If Jarmusch’s latest often feels as though it lacks a pulse, this star-studded parable is held together by one consistent truth: When Hell is full, the dead will walk the Earth. And when the Earth is fucked, the living will do whatever they can to sleepwalk through the nightmare.

Marshall-Green is just finding his way, and his debut is very much a first film. ... Modest and unfussy, “Adopt a Highway” fails to ground its fable-esque qualities in a deeper bedrock of emotional truth, but its best moments offer a tender glimpse at what people do with several decades of pent-up resentment.

The movie makes up for uneven dialogue and pacing issues through sheer horrific imagery.

Powell is an exceptionally promising filmmaker, but by the time he arranges all of his ducks in a row for the finale, he’s lost track as to whether Lucas is continuing the cycle of vengeance that has poisoned so much of his family, or if he’s breaking it.

It almost doesn’t matter that the movie is too emotionally prescriptive to have any real power, or too high on imagination to leave any room for wonder; DuVernay evinces such faith in who she is and what she’s doing that “A Wrinkle in Time” remains true to itself even when everything on screen reads false.

What this movie has — courtesy of Kurt Wimmer’s upwardly mobile script — is a rickety ladder that it climbs from comically low stakes up to the highest levels of power.

And while some viewers may brace while watching (or avoid altogether), the overwhelming feeling of watching this adaptation in a packed theater was solidarity and catharsis. As dark as the dirt is in this story, “It Ends with Us” is a film focused on what can grow out of it.

It’s light entertainment meant to be shared, a big glass of summer fun that goes down easy.

"Blackbird" may be a tearjerker, but it’s also a reminder that there’s more to tears than tragedy, even in the midst of personal loss.

This is a dense, unforgiving movie in the classic sense, an adults-only drama that doesn’t placate despite its stylistic overreaches. It’s disappointing that in its final moments, the movie has come so far off its own hinges, so deconstructed its own rivets, that it can’t put them back together again. But everything that’s come before is so rich that you’re ready to forgive it.

Even when nothing else in the film makes sense, the unhinged ethos of its own creation leaves a clue behind with the clarity of a body-chalk outline.

At the core of it all, Juri’s performance is a marvel of coiled emotion and wide-eyed wonder at the world around her. It’s just that the film around her does a disservice to that performance.

Admirable as it is that Deep Water tries to play things straight, Harlin’s film would have benefited enormously from a neurologically enhanced super Jaws in the third act.

Lessons about loving oneself, accepting one’s faults, and being the best version of yourself are cheesy, but not without purpose. Call it cinematic comfort food, but Dumplin' knows how to satisfy.

Alita: Battle Angel is [Rodriguez’s] best film since he brought Frank Miller’s graphic novel to the screen, a sci-fi epic that does something rare in an age of endless adaptations and reboots: lives up to its potential while leaving you wanting more.

Shot in beautifully textured 16mm and told at an unhurried pace, Person to Person requires some getting used to, but once you settle into its groove the movie becomes much more than the sum of its parts.

Surprisingly funny, well-acted, and a little offbeat, Aline is as delightfully kooky as its monumental subject.

It doesn’t stop “Axel F” from getting the job done, but that’s little consolation in a movie so concerned with the long-term consequences of not caring about anything else. If only “Axel F” didn’t make it so damn easy to forgive it for that.

Olin, at turns daringly open and frustratingly restrained, makes Maya entirely her own, the focal point and reason for the film itself.

Pretty and discardable in equal measures, the movie illustrates ingredients of the filmmaker's appeal while falling short of assembling them into a coherent whole.

If the genre elements sustain the work as a whole, the plot suffers from the meandering quality that frequently plagues late period Allen work. Still, the filmmaking finds its groove in individual moments.

It's all a shell of itself, with Fred Savage on hand to occasionally note how weird this all is.

The latest Blumhouse movie about creepy kids is a fitting addition to one of horror’s most reliable subgenres, and it manages to elevate itself above the competition through some genuinely compelling adult drama and a delightful Duffer Brothers-esque supernatural twist. And it’s infinitely more enjoyable than any direct-to-streaming January horror movie has any right to be.

It’s a natty-enough twist on the survivor story — what if you were stuck inside, not outside? — and one bolstered by the inherent watchability of star Willem Dafoe, one of the few performers absolutely up to the task of this particular feature.

6 Years offers little in the way of new material. Yet Fidell, working with executive producers Mark and Jay Duplass, effectively broadens her range by borrowing the sibling directors' improvisatory style and ceding control to her two leads, whose heartbreaking performances imbue this familiar Austin-set narrative with a fiery edge.

With emerging rebel leader Rey (Daisy Ridley) providing a sturdy emotional foundation, and billions of Disney dollars fueling an obviously stunning array of special effects, Rise of Skywalker doesn’t squander every opportunity to dial up the thrilling nature of the epic at hand, but all that razzle-dazzle can’t obscure a hollow core.

Caught somewhere between “Buffy the Vampire Slayer” and “The Wire,” this dark genre hybrid has a lot of flaws, but none of them are fatal.

It’s hard to understand how anyone so capable of diagnosing this problem can also believe themselves capable of solving it — so hard, in fact, that the last 20 minutes of Generation Wealth might compel you to reconsider the value of the 80 minutes before them.

The script lacks bite, save some wry meta-commentary on the movie’s existence (including a passing reference to “horror transmedia”). Nevertheless, Susco follows the well-worn path of using the horror/thriller genre to explore the eerie ambiguities of modern times.

Here is a rare new entry in that smallest of sub-genres: Movies that don’t punish teens for f--king their brains out (surprise surprise: it’s French).

The new movie basically jams the archetypes of a John Hughes teen comedy into a minimalist haunted scenario. While that’s not enough to suppress the underlying gimmickry of the storytelling, Annabelle Comes Home at least manages to charm and frighten its way through the purest distillation of the “Conjuring” formula to date.

Sutton’s tricky balance of B-movie caricatures and gloomy expressionism doesn’t always match up, but that very discordance speaks to the potency of its themes.

If The Mauritanian is a slight cut above so many of the pious and self-flagellating political thrillers that Hollywood churned out in the years after 9/11, that’s because it doesn’t aim to exorcise America’s guilt so much as it tries to use it as a necessary step on the road towards forgiveness.

Smith puts on such an outsized performance that it’s easy for him to overshadow its smaller joys — and when Genie is suddenly silenced in a limp third act, the entire film suffers.

The violence, while pervasive, does not feel gratuitous. Each kill is quick and to the point, and the camera never lingers too long on the flesh-torn wreckage.

American movie-watchers are used to consuming their history lessons with a heavy layer of artificial butter on top, but William N. Collage’s script filters Gordon’s saga through so many creaky Hollywood tropes that the over-cranked genre stuff begins to feel more honest by comparison.

The suspense builds creepily enough, with a classic fake-out in a strong first act. But when the movie turns into full-blown horror, which it eventually sort of does, the pacing of the violence is all out of whack.

In a country that insists everyone gets a title shot when most of them aren’t even allowed in the ring, Winkler rope-a-dopes us into a strange and rewarding story about three people who dare to punch above their weight class no matter what kind of beating they have to take for that temerity.

Palmer isn’t exactly high art, but it’s no small feat for something so predictable to avoid feeling dishonest.

The home stretch of We Broke Up is so knowing that the forced smile of the movie’s first hour achieves a certain poignancy in hindsight.

If you have your heart set on watching a new release about people who have a ghost today, “We Have a Ghost” will be a tolerable experience. But for everyone else, reading the film’s highly descriptive title is about as interesting as spending 127 minutes watching it.

The heart of this story remains firmly intact, but there’s something about seeing it rendered in live-action that takes away its inherent magic.

It’s funny and strange and sometimes truly dark. Not all of it works or even coheres, but it also offers a fresh look at what love does to people, both on the big screen and out in the world.

The movie has few tricks on offer but above all, delivers a solid reminder of Penn’s filmmaking talent, and welcome evidence that it runs in the family.

The Deb may not be the most memorable movie musical of the year, but its heart and funny bone are in the right place.

Finley often seems to be at the mercy of his material’s strangeness. He stages most scenes with a vacuum-sealed flatness, as if unsure how else to focus our attention on what’s sucking the life out of the film’s world, and his cast — who can only stretch their characters’ shared frustration so far — are left with little to do but lean into the anti-drama of intergalactic domination.

The movie's uneven tone and ridiculous twists never quite gel, but Knock, Knock is so eager to please that it's hard not roll with the absurd depravity on display — which has been the essence of Roth's appeal from the outset.

On a Magical Night is a fanciful tale of marriage and its malcontents; a muted sex farce that unfolds like an overwhelmingly French twist on “A Christmas Carol” for people who are sick of their spouses.

Subway is a rush of youthful energy so raw and well-realized that it steamrolls any of the director’s attempts to cohere it into an actual story.

It’s all an approximation of fun, mirth in tiny portions, amusement of the thinnest variety.

Too robust to sink into the rhythms of a character study, but too financially limited to tell a story that matches the sweep of its director’s vision, Free State of Jones is a film divided against itself, and it cannot stand.

Attempts to ride the film through its own uncomfortable wavelength do offer some treats, even if they all come with caveats.

The creativity may be lacking in other areas, but “Goosebumps 2” steps up the creature feature quotient with style and smarts.

Truth to Power is a promotional film, not a work of journalism.

It’s great that “Stormy” might buy its namesake a small measure of the sympathy she deserved from the start, but 110 minutes of your time shouldn’t feel like this steep of a price.

Eisenberg’s performance is left to affirm that art can truly happen anywhere, but when he’s offscreen it doesn’t seem to happen anywhere else.

A loud, visually assaultive assemblage of genre tropes as technically accomplished as it is difficult to watch, "The Strange Color of Your Body's Tears" has plenty to impress while simultaneously offering so little.

The latest Silent Night, Deadly Night is an audacious 2025 season capper for Cineverse and a solid achievement for Nelson, one that promises the director will give us more genre worth unwrapping down the line.

With the bawdy and intoxicatingly batshit Dog Eat Dog, Schrader is off the leash once and for all.

A delightful mash-up of everything ’80s, from E.T. to Madonna, Princess Diana to Roxy Music, the Jackson family to Ronald Reagan, this anachronistic retelling is faithful to Coolidge’s original film, but with its own flashy new touches.

The scariest thing about The Devil Made Me Do It is the possibility that it will set the stage for more of this, and less of what made the franchise so compelling in the first place.

Cafe de Flore constantly hovers on the brink on some revelation it never quite arrives at.

Alternately mortified and charmed by the unhinged lifestyle, the film goofily celebrates the idea of a societal escape before drowning its idealism in a puddle of half-formed jokes.

It feels like an utterly ridiculous film before you hit the multitude of twists that blow up its already-shaky premise a dozen times over. But at a certain point, the film’s commitment to its own asininity becomes so overpowering that even the most cynical viewers will have no choice but to suspend their disbelief and be sucked into its magic.

Charli’s version of herself, though, is a fascinating creation — self-deprecating, yes, and laughing at herself, but with the clinical distance of a telescope lasered onto a forming star. See this movie with a crowd of Charli’s friends and collaborators, and you’ll too be in on the joke.

Like so many of the faith-based biopics that have helped turn the genre into a flyover-state phenomenon, American Underdog is sustained by a vaguely fetishistic enthusiasm for its subject’s hardships.

Decent enough as a night out but destined to be used as a fundraising tool, the film is galvanized by its push towards a perverse kind of representation; the idea isn’t to make people with cystic fibrosis feel seen, but rather to erase them altogether. And the highest compliment one can pay to Five Feet Apart is that it has the power to play a small, valuable role in that effort.

While the filmmaker’s craft has never been shakier than it is in this stilted and wildly uneven tale about the twisted strings that tie some couples together, it’s also never been clearer that said filmmaker is Adrian Lyne. Not only does this delirious movie find him swan-diving back into the same fetid lap pool of envy, lust, and psychosexual control where he used to swim laps every morning, it finds that he’s basically got an entire lane to himself.

It seems that this particular game of Pokémon needed more time at the gym. Yes, that’s a “Pokémon Go” reference, and if you can’t follow it, don’t bother.

Gates only pokes fun at how America casts itself until she gets distracted by a cinematic fantasy of her own.

Wittrock and Chao are both enormously likeable in their roles, even if Basilone’s derivative script often dilutes the organic chemistry between them in order to maintain the integrity of its plot.

A riveting but utterly ridiculous melodrama about the burden of guilt and the value of bunny shit, Atom Egoyan’s “Guest of Honour” layers one absurd turn on top of another with the confidence of a veteran architect, and yet — even at its most perversely entertaining — this very unpredictable movie only feels as if it’s working in spite of itself.

This material could make for a powerful work, but Viceroy’s House is certainly not it.

Body at Brighton Rock is the happy work of someone who misses when scrappy genre fare could have low stakes and still feel slightly dangerous; when filmmakers were empowered by the knowledge that a VHS of their schlock took up just as much real estate on video store shelves as a tape of the biggest Hollywood blockbuster.

Even as Castle in the Ground begins to fray and fall apart, Joey Klein’s dour but gripping opioid drama remains believable for how perfectly it dovetails with its grieving protagonist.

Sam Levinson’s exasperatingly gorgeous Malcolm & Marie is a lot like the two people who lend its title their names: confident and insecure in equal measure, stuffed to the gills with big ideas but convinced of nothing beyond its own frenzied existence, and reverent of Hollywood’s past at the same time it’s trying to stake a new claim for its future.

So long as “Billy Lynn” remains focused on his ambiguous mindset, it remains an engaging, somewhat theatrical character study. But Lee’s ongoing need to complicate his approach yields a movie trapped between conventional narrative tropes and questionable attempts to deliver something that registers on a more visceral level.

As ghost stories go, this one's done just well enough to provide reminders of how it has been done better.

A wish fulfillment in feature-film-shaped form and little else, “You, Me & Tuscany” isn’t especially memorable or surprising, but there’s a soothing, smoothed-over quality to this film — which was shot on-location in Tuscany, so points for that — that makes it a suitable candidate for your next airplane viewing.

Like Luther’s latest nemesis, Luther: The Fallen Sun goes big, and not always in ways that work to its benefit.

Woefully inauthentic, milquetoast as a mild breeze and far too tidy for any of its sweeping resolutions to have even the faintest hint of staying power, The Hollars takes 88 minutes to inspire the same warm and fuzzy feeling that a Hallmark card can deliver in a heartbeat.

Unfortunately, the character development never hits hard enough for “I.S.S.” to transcend being a cool idea, rather than a cool movie.

The elegance of Francis Lawrence’s direction, cinematographer Jo Willems’ measured camerawork, and James Newton Howard’s ominous score adheres to a familiar set of beats, but it’s the rare big Hollywood mood piece and mostly satisfying on those terms.

Hubie Halloween gets by on the strength of its cameos and sight gags.

Zippy at first with the charisma and verve of a Doris Day/Rock Hudson movie, before it way outstretches its welcome across multiple encores and a 132-minute running time, Fly Me to the Moon has the patina of a straight-to-streaming movie tossed into theaters due to a backend deal or to appease filmmakers.

Green wisely cedes control to his actors, with Bullock as the main engine pulling the material along. But neither his direction, nor any of the formidable performances, can do much to alleviate the bumpy road of Peter Straughan's screenplay.

Alone Together has the momentum of a reclamation of sorts, but the plot tries to do too much, say too much, when it really should just be about love. Who cares if it’s formulaic or not? In the middle of this pandemic, maybe being something we can rely on is a good thing.

A mouth-watering but utterly flavorless documentary about one of the most acclaimed sushi chefs in the world (and arguably the most famous), Matt Tyrnauer’s “Nobu” is such a fawning portrait of Nobu Matsuhisa that it feels like it should only be available to watch on a DVD sold at the gift shops in the restaurateur’s hotels.

Like a time-traveler who sets into motion the same fate they’re trying to undo, Submission is so desperate not to become a cliché that it ultimately wastes a golden opportunity to become something more.

Bruised isn’t breaking any new ground from a narrative standpoint, but it does show the strength of Halle Berry as a director, boasting a powder keg of dominating performances within a simplistic story.

Koppelman’s attempts to do too much are easy to forgive in a film that often seems to be doing so little. The same is true of the writer/director’s rookie clumsiness, which is offset not only by Amanda Seyfried’s expert performance in the lead role, but also — and even more importantly — by Koppelman’s own unwavering conviction about the limits of self-expression.

The film is peppered with comedic delight. Coogan’s deadpan gravitas leads the way in a cast that mostly delivers.

However afraid she is to let things get too serious, Miller Rogen is powerless to erase the emotional undertow that carries this story forward. All of the pent-up animosity her movie doesn’t know what to do with becomes its greatest asset.

Singer’s Reptile, distributed by Netflix, wants to be a David Fincher procedural with Steven Soderbergh’s paranoia, but it’s a fangless homage without suspense, logic, or shame.

More sad than salacious, it’s the rare film about a criminal that offers human details without humanizing a man who so many agree was a monster.

No one will say that Jumpin’ Jack Flash, a comedy thriller in which Whoopi plays a computer operator who gets accidentally tangled up in a silly plot involving spies and dead bodies, is the greatest film ever, let alone a passively good one.

And, yes, it is also often quite funny. Most of that humor comes care of Sandler, who slips back into Happy with something like grizzled ease, and seems to have not lost a trick on what makes the character both so funny (his rage, his imagination, his fashion sense) and so easy to care about (his rage, his imagination, his fashion sense).

Despite Close’s valiant efforts, everything about Four Good Days feels artificial, like face powder barely caked on over the horrors of a TV movie of the week.