William Bibbiani

What a delightful discovery this movie is, and what an incredible collection of impeccable performances. Ahn’s film finds the drama in the intentionally quiet life of introverts and lulls his audience into peaceful, wise, contented security.

Ruben Brandt, Collector is a wonderful heist film, a thrilling action-adventure, a gorgeous visual feast, and an intriguing look at an artist whose greatest talent is recognizing the value of the art inside others.

The cynicism of Donnybrook is overpowering, but unfocused. It’s easy to see why some people would react strongly to its ugly tale of misery and violence, and yet without context and contrast, without making statements beyond “the world sure does suck,” Sutton’s film feels frustratingly hollow. It makes an impact but leaves no impression.

Although it’s almost too much story, too much humor, and too many ideas for one movie to contain, the breathlessness of Happy Death Day 2U is irresistible. This is one frightfully clever sequel that audiences will want to revisit again… and again… and again… and again… and again…

The Prodigy may offer some shocks to those susceptible to this genre, or who have never seen it before, but to horror fans it will probably seem unremarkable and even bland.

Alita: Battle Angel is Robert Rodriguez’s best film in many years. It’s an ambitious, impressive, visually spectacular production with great performances that make its strange world seem real.

The LEGO Movie 2 isn’t quite as funny or as brilliantly executed as the original, but it’s an ambitious, likable sequel. Kids will enjoy it and adults will appreciate that the filmmakers took it seriously, and tried to say something meaningful. Just don’t think about it too much, because the LEGO universe is often weird and confusing.

Serenity is a twist in search of a movie, a film noir in search of a purpose, and a great cast in search of better material.

Anna and the Apocalypse is a delightful Christmas/horror/comedy/musical hybrid, with a great cast, entertaining gore and a storyline that’s easy to take seriously… even though it’s fundamentally absurd.

It’s a movie about escape rooms that literally kill you, and if you’re willing to buy into that premise, it’s about as good as a movie with that premise could probably be. So, hey, 2019 is looking up.

The lazy gags, wasted supporting cast and unfocused writing make the film an unfunny chore, which evokes but doesn't come close to their earlier comedic outings.

Vice is a funny and vicious political commentary, revealing in clear, thrilling detail a man whom filmmaker Adam McKay considers one of the most insidious and dangerous political figures of the last fifty years. But that viciousness also makes Vice one-sided, even reductive.

It’s a weird and wonderful superhero adventure that strives — and almost succeeds — to be the most epic superhero movie ever made.

Bumblebee is, again and easily, the best “Transformers” movie. Heck, it’s probably the only genuinely good “Transformers” movie, with nary a caveat to be found. But it’s also a lively and earnest 1980s nostalgia trip, made with affection for the era and its characters and its soundtracks and its storytelling styles and, yes, even its toys.

It’s an overpowering world of steampunk delights, almost Miyazakian in its presentation. It’s hard to complain about a path being well-worn when all the sights will make your eyes pop.

It lacks character, it lacks morbidity, it lacks subtext, it lacks suspense. It just kinda lays there like Hannah, but without any of her sinister magic.

If Jennifer Westcott’s animated kids’ movie Elliot the Littlest Reindeer was a Christmas gift, it’d be the toothbrush at the bottom of your stocking. It’s well-intentioned, and you might get some use out of it, but let’s just pray it’s not the highlight of your holiday season.

It’s incredibly thrilling to watch, impressively emotional throughout, and easily the best Spider-Man movie since “Spider-Man 2.”

It’s a straightforward retelling with a confusing design philosophy, disappointing action sequences, weak storytelling and a cast which clearly deserved better material.

Green Book lacks the depth it aspires to, and only works on a very superficial level. Viggo Mortensen and Mahershala Ali give exceptional performances but this message movie fumbles its message.

Widows is so severe and reserved a picture that it never quite works as a thriller, but it’s so mired in conventional thriller storytelling that it never completely works as a serious drama either. But there’s no denying the power of that cast and the particular vision of McQueen, who turns Widows into something truly distinctive… if not necessarily effective.

Instant Family is a decent, involving, endearing story, with funny performances and heartfelt, entirely earned dramatic crescendoes.

If Overlord was a video game, it would be a great one. It just happens to be a movie, and it’s a great one of those too. It hits all old-school genre tropes so hard that they make new noises, and infuses cheesy grindhouse thrills with all the “you are there” intensity of a great interactive experience.

Few filmmakers are as playfully cynical as the Coens, and in The Ballad of Buster Scruggs they haven’t just made a funny, sentimental, exciting and blistering western, they’ve also unlocked their entire filmography for anyone who may have missed the connections before. And there’s no going back now. It’s the Coen Bros.’ world, and good luck to anyone who lives there.

The Crimes of Grindelwald probably had enough plot to drive a four-hour mini-series, but even so, what we get is often absorbing and grand. The sense that this magical world is actually, well, fantastic is finally back in the series.

Uniquely violent, stylish, and engaging, The Night Comes For Us is an exciting prospect that delivers on all fronts.

Audiences looking for quality stories about faith and patriotism will find Indivisible to be a thoughtful and satisfying motion picture. Although it never reaches the emotional and cinematic zeniths that might make it great, it does what it sets out to do, by offering hope and guidance to audience members who need it. And that’s kinda great in itself.

Luca Guadagnino’s Suspiria is an interesting intellectual exercise, too ambitious to be ignored yet too overbearing to be enjoyed. Despite moments of genuine terror the film is less interesting in being scary than it is in humanizing what scares us, but once we know more about the witches in Suspiria, the less intriguing they are.

The Girl in the Spider’s Web is such an absorbing airplane novel of a movie that you half expect to walk out of the theater and into O’Hare International. Your flight was on time, and the turbulence was totally badass.

Stan & Ollie muddles up the history a bit, as all biopics do, but it’s a film without any meaningful flaws. Every character is wonderfully realized, every performance is spectacular. You’ll laugh all the way through, you’ll cry by the end, and you’ll see the brilliance of Laurel & Hardy come back to life via the very same cinematic magic that made them legends in the first place.

A film that could have been taken seriously as a drama — a politically one-sided but nonetheless competent drama — devolves into ghoulish sideshow grotesquery.

This isn’t a glorious rebirth, it’s a functional facsimile, and it’s a wholly satisfying piece of slasher entertainment regardless.

It may not be a great movie, but Timotheé Chalamet delivers a performance so vibrant that it almost rubs off on everything else, and he’s matched in every scene by Steve Carell, Maura Tierney and Amy Ryan.

As directed by Ari Sendal (“The Duff”), the film keeps its low-key, harmless energy at a steady simmer. Every once in a while a joke is funnier than you might expect, or a monster looks surprisingly spooky, but overall this is a safe, by the numbers Halloween family film.

The imagery is creepy and the pacing is brisk, but the story is a faded carbon copy of other, better serial killer thrillers, and the new additions to the Hellraiser mythology rob the Cenobites of their deviant allure and otherworldly menace.

The film has a stirring emotional honesty, and an impressive intelligence about its subject matter. It’s a film that may one day be required viewing for adolescents, and it might just change them the way that these events change its protagonist.

It’s in love with its location and couldn’t care less about the characters. Even the kills are rote disappointments, at least by slasher-enthusiast standards.

Bad Times at the El Royale is vibrant motion picture, in a way few films are nowadays. One might even call it indulgent, although “decadent” is probably more accurate.

The Oath is a film of its time, and that immediacy is both its strength and its downfall.

The Sisters Brothers is almost as aimless as its title characters, but it's worth the journey. John C. Reilly and Joaquin Phoenix shine as wild west hitmen who are just smart enough to know they should be smarter, whose quest leads them in unexpected, funny, and surprisingly emotional directions.

The House With a Clock in Its Walls is easily Eli Roth’s best motion picture, and that’s not an attempt to damn the film with faint praise. It’s a spooky and amusing piece of family-friendly Halloween cinema, sharply produced and mostly effective, told with skill and panache.

A Simple Favor is a sharply dressed comedy-thriller, and the screenplay is even sharper. Anna Kendrick and Blake Lively dominate the screen in two of their best and funniest roles, and director Paul Feig is in rare form, using spry humor to make this subversive and creepy thriller more unusual and unpredictable.

The film’s failure to modulate its tone, its intensity and its messaging makes it a dreary, one-note production.

There are lots of jokes, even though they’re only sporadically funny. There are lots of action sequences, even though they’re edited haphazardly and sometimes hard to follow. There are lots of monsters, even though the more we learn about them, the harder it is to care.

Schnabel creates a natural, immersive motion picture that conveys the experience of being, living with, and painting like Vincent Van Gogh.

Whether you find it exciting or troubling might vary from person to person, but either way Jennifer Garner delivers a standout performance that demands recognition, and will hopefully lead to better action movie roles for the actor in the future.

It’s a spooky, entertaining, but totally goofy entry in “The Conjure-verse.”

Let the Corpses Tan is high-octane high art. It’s incredibly violent. It’s unexpectedly playful. It’s strikingly sumptuous. And its depths could easily be mistaken for shallow stylistic overtures. But if you examine the surface more closely, you’ll discover it’s impressively smart. It may be one of the most rapturous movies of its kind.

The Little Stranger has all the disquieting atmosphere of a total void, and like a total void, not a lot happens in it. You might get sucked into the cold, but you’ll grow bored quickly.

Mile 22 is a straight-to-video action movie that got the big budget treatment, and not in the good, cheesy, fun way. It’s an undercooked story with characters who don’t know how to express themselves without yelling, and it’s full of laughable plot points.

All the genre elements play like an afterthought, and that's frustrating because the rest of the movie isn't quite spry enough to stay interesting without action, adventure, or at least little more weirdness.

A-X-L may be a dog, but he’s designed to be a weapon, so he looks like nightmare fuel. And nightmare fuel usually isn’t the best centerpiece for a family-friendly flick.

The Happytime Murders may not be a timeless classic on par with Roger Rabbit, but it’s more interesting and nuanced than its raunchy, violent humor suggests. The puppeteering is fantastic, the characters are interesting, and although the story isn’t ingenious the jokes are usually funny.

Puppet Master: The Littlest Reich almost works. The dialogue and performances are unusually good for this kind of material, and the gore effects are shocking. But the changes the filmmakers made to this franchise have unpleasant consequences, which dramatically reduce the film's entertainment value, and arguably rob these iconic puppets of the very characteristics that made them special.

Alpha comes close to greatness, specifically that rare kind of greatness that we reserve for timeless epics, or at least gorgeous Frank Frazetta illustrations. The story and protagonist aren’t quite rich enough to take it to the next level.

One of Spike Lee’s best movies. With a dynamite cast, sharp script and pointed humor that underscores real-life, disturbing horrors, it’s an entertaining crime drama that amuses and shocks and invites the audience into a complex and impassioned conversation about the power of racism - and the moving image - to influence our lives.

The Meg is a big, dumb shark movie that takes itself a little too seriously, and that’s the point. Jason Statham is perfect for the material, the shark attacks are entertainingly broad, and the supporting cast brings personality to the otherwise straightforward script.

A formulaic and depressing motion picture that takes meaningful characters and strips them of their reason to exist.

The Darkest Minds is smart. It has a lot to convey to its young audience, and the strong cast does everything in their power to illustrate those themes and to bring their characters to earnest, believable life. But it’s not quite thrilling enough to sneak its mission statements under anyone’s noses, so it plays a bit more like a manifesto than a sci-fi thriller.

It’s a kind and thoughtful drama that respects its characters and has faith in them, letting them live and breathe and find the meaning in their own lives.

The Equalizer 2 makes more-or-less the same impact as “The Equalizer.” It’s a reasonably satisfying mid-budget action thriller, with slick style and an intriguing hero, who only uses violence when necessary, and as a means of redemption for himself and his community.

The scares are ridiculous, the plot makes no sense, and you’ll probably spend the whole running time wishing someone would spill a drink on their keyboard and erase the movie's hard drive.

Despite the film’s good intentions it’s an underwhelming adaptation of Shakespeare’s play, with cute side gags that make more of an impression than the characters or the story.

Joaquin Phoenix gives an admirable performance as an interesting artist, whose life story otherwise gets the short shrift by this conventional drama with a frustratingly narrow focus.

Living up to the legacy of Die Hard is a tall order, and Skyscraper never reaches those heights. But it's a gigantic and silly blockbuster matinee of a movie, with likable performances, absurd action sequences, and a heck of a lot of duct tape.

Fireworks takes you on that little journey. It may affect you deeply, or it may just come and go, a fizzling sentimental aside in an otherwise hectic day. But it’s hard to deny that it approaches its fantastical story with maturity and grace, and a thoughtfulness about what it would truly mean to leap into a “what if” and seriously consider never coming out again.

The First Purge completely earns its action-packed and rousing finale, but getting there certainly takes a while.

Berg’s life is a natural for the movies, but it’s difficult to imagine how the film we got out of it turned out so dramatically inert.

Damsel is viciously whimsical, if such a thing is possible, and it’s thrillingly subversive. But the punchline comes early, and it’s only repeated as the film progresses.

All the human strife, all the political squabbling, comes across like an excuse to be “badass” but high-minded about it. The film’s shootouts are “cool” but lack anything resembling a meaningful perspective, so when the characters talk about the political rationales for their violence, it rings hollow. And when the bullets fly, nothing else seems like it ever mattered.

It’s a well-intentioned comedy with funny performances and a handful of great humorous set pieces. If it feels as though it’s three or four different movies fighting each other for dominance, then at least those movies are all, in their own separate ways, relatively entertaining and amusing.

Bernard and Huey isn’t particularly funny, although the script does tend to pump out a zinger once in a while. It isn’t particularly tragic, because the plight of these characters is well-earned.

It’s a stylish and amusing thriller, but a hollow one, with mostly broad-stroke characters populating an otherwise ultra-detailed fictional criminal underworld. Fans of crime movies like John Wick will be entertained by the big ideas and backstories, but they probably won’t form the kind of connection they have to other, better films of its ilk.

Hereditary is one of the scariest movies around, and a spectacular showcase for actors Toni Collette and Alex Wolff. The film’s subtle shocks and realistic drama combine to create a dreamlike atmosphere, drenched in psychological horror, which builds and builds to a climax that you won’t forget anytime soon.

Ocean’s 8 is the most satisfying installment in the franchise. The all-star cast is impeccable, the shift in focus yields sharp insights, and the heist itself is wily and enjoyable. What the film lacks in suspense it makes up for in style, and that style has undeniable substance.

Upgrade is an intense sci-fi action thriller with big ideas, incredible action and a remarkable lead performance.