It's almost enough to make you wish that Kokidas and co-writer Austin Bunn had fictionalized the story. But then again, a beardless Ginsberg isn't really Ginsberg at all, which gives Radcliffe all the room to play around with the character that he needs. It might be best spell yet.

Chock-full of popcorn nostalgia and fan favorite characters and villains and power moves exactly like what any fan of the long-running saga is looking for.

While not aspiring to the heights of the texts underscoring his work, Piñero displays a daring formalism that transcends its many inspirations to find its own unique rhythms.

Things grow slacker and a touch sillier by its middle act, which both does away with big problems and introduces entire new ones in their place. Still, Condor remains such a genuinely adorable leading lady and Lara Jean such a special character that fans will undoubtedly embrace the messy ride.

For anyone frustrated with countless formulaic exercises that drain modern horror of fresh ideas, Tucker & Dale is a downright cathartic indictment that encourages comparison to the "Scary Movie" franchise. It's mostly a smart spoof that looks awfully dumb for a reason.

The material, however, takes a Raymond Carver short story and plays it almost too straight. Ferrell looks uncomfortable, but not amusingly so.

While Francine distinguishes itself with atmospheric strangeness, Cassidy and Shatzky never create a satisfying whole.

Ultimately, Saving Mr Banks is witty, well-crafted and well-performed mainstream entertainment which, perhaps unavoidably, cleaves to a well-worn Disney template stating that all problems - however psychologically deep-rooted - can be overcome.

Aside from the thrill of its lavish sets and costumes, there isn’t much new to offer in this Beauty and the Beast.

"The Book of Solutions" is — first and foremost — a high-energy ode to the joys of being possessed by a creative spirit, and the pleasure that Gondry takes in telling a plot-light story that’s driven by pure invention is both palpable and contagious.

Selena y Los Dinos is no mere tribute, it is a vibrant argument for Selena’s humanity, as well as her status as a legend.

In Unidentified, women are good, women are bad, and women are everything in between. In a society where a woman’s death can easily go unnoticed, this film makes sure the audience pays attention.

Even if 1001 Grams isn't Hamer's best, it sees the director's enjoyable style come into full form.

Just as this series focuses on survival instincts, it seems that Scott has found a way to exercise his own, keeping the “Alien” series relevant by resurrecting the same old scares.

There’s sadness and beauty in every frame.

Director Annie Silverstein doesn’t elevate these conventions to new heights, but understands their potential well enough to craft an absorbing window into marginalized lives.

Monsters University, the latest Pixar offering, charms in an excessively familiar way that illustrates a troublesome eventuality: Pixar has lost its edge.

As is often the case with such violence, it eventually becomes numbing. By its midpoint, once the novelty of a superhero movie showing super levels of violence wears off, the thinness and lack of spark in the fight scenes becomes more readily apparent. By the film's end, they are hard to distinguish from any other superhero fare. Similarly, lack of imagination keep the film's prodigious swearing and occasional nudity from feeling like anything original.

Sponge on the Run sprints by too fast to dwell on the moments when it runs out of breath, and the mad science that Hillenburg first experimented with on “Rocko’s Modern Life” still draws from such a textured palette of sweet insanity that you can’t help but keep watching.

A confident, entertaining, and well-upholstered historical spy thriller about a regular guy who stumbles his way toward saving the world, it’s the perfect movie for anyone who watched “Bridge of Spies” and thought: “If only that had been 30 minutes shorter, a bit less artful, and a lot more British.”

For all of its singularly bizarre thrills, all of which reaffirm Garland as a vital interpreter for a world that’s coming apart at the seems, Men is the first of his films that makes life feel simpler than it really is.

The genius of the first movie was its ability to disguise a searing critique of capitalism inside a hilarious package, an idea that is genuinely funny itself. The sequel, with its recycled jokes and re-mixed songs, is merely a reminder of how original the original actually was.

Execution is more of the issue, as the film’s 112-minute running time feels both packed to the gills and unable to fully tackle everything James’ script throws at the wall. Yet a strong visual sense and excellent performances, especially from Midori Francis, are tough to beat.

Despite charming performances from Sally Hawkins and Ethan Hawke, this saccharine romance...rings a bit false from start to finish.

Just like there’s something cruel about the way Dangerous Animals treats women, there’s also something thoughtless about the way it deploys its undersea threats. Sure, they’re not ultimately the bad guys, but haven’t they suffered enough bad press over the years?

A movie that isn’t quite sure what it’s saying, even as it mesmerizes you with Javier Bardem’s performance.

The darker undertones of the family are handled with surprising nuance considering the first-timer behind the camera. The movie deals in open secrets, implications, and unsettling histories; a sense of alienation haunts virtually every scene.

High-Rise isn't an entirely cohesive accomplishment, but that's part of its zany appeal. While in certain ways his weakest film, it maintains the morbid entertainment value found throughout Wheatley's work while marking an ambitious step up in scale.

While the film is hardly as transgressive as its subject, it manages to be unexpectedly moving, and a nostalgic time capsule of an art-world rebel whose unorthodox methods and decidedly politically incorrect vision couldn’t exist today.

While depicting a landmark moment in humanity’s efforts to understand our place in the universe, Good Night Oppy renders the rovers’ journeys with such oppressive sentimentality terms that it can be hard to feel the full weight of the awe and wonder the movie drops into your lap.

As Swift observes in the movie, powerful women are given the almost impossible task of being “strategic” but not “calculating,” and Wilson is so good at splitting the difference that some of her documentary’s most humanizing moments are beautiful for how they contradict Swift’s intention.

While Entertainment lacks the focused critique of "The Comedy," it nevertheless offers a fascinating look at the tension between personal aspirations and the harsh realities holding them back.

A movie theater may not be the safest place to hide from a tornado, but this winning July blockbuster makes perfectly clear that huddling in the dark with strangers is a hell of a lot better than watching the storm from home.

It’s tough to watch a movie whose rootbound nostalgia keeps it from making good on the promise those stories made to show us something we’ve never seen before.

Schrader adapts the 2021 novel Foregone by Russell Banks into his own specific creation, and one that leaves viewers dizzied and lost by the chopped-up melancholy of it all.

Stearns’ tone involves a tricky negotiation between the melancholy and the macabre. “The Art of Self-Defense” doesn’t always pull that balance off, but it has enough ambition and wacky payoff to make the zany gamble worthwhile.

With the exception of a few candid moments featuring James at home, Knuckle isn't particularly well-made, but there's an inherently fascinating quality to the material.

Freeland is clearly having fun behind the camera, but broad and superficial performances mean the fun doesn’t always translate.

Kendrick makes the case for why she belongs in more dramatic roles that allow her to shed her normally peppy usually cheery onscreen persona. We know how good she is, and we’d only love to see more.

Drop works best in its nimblest moments, but ultimately we should have nothing but gratitude for a movie that has almost zero bloat and tells an effective, original story in 90 minutes, even if this sleek package is made up of some shopworn tropes.

Documentaries should inherently spark questions and debate, but Nuisance Bear too often throws out a buzzword or heady topic and abandons it.

It’s a nifty fit for the Danish filmmaker behind similarly cold-blooded dramas like “A War” and “A Highjacking,” who establishes a sense of unease from the film’s opening moments and never quite relents.

What Majors does here, how raw and vulnerable and brave he is not just with his craft, but his very body, is something to behold. This is true artistry, absolute commitment.

Few contemporary horror films start this strong to end so poorly, and with such a lack of ease. Molly deserves answers, but “Knocking” forgets what the questions were in the first place.

For all of the garishly shiny lens flairs that gleam off our heroes’ metallic heads, Transformers One feels rusted over, offering a predictable, formulaic product as generic as its “working title that never got dropped” name.

The Black Phone is a succinct and stressful terror blanketed with themes of friendship, family, and inventive portrayals of resiliency.

This is the kind of formative underground movie you could pledge your allegiance to for life, especially if you’re coming across it at a certain age for the very first time.

While Yen makes sure to acknowledge that he isn’t as young as he used to be, such admissions prove needlessly self-effacing.

But aside from calling for some bland common sense regulations that should be uncontroversial to any sane person, Roher doesn’t attempt to make anyone agree with him. After all of the information is presented, the film is much more interested in exploring the human story of how each of us has to wrap our own mind around an impossibly large topic.

Grainger and Shawkat are wonderful together, conveying the depth of a 10-year relationship with affection and honesty.

Aster, who’s exclusively interested in making the kind of films that should be reviewed straight onto a prescription pad, is too beholden to his neuroses for his latest movie to play like a cheap provocation. This time, however, there’s a good chance those are your neuroses, too.

None of the characters in Klaus are as delightful as they are well-drawn, and Pablos’ film never earns the holiday spirit it tries to manufacture down the home stretch. But there’s no denying that the future of “traditional” animation looks a little brighter than it did yesterday, and that’s reason enough to celebrate.

There’s a thin line between kindness and complicity, and “The End” achieves its sneakily immense power by dancing all over it with an ambivalence that Oppenheimer’s previous work never allowed for.

It’s an ambitious piece, but in the dance between experimental ideas and grounded storytelling, Aviva should have listened to her body.

This is a proudly traditional oater that travels down old trails with new sadism, as though the Western genre only died off because the movies weren’t cruel enough.

You might know where this is all going, but damn if you won’t enjoy the wild ride there.

Stevenson’s spin on The Omen can tie its borderline NC-17 terror to a multi-decade genre legacy suddenly feasting on noticeably improved visual artistry and a narratively satisfying revamp of stale IP.

The movie that’s happening in Ejiofor’s eyes is far more wracked and compelling than the one that Marston shows us through his own.

The screenplay itself fails to get inside Liane’s head as much as Khebizi and the film’s visual style do. You leave feeling like you only scratched the surface of who Liane is. You want more for her as much as she wants more from her small life.

From Romero’s original zombie series to the films it inspired, this type of horror succeeds when it laces its scares with biting social commentary, and “Cargo” utilizes this formula to great success.

While it’s tempting to go easy on this frequently electric film, and forgive it for not living up to its full potential, the most satisfying thing about Lee’s spotty underworld adventure is the sense that we’ve been conditioned to expect better.

The Unknown Girl combines its naturalistic direction with a strong lead performance and topicality, although these ingredients are hobbled by their familiarity.

It’s enough that this heartfelt delight makes par on its premise; there’s a birdie here and a bogey there, but director Craig Roberts (“Eternal Beauty”) keeps a firm grip on the film’s whimsical tone from start to finish, the former “Red Oaks” star finding a way to have fun with his shots without risking his straightforward approach to the pin.

Even though the story involves legitimate issues surrounding sexual identity and the boundaries of monogamy, its humor only goes surface deep. For the most part, the endearingly silly plot amounts to little more than sight gags and off-the-wall asides.

The resulting adrenaline-packed vehicle delivers a multi-directional sugar rush. It moves so quickly that the bells and whistles blur together.

Too in love with itself to ever totally go off the rails, Pacific Rim doesn't qualify as the first full-on dud of del Toro's career, but it's hard not to get the sense that something's missing.

Johnson’s performance is out-and-out wonderful, a beady-eyed fusion of body and spirit that osmoses Safdie’s sensibility to deliver what can’t be disputed as the most layered work of the actor’s career. A vividly contradictory Blunt, funny and sad especially in articulating Dawn’s conflicted response to Mark’s post-rehab emotional about-face during a tense argument, is equally sensational.

A provocative and frequently brilliant thriller.

This could be a recipe for excessive self-indulgence, but the meta quality of Red Flag is entirely irrelevant to its low key charm and persistent irreverence -- anchored, as always, by Karpovsky's loopy screen presence.

This morbid film takes body horror to a new level, but leaves its brains behind.

As “First Steps” limps to its total nothing of a conclusion, it feels less like a victory than it does a total surrender. You have to walk before you can run, but at this point the MCU is back to crawling on its knees, and at this point it seems like it might be too afraid to ever stand back up again.

June Zero is a film as a conversation piece. It may not be especially articulate at moments, it may not be as focused as it could be. But some of that is by design: This is a film with questions, not answers. Its tangents are like those of any meaty conversation. And it’s a conversation worth having.

While the script is far too spotty and unfocused for the film to be anything more than the sum of its parts, the setting — and the set-pieces that Daly creates from it — is enough to prevent this unlikely genre mash from being a blight of its own.

The closing minutes are a completely original sort of survival drama, one that defies precise explanation even as it delivers significant payoff.

A somewhat funny, perversely family-friendly musical-comedy about all of the ways that modern parents are making their children insane with anxiety.

When The Lovers and the Despot finally crawls to a close, you’re left with one thought above all others: This could make for a really great movie, some day.

Representing lower-class violence taken to an extreme, the cannibalism cannot be contained by police work. The movie's gradual build to a thrilling, appropriately bloody climax intensifies this disconnect.

Bier has done far more compelling work before, but the globe-spanning, life-affirming, morally upright trajectory of her latest accomplishment weakens its quality while sustaining its popularity. In a Better World is heavy, but it's also heavy-handed.

Touch Me Not points towards all manner of holistic truths, but leaves them all frustratingly out of reach.

With its bisexual lighting and hyper-designed oddball aesthetic, Please Baby Please looks a lot more polished than its messier camp influences. Aesthetically, the film cobbles together its many cinematic influences with admirable swagger. But film isn’t solely a visual medium — it’s a storytelling one as well.

Via his subject’s idiosyncracies – VanDyke is a habitual hand-washer and diagnosed OCD-ite – Curry starts to weave a subtle, but nonetheless eloquent critique not just of one man's compulsions, but a culture's.

Agnes may start as a slaphappy pastiche of a particular horror sub-genre, but — like Anna Biller’s “The Love Witch” before it — the film’s veil of irony proves sneakily disarming.

Last Breath is so taut — and the story it tells so remarkable — that you might just start to doubt even the most obvious of assumptions. That’s all the more impressive in a movie that is this happy to be hackneyed.

This is a film of rare joy and spirit, and one that deserves to be celebrated as both a feminist fairytale and a manifesto that will inspire a myriad of future stories.

One development gets short-shifted: the onslaught of studios drowning out what made the Con so attractive in the first place.

Estevez treats the drama with a straight-faced, utterly earnest approach with dual respect for the material and the audience's awareness of how it can go wrong. By playing it straight, The Way never goes off the deep end.

Like its tattered setting, The Rover is scattered with intriguing ideas never successfully fleshed out.

The movie’s narrow focus on the pre-existing conditions that fed into the cable car crisis does more to flatten the people involved than it does to bring new dimension to their ordeal.

The film shimmers with beauty and sadness despite its length, and the Japanese director’s background as both a photographer and a documentary filmmaker brings a gossamer naturalism to this realistic tale about a young woman’s regrets over abandoning her child years after the fact.

At just 81 minutes, the film’s sagging middle soon gives way to a zippy and very funny final act, which ties up big plot points while still hinting at more adventures to come for its charming trio.

Director Sarah Gavron's celebratory chronicle would inspire strong reactions even if it wasn't much of a movie, but the filmmaker compliments her powerful tale with the immediacy of her filmmaking and performances on the same level. It's an unabashed message-driven story that imbues the past with modern power.

While the raw material for something twisted and operatic exists here, Leblanc is too committed to putting meters of space between herself and the material to fully absorb the viewer. The motivations for that choice, however arty, are uncertain.

Russell and Karpovsky are a winning pair, and if they ever want to hit the road for more big jokes and even bigger revelations, any director would do well to let them take the wheel.

The pervasive elegance makes up for a largely derivate plot. We’ve seen variations on this story before, and Mean Dreams doesn’t do much to shake up expectations — until, that is, a violent finale that punctuates the characters’ psychological development.

Edited by writer-director Levin, Runoff is the kind of film that finds power and pleasure in silence; many of its best scenes come in careful, long, quiet scenes of revelation or desperation.

The film’s wild ending will determine whether or not a viewer enjoys the film. But rather than trying to understand exactly what it means, you’re better off appreciating it like one of Alex’s photos.

It’s certainly hard to imagine a cruder way of connecting the dots between the series’ fractured mythology.

Every beat of the film might be obvious, but that doesn’t detract from the enjoyability of watching an indelible young heroine like Lara Jean figure out her own life and just maybe fall in love in the process.