Even when the storytelling falls short, Pedro Páramo never fails to offer up ideas worth pondering.

You don’t watch Red One so much as stare ahead at the screen. It is a movie that is playing in front of you, I can comfortably give it that much, and for one meant to summon up the Christmas spirit, there’s not a whiff of mirth from the screenplay to the production level.

Funny, joyful, and brimming with confidence, The Colors Within chronicles its characters’ tentative first steps into a world outside of the ones built for them by their families and teachers, and it does so with a vibrancy that allows us all to feel as if we’re seeing that world through Totsuko’s eyes.

What this story reminds us isn’t that a woman named Sara Jane Moore was radicalized into action, but that history — for all of the larger than life sweep that word implies — is ultimately written on a level too personal for textbooks to ever understand.

The central connection is palpable, speaking yet again to the talents of the film‘s two leads, but the queerness that beats at the heart of it is often vaguer than it needs to be, just a silhouette in the night rather than a shadow play of outright love and desire.

On its own, Paddington in Peru is a fun if forgettable matinee for the whole family to enjoy, but — like its hero and its villain alike — the movie belongs to a tradition that it implores us to cherish like an heirloom, and it would be a direct contradiction of its story to orphan it from the greater context of its creation.

“How does he do it?,” someone asks. Music by John Williams doesn’t have the slightest idea. This long and indulgent doc is content to let us bask in the mystery of it all, if only because it understands that people will be asking that same question for centuries to come.

The film turned out to be a fascinating microcosm of the continued effects of Hollywood sexism. In Turner’s wit and Adams’ pain, we get a glimpse of the brilliant women who were sidelined in favor of childish men in this one tiny corner of Hollywood. All the pieces are there in “Chasing Chasing Amy,” but it all proved a bit unwieldy for what is essentially a Kevin Smith fan film, albeit a charming one.

It’s not that Absolution is any worse than the awful likes of “Retribution” (quite the opposite), but this seedy crime saga makes it uniquely clear that Neeson’s special set of skills have taken him as far as they can.

Any weaknesses lie more in the slightly tired general themes Ma explores. The Mother and the Bear doesn’t bring a lot of new material to the familiar narrative of parents becoming enlightened towards their child’s sexuality.

The film just lacks in, you know, tension, danger, build, and stakes, the hallmarks of dramatic narrative. It’s almost as though the word “mellifluous,” pertaining to Hania Rani’s score, was coined for this film.

Vengeance Most Fowl updates the look of Wallace and Gromit’s established world by combining classical craft and cutting-edge tools to fit the modern era. While the results are seamless (Aardman Animation never phones in the work) and the cheeky comic tone remains the same, it inevitably calls attention to the loss of something intimate and handcrafted that was previously part of the infrastructure.

A throwback character study that invokes the kind of mid-budget hits that kept the lights on at Warner Bros. for 50 years, Juror #2 both enriches our understanding of the Hollywood icon who made it and stands on its own as one of the best studio films released in 2024.

That Zemeckis and cinematographer Don Burgess manage to pack multiple lifetimes of experience into a single space, a fixed camera upon it, and mostly pull it off is quite a feat.

New Wave is piercing in its unveiling of the cycle of blame that came out of the Vietnam War.

Netto and Schindler are less interested in pulpy sadism than they are in pure suspense.

For the most part, Black Box Diaries — per its title — is a personal testimony of a stressful journey, illustrating how survivors struggle, cope and find relief in support.

If nothing else, audience members will walk away from Martha with a far greater understanding of Stewart — of all the “good things,” in her parlance, and plenty of the bad — and equal admiration and unease of what that all adds up to.

Despite the film’s best efforts to melt its characters into the vast sludge of superhero cinema, the union between Eddie and Venom is simply too pure to be diluted down to nothing. Thanks to Hardy, even the least of the movies in this franchise is definitely something, and it’s something that its genre may not be able to survive without.

The film is determined to prove that people can meaningfully interact with the world in any number of ways, now more than ever, and it accomplishes that goal with real clarity and rare emotional force (the last shot is the kind of gut-punch that hurts so good).

The movie struggles to translate its noble aims to compelling drama, with any audience investment merely being a byproduct of the inherently high stakes.

All the individual pieces that make “Allswell” interesting are smothered in treacle.

Not to be missed, Falling Stars reimagines the fantasy tropes of witchcraft through the kind of regional character specificity that indie audiences see more often in films like “Winter’s Bone.”

Time doesn’t stop in the world of Nocturnes, but in this introspective and captivating doc, a respite isn’t just possible, it’s imperative.

Nothing about it feels the least bit real, but nothing about it feels dishonest either.

What I wish for this film is that it had trusted the lilting rhythms of its own initial story more confidently rather than a crash into various melodramatic episodes in the finale that only serve to get us to a hurtled-toward cathartic ending.

The Line is a must-see for a peek behind the coke-filled sheets of fraternities, well, everywhere.

As more people try to make peace with how their darkest hours have irreparably damaged them, actors with creepy smiles should breathe a little easier knowing that they’ll be employable for the foreseeable future.