William Bibbiani

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.

The film undercuts its admiration of Mary Wollstonecraft Shelley by judging, harshly, her life choices and reducing her timeless masterpiece to simplistic metaphor for a lousy marriage. Mary Shelley deserves better than Mary Shelley.

It’s gorgeous, it’s distinctive, it’s quirky, it’s definitely about mermaids, and it might just make you question your sanity.

Breaking In is a clever twist not the home invasion genre, with a dynamic lead performance by Gabrielle Union as a mother protecting her family. It’s a crowd-pleasing thriller, good but never quite great, because the story collapses under scrutiny. The film is trying to be clever and yet it relies on big, and obvious gaps in logic, but those flaws probably won't ruin the experience.

A few sharp moments can’t compensate for a film that feels half-developed, and only half-heartedly told. Like its protagonist, Bad Samaritan isn’t quite as bad as it could have been, but it’s not good either.

The cast does the best they can to save the weak material, and it’s interesting to see how the filmmakers are trying to make this off-putting concept work. But it's not funny enough, or even weird enough, to get away with it.

Even though they sometimes land a great joke, the troopers aren’t inherently amusing or even all that likable this time around. They’re undeniably corrupt cops, even if they are relatively benign about it. Super Troopers 2 still manages to be funny quite a bit of the time, but the word “funny” needs an asterisk next to it, warning that the laughs might carry with them a certain amount of guilt.

It’s a sweet story about someone who doesn’t know what their story is. It’s a funny film about seriously figuring yourself out. It’s a serious film about pain, in which no one intentionally inflicts it. Craig Johnson might not have made a particularly strange film, but it’s a particularly kind one, and it’s worth loving.

Blumhouse’s Truth or Dare is what happens when high concepts crash. The audience is here to watch people play a deadly game of Truth or Dare, and yet the film’s truths and dares are unremarkable, and the players are mostly boring.

This is a film about pain, and it forces the audience to live in and work through that pain. And it’s absolutely worth the effort. By the end it’s a transformative experience.

Unsane is a creepy little thriller, with a concept that could terrify just about anybody, and a plot that wobbles but ultimately stays on the rails. Claire Foy gives a standout performance and Steven Soderbergh’s intimate visual style sells the idea that we are watching something horribly sinister get revealed.

Without a strong guiding hand we’re left with a finely acted, but only adequate biopic, which brushes against greatness and then paints over it.

Game Over, Man! is a sloppy production, with screaming and bullying used as a placeholder for actual jokes. The characters are such enormous jerks that they probably don’t deserve to succeed, at anything, so it’s hard to want to follow their adventures through an entire film.

It’s a speedy adventure with diverse action set pieces and a mystery that boasts at least one halfway decent twist.

One of Wes Anderson’s best movies, an imaginative and amusing travelogue through incredible settings, populated by wonderful characters, with a lot of heart and even a little insight. You can feel the love radiating off of this movie, like a hug from your own beloved pet.

Dibb’s adaptation will have less of an impact if you aren’t seeing this story play out for the first time, but if you are seeing it for the first time, it’s probably going to break your heart.

It’s neither funny nor exciting enough to obscure what a miasma of unfocused randomness it is, even though the cast is clearly trying to make something out of all this half-baked material.

It takes extremely familiar plot points and plays them straight, adding nothing new except the premise - a white American joining the Yakuza - which ultimately has very little to do with how the story unfolds. The film might be a functional crime drama but it’s an incredibly unremarkable one.

Death Wish takes the serious topic of vigilante violence and reduces it to melodramatic hero worship, and it’s not even particularly good at that. The action is forgettable and the plot barely holds together.

Red Sparrow is too disturbing and brutal to be popcorn entertainment, and by trying to make the uncomfortable storylines and interminable torture sequences palatable for the audience, it completely undermines its ability to operate as a serious drama.

It takes real intelligence to make the best dumb jokes. Game Night has plenty of both, combining skilled filmmaking and ridiculous gags in equal measure, and letting the seriousness and silliness play off of each other for maximum effect.

Fifty Shades Freed concludes the trilogy as it began, with a romance you can’t believe in, endless montages of affluence, lousy dialogue, weak plotting, and - admittedly - a heck of a lot of sex.