We’re largely left with an arresting return to the sort of wild work Cronenberg delivered in the 1980s and 1990s, if one where the shock is ironically missing.

Potential abounds in As Above, So Below—a sort of “Indiana Jones and the Haunted Catacombs”—though the many ideas at play never fully come together.

V/H/S is icky stuff that doesn’t deserve a pass just because the awful men in it get what’s coming to them.

Already, the younger Panahi has a firm command of the (largely) fixed camera; an eye for incorporating dramatic landscapes into the mise en scene (the family’s goodbye, a long shot against drifting clouds, is a heartbreaking stunner); a penchant for stylistic flourishes (including a magical flight into the stars); and an affinity for performance.

Just when I was about to nod off, Top Gun: Maverick jostled me awake with a fresh approach to the sort of blockbuster entertainment that the original movie managed so expertly. Faint praise? Maybe. But also higher praise than I ever expected to be giving.

A horror meditation on the biblical origins and self-perpetuating permutations of patriarchy, Men unfolds like an echoing primal scream.

What follows is a slightly unfocused twist on the sex-and-death genre; promiscuity is punished, yes, but out of hypocritical jealousy rather than any sort of moral high ground. If this doesn’t entirely work, it’s because of the movie’s depiction of the elderly couple.

This is largely an obligatory Marvel Cinematic Universe installment until it becomes possessed, quite literally, by a horrific spirit.

No matter where the film leaves us narratively, however, its evocation of estrangement—even, perhaps especially, as part of an Internet where we can talk to anyone at anytime—is both emotionally palpable and cinematically potent.

The Northman throws a few wrinkles into its vengeance story, but doesn’t offer up much food for thought. This is mostly a visual extravaganza of gritty historical detail, mythic imagination, and brutally horrific violence.

The movie’s best moments are those of cinebro-bonding between Pascal and Cage’s characters.

Apollo 10 ½ is so adept at making the mundane magical that it almost doesn’t need the conceit that gives the movie its title.

Everything Everywhere All At Once is at once a showcase for one of the world’s greatest acting talents and a manic meditation on reality, regret, and the richness of family bonds. It’s a movie that’s difficult to describe, but easy to love.

Turning Red is a wonder in the way 13-year-old girls can be: monstrous one moment, heart-melting the next.

Plemons amuses as the arrogant billionaire, dripping with disdain for his captor, but both he and Collins are saddled with speeches explaining the essences of their characters, as if they weren’t trusted to do so in their performances.

Crawl lends credence to the claim that you should never give up on a director.

Even while understanding that much of Belfast is supposed to be from the perspective of Buddy (Jude Hill), a young boy who witnesses the beginning of Ireland’s “Troubles” in his working-class neighborhood (and serves as something of a stand-in for writer-director Kenneth Branagh), I still felt a type of artistic naivete at work—a belief that all you need is black-and-white cinematography and a cute kid to create something of deep meaning and emotion.

With a more streamlined narrative, it would have been stunning. As is, the movie certainly marks Diallo as promising.

In the end, After Yang is less interested in excitedly speculating on the inner life of its title character than it is interested in what we homo sapiens do with the lives we’ve been given.

Pattinson and Kravitz bring real heat to their scenes together—there’s a great moment where he holds her against his chest as they’re hiding from a pursuer and their breathing slowly, erotically falls into rhythm. Even at three hours, the movie could use more of her.

Koepp’s fairly straightforward screenplay doesn’t take us in many surprising directions, so the film’s pleasures lie in Kravitz’s jittery performance (she’s working in a similar vein to Claire Foy in Soderbergh’s other recent psychological thriller, Unsane) and the experimental filmmaking that’s usually going on in the corners of a Soderbergh production.

Encanto takes on a complicated, mature topic—multigenerational family dysfunction—and dramatizes it in ways that are simultaneously literal and metaphorical, which is something only the best of Pixar usually manages to pull off. Here, the result is at once limited and meandering, underexplored and overstuffed.

Train to Busan is a cleverly concentrated shot of zombie terror.

The comic setups take longer than they should, then the punchlines give you a violent bear hug when they should be lightly slapping you on the cheek before quickly moving on to the next gag.

Other than these visual delights, Moonfall isn’t much fun.

The meta irony is that even as Scream 2022 is telling certain fans to back off and calm down, it’s also wooing a new generation. Luckily the film is clever enough to earn such … well, let’s call it appreciation, rather than allegiance. It’s just a movie, after all.

Ready or Not works best as a black comedy about how far the obscenely rich will go to keep what they (undeservedly) have.

The result is a laboriously convoluted narrative (Benedict Cumberbatch’s Doctor Strange plays a significant role) that only grows exponentially as the story unfolds, to diminishing returns.

Crawford is riveting in the lead, tapping into David’s impotence and barely suppressed rage while also making him sadly sympathetic—especially in the sweetly sincere moments where he tries to maintain a genuine connection with his children.

Of course, Cruz is luminous—especially as she embraces a maternal side that is at once nurturing and ferocious.

So what is a Coen brother movie like? Imagine a work of German expressionism as filtered through the stark spirituality of Ingmar Bergman or Carl Theodor Dreyer.

Full of nuance and understanding, C’mon C’mon meets a family in crisis and proceeds to hold them in its gentle hands.

Bergman Island deftly interrogates the idolization of art and the lionization of artists, while also distinguishing between experiencing a place and sucking it for “inspiration.”

Now this is how you reheat a piece of pop culture. Nearly 20 years after The Matrix Revolutions, which left its two main characters dead, director Lana Wachowski returns to the series with enough self-aware wit, narrative ingenuity, and filmmaking prowess to more than justify the endeavor.

As Yusuke Kafuku, the theater director, Hidetoshi Nishijima delivers a master class in withholding, while still giving the audience everything we need. He’s both stoic and seething.

Reinsve gives Julie both a hard edge and soft center, so that we root for her even when she makes decisions with which we disagree.

Featuring a pair of novice performances that will either make the actors stars or preserve them in cinematic amber as these exact characters, the 1973-set Licorice Pizza marks an ambling, deceptively breezy, and incredibly sweet effort from writer-director Paul Thomas Anderson.

Be careful with Petite Maman; the movie is small and quiet, but if you let your guard down, it might devastate you.

Like each of del Toro’s nastier pictures, Nightmare Alley closes in on you with a hellish elegance.

Writing and directing her first feature, which she adapted from an Elena Ferrante novel, Maggie Gyllenhaal employs an intensely intimate camera, one that’s so tight on Colman’s face that at times her features are a blur.

Greene seems to have produced a respectful account of the experiment, allowing these men to find some form of catharsis without exploiting them.

Mosese’s camera is dispassionate, but deeply attentive.

Gently yet urgently, Flee gives intimate attention to one refugee’s story, while reminding us that Amin also stands in for millions upon millions of others across the globe who are subject to dehumanization as they simply seek a safer life.

During the production numbers, Spielberg’s camera is almost always on the move, but not in a distracting way. Usually it’s trying to keep up with the dancers and give them as much of the frame as they need; at other times it winds its way among them, increasing our sense of exhilaration and intimacy.

Rex, meanwhile—an actor and former VJ with a brief early stint in adult entertainment—delivers an unequivocally great comic performance. Simultaneously sweet and icky, he gives the character a light, even gentle spirit that’s at odds with the materialist manner with which he thinks about and engages in sex.

Garfield is fine, if a bit one-note in his show-must-go-on energy. The real issue is that the film is maniacally focused on Larson as the uber-struggling artist in a way that eventually feels monstrous, devouring any other character or concern that happens to cross its path.

If Test Pattern feels a bit unfinished by its end, it’s not because I wanted resolution—documenting the refusal of resolution seems to be the point—but because there seemed to still be more, especially between the main couple, to explore.

Director Ridley Scott and cinematographer Dariusz Wolski lacquer things with the right sheen—and the outfits and hairstyles, if nothing else, will keep you awake for the nearly three-hour running time—but House of Gucci’s promise as a campy, fact-based crime melodrama is only realized when Germanotta is running the show.

Spencer relies quite heavily on Kristen Stewart’s central performance. Once you adjust to the repetitive rhythm of speaking she employs—a rush of words, followed by a pregnant pause, then another rush with a single syllable of emphasis—you can appreciate some of the more delicate work she’s doing, particularly her darting eyes and changing posture.

Cumberbatch makes every moment he’s onscreen mesmerizing—entertaining and terrifying at the same time.

At its best, this is galaxy-brain, comic-book stuff rooted in a tactile sense of place. Unfortunately, Eternals runs nearly three hours and is bloated with elements that have served other MCU installments well, but fall flat here.

Detractors might call it navel-gazing, but to me The Souvenir: Part II is introspection to adroit, therapeutic purpose.

This is a film of clashing ideas and clanging style.

Passing is an impressionistic experience, much like the Emahoy Tsegué-Maryam Guèbrou piano piece that composer Devonté Hynes incorporates into the score, a portrait of an identity that refuses to be pinned down, for better and for worse.

Weerasethakul casts spells, and this is a particularly auditory one, the weaving of a liminal soundspace.

This is another sad-sack Anderson movie, with perhaps the saddest collection of actors we’ve seen. And yet, this being Anderson, The French Dispatch is also absolutely delightful.

If you can get on its moodily monstrous wavelength, the movie will have you asking why we let some animals sleep on our beds and put others in pens.

There’s a tactile quality to the film—the way softly glowing lamps float alongside characters in dark hallways or fabrics drape around them and flicker violently in the wind—that makes everything feel simultaneously graspable and out of this world.

If the overall project of the Craig pictures was to domesticate 007, No Time to Die accomplishes its mission. But it was a bit of a slog to get there.

Ducournau’s insistence on taking this scenario to unimaginable extremes may occasionally distance us from the humanity she’s also clearly interested in, but there’s no denying that her handling of craft and form—particularly the way the reddish-pink glow of a fire-truck’s flashing light filters much of the imagery—is masterful.

Malignant isn’t much of a horror movie—the scares are standard, the dialogue is awful, the performances are incongruous—but as a horror idea, it’s a whopper.

By its bombastic (and somewhat abrupt) final scene, you have to imagine that The Eyes of Tammy Faye accurately captures how Tammy Faye saw herself.

With The Card Counter, Schrader offers another self-flagellating portrait of a man who’s experienced—and enacted—great sin, struggling to perceive anything akin to divine grace.

What’s really spooky about Candyman is that the movie is confused in almost exactly the way that the first film was. Maybe the material itself is haunted.

Shang-Chi and the Legend of the Ten Rings isn’t perfect. There’s a bit too much exposition involving myths, history, and character backstory; that climax inevitably abandons the intimacy of the fight scenes for gargantuan CGI. Yet by that point the movie has earned too much goodwill to be affected much by such complaints. I’m sure there are plenty of punchplosions to come in the MCU, probably even delivered by Shang-Chi himself, but at least Ten Rings offers a momentary respite from the reverberations.

Nine Days is slow going at first—it sometimes feels as if the title is a reference to its running time—but eventually this pensive, existential thought experiment blossoms into something more cinematic.

We get some great music in Respect, but only a surface sense of the rest.

I don’t know if I’ll ever be a connoisseur of kill-shot comedy, but director James Gunn at least makes it somewhat palatable.

Whatever else he ends up doing in his career, Adam Driver will always have Annette. Surely this will go down as his most notorious performance (and yes, I’m including his snit-fitty—and thoroughly magnetic—turn as Kylo Ren in the Star Wars movies).

This is, in many ways, a deeply thoughtful film—about loneliness, grief, anger, and finding something to truly care about. And Cage gives a performance that embodies all of those things.

At its heart, The Green Knight is about the very idea of legends and myths: how they grow, what they reveal, what they conceal.

Holy Moses! (No need to desecrate this with any more words.)

Old is vintage M. Night: a high concept brought ever higher by a filmmaker apparently incapable of second-guessing himself.

Cheadle is wonderful—weary and gravelly as an underestimated ex-con playing everyone’s assumptions about him to his advantage.

A dizzying story told at a dizzying pace, Zola might register for some as a transgressive lark (it certainly has comic touches, including a montage of Stefani’s clients’ penises). My experience was more like a simmering panic attack; it’s “fun” in the same way Uncut Gems was fun.

It’s not just the historical footage that makes the documentary special, however; it’s also what Questlove and his filmmaking team do with it.

Black Widow certainly suffers from MCU bloat—dutiful references to other installments in the franchise, an overly convoluted plot leading to a two-hour-plus runtime, an endlessly explosive action finale that takes place mostly in front of green screens—yet a strong cast and emphasis on character ultimately overcome much of those grievances.

Director Justin Lin (making his fifth Fast film) nicely balances chaos and clarity in one early chase scene through the jungle, but later lets the visual bombast take over.

One of Pixar’s smaller, sweeter efforts.

If In the Heights is packed with enough bold choices to invite both effusive praise and endless nitpicking, that comes with the genre.

The movie considers what it means to move on, to reconcile with the past while creating a new future. For both a city and a person. And, perhaps, a sea nymph.

All Light, Everywhere is very smart and extremely meta (Anthony often films himself and his crew setting up a shot, to emphasize the observational point), though it can be a bit dry.

Much of Holler’s plotting feels driven by issues (factory layoffs, opioids) rather than allowing those issues to naturally exist within the narrative, but Adlon brings an exhausted authenticity to the film that makes up for it.

Exhaustingly over-directed (Craig Gillespie zooms in from an establishing shot to a close-up in nearly every other scene), the movie is also a nonstop parade of grating, obvious needle drops.

On the surface, A Quiet Place Part II is another expertly crafted and well-acted monster movie, much like its predecessor.

Shiva Baby has a comic claustrophobia that almost makes you choke, so intense is its depiction of familial/traditional walls closing in on its main character.

Wow, when this thing eventually curdles, it really curdles into something rank.

It’s another astounding assemblage of dryly humorous, immaculately designed, fixed-camera vignettes, if an even more morose collection than the previous ones.

Hang in there with Together Together. What may seem at first like a slender character study eventually grows into a more expansive exploration of loneliness, before ending on a perfect, powerhouse final shot.

Thanks to little filmmaking touches, Kong has real personality, which helps us come to care for his plight.

A triumph of design, Raya and the Last Dragon is held back by a lackluster story, one cobbled together from various influences (Indiana Jones, Star Wars, an array of Southeast Asian cultures) and bent in service of a tortured—and somewhat confused—lesson about learning to trust.

This is too neat, tidy, and digestible of a take on such a wrenching topic—especially when we know the forces of injustice at work here were only temporarily stymied by this trial, and hardly defeated.

When Pieces of a Woman is at its best, it’s focusing on this traumatized couple and how neither knows how to make room for the other’s grieving process, partly because their respective processes conflict. Unfortunately the movie wants to be so much more.

You’re guaranteed to come away with new respect for the octopus as a species and astonishment at the intimate connection Foster experiences.

Day has a startling combination of confidence and corruptibility as the legendary jazz singer, but the film itself is a jumble of barely established characters, over-stylized techniques, and didactic dialogue.

Murphy is committed, bringing back the same low-key charm he showcased in the original, while also undercutting Akeem by showing how he has come to represent the repressive Zamundan traditions he once rebelled against.

A tender, fictionalized memoir anchored by two stellar performances.

As for Hopkins, he gives a precisely observed performance, capturing Anthony’s confusion without limiting the character to that single quality. He’s dazzling, for example, when turning on the charm for a potential new caregiver.