Will Leitch

The movie is exhausting, but when we’re talking about the DCEU, we have been the victims of far worse. The movie bores you but, perhaps newest for this universe, it does not drain your will to live. One takes progress where one can find it.

The movie is tougher, and more rigorous, and more interested in the hard work of healing than empty slogans. It is true to the spirit of Mr. Rogers without every deifying him. I bet he would have loved it.

When you turn those kids into adults, they lose not just most of their wonder, they lose most of their interest. They’re just some people in a horror movie trying not to get killed. And we have seen that many, many times before.

The greatest achievement Tarantino pulls off here is, by pure force, to yank this era back to life, to recreate it and revive it as if driven by some sort of religious mania.

This is a universally powerful story, with terrific songs and countless funny and fascinating supporting characters. It’s a classic of performance and sensation. This version, seemingly by design—like that was the damned plan all along—drains every bit of life from it … in order to make it more “realistic.”

The first thing to note about Toy Story 4 is that it is extremely funny: I’d argue it’s the most consistently comedic of the entire series

It turns out, after the third attempt to recapture the magic of the first film, that the Men in Black universe is not a particularly compelling one after all. Probably time to move onto something else. They’re all tapped out here.

We’ve seen a lot of this before, though the ’90s setting is a nice twist and provides a soundtrack that will prove consistently pleasing to any aging Gen Xer. But it’s Larsen who gives this weight and emotional depth.

This is Shyamalan at his worst, a speechifying, moralizing scold who wants your adoration but doesn’t want to put in the effort, or himself at risk, to earn it.

Where The Big Short was bold and enlightening, this is just well-trodden ground, trod over once again in a fashion that feels decreasingly novel.

This movie isn’t just about America, or the collective power of the human imagination, or one man’s heroism, or one woman’s strength in his absence. It is about how being human can mean cruelty and tragedy and loss and unimaginable pain … and how that’s still not enough to defeat us, not by a long shot.

As moving as the families’ recoveries can be, and as earnest as Greengrass is at trying to honor their stories, there is an undeniable waft of the familiar in his dramatization of their difficulties. Greengrass hasn’t found a new spin on this sort of material. You admire the resilience, but I’m not sure Greengrass makes you feel it.

The Old Man and the Gun is a jaunty joyride, a valedictory for a beloved American icon and a giddy true story. But Lowery ties it all together at the end: It’s a story about how the years go by, and who we are. It’s a story about all of us.

The movie is a shameless, relentless wreck.

What’s immediately surprising and dispiriting about The Happytime Murders is how haphazard the actual puppets are. They aren’t inventively or cleverly put together, and they’re sort of repulsive in a way that’s less “edgy” and more “consistently unpleasant to look at.”

This movie is unbalanced and constantly fluctuating and as uneven as you’d expect from Spike Lee, but this time that works for the film rather than against. There’s a nationwide emergency, and Spike Lee, with BlacKkKlansman is screaming in your face for action at every turn.

Sorry to Bother You has so many ideas busting out of every seam, so much ambition, so much it so urgently wants to say, that it feels almost churlish to point out that the movie ends up careening gloriously out of control.

The movie’s action is no-nonsense, no-frills explosions and machine gun stuff, and it lacks the soaring vision of Villeneuve; Sollima is much more of a plunge-forward linear filmmaker. That approach has its advantages, though, and while I wouldn’t have wanted Sollima to try to tackle some of the thornier ethical issues of the first film, he’s more than capable of rampaging through and past them here.

The movie is ultimately harmless, trivial puffery that vanishes from your brain as quickly as you experience it.

The primary fascination of Won’t You Be My Neighbor? lives when it stands outside this man and stares at him, unfathomably, wondering what in the world must have made him tick. The film tries to do more than that, with varying levels of success, but that’s the core: Who is this guy?

Deadpool 2 is at its best when it cheerfully doesn’t give a shit. The more it cared, the less I did.

The movie keeps trying the bank shot of propping up its crazed premise while its lead actress, gamely, almost bravely, tries to undercut it. It never quite makes it, but you appreciate how hard it, and she, tries.

This is a ridiculous movie without much desire or energy to get too ridiculous.

I don’t know how he does it, or for that matter why, but Spielberg turns Ready Player One into something that’s both nostalgic and new, something impersonal yet uniquely his. It is not one of his better movies; it’s probably not even in the top half. It’s way too long and packed with too much extra junk. It is still, somehow, a gas.

There are movies that fail because they are misguided, or because their heart isn’t in the right place. This movie wants to be special, which makes the fact it is such a lumpy, clumsy mess all the more frustrating. You root for this movie, and the movie tries to go a long way on that good will. It doesn’t make it far.

This is a film that wants to make you feel as confused and terrified as the characters you’re watching. In this, it is unquestionably successful.

The movie has its moments. But Thor wrestling with the Hulk is more realistic and, frankly, more relevant to the current facts on the ground.

Phantom Thread gets under your skin. On the surface, it is proper and refined and exquisite. But underneath, messy, angry real life keeps bubbling up, fervent and eager to escape. At last, it bursts through the seams. It always does.

For all the technical achievement on display, as impressive as it is that you could recast a main role in so short amount of time, All the Money in the World is disjointed and frazzled.

The movie is smart, stirring and deeply exciting, but more than anything, it is surprising. This is a Star Wars movie that plays with your assumptions and upends them, but it never betrays the story, characters and ethos at the series’ core. It expands the idea of what a Star Wars movie can be. It’ll knock you over.

The real problem with The Snowman is that no one involved seems to understand how movies work. There is no setup, no character development, no suspense, no mystery, no suspects, no payoff.

The Mountain Between Us is Grade-D bunkum with the good fortune to have actors working their hardest to sell it like Casablanca.

Robinson is so eager to please that she’s a little too on-the-nose sometimes; she’s definitely not subtle. But that’s okay, too, because she allows us to spend time with these people, and smart, flawed, lovable people, as they try to peel apart the layers of their lives and then reconstruct themselves.

For all its supposed irreverence, the movie feels product-tested to the moon; there isn’t a single shot that isn’t trying to sell you something. The movie also has some of the creeping bro grossness of some of Vaughn’s other films.

Aronofsky can be a moving, almost disorienting stylist, but he’s all blunt force trauma here.

It occasionally reminds you of how awful it can be a kid, and It also occasionally makes you jump out of your chair. But it never figures out how to do both at the same time.

Soderbergh has been an indie wunderkind, an anarchic prankster, a self-sabotaging bomb thrower, even a studio hack. Logan Lucky isn’t the best movie he’s ever made, but it’s pointing him a most fascinating new direction—the auteur as compulsive entertainer. He’s well on his way.

The Glass Castle is a two-hour fight between a messy, sad, angry real-life family story and a Hollywood movie that keeps trying to soften all the edges and turn the tale into something “inspirational.”

You won’t find much of this particularly new or enlightening. It’s a little surprising, considering how much thought Leitch (no relation, by the way) has put into the action sequences, how perfunctory and even lackadaisical the rest of the film is.

It’s an overwhelming horror movie—maybe a little too overwhelming.

Valerian wants to be weird and sexy but just won’t let itself.

It takes everything Nolan does well and everything he doesn’t, everything he fights against and everything he embraces, everything great and terrible about him, and streamlines it, focuses it, until it’s pure Nolan, straight into your veins. It’s the most Christopher Nolan film imaginable. It also might just be his best one.

This movie is all about sensation, about grooving on the very specific but unquestionably catchy hook Wright has laid down for you.

All the signature Bay Movements are here, the slow-motion hero shots, the scale so vast that even planets look small and modest, the aggressively dorky jokes, but they all have a perfunctory feel, like even Bay couldn’t muster up much enthusiasm this time.

The movie is cluttered, disorganized, choppy, obvious and, at the end of the day, not even energetic enough to work up much frustration about.