

To say that I was mildly disappointed in Jackass Forever is true. To say that I spent the entire movie screaming, stomping my feet, covering my face with my hands, and squealing with joy, and would’ve happily sat through another 90 minutes of it is also true.

I find myself at a bit of a loss when trying to explain exactly what about it had me so engaged, probably for the same reasons Julie can’t seem to decide on a career. The Worst Person In The World feels like life. And how do you sum up a life?

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

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 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.

Hand of God is a charming, frequently funny coming-of-age tale shot so exquisitely that it would make any Italian-American angry at his ancestors.

Don’t Look Up is a strong idea (with story credit to McKay and journalist David Sirota), and lots of the individual jokes work, but at times it gets so caught up trying to make fun of so many different things that it seems to lack an internal logic. Satire in and of itself isn’t quite a story.

Flaws aside, Gyllenhaal genuinely feels like a new voice as a storyteller, and not just an actor stretching, which is a rare thing.

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.

Benedetta is the rare, almost miraculous, really, two-hour-plus movie (131 minutes, to be precise) that only seems to get better in its second hour. The momentum builds and builds until the action comes to a glorious crescendo.

Licorice Pizza seems to further all of Paul Thomas Anderson’s pet themes while adding a personal twist, and at this early stage it’s hard to think of it as anything other than a masterpiece.

Baker’s indelible portrait has the natural rebelliousness of characters who refuse to perform the societal script they’ve been handed.

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.

King Richard is another kooky success story that never really interrogates what it means to be successful.

7 Prisoners refuses to cheat, almost to a fault. (It’s art, you’re allowed to cheat a little). That makes it slightly disappointing in the end, but not enough to undo what an adroit snapshot it is of the way exploitation thwarts organization and dulls its opposition.

Spencer treats Diana as if she was kidnapped into all this, being held against her will. It depicts her life as such a demeaning, excruciating, maddening spectacle that you wonder why she doesn’t just leave. That Diana was a prisoner is a perspective meant to flatter that actually flattens.

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.

Red Notice is content to merely mimic the rhythms and pacing of a fun movie the same way Ryan Reynolds has become adept at delivering lines that have the tone and cadence of jokes without the comedic value.

The French Dispatch feels like a confident and even vulnerable exploration of Anderson’s own psyche; it’s his best film in at least a decade.

It’s silly, thoroughly disposable, and a breezy 90 minutes long. What else could you ask for?

I’m not entirely certain I understand what Titane is, but I’m convinced that all movies could stand to be a little more like Titane.

It’s an immersive, transporting, intriguing, fully-realized world that we can enjoy spending time in without rating against our ideas of which characters should “win” in that world. I don’t know how this story plays out but for now I’m content to bask in the spice glow.

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.

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.

Vacation Friends isn’t exactly groundbreaking or revolutionary in its comedy — it does have a few stock situations and characters (the extended stylized drug scene, the disapproving father played by Bunny Colvin) — and one could argue that it doesn’t have much in the way of nutritional value. Yet it allows us to enjoy empty calories in a way not many movies of its ilk do, offering just enough to elevate the genre.

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.

The Protege‘s stunts are actually pretty good.

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

The beauty of Green Knight is that it’s so fully realized on every level — score, cinematography, production design, acting — that even when you don’t know entirely what Lowery is on about you can’t look away. It’s almost as if every individual shot has a narrative arc unto itself. It’s so compelling on a micro level that the “big picture” becomes irrelevant.

The beauty of Pig, the new Michael Sarnoski movie starring Nic Cage as a bedraggled truffle forager, is that while it is utterly bonkers, it’s not bonkers in any of the traditional ways that we’ve come to expect. It’s quietly bonkers, meditative and subdued, rather than loud and frenetic.

While Roadrunner is a love letter to Bourdain and a nostalgic watch for all of us who thought we saw something of ourselves in him, it’s also a comment on our inability to truly know anyone else. In that sense, it’s a fitting tribute to its subject, a man who tried assiduously not to present himself as someone who had all the answers.

As always, it’s impossible not to be impressed with Soderbergh’s ability to stage and shoot a scene, a talent he has historically put to use in some of my favorite stories (The Knick, for instance). But when he uses that talent to just sort of breeze through a rough draft story before flitting off to the next project, it’s a kind of disrespect to the subject.

Never before has a streaming release so capably evoked “Summer blockbuster.”

The plot makes you study each frame intently, and the execution of each shot is so effective that your eyes never get bored. It’s just fundamentally sound, meat-and-potatoes filmmaking.

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

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.

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.

If Without Remorse has any value at all, it’s as a headscratcher. You know it doesn’t work, but what were they attempting here?

Something about Mortal Kombat‘s total lack of pretense towards nutritional value is weirdly refreshing.

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.

Goofiness and occasional sub-par acting is forgivable in YA space fiction. Less acceptable is the consistent disrespect and disregard Voyagers shows toward its own characters and premise. If the eternal question is “what did you want this movie to be?” Voyagers’ consistent, unmistakable response is “sort of like other movies.”

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

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.

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 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.

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.

It’s a movie that’s been in the oven forever yet still comes out feeling half baked. Still, it’s hard not to sense the kernel of something good here. Chaos Walking is a bit like a house with “good bones.” The framework for something beautiful is there, but you’ll have to squint to see it amidst the cracked windows and trash-strewn lawn.

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.

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.

The Father is brilliantly structured and executed, but in the end it’s just a cleverly constructed way to depict the mundane. It never finds that level of the fantastic or allows for the kind of magical thinking necessary to escape its dreary reality. Ultimately it wallows in the pathetic. Who needs this?

White Tiger subverts expectations right up until the very end, self-consciously commenting on what it doesn’t do as much as what it does. In that way White Tiger allows other stories to define it maybe more than it should.

Cahill is so effective at blurring the lines and making both “realities” feel equally plausible that it’s hard not to feel your own reality attenuating as you watch it. Owen Wilson and Salma Hayek, something of an odd couple on paper, are also perfectly cast.

We know what we’re getting with this particular genre, and The Marksman, starring Neeson as a Texas rancher protecting a young boy from drug cartels, is a perfectly adequate exercise in providing it. If it lacks some of the panache and grindhouse appeal of previous installments, it also avoids the xenophobia and general mean-spiritedness.

Some Kind Of Heaven is a surreal, visually sublime slice of life that offers escapism and subverts it in the same breath, an enduring portrait of a particular subculture the likes of which I haven’t seen probably since Wildwood, NJ. I spent virtually the entire 83 minutes laughing, slapping my forehead, or both.

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

Sylvie’s Love is heartbreaking and heart melting in almost equal measure, a film about professional disappointment and the importance of timing as much as it’s about love. I haven’t been so emotionally wrecked sitting alone at a festival movie since Brooklyn. Sylvie’s Love is damn near perfect

It’s a conceptual joke in search of actual jokes. Like a C- term paper delivered on time, the most impressive thing about Fatman is that it’s finished.

Through its personal approach and creative structure, Dick Johnson Is Dead manages to make reckoning with a loved one’s mortality not just entertaining, but oddly uplifting. The empathy and humanity it applies to death make it, above all else, life-affirming.

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.

In the end, the timeliness of 2067’s premise is matched only by the clunkiness of its execution.

It offers, mainly, the vague sense that this is all supposed to be a fresh and intriguing way of telling a story. And this intrigue is meant to be enough for us not to mind that the characters are all ciphers performing a series of illusory bits and homages amidst a frozen wasteland. This dearth of recognizable humanity and situations made me feel, presumably Kaufman-like, trapped inside my own head, both lonely and bored.

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

Oddly, the most compelling part of Unhinged is seeing just how much mayhem director Derrick Borte and writer Carl Ellsworth can squeeze out of this most mundane of premises.

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

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

Dare To Dream delivers The Secret‘s philosophy in classic Nicholas Sparks movie format, complete with deferred scholarships, single mothers finding love, and copious Spanish moss.

The smartest thing Eric Bress did in Ghosts of War was to cast Billy Zane, and the dumbest thing he did was keeping Billy Zane off screen for 90% of the movie.

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

Palm Springs is the perfect kind of art-comedy. It comes on like a brilliantly silly little lark and eventually lands on you like a ton of bricks.

Babyteeth, from director Shannon Murphy and writer Rita Kalnejais, always keeps us half a step off balance. Their film has that a sense of casual naughtiness, a straightforward love of innocent mischief common to the best Australian movies, which in this case serves to leaven the central tragedy.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

Painstaking subjectivity maybe isn’t the prize it seems when the subject is syphilitic, incontinent, and senile. Context is not the enemy.

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.

Extraction is constant, hyper-stylized murders and maimings, shot clearly and intelligently without too much unnecessary plot. It’s exactly what I’d been missing about action movies.

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.

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

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.

Movies that make you think are great, but most of our finest filmmakers attempt that (even sometimes when they shouldn’t). With Leigh Whannell, we have a hyper-competent craftsman who seems like he’d rather make us shit our pants. It’s nice.

Onward is a perfectly fine movie made up of elements of Guardians of the Galaxy, Zootopia, Coco, Wall E, and assorted other Disney products that it doesn’t employ quite as well. Your kids probably won’t notice, but you will.

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

Bloodshot‘s bad composition doesn’t give us enough space to appreciate its cleverest conceits. It trades lucid composition for “emotional truth,” but mostly it conveys the emotion of someone throwing energy drinks at your head.

Portrait of a Lady on Fire doesn’t shout at you. It whispers gently from the porch of another house, leaving its message to be carried on the breeze.

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.

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.

From the very beginning of Angel Is Fallen, the camera is far too close to everyone’s faces while the frame jiggles slightly and parts of it cycle in and out of focus as if the action is happening down on the field and we’re watching it from the nosebleed seats through a telescope. Is this an artistic choice or a logistical compromise? Either way, it sucks.

“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.

In a lot of ways, Child’s Play seems like a good idea that the people involved didn’t have either the time or the talent to execute properly.

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.

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

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.

Once Upon A Time may be a more languid journey than usual, but it gets to a familiar place eventually. In a way Tarantino has turned himself into the kind of Spaghetti Western anti-hero that’s always obsessed him — flawed but ultimately triumphant. I’m still happy to be along for the ride.

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

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.

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.

Some of the men’s fancies are beautifully visualized (including what I will describe only as an extremely vaginal apparition), but they remain just that — fancies. It’s never clear that what’s happening in the men’s wizened heads alters the world outside it.

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

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

Honey Boy crystallizes everything Shia Labeouf’s performance art persona from 2009 until now seemed to be trying to say: that authenticity and authorship are dull considerations compared to insight and emotional truth.

It’s a remarkable work of feral filmmaking that makes everything else feel domesticated by comparison.

Richard Jewell is ultimately a character assassination that rests on hackneyed narratives and lazy assumptions. Which makes it exactly the kind of thing it thinks it’s railing against.

1917 is a movie’s movie, more showpiece than insight, a kind of flashy sizzle reel of The Great War’s horrors. It will rattle your speakers but probably not your soul. Nothing wrong with that, but better to know going in.

Dolemite Is My Name is escapism, but it’s also not mindless escapism.

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.

It’s the rare riff on Shakespeare that actually feels like a living story and not something to be tacked to the wall like a tapestry.

Suffice it to say, there’s very little flash to Little Women and a whole lot substance. It doesn’t scream what it is. It nurtures our appreciation gradually so that when we finally realize that we’re truly in love, it feels that much sweeter. It’s one of the most successful adaptations I’ve seen in a long time.

Mostly it’s just a joy to watch these two actors face off in front of grand tapestries and stunning frescos. Two Popes has a gentle but winning sense of humor, and the two make an adorable couple.

It’s an impressive movie in many ways, dizzyingly complex and intensely brainy, but if you don’t buy into the complex plot and its many (MANY) twists, they tend to be more tiresome than exhilarating. It’s a loving, labyrinthine homage to a genre I’m not sure deserves it.

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.

At times, watching Nic Cage over emote every single line and bad guys get iced by killer monkeys is as sublime as it sounds.

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.

Parasite doesn’t attempt to solve the world’s problems, or even to entirely explain them. It’s a woolly meditation from one of our woolliest meditators. Bong Joon-ho cements his place as one of the greats.

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.

The Death Of Dick Long is a fantastic movie but also a wonderful lesson in storytelling. Every person believes deep down that they’re the hero of their own story. Treating them that way, as people and not punchlines, paradoxically makes for much better punchlines.

Can a movie be simultaneously infuriating and inspiring? Ad Astra (“to the stars” in Latin, because the kids love Latin) is director James Gray’s biggest, boldest, most ambitious and epic film to date, and easily his best. And yet… you know how some filmmakers seem simpático and others just rub you the wrong way? Gray is the latter for me.

Hustlers is solid, with fantastic performances, but it’s so similar to so many scam movies that came before it that it suffers a little from the expectation that it will go further.

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

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).

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.

Every shot in Midsommar is such a feast for the senses that you’re happy to go wherever it takes you — a sunshine-and-flowers-filled waking nightmare.

Toy Story 4 works overtime to find the humanity in all its characters, even the scary ones, despite the fact that it exists in a world of sentient toys and anthropomorphic garbage. That is not only endearingly sweet, but kind of wild.

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.

Booksmart’s version of specificity mostly feels like old tropes sporting new stickers. It seems to take place in this weird bubble, where everyone is sexy and Yale-bound and achingly cool (even its supposedly uncool protagonist is the class president). That it never really acknowledges this makes you wonder if the filmmakers know it exists.

Exuberantly gross and proudly ridiculous, this Hellboy feels like the picture Glenn Danzig sees in his head when he doodles in his notebook.

Little would’ve required Oscar-caliber writing and a once-in-a-lifetime child actor to pull off, and it just doesn’t have those. It has Regina Hall but it can’t use her.

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 Highwaymen seems to want to be reactionary but comes off merely crotchety.

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.

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.

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

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

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.

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.

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.

Its power is in the way it says that injustice isn’t out of place in a heartwarming family drama; it’s part and parcel to these characters’ experience, to being black in America. Like the blues, Beale Street can soothe even as it tells a disturbing story. It’s easily one of the best of the year.

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

If you scratch the surface, Buster Scruggs gets to the root of what the Coen Brothers’ work is about, and what it’s always been about.

Green Book certainly paints a rosy picture of race relations, but ultimately I don’t think its little white lies are a bad thing. Like my father did with me, it’s telling us a story that makes our grandfathers seem better than they probably were. But it does so as an example of how we should be, as an aspirational ideal that maybe we’ll live up to one day even if we didn’t yesterday.

A lean heist movie with this cast could’ve been an incredible thing, and the performances alone keep Widows from ever being too boring. But the story got away from them on this one. A movie that’s about too much ends up being about nothing.

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 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.

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.

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

It’s not quite horror, crime, or comedy — it really just is “fantastic,” in every sense of the word.

Some movies provoke and challenge, others are just fun as hell. The World Is Yours is firmly among the latter, feeling “Hollywood” in all the best ways, though it’s also sneaky smart. If you have any friends that hate arthouse movies and refuse to read subtitles, this is the movie to convert them.

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.

It’s not the kind of film you watch waiting for “the answer.” Saulnier isn’t going to solve the equation for you in Hold The Dark. But he is going to kick your ass.

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.

Searching has a big performance and a big gimmick, and it’s hard to say which is the bigger discovery.

Gleefully crafted and full of memorable shots.

Happytime Murders isn’t the funniest or the smartest movie I’ve ever seen, but I forgive it because it isn’t trying that hard. At least, joke-wise. There’s something beautiful about the level of craft that goes into just one puppet, that in many cases ends up appearing in a single, one-off joke about pubic lice.

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.

Crazy Rich Asians is just really easy to watch. It’s formulaic, but doesn’t cheat; has insanely low stakes, but transparently so. It’s a kitschy pop song done very well.

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

As relatively weak as the CGI is, The Meg is brilliant at giving its dopey characters consistently entertaining dialogue and striking the perfect balance of clever/stupid without being overly self-aware.

Long on set up and leaden dialogue, short on resolution, The Darkest Minds is set in an apocalyptic future where teen movies no longer have endings. Oh, wait that’s the present.

In BlacKkKlansman you sense Lee’s passion more than his technique. In a welcome surprise, it’s also funny. It’s easily Lee’s most crowd-pleasing movie in years, almost to a fault.

Mission Impossible: Fallout is not a triumph of literal realism, orderly plotting, or restraint, but it’s proof that thoughtful execution, comedic timing, and a true moral center count for much more.

Blindspotting excels at capturing a feeling and expressing it with style and kitsch, but there are times when you wonder what new insight they’re offering beyond the rhymes.

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.

Puzzle is one of those rare movies whose acting is so good it elevates a mediocre story.

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

A movie with this strong of a message can easily come off preachy, self-righteous, and didactic, but Riley’s sense of humor and flair for absurdity save it from any of that. Boots Riley feels compelled to say but doesn’t presume to know. He has a way of dreaming rather than grandstanding, of pondering rather than prescribing.

Eighth Grade is both a stunning achievement in cinematic veracity and maybe not the best watch for anyone who’s spent their adult life trying to forget middle school. It’s so traumatic and awkward and embarrassing that there were times I wanted to retreat back inside my own body.

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.

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 still has the scary masks and jump-scares, but whether through its creators’ cleverness or current events, it is now disturbing on a much deeper level. The social commentary no longer feels like fake sloganeering.

Gotti is technically inept, where every scene feels like a disconnected sizzle reel for a different movie than the previous one, but the fascinating thing it about is less what it fails to do than what it’s trying to do.

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 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.

First Reformed is bleak and bone dry, a little self-indulgent, and it screams neither “fun” nor “production values.” It is the opposite of a “romp.” But damned if it doesn’t stay with you.

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.

Even on a technical level Breaking In is shockingly inept.

In hitting so many bullet points from the boardroom presentation justifying its existence, it’s a wonder that Life of the Party manages to work in anything personal or natural at all. And it does, which is a testament to the talent of the people involved (McCarthy, Gillian Jacobs, and Maya Rudolph especially). I just wish I could see them in a movie that wasn’t trying to be everything to everyone.

The Tully character is a perfect outlet for Cody’s writing. One of Cody’s most charming attributes is her flair for small wisdoms. There’s some sneaky trenchant life analysis happening throughout Tully, which is what keeps the every day family stuff from feeling mundane or self-indulgent.

The remake has the right tone, an interesting angle, a delightful supporting cast, and Anna Faris acts her butt off, but there are times it feels like she’s doing it opposite an upturned broom.

I Free Pretty is surprisingly resonant for a high concept light comedy, offering all the catharsis of watching someone truly discover herself and own it, as well as the awkwardness and pain of watching someone needlessly tear herself down and self-sabotage.

Super Troopers 2 is broad and hammy, like a lot of comedy, but unlike a lot, it makes little pretense to realism. It’s proud dad humor. It pokes you in the ribs enough times that the obnoxiousness eventually takes on a weird charm.

It’s still saccharine, overwrought, blandly acted, painfully earnest, and uber-dramatic, and constantly staring longingly at the night sky and bodies of water for some reason, but… teen romance is all of those things. It fits. Maybe the Sparks formula isn’t so bad as long as Sparks himself isn’t involved.

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.

Few directors are better at endings, at tying things up in a neat little bow like Wes Anderson, and Isle of Dogs, like many of his movies, ends strongly enough that you’ll forgive a little dragging, a bit of narrative floundering, throughout the middle section.

The action set pieces are hit and miss, mostly not the worst thing I’ve ever seen, and if there’s one thing Tomb Raider is actually good at, it’s giving death more gravity than you usually see in these kinds of movies, where faceless henchmen are dispatched with nary a second thought. For the most part, though, Tomb Raider is content to be the kind of movie that reminds you of other movies without differentiating itself from them.

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.

Roth and Carnahan’s motivations here remain murky and Death Wish never justifies its existence. Divorced of context, it’s like sauce and tomato without the burger.

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.

It proudly exists on a visceral, sub-verbal level; that’s part of the magic of it. It’s a movie that’s easy to spoil and hard to describe, where mystery is most of the point and interpretation tends to cheapen. Which is to say: just go see it.

It’s content to be what it is — a bit of silliness, really. It’s an excuse for goofy slapstick and wordplay. And it’s the rare light fare that can be light without feeling like chintzy gift shop pandering.

Fifty Shades Freed is meant to make us believe that a matching tea towel marriage doesn’t preclude shirtless Fabio romance novel cover sex, but everything is so catalog-ready and scrubbed free of humanity that it actually does the opposite.

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.

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.

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.

Only The Brave (or, The Granite Mountain Hot Shots, the vastly superior title by which it was originally known), feels like the world’s best two-hour beer and/or pick-up truck commercial, and I mean that as a compliment.

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.