Witney Seibold

If you hand Paul Feig a good script, he becomes a better director. With "The Housemaid," he doesn't just explore his characters well, but wisely delves into themes of class. The dishonesty of the rich dangles over "The Housemaid," pointing out how wealth is a moral trap. It's alluring and dangerous. Wealth is practically a living creature. It seems to be dazzling and charming and seductive, but hides its true intentions, fangs secretly in its otherwise perfect smile.

Will Nobody 2 set hearts aflame? No. If this had been the first "Nobody," no one would have been clamoring for a sequel. But it is a glorious Saturday matinée, a brisk trifle for the waning days of summer. It's the kind of movie that you'll remember better for the friends you saw it with than the movie itself. And that can be one of cinema's most important functions.

The Fantastic Four: First Steps is set in a world that I wouldn't mind living in. Even if there are occasional, ineffable cosmic deities plotting to devour me, and terrifying silver aliens ripping my soul apart with their eyes. "First Steps" is a superhero movie where we're already better. And I love that.

Hess and his army of screenwriters (only five are credited) have taken the wisest possible route with their adaptation: A Minecraft Movie is a broad, slapstick farce without a hint of seriousness, reverence, or coolness. The most shocking thing? It's not terrible. 

Ultimately, Snow White is better than "Beauty and the Beast" and "The Little Mermaid" — by a long shot — but it's not as good as Branagh's "Cinderella" or Burton's "Dumbo." And, sadly, it overall still bears the boring sheen of a corporate mandate. This is another cynical enterprise, tapping into certain nostalgic images in the hopes that we'll pay for the same high we had as children.

Although it doesn't possess the hard-boiled, shifty-eyed salaciousness of a traditional whodunnit, "Conclave" is certainly in the spirit of a private investigator story.

Crowley may be telling a melodramatic story, but he studiously avoids sentimentality.

It may not be the best Lanthimos, but it's certainly the most Lanthimos.

The film may end on a bleak note, but there's some levity mixed into the very batter.

In lesser hands, Challengers would have been a chintzy soap opera. Guadagnino, however, is able to bolster an admittedly typical soap story with an energetic style and attention to detail.

Bleak, severe, and awesome, "The First Omen" is the best horror movie of the year so far.

"Godzilla x Kong" is infectiously fun, raucous, and, in the 8-year-old sense, awesome. One will not take much away from "Godzilla x Kong," but you'll leave the theater with a big damn fool grin on your face.

It's a lightweight, weirdly teen-friendly (but very R-rated) slumber party movie with an upbeat and liberating "be gay, do crime" vibe. It's a queer, hand grenade-shaped squeak toy. 

The Book of Clarence is aspirational, unique, moving, funny, weird, and very shaggy. But it's better to have a picture's cup runneth over than to present us with an empty chalice.

Godzilla Minus One is one of the rare Godzilla pictures about the indomitability of the human spirit.

The canon of "The Equalizer" has never taken the world by storm, usually percolating in the background of popular culture as a piece of intense ephemera. Robert McCall is a former Marine and DIA officer, but that is entirely ignored in part 3. He's a superhero played by Denzel Washington, and the filmmakers assume that is enough. For many audience members, it will be.

The Way Back is a somber sports drama more interested in exploring the plight of its hero than in just the big games.

Ad Astra is grand but, rather frustratingly, it's not great. James Gray’s film is a most impressive technical achievement, and the first half is exciting and flirts with profundity. The second half, however, slows to a maddeningly sluggish pace, and the film ultimate leaves you worn out and disengaged.

Despite a problematic ending, Midsommar is an emotionally harrowing and slowly insidious journey, languidly forcing dread on the viewer, wrapping them in a weird nightmare summer camp of sunlight and cheer.

Brightburn doesn't take its satire to any kind of satisfying extreme – although a mid-credits stinger does include a larger joke at work – but as a superhero murder thriller, it is perfectly entertaining.

Cold Pursuit is partly a great action thriller, and Liam Neeson is still kicking plenty of butt, but the film is mostly an intriguing, relaxing, totally tuckered-out character study of old men running out of the energy required to run a criminal enterprise. As thrillers go, this one is more adult than your average.

Peter Jackson's technical ambitions sometimes muddy his otherwise moving WWI documentary They Shall Not Grow Old.

Melissa McCarthy gives one of her best performances in a surprisingly relatable story about a criminal misanthrope with a heart beating deep inside her.

The Old Man & the Gun is a fitting swan song to screen legend Robert Redford.

An exciting and scary final act makes up for a middling kid horror fantasy that is marked by a slow start and an inappropriately comedic tone.

The Equalizer 2's conventional storytelling is certainly weak, and the violence is particularly brutal, but Denzel Washington and Antoine Fuqua have created a unique Punisher-with-heart vigilante character that is a pleasant thrill to watch and a modest delight to revisit.

Certainly weird, confrontational, wildly satirical, and certainly unique, Sorry to Bother You is one of the funniest, energetic, and best films of the year.

Sicario: Day of the Soldado is a darkly thrilling film with excellent performances, and its gritty, intense action is balanced by heady themes of moral decay, but overall, because of recent political developments, it feels behind the times.