Holbrook—a Garrett Hedlund-Charlie Hunnam hybrid—at least delivers the tough-guy one-liners Black specializes in with the right combination of sincerity and bemusement (even better is Sterling K. Brown as a government agent). But in the mouths of pretty much everyone else in the cast—including Trevante Rhodes, Thomas Jane, and Keegan-Michael Key—the dialogue falls flat.

I’m convinced more of Hawke’s passion for the man than his place in music history.

The Happytime Murders is at its best not when it’s at its most “adult,” but when the filmmakers find new, surprising ways to employ their puppeteering creativity in the real world.

On the surface a sports documentary about the titular tennis legend, John McEnroe: In the Realm of Perfection is also a call to watch things more closely.

This is a movie that’s honest about night coming on, but it also reminds us of the small things that will get you through that night, until the morning dawns.

Minding the Gap honors the pain of these young men’s lives so fully, it earns the right to conclude with the equivalent of a perfectly executed flip—audacious, improbable, and liberating.

Despite the strong lead performance and these immersive aesthetics, Madeline remains frustratingly at a distance. Even as the movie puts us inside her head, it somehow fails to illuminate her.

It’s at once deeply formulaic and—in terms of the faces and places we usually see on movie screens in the West—refreshingly unfamiliar.

Mary and the Witch’s Flower turns homage into a richly rewarding adventure.

BlacKkKlansman is a joke that sticks in your throat, as well as a necessary examination of blight history (those shameful marks on the American record when “white history” and “black history” awfully intersect).

Leave No Trace, Debra Granik’s first fiction feature since 2010’s masterful Winter’s Bone, is a movie that’s willing to whisper. If you don’t listen (and watch) closely, you might miss out on the deep wells of emotion beneath its placid surface.

Ant-Man and the Wasp is still beholden to an overwritten superhero/sci-fi storyline that involves lots of quantum talk and way too many players.

Watching Game Night is like witnessing someone on a hot streak while playing charades. As they keep nailing points for their team in rapid succession, you wonder how long they can sustain it. In Game Night, it’s the laughs that just keep coming.

In its eagerness to please, Eighth Grade does go for some sunnier touches that feel good in the moment but don’t necessarily ring true upon closer inspection.

With Zama, Martel no longer hints at that past, but actively exhumes it, unleashing ghosts in the process.

While some are hailing Mission: Impossible — Fallout as something truly special, I wouldn’t go quite that far. It does, however, offer as many thrilling dance numbers—I mean, action sequences—as any of the other installments.

As wonderful as Fantastic Mr. Fox is, Isle of Dogs represents a leap forward for Anderson and his extensive team of stop-motion animators.

It comes at you hard, bright, and fast. This is an angry, explicitly funny movie that refuses to conform to a three-act structure. Instead, it plays like a series of loosely connected skits riffing on the impossibility of black identity in a United States that’s hurtling toward classist, capitalistic implosion.

Thoroughbreds has a brazenness that’s promising, then, even if it also seems to be a bit too taken with its characters’ amorality. The movie works hard to make your eyes open wide, but doesn’t seem to realize that a squinting introspection can have its own sort of edge.

It all goes down easy enough. And while never pushing the feminist angle too hard, Ocean’s 8 does ultimately become about the ways these women exploit the sexist expectations of men.

Collette anchors all of this supernaturality with a powerhouse performance.

If you’re on their wavelength (like Kumiko, Damsel is driven by a dry sense of humor, with the studied pacing to match), you won’t mind. But if you’re not able to completely buy in, the movie’s second half might feel a bit like the long stretching out of the same, sly joke.

Given Kikuchi’s purposefully distanced performance, Zellner’s tendency to give scenes four lungs full of breathing space, and the often jarring musical choices, it’s almost as if the movie is daring you not to like it.

There are at least four movies stuffed into Jurassic World: Fallen Kingdom, and about a third of one of them isn’t half bad. I don’t think that math adds up to a decent film, but if all you need is a roaring dinosaur every 15 minutes or so, it might not matter.

Incredibles 2, written and directed by original filmmaker Brad Bird, consists of two parallel narratives.... Together, they add up to a joyous and cathartic riff on working parenthood in this multitasking millennium.

Perhaps my preference is best explained this way: I’d rather live in the world of You, the Living. Songs from the Second Floor is the one I’d rather watch.

Medicine for Melancholy is one of those feature debuts that equally hints at the filmmaker’s influences and the idiosyncratic direction they will eventually head on their own.

The stunning set pieces take full advantage of animation’s unique mastery over time and space, so that we don’t just watch the characters’ daredevil exploits – we’re spinning and whirling right along with them. It’s as if we’ve mastered space and time ourselves.

In this early feature, which he co-wrote and co-directed with Shih-Ching Tsou, Sean Baker displays a soon-to-be-familiar instinct and affection for characters existing on the edges of society. If his eye for casting and sense of narrative drive isn’t finely honed yet, you can still sense a unique cinematic perspective being brought to bear on an overlooked milieu.

The extensive dialogue sequences literalize the sort of things Wong usually captures via woozy imagery; moments that have powerful emotional weight in his other features here feel like silly gestures.

It’s the moral imperative of the found-footage formalism that sets REC apart, transforming Angela’s camera from a visceral instrument of voyeurism into a tragic, last-gasp tool of truth and justice.

Rather than take a histrionic approach, Lee trusts his four-hour running time, allowing the evidence of governmental indifference and incompetence to quietly pile up until it becomes cumulatively enraging.

It’s probably unwise to come to Leone looking for too much in the way of feminism. Instead, Once Upon a Time in the West offers quintessential examples of the things he was better known for, including another blustery Ennio Morricone score. Visually, he mostly vacillates between extreme close-ups of intense faces and vast widescreen compositions, a technique that is lurching but also luridly beautiful.

By the movie’s end, the aching mixture of loneliness and desire transcends the immanent to embrace the metaphysical, a move that is a Weerasethakul signature.

Dark—with a black wit to match—this serial-killer thriller from director Bong Joon-Ho functions clinically as a genre exercise, while also holding persuasive power as a stark meditation on police corruption.

Wild is a relative term for Wong Kar-wai, the master of cinematic languor. You can feel the tension in his second film between genre excitement (there are jarring bursts of violence) and the languid sort of yearning that would become his trademark. These Days of Being Wild are both electric and exhausted.

Ramsay, whose Ratcatcher was noxiously obsessed with the miseries of life in a 1970s Glasgow housing complex, finds a locus in Morvern’s stunned grief. Morvern Callar is equally bleak, but to a purpose.

The movie manages both senses of scale—the intimate and the expansive—with equal majesty, merging them into something moving, mesmerizing, and poetic, in a way only Lean movies could really manage.

Andersson catalogs misery of many kinds, and aside from the moments of humor in the film he offers no balm.

Considering this is a remake of a superior 1997 Norwegian film, director Christopher Nolan doesn’t create anything nearly as inventive as his Memento, but at least Insomnia is expertly conventional.

The movie’s best moments – especially those involving the futile acorn hunt of a squirrel/rat – are those in which [Wedge’s] wicked wit shines through.

Ramsay has a gifted eye—the opening shot, of a boy twisting himself in a lacy curtain, is a stunner—and she establishes an undeniably vivid sense of place, yet there is a gravitation toward the tragic and repugnant that goes beyond description and toward a place of awed fascination.

Nothing that occurs is out of the realm of ordinary experience—there is a wedding, a grandmother’s stroke, money troubles, a funeral—yet it all reverberates with meaning because of the camera’s careful attention and the sensitive performances by every actor in the ensemble cast.

It might be corny, but the basketball nerd in me can’t resist their rivalrously romantic games of one on one, which is a sweet motif throughout the film.

Does Close-Up reveal the truth? I’d prefer to say it reveals the beauty of distortion.

The deeper American Beauty tries to get, the shallower it reveals itself to be.

Children of Heaven is a simple film – it has bold, childlike colors and a narrative that turns on unremarkable, everyday events – yet Majidi and his young actors invest it with such basic truth about the inner lives of children that the movie feels as big as the universe.

Even for a Wong Kar-wai film, Fallen Angels is lavishly stylized.

Wong captures this in his usual, expressive style, employing black and white at times and staggering the frame rate to accentuate heightened moments (including an aching slide into slow motion as the two men share a cigarette).

There’s no denying that Cage and Travolta are having a blast with what is essentially an acting thought experiment. They’re both fantastic.

Campion’s camera captures the sort of things most costume dramas are too fussy to notice: mirrors and windows that bifurcate Isabel’s distressed face; the bleary darkness of her home with Osmond, where the doors close behind her like those of a tomb; a slide into slow motion when one character smells a flower that has been given to her and another character crucially notices.

There are enough issues here for three films by a perennial provoker like Lee, and critics will undoubtedly accuse him of throwing too much fuel on the fire. But this time, aided by Reggie Rock Bythewood’s thoughtful script, Lee’s ambition pays off. With 15 men squeezed together on a single bus, issues such as racism, homophobia and responsibility are tackled as they would be in real life: fitfully, passionately, derisively and, above all, hilariously.

Scales glisten, legs scuttle, antennae unfurl, all in a symphony of exquisite shapes and inhuman motion. Watching the movie is like peering into a living kaleidoscope.

With or without special effects, Twister delivers the same sort of suspense that’s been a staple of good drama since storytelling began.

Right out of the gate—and even working within the modern Hong Kong gangster genre—Wong Kar-wai burst onto the screen as a strikingly unique talent. This is clearly a filmmaker less interested in plot and dialogue than he is in movement, music, and color—no matter the time, place, or story.

James and the Giant Peach is a wondrous interpretation of Dahl’s book that revives the magical possibilities of film while liberating our own imaginations as well.

Everything we see in Welcome to the Dollhouse is filtered through Dawn’s heightened perspective. There is one explicit fantasy sequence, but really the whole movie could be taken as a hormonal exaggeration. Solondz and Matarazzo may offer the cringiest middle-school experience imaginable, but that doesn’t make it any less true.

Whatever ineffable thing Wong Wong Kar-wai does—let’s call it despondent extravagance—he distilled it into its purest form with Chungking Express.

Brosnan is excellent, wearing Bond more lightly than any of his predecessors.

The Secret of Roan Inish is mostly a story about storytelling, and how folk tales and real life can intermingle.

Another 1990s domestic parable chastising workaholic dads, The River Wild also functions as a gorgeous travelogue and a Meryl Streep action film. Director Curtis Hanson sure packs a lot into one river trip.

It’s no small thing to move millions of hearts, over many years, with the story of a possible murderer (and, in Red’s case, a real one) who gets a second chance. The Shawshank Redemption managed a small miracle in doing just that.

Lee gives this familiar figure of vengeance a soft, singular touch.

A romantic, flashback-rich narrative distinguishes this feature-length animated effort, which Warner Bros. was confident enough in to give a theatrical release.

If Spielberg’s account of the Holocaust is not his greatest movie, it is still the defining moment of his career, the point where his yearning to be taken seriously (The Color Purple, Empire of the Sun) finally fully merged with his filmmaking talents.

The Remains of the Day belongs in the same conversation as Wong Kar-wai’s lush, masterful In the Mood for Love. Both swoon in secret.

Dazed and Confused distinguishes itself because it looks upon its characters with understanding—understanding that their foibles come from the fact that they’re at a stage of life when they’re still trying to figure life out.

Director Wayne Wang and his dreadful cast – the performances are almost across-the-board atrocious – had no chance.

The definition of a satisfying Hollywood action drama.

Just about every line of dialogue written for a child or teenager is painful (the movie must have been dated a week after release), though I suppose that helps Hocus Pocus work as a time capsule. Far more charm can be found in the largely practical effects and sets.

Raimi and his camera never slow down, which is good because many of the gags don’t stand up to scrutiny.

Washington has never been better, capturing the greatly varied phases of Malcolm’s personality while always giving us a full sense of a single man: sharp, smart, with a quick smile but also a simmering, righteous anger.

Robert Redford hovers like a ghost over A River Runs Through It—not so much as director (this is a sturdy if uninspired adaptation of Norman Maclean’s novella), but rather via his sacramental voiceover and the casting of a young Brad Pitt.

Brother’s Keeper is more of a fly on the wall than opportunistic shock doc.

Honeymoon in Vegas is a bit corny and contrived, but the movie gradually levitates above its limitations thanks to its three leads, whose performances count among the best in their careers.

Death Becomes Her doesn’t really work on a story or character level at all, but the central idea is too tantalizing and the cast is having too much fun for that to matter much.

Overall, this is an uneven work of adaptation.

Paris is Burning crackles because of its subjects, almost all of whom are natural performers in some way.

For me, the distinguishing factor is the sense of humanity director Jonathan Demme brings to this inhumane material.

For all the bullets that are spent, The Killer spends just as much time ruminating on the likes of honor, friendship and even the allure of guns themselves. “Easy to pick up,” Chow observes at one point, “difficult to put down.” The Killer is hardly a cautionary tale, but contrary to what its blunt title implies, it is a complicated one.

The movie’s morality lies in its form.

This ranks among the most mercilessly creepy children’s films I’ve seen.

What’s more, the literary and philosophical bon mots are not only name drops, but instead woven into the story in meaningful ways. Unfortunately, a male, heterosexual paranoia underlines the plot proper and ultimately usurps the unsatisfying finale, making Metropolitan an intriguing debut rather than a triumphant one.

From the caressing close-ups of a .38 revolver over the opening credits to the climactic image of a spent weapon being dramatically dropped on a car seat, Blue Steel interrogates the notion of gun worship, all within the confines of a shoot-em-up police thriller.

In some ways this is as metaphysical as something like Close Encounters, it’s just lacking the tonal control of Spielberg at his best.

Writer-director Steve Kloves (who would go on to write the screenplays for all the Harry Potter films) takes three gripping characters who could each anchor their own movie, and crafts a film that honors all of them.

Yes, Vampire’s Kiss features one of Nicolas Cage’s most outlandish performances (which is saying something), but it’s also a dismal film, ugly and misogynistic in a particularly 1980s way.

Not controlled or competent enough to work as a spoof, a serious action flick, or anything in between.

So familiarity is certainly part of my outsized affection for this 1989 Joe Dante satire of suburban America. But I also think the movie has wider significance in the way it presents suburban expansion as a cheerier version of manifest destiny—an unstoppable force that gobbles up land and then quickly sets about circling the wagons.

It’s not the sum of its parts, so much as it is the way De Niro and Grodin make almost every one of those parts glisten.

The fact that Columbia Pictures produced this is hugely significant. It’s not only that School Daze is written and directed by an African-American filmmaker; it’s that it offers a black perspective outside of genre (blaxploitation) or historical fiction.

A gem, in that there’s really no other movie like it. A mixture of camp, parody, and full-throated sincerity, Moonstruck ultimately coalesces into a romantic comedy that’s tonally aberrant yet emotionally coherent.

Broadcast News would be nearly perfect, except for its final few minutes.

Near Dark boasts one of the horror genre’s most unique milieus.

Overall, the movie seems impatient to get to the gory set pieces, which read less as horrifyingly inevitable consequences of the story at hand and more like standalone, gross-out art installations.

The Living Daylights marks one of those moments when the Bond franchise was awkwardly caught between two eras.

Despite all the mania and exaggerated characterizations, Raising Arizona is ultimately one of the Coens’ kinder (if not gentler) efforts, a raucous cartoon that consistently offers the beleaguered, desert-stricken H.I. little oases of grace.

Ford dials up the smarm of Han Solo and the hubris of Indiana Jones to portray a man who’s just smart, capable, and charming enough to be dangerous—to himself, his family, and the villagers.