A Hallmark movie with a major dose of God thrown in, I’m sure there’s an audience out there for Redeeming Love. After all, 3 million people who bought the book can’t be wrong (they can, it’s trash). Think Little House on the Prairie on Cialis.

Farhadi takes a seemingly simple idea and threads holes and complications into it, creating a pressure cooker of intensity based on a handful of white lies and distrust. It’s a tragedy of simple misunderstandings, and misgivings.

Everyone has secrets, Hosoda posits, and the internet may play a role in our ability to process them, heal our wounds, and maybe find the person who can save us from ourselves. That he does that through a gorgeous SF-tinged version of a classic fairy tale is not simply a bonus (just those components would have made a memorable new version of Villeneuve's timeless story). It's a vital act of recontextualization, not ham-fisted revisionism.

The fifth Scream is an ultimate reflection of the beloved first film, and perhaps its only misstep is that the directing duo didn’t relish in their finale, soaking in some of the beautiful homages they visually set up. Even so, Scream is a blast, a solid setup for more to come.

It looks like an authentic period drama and has a pleasant spirit, even if it has difficulty keeping things totally interesting. It may not pack the esteemed grandeur of a five-course meal at a Michelin star restaurant, but it does deliver the gentle nourishment of a thoughtfully cooked dinner to share with a loved one.

It’s all too bland, the smooth-crotched erotic thriller equivalent of banging a G.I. Joe and a Barbie together.

While The Mitchells vs. the Machines has its points to make, it’s also deftly funny, and never didactic. You’ll care about the message because you’ll care about – and probably identify with – the Mitchells.

It’s a fittingly mediocre end to a franchise that has always been OK with being average.

Torn isn't really about growing up in the shadow of a legend. It's about growing up without a father, about finding your way through the grief of your other family members, and how processing that experience never really stops.

Doggedly mediocre actioner The 355 is the cinematic equivalent of gathering together Formula 1’s finest drivers and tossing them the keys to a Yugo. With two Oscar wins and four Oscar nominations between them, Jessica Chastain, Penélope Cruz, Diane Kruger, and Lupita Nyong’o are gonna do some pretty nifty work with a Yugo. Still, actors this capable deserve better gear.

It’s not just that it’s a great thriller. Its importance as a film is that it really weaves the lead character’s disability into the script, in a way that arguably wasn’t equaled in the subgenre until Mike Flanagan wrote a deaf heroine for Hush.

The story and screenplay by Cameron Larsen and Jose Prendes, respectively, take a significant liberty with the legend for the purpose of a last-minute revelation that’s more a yawner than anything. But even if the disclosure had worked, the film offers little authentic horror (the one jump scare doesn’t count) and its suspense is negligible, though some creepy imagery, such as scorched dismembered doll arms, may momentarily get under your skin.

King Car has moxie and its heart is in the right place, even if it feels like dialectic materialism for motorheads.

Ultimately, it’s an aspirational and inspirational tale of daring to reach for the stars even when authority figures tell you they don’t exist – and the value of having a friend who believes in you, even if they have an umbrella handle for a nose.

Labyrinth of Cinema is a chaotic entanglement of ideas and endearing characters, a sweet departure for the luminous artist Ôbayashi was.

The occasional sudden zoom or quick comedic cutaway make for brief moments of respite, and it’s hard to truly hate a film aiming for such kindly emotional resonance. But whatever slight wisdoms or truths are to be found here are squandered in a big nothing of a story trying to render them meaningful.

Ultimately, by placing everything within the online adventure, the real-world threats become secondary to the dungeon crawl. Hardened SAO fans may be fascinated by the tweaks in this remaster, but Aria of a Starless Night just feels like a repackaging.

Red Snow does a surprisingly good job of manipulating, and then subverting, your sympathies for these particular devils.

I can happily report that the animated singing animals sequel is a hell of a lot better than the first one. Which, in the grand scheme of things, isn’t saying that much.

The strange and challengingly charming awkwardness of Alana and Gary, as well as the more entertaining anecdotes, will get you past the somewhat lumpen structure.

All the broad humor of the original film is gone, replaced by clunky and often tasteless gags, and the attempts to extract pathos from genuine tragedies vary from tacky to insulting.

While Levi gives you someone to genuinely root for, once the movie reaches Warner’s debut game for the Rams in 1999, all nuance goes out the window as you’re pounded into semi-hysterical submission to cheer for a proverbial win for the gipper.

Joel Coen’s The Tragedy of Macbeth is an outstanding gem of form and content, and I take solace that future generations of English students now have a new text to learn from.

Brimming with cornball humor and overt sentimentality, there’s something compelling within the film’s unyielding commitment to its own idiosyncrasies, not to mention the emotionally cogent backbone.

Cameron’s journey is a complicated and poignant one, though the muted aura that maintains a rigid hush over scenes keeps the viewer at something of an emotional detachment.

So often in these big multi-villain events, the hero gets swallowed up, but here he defines the film. If this really is Holland’s last outing, then he leaves having kept true to the spirit of his Spidey.

All said, Nightmare Alley is something to be admired, rather than treasured. It’s big, classic moviemaking with a moral in the end. And there can be a lot to be said for that.

In a year when there's been great discussion about unlikable protagonists, Colman's creation of Leda as a living, breathing, deeply flawed character who can be both wounded and cruel – and the way Gyllenhaal sympathetically frames this unflattering portrait – is a fascinating reminder that not every film needs to leave us feeling comfortable.

Bad Luck Banging or Loony Porn is a frustratingly brilliant (and brilliantly frustrating) experience that formally doesn’t really have a contemporary cinematic referent, an eyeball-slicing polemic by a bomb-throwing provocateur.

Hamaguchi’s films, from Happy Hour to Asako I & II, are all explorations of love, the complex, overwhelming emotion that has the power to break your heart. Drive My Car dissects that heartbreak, what it means to love someone and how to come to terms with that love once they are no longer around to fix what was broken.

As is typical by now, Baker (along with cinematographer Drew Daniels) captures the ethos and texture of America on the fringes in a way not many others do.

I will admit, the fact that Oklahoma oddball Mickey Reece had recently become the cinematic flavor of the month left me cold and baffled, especially with his breakout festival hit Climate of the Hunter. Yet the excellence of religious chiller Agnes finally means you can mark me as a true believer.

It’s bleak and brutal, and Waugh’s cold tone (a definite throwback to Shot Caller) leaves no one with clean hands. But as a testament to the costs of a noble sacrifice in the face of institutional inhumanity, it’s as vital as any of his earlier films.

It’s a personal, aching, and romantic film that’s swimming in the complicated trials of youth.

I’d be hard-pressed to find a filmmaker who, in a general sense, I agree with but whose movies irritate me in the way that Adam McKay’s do.

As it stands, an extremely funny script and one J.K. Simmons do save the movie from being just a standard TV biopic of the week.

Spielberg suppresses his worst tendencies in the uncharted territory of his first movie musical. His solid direction respectfully doesn’t oversentimentalize the material.

Superficially, Wolf may seem like an entry into the queer canon, and it's not hard to see superficial similarities between the facility and a gay conversion therapy facility, or to superimpose transphobia onto Jacob's diagnosis of species dysphoria.

There is a raw sexiness to Benedetta that’s deeply engaging and thrilling.

It’s a slow document of stiff upper lips beginning to quiver, and while Knightley excels as the perfect Kensington upper-crust mummy, it’s Goode who personifies that desperate attempt to keep a veneer of control, even as his world is on the verge of devastation.

It’s not terrible as far as video game adaptations go, but as with many of them you’ll be wondering what the point is when a superior experience already exists.

Writing With Fire is at its best when emphasizing the barriers these women have to overcome daily to fulfill their desires to be journalists, and showcasing the importance of Khabar Lahariya’s work where corruption runs amok.

Cinematographer Paul Guilhaume paints dreamy scenes of happiness, too, playing in the backyard with siblings, trying on a pink bikini – in these moments we see the most of Sasha’s personality.

Karam manages an incredible feat of genre-bending, as neither the comedy nor horror impairs the other. Each is built so naturally within the drama: The laughs are the result of simply having well-realized characters and the scares an existential manifestation of their contentions.

Julia is a thorough documentary, concise in a way that’s ideal for the casual couch surfer. Like Child, the film’s a delight, but slightly unlike her, Julia doesn’t bring any new techniques to the table of biographical documentaries.

With its bold visual sense and fanciful storyline (credited to six writers, no less), Encanto feels like a companion piece to Coco, but it has nowhere near the same emotional heft as that far superior 2017 Oscar-winner.

This is far from the first movie about the perpetual struggle of relating to other people; it’s not even Mills’ first stab at it. But C’mon C’mon is so lovingly assembled and insightful in its thematic concerns that it feels like he could keep returning to that well and find something just as essential there every time.

The interplay of setback and triumph of the sports film genre, here informed by both racial and socioeconomic concerns, is comfortably familiar, and Green, with writer Zach Baylin, never met a tennis serve/time transition they didn’t run with, but they keep their gaze on Papa Williams and his provocative eccentricities, dutifully lionizing the man as good as any royal biographer.

House of Gucci isn't aggressively bad, but it is undeniably tedious, threadbare, and unengaging.

Never bordering on cheesy, She Paradise is a heartfelt ode to the strength it takes to learn to stand up for yourself in a painful world.

While India Sweets and Spices adds a veneer of depicting the contemporary Indian American experience, beyond the gorgeous lehengas and saris, past the insert shots of perfectly arrayed cuisine, lies a bland, uninspired story cut from a well worn template.

That's where Kurt Vonnegut: Unstuck in Time is most fascinating, in its exploration of the blurred lines between what who writers (and filmmakers) are, and what they write, and why they write.

Ghostbusters: Afterlife may not change cinema in the way the original did, but it’s a worthy next generation.

Campion and her cast do an extraordinary job of bringing all these characters in midway through their own private traumas, and Dunst brings silent grace and sadness to a woman inherently doubting her own motivation.

The United States of Insanity is as much a portrait of a long-ignored, mocked, and lambasted band, and the subculture that surrounds it, as it is a trip into a deeply disturbing and Kafkaesque assault on civil liberties.

I’m not sure tick, tick…Boom! is for everyone. People who like Rent/Larson and musical fans in general will love it.

The micro-homilies proliferate, the stagy drama heightens, and subtlety gives way to a little pandering. You can forgive these transgressions – there’s never any doubt that Branagh has put his heart into this endeavor – but they keep it from achieving greatness.

Watching this vaguely preternatural, shoddily animated interpretation of a beloved character parade around really makes you feel the disconnect between page and screen.

At heart, The Souvenir Part II is a film about filmmaking as art, industry, and identity.

There’s a hollowness to its beauty, as much as there is with its messaging.

Red Notice barely feels like a film, which is fine. It’s a series of set pieces flimsily bolted together with Reynolds doing the Reynolds thing, Johnson doing the Johnson thing, and Gadot doing the Gadot thing.

Wain's psychosis is shown from the inside, the Victoriana giving way to psychotronic visions that re-create Wain's futurism and dalliances with Cubism.

It’s an erotic thriller set-up matched with the sort of morally dubious character that would have De Palma’s ears perked, but it plays like more of a farce in practice.

Co-fabulists Pablo Larraín and writer Steven Knight have made a film that marries the former’s elliptical, experimental style with the latter’s penchant for alternative histories stuffed with archetypes. But it is Stewart’s performance at the center of it all that is the most startling aspect of Spencer. She brings a theatricality in the way she moves and speaks that transcends impersonation yet falls thankfully shy of camp.

Sapochnik has delved into bleak futures before, with his 2010 brutal forced-organ-donation capitalist satire Repo Men, but Finch is much closer to last year’s The Midnight Sky, in which George Clooney stared at his own incoming invisible apocalypse.

There’s been an urge to excuse the director and blame the studio, arguing that Zhao just didn’t fit into the strictures of the MCU. Yet that doesn’t explain how weak the script she co-wrote is, or why it’s so insufferably long, or why it almost completely fails to tackle its own core conceits of blind loyalty, of the perils of immortality, of rebellion against faith.

The longer you are immersed in this exchange of stories, of hope dying against darkness but proving its value just by its glimmers, the more it enthralls.

Shot in black and white with some quirky wipe transitions thrown in (haven’t seen the classic page-turning wipe in a while), El Planeta orbits around an aesthetic and sensibility rooted in Eighties indie films. But mother and daughter have a comfortable chemistry that surpasses the deadpan material.

Hamaguchi has a beautiful outlook on mistakes and the complex emotions that make up humanity, and his tenderness toward each character he brings to life makes him one of the best storytellers working today.

This is definitely one My Hero Academia adventure that should go back to the classroom.

Honestly, this movie is so pure. Take a couple hours out of your weekend and go feel good.

There’s not enough here to carry the painstaking production design and costuming – a visual feast let down by shortage of meaning. This is a movie about perception, indeed: As beautiful as it is on the outside, the inside is completely superficial.

I bet Samuel had the time of his life making this, 'cos it shows. It’s violent. Holy crap, is it violent. It’s unrelenting. It’s bleak. It’s also entertaining as hell.

Time may ultimately be kind to Cooper’s first foray into the horror genre, but the present holds nothing but darkness.

This heartfelt portrait, which brings the artist tantalizingly close, will certainly bring greater renown to Dalton. But she remains, stubbornly, unknowable.

An anthology film of five segments, it is an indulgent celebration of that venerable weekly magazine whose collective bylines helped shape the cultural preoccupations of the last century, not to mention informing much of Anderson’s work.

If Villeneuve's grand and epic take evokes any earlier cinematic vision of Dune, it would be the first failed take, which would have seen director David Lean and writer Robert Bolt cross similar wastelands as they did in Lawrence of Arabia.

Though this capable documentary is comprehensively informative in so many ways (perhaps to a fault), the one thing it doesn’t quite convey is the wonder and marvel of the undersea world of Cousteau, which continued to move him until his death at age 87.

Masie Crow's Sundance-selected documentary thrives on providing such depth and nuance to very real students with very real experiences.

Mass takes the high school shooting drama out of the exploitation rut into which it has fallen, and instead turned it back into a story of people. It's a simple achievement to name, but an extraordinary one in its impact.

Maybe Halloween Kills will make more sense when the finale of the trilogy, Halloween Ends, gives those themes some context. But as a sequel to the deliciously absurd 2018 resurrection, it’s a ponderous bore, far-too-intermittently broken up by spurts of the franchise’s signature gore.

The Velvet Underground is exactly the movie the Velvet Underground deserves.

While never taking credit away from the other rescuers who also risked life and limb, The Rescue comes back to the bunch of self-described oddballs who got the kids out.

It’s the lack of tension, overlong running time, and ultimately mawkish message that makes Needle a nonstarter.

Based on the folky country song “Just Like Old Times” by Todd Snider, the film feels like a throwback to the heyday of Austin: eclectic acoustic guitars, dingy pool halls, dive bars with fountains of whiskey, neon signs, and lots and lot of late-night tacos.

It’s the sublime and understated performance by Krisha Fairchild (Krisha, Waves) as the aging pot farmer Devi Adler that elevates Freeland past its potential as a tone poem cliche into a far more arresting portrait of the old versus the new and beyond.

Overstuffed and overextended, The Blazing World is buoyed by the soundtrack (especially the songs by Isom Innis and Sean Cimino in their project Peel), and the too brief appearance by the wonderful Soko. In the end, the film tries too hard.

It’s not frustrating, but then, it’s not quite that engaging. It may spark a little light self-recognition among filmmakers, and that’s all Hansen-Løve seems to aim for.

Focusing her camera on the rising cogs in the machine of China’s insatiable consumer culture, Jessica Kingdon expands on her 2017 short “Commodity City” with the visually stunning feature Ascension.

The Last Duel is a thematic gold mine, one that sits nicely alongside some of Scott’s best work to date.

If you like your affected character dramas with a healthy dose of weird insanity, you may just find yourself head over hooves.

So often, romance subplots in Texas noir feel like afterthoughts, there to increase a little bit of tension. But South of Heaven’s most meaningful moments are in the interplay between Lilly and Sudeikis as the star-crossed lovers with time most definitely not on their side.

Even if it beat Videodrome to the screen by two years, it's not quite the same level of must-see programming. It's fascinating, but less coherent, less scathing, and far more meandering.

It's this overstuffed storytelling, mixed with lackluster pacing, that renders No Time to Die a torturous misfire, and an utterly disappointing exit for Craig's Bond. I hate to say it, but this is Bond's Rise of Skywalker.

Venom: Let There be Crazy, Stupid Love isn’t a great movie, but it doesn’t matter because it’s just big, dumb, romantic fun.

With the exception of Kroll’s gravelly-intoned Uncle Fester, the voicework is sketchy, with Theron’s Seven-Sisters elocution bordering on sacrilege.

Titane is a dance. Julia Ducournau’s follow-up to her engrossing debut Raw is a flashy, traumatic body horror explosion that is just as gnarly as her first film.

Although The Many Saints of Newark offers an alluring glimpse into Tony Soprano’s birth under a bad sign, it never shows the blue moon in the mobster’s eyes.