Although the changes to the source material are guaranteed to polarize some Stephen King fans, Pet Sematary bucks the remake trap of simply paying homage to an iconic piece of horror. Instead, it makes drastic changes to the plot so it can ultimately go more complex with its themes. That’s a hell of a trick to pull off. Sometimes, different is better.

The Day Shall Come remains a riveting watch, though, if only for Morris’ deft, lightning-fast pace and the cast’s mastery of his language. ... The problem is that the film’s humanity is often eclipsed by its big-picture message and satirical edge.

Even if the rapid-fire pace of the jokes keeps a tiny handful of them from landing, the film gets bonus points for not being afraid to get emotional.

Simply put, Elle Fanning is Teen Spirit. This is a performance piece, nothing more and nothing less, and those invested in seeing Fanning soar in her career have every reason to watch.

A singular work, brimming with ideas, by a budding visionary with a hell of a lot to say.

Unsurprisingly, Everybody’s Everything feels most conventional during its talking-head interviews, an aesthetic shared with almost every other music documentary out there. ... But when the film shows rather than telling, it’s clear that there are no easy answers for this kind of tragedy.

While one wishes the beats were a touch more oiled, the film’s strengths reside outside the confines of narrative.

It’s easy to get swept up in Booksmart‘s pace and pleasures, but take a breath and you might find yourself longing for a world that’s at least a touch more familiar.

Patient, meditative, and sanguine, Adopt a Highway is a rugged slice of Americana.

Little Monsters oozes with heart and soul, making for an ultra likable, last-minute addition to a genre that should be buried 12-feet under in the near future.

Perry’s kinetic style and Moss’ explosive performance transform it into something that feels more authentic than actual history.

Moondog’s antics aren’t all that funny or captivating, even when divorced from their assholery.

Long Shot is a major win for Levine, Rogen, and Theron, who defied the odds to deliver an instantly re-watchable hit. It’s sexy, it’s funny, it’s smart, it’s topical, and, above all, it’s exactly what some people need right now.

Exciting? Sure. Unique? Without a doubt. But it’s hard to not feel frustrated by a script that never seems to figure out what it’s trying to say.

After similarly sumptuous but somewhat tragic films like A Fantastic Woman and Disobedience, Gloria Bell feels more life-affirming, more explicitly comic. In many respects it’s a beat-for-beat remake of Gloria, with only a few cultural details swapped out, but the tale translates quite well.

To commend The Boy Who Harnessed the Wind is reasonably easy. Here’s a film that’s pro-science, and sheds new light on a world that Western audiences don’t normally see. But it’s all so dramatically meager and obvious as well.

Apollo 11 is a great documentary, and its greatness can largely be attributed to the stunning archival scenes compiled within it. It’s impossible for anybody who wasn’t there to truly understand what it felt like to see Apollo 11 complete its travels, but for at least 93 endlessly arresting minutes, Apollo 11 does its very best to put you right there.

There are touches of the freshness that percolated through Black Panther and Thor: Ragnarok, two films that brought new points of view, loads of promise, and no small amount of political and social resonance to the MCU, but only a little of the sense of newness and boldness that Ryan Coogler and Taika Waititi’s films had in abundance.

Those who follow it down its strange little alley will be rewarded with beautiful music, Isabelle Huppert, and a table-flip for the ages. See it with your mom. It’ll be weird. That’s what Greta would want.

Transit is a walkabout potobiler that ruminates more often than it feels compelled to run. It’s brutal, stark, dry, compelling, rich, and all the other drastic hyperbole that one can only bestow upon a genre-bending experiment like this one.

Despite existing within the auspices of a predictable subgenre of indie film, Paddleton manages to affect and delight in surprising ways.

Between its continuous insistence on broad humor and its lack of broader context about the industry period in which Paige came up (she was among the first womens’ wrestlers in WWE to break out when the division gained traction after years of public degradation), Fighting With My Family ultimately reveals itself as a shallow take on a genuinely fascinating story.

Even if the run-up takes its time, DeBlois sticks the landing – for this film, for his trilogy – and makes something that feels a bit more knowing in its themes: Life goes on, protect the ones you love, and enjoy the world we all share. There are far greater crimes children’s films can commit than positive messaging.

Like its unstoppable heroine, Alita: Battle Angel is something strange and unique and special, built from the finest repurposed parts.

As a teller of tense, personal stories about communities in crisis, Farhadi is an absolute master; but with Everybody Knows, he falls just a bit short of the greatness people have come to expect of him.

It’s a pleasure to report that Happy Death Day‘s unexpected delights were in no way a fluke, and Happy Death Day 2U builds on its off-the-wall concept to even greater effect.

Horror Noire will also open doors for horror fans both old and new, while also reminding them that the can take these movies at much more than face value.

With High Flying Bird, Soderbergh may well have crafted the most direct distillation of his own philosophy of filmmaking to date: idiosyncratic, confident, and endlessly disruptive.

While it’s a reasonably paced thriller, The Prodigy is almost wholly devoid of real scares.

Lords of Chaos can’t seem to find its center for the entirety of its indulgent two-hour runtime. From moment to moment, the mood shifts from comic to dramatic to horrific to exploitative.

An entertaining if mostly inconsequential romp, in its best moments What Men Want feels less like an update on What Women Want and more like a gender-flipped version of Jerry Maguire.

The Second Part is a film almost wholly redeemed by its climax, a culmination of unexpected plot threads and surprisingly sweet character development that ends up making the whole more valuable in hindsight.

Throughout Piercing, it’s never clear who’s getting played, at least except for the audience. Those with the stomach for what Pesce and his stars have to offer will likely give over to the rush of it, as the film plays fast and loose with expectations at every turn.

Disappointing and confounding, Velvet Buzzsaw can ultimately be filed under What Could Have Been given the kind of talent involved.

The little beats throughout Cold Pursuit are distinctive enough to cover for this gory caper’s periodic misfires.

Ánimas packs a lot into its 90 minutes, and occasionally suffers for it. There’s a dourness to the movie, a self-seriousness that won’t make it anyone’s favorite escapist flick. But while it wears its themes on its sleeve, they remain undoubtedly striking and thought-provoking, especially in an age where the issue of mental illness is being discussed on a global scale.

Serenity is often stylish. It is never, ever dull. It is also deeply stupid.

Every second grates and confuses in equal measure, with nary a thrill of inventive, exciting action filmmaking to break up the monotony.

The Kid Who Would Be King is a reliable family film, and Cornish polishes old tropes with fresh eyes and a sense of clever imagination.

IO is dull, it drags, and it’ll beg the question: When will this, all of this, be over?

Shyamalan comes off so smug by the end of this movie that it’s insufferable — and also kind of jarring. It’s as if he’s learned nothing from his past and still believes he’s pulling a quick one on his audience.

It’s a gripping, fascinating watch, an elegantly assembled portrait of the end result of influencer culture and late-stage capitalism – the blind leading the blind into an empty, insubstantial image of success and luxury that turns out to be nothing but smoke.

Although its leads find the odd moment of charm together, even Kidman in what’s somehow the worst-shaded part of all three, The Upside fumbles far too often when it attempts to enlighten or edify its audience.

It’s also not all that good, even if it’s hardly the kind of “bad” that most would get riled about. Escape Room is cut from one of Hollywood’s most familiar cloths: the “mall horror” movie.

Director John Crowley has fashioned a film that feels like a natural evolution from the Victorian novel, one in which the circumstances are deceptively modern even if everything else feels somewhat old-fashioned.

When people talk about Hollywood movies feeling more and more like product, this is what they’re driving at.

There’s a fundamental problem here, one of conception, not of execution.

There’s not an ounce of wasted motion to be found throughout Cold War. Pawlikowski moves at a fleet pace, trusting in his audience to fill in the gaps that the film’s understated storytelling leaves along the way.

Marwen is too much, not enough, and yet still deeply watchable. It’s admirable for the wildly different approaches it takes. Only a stylist like Zemeckis could try something like this. Take a real man’s witty, real-life therapy-based photography and attempt to spin it into a mo-cap circus with every genre tool he can think of.

It doesn’t reinvent the wheel, but Bumblebee feels revolutionary within the confines of a long-running franchise like Transformers.

That said, Marshall is particularly well-served by Blunt and Miranda, who seem to be having such a good time together — both as characters, and as two movie starts making a sequel to a freaking classic in really cool getups — that even when floating through the sky on the tail of a balloon looks kind of dull, their charms are nearly impossible to resist.

The problem is that, unlike The Big Short, he can’t seem to wrestle with the drama, and when Vice takes a more dramatic turn towards its manic third act, McKay’s preaching winds up feeling like Oliver Stone, Jr. All of those meta, tongue-in-cheek quirks start becoming self righteous and smug when they used to be clever and decisive. It’s a damn shame

The Mule is a functional take on capitalism, work-life balance, and the creeping, overlong process that is aging. The tense moments click.

As with any number of popular YA novels-turned-feature films, Mortal Engines has a wealth of possibilities and curious ideas at its disposal. Instead, it tears past them in pursuit of some of the subgenre’s most exhausted narrative tropes, chewing up everything engaging as it grinds along.

Once Upon a Deadpool doesn’t offer nearly enough new gags to justify its cheeky family-cut re-release. Sure, the bits they add are great – Fred Savage’s hostage situation with Deadpool should have been a cool third of the film – but in the end, it’s a retread as limp as one of Wade Wilson’s re-growing limbs.

Aquaman is a pure piece of bright, ridiculous spectacle, hammering its Saturday morning cartoon sensibilities down its audience’s throat with a huge, cheesy grin on its face.

Mowgli is not entirely recommendable, but it’s not a total bust either.

It’s vital in the sense that there aren’t enough third-party chronicles of this undeniably potent force in the online world, but it’s sloppy in how safe it feels — it’s easy to imagine the stars agreeing to speak so long as certain topics were either breezed over or avoided entirely.

Vox Lux wants to be everything and winds up being nothing. By the end, when the whole thing devolves into a dubious concert film, and we’re watching fake fans go crazy over fake songs, there’s this uncanny valley of universal bliss that’s just achingly hollow.

If you walk into Mary Queen of Scots looking to be dazzled by some great performances and rich art direction, you’ll walk out satisfied, no question. If you want something more than that, it’s likely the reaction will be more mixed.

There’s a breathless sense of discovery and play that makes the film seem new, even as it’s tap-dancing through the imprints of so many sci-fi stories throughout the years. Simply put, superhero movies don’t often carry this sense of possibility anymore.

There’s a rich, hilarious novelty to the film’s juxtaposition of glittering pop and ultraviolence, but by virtue of the clear disconnect between story and song, that novelty quickly wears thin.

The House That Jack Built is an audacious and divisive film, sure, but only because of the context surrounding the film. The gore! The violence! The subject material! Oh my! At its core, though, von Trier has actually assembled his most accessible work to date.

Like the women who populate its halls, it might be easy to see The Favourite as only one thing, to reduce it to one quality, but it contains multitudes. And like its three central characters, you underestimate it at your peril.

It’s moving stuff, even if Kore-eda threatens to dilute his themes by overindulging in them. Shoplifters overstays its welcome somewhat as the third act rolls on, with an epilogue that seems to exist only to absolve characters that don’t quite deserve it. The empathy is admirable, but one wishes for a touch more restraint, especially in the wake of such an emotionally devastating climax.

Green Book means so well, and admittedly, it just gets by on its leads and its good humor.

Creed 2 is a commendable chapter in the franchise, thriving from a strong commitment to character, mostly thanks to Stallone’s reverence to his own legacy and the new one being created for Jordan.

There’s nothing particularly memorable about Robin Hood even when you’re laughing at it, and that may be one of the saddest fates a movie can meet.

The Christmas Chronicles is a passable enough lark, and may well be on the upper end of the spectrum when it comes to modern cinematic Christmas fare.

It’s gripping stuff, especially since Goldhaber and Mazzei map out an endgame that’s maintains an intriguing ambiguity while still providing a definitive conclusion.

The Front Runner is a naively misguided product of panicked, desperate modern times. But perhaps even worse, at least for the type of film it wants to be, it lands somewhere between irrelevant and a woeful misreading of the room.

If you’re going to tackle serious subject matter, maybe don’t run it through tacky fluff that amounts to a fleeting sugar high. Sure, this movie will get all the right oohs and aahs, sighs and sobs — it certainly won over the freebie test audience at my screening, good god — but it won’t linger.

There’s a thoughtful, kid-friendly parable about the hazards of internet fame somewhere in Ralph Breaks the Internet, but its aim is so scattershot that it only emerges in fits and starts.

Good actors can’t make up for narrative inconsistency. Beasts can’t erase the frustration of seeing characters you love behave in ways that make no sense. One can forgive retconning backstory where it doesn’t belong if it feels true to the fictional world you love. That doesn’t happen here.

While The Grinch never rises to the level of a modern Christmas classic, it’s an enjoyable enough holiday diversion with a core message that’s as lovely today as it was when Dr. Seuss first wrote it.

The uneven quality of the vignettes aside, The Ballad of Buster Scruggs is still a suitably Coenesque jaunt through the merciless trails of the American West.

Because it’s Claire Foy’s turn, The Girl in the Spider’s Web cannot honestly be called a colossal waste of time. It’s merely a moderate waste.

Outlaw King is like watching prog versus metal. When it’s prog rock – folksy and wooden ­– it’s at its worst. Muted, draggy, earnest, with wee traces of carefully placed humor or commentary on a bygone era? It’s Moody Blues, and even a little Jethro Tull? Hardly worth putting on, unless you like your history slim and bone-dry. But at its best, it’s heavy metal, with swinging axes and church slayings and all sorts of grim goodies.

For a film that looks this wacky, it’s a shame that The Nutcracker and the Four Realms is ultimately pretty boring.

Boy Erased finds its best stuff when it matches the unabashed earnestness of Jared, and of Hedges’ performance. The film isn’t so much preaching to the converted as begging the ones who aren’t yet to finally come over and stand on the right side of history.

One critic’s ‘too much’ may be another’s ‘so much to unpack’. But that’s the thing. The style, the lament, the punchy rhythm and breathless momentum of The Other Side may be hefty, but it certainly makes a dent.

When Neville chronicles the failed work of Orson Welles, They’ll Love Me When I’m Dead comes alive with newsreel tabloid verve.

This is despairing filmmaking, but also the kind that arrests the eye from its first moments. Lee has made something rare here: a portrait of poverty that treats its subjects not as victims or as aggressors, but simply as pawns of a far grander social scheme than any of them can possibly comprehend.

It’s about how reality invades our dreams, and how the people we trust teach us to be less trusting as we get older. Tan plays these themes out with a rare emotional honesty, never allowing the fact that it’s a deeply personal work to prevent her from indicting herself alongside any of the other key players involved.

Hunter Killer has thrills, but they’re of the cheapest variety.

Bohemian Rhapsody is another lame music biopic, and its failures ultimately lie in the poor creative choices, the gutless approaches to potentially explosive events in the life of this band. We’re not buying this new album. There’s no new material to be found in Bohemian Rhapsody.

Carell, Chalamet and their supporting players can only spit-shine a relatively rote addiction story so much; by the time the thrill of their work passes, it’s easy to find oneself waiting for more.

The film is filled with sensitive performances that help to upend the fantasy of the nuclear family as the cure for society’s ills. It’s a sparse but stunning mood piece, and a wonderful showcase for Dano as a uniquely family-driven auteur.

Its moments of creativity and daring, while effective and elevating, never even approach the audacity of the subject on which they center, and it’s easy to wish that Heller had pressed down a bit more firmly on the gas. But the overall effect is so simply pleasing, the performances so honest and engaging, and the story, frankly, so worthy of an earnest what the fuck? that it’s hard to work up the steam for any kind of complaint. It all works, and works well.

What They Had is an indie drama of a familiar cut, delivered so well that you’ll forgive its smaller inconsistencies.

This is punishing filmmaking, both in its sense of overwhelming despair and in its all-too-physical violence, but what sets Apostle apart from being an especially well-shot exploitation feature is its interest in the ideals behind the violence we perform on one another.

While it deals in the traditional melodramatics, straight from the ‘ol Hollywood emotion factory, Tillman Jr.’s aim seems true. The Hate U Give feels so Right Damn Now that you could leave the theater and see its stories on the nightly news.

Gyllenhaal gives one of the most staggering performances of her career, and Colangelo’s deft command of tone keeps the lengths to which Lisa will go to stay close to Jimmy’s perceived greatness close to the chest right up to the end.

The Thanksgiving table is a perfect battleground for these heavily entrenched political lines, with Barinholtz’s smart, nuanced script pulling no punches. While the satire definitely loses some of its bite in its wild, unpredictable closer, the film still takes Barinholtz and Haddish to fascinating places as performers – neither of them have been as intense or vulnerable onscreen to date.

22 July is a thoughtful, gutting achievement that you’ll likely never want to watch again. Greengrass’ approach here is graceful and deeply resonant, but it’s undoubtedly draining, especially considering you still have roughly two hours to go after the shootings that ignite the narrative

As a fish-out-of-water comedy, it’s effectively funny more often than it isn’t, and as an ode to the unlikely communities that arise around black metal, it’s entirely sincere in its intentions.

Despite its carefully measured comedic voice and the detail with which it depicts the IVF process, the film never quite manages to feel like something completely groundbreaking.

To be honest, Venom’s almost worth watching for Hardy’s bizarre accent and whirling-dervish mania alone, but it’s a shame he’s not surrounded by a better, more exciting film.