While I may not particularly care for where things go in the final moments, I’m impressed by the movie’s audacity. Indeed, it’s another horror play—a bonkers big swing that’s less reminiscent of the other Alien films and more akin to recent gonzo fright flicks like Barbarian and Malignant.

Like An American in Paris, which Vincente Minnelli directed two years earlier, The Band Wagon will either strike you as ebullient and exhilarating or aggressive and overwhelming—in both technique and theme.

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

There’s a playfulness and a romanticism to the technique—a way of placing the characters both within and without history—that elevates Tesla from being a snarky art installation to something, presumably like Tesla himself, with a soul.

Adonis’ motivations are less compelling here than they were in Creed—especially in the way they sideline his relationship with the pregnant Bianca. In the end, he does what he does so that there can be a Creed II, nothing more, nothing less.

While the ensemble cast is laudable—Rebecca Ferguson, Idris Elba, Tracy Letts, Jared Harris, Anthony Ramos, Moses Ingram, Greta Lee—there isn’t a Henry Fonda to anchor things.

Unfortunately, Folie à Deux fails to take full advantage of the musical format. Returning director Todd Phillips—who showed a surprising command of cinematic language in the first film—fails to bring a coherent formal strategy to this new genre.

As a character study, Mankiewicz registers as something of a boozy cliche. As a political project, the film is erratic.

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.

There’s a cheerful honesty to Elvis Presley’s Chad Gates in Blue Hawaii that’s irresistible.

Like its predecessor, Spider-Man: Homecoming, Spider-Man: Far From Home is content to be a high-school movie first and a superhero saga second.

Writer-director Paul Harrill stages a gripping early investigation sequence—in which Shelia wanders the home alone at night, asking any supernatural presence to make itself known—but otherwise the film largely consists of long conversation scenes that verge on the inert.

Ultimately, Charlotte’s Web is too potent a tale of life and death, as first learned by observing life on a farm, to keep even this so-so effort from ringing true.

It’s like watching the problems of a pillow. Adam Sandler, as Jay’s manager, delivers the most interestingly human performance in the film, but he’s not given nearly enough to do. If the movie had been equally weighted between them, Jay Kelly might have been somebody.

Plemons roots each scenario in an individual reality. He rises above the movie’s rigidness to remind us that each of his characters is not just a sour joke or an intellectual conceit, but an unknowable, yet relatable, human.

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.

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

There’s a vulnerability to A Quiet Place: Day One that’s rare in big, would-be blockbusters.

As Armageddon Time proceeded, I became increasingly uncomfortable with the way Johnny’s story only served to stoke Paul’s (and the movie’s) moral consciousness—to be ground zero for the film’s white guilt. Yes, in some ways Johnny is a supporting character much like any other, serving a particular purpose in the narrative. But the racial realities add a significant wrinkle.

The film shouldn’t be snidely dismissed, despite its faults. With Rise of Skywalker, Star Wars limps to a close, but there’s still good in it.

I could watch Ingrid Bergman and Gregory Peck whisper while staring deeply into each other’s eyes for ages, yet Spellbound still registers as a talky exploration of psychoanalysis, something director Alfred Hitchcock would later examine with more insinuating subtext in his masterpieces of the 1950s and ’60s.

The unsung hero behind the best Pixar films is the story—the nuanced, inventive, resonant-for-all-ages narrative that provides a foundation for the indelible characters and dazzling animation. Elemental feels like a Pixar first draft, in story terms.

Overall, this is an uneven work of adaptation.

While mostly hewing to unremarkable biopic formula (yes, there’s a slow-clap response to a speech given by the main character), this dramatization of the life of double Nobel-prize winning scientist Marie Curie does manage a few inventive flourishes along the way.

Even taking a step back from current events, News of the World registers as a fine film at best. Hanks is sturdy, though this is also one of those performances where there isn’t much surprise in those kindly eyes.

Much of what makes a great Pedro Almodovar film can be found in The Room Next Door: a layered narrative, a thoughtful color scheme, a focus on women, and an intense interest in sex and/or death. But a certain vitality is strangely missing, and not because of the subject matter.

Nanny stands as a promising feature debut for writer-director Nikyatu Jusu; I’d rather see an abundance of ambition in an emerging filmmaker, which is what we get here, than timidity.

“This is not your mother’s Wuthering Heights!” the movie howls back at the wind whipping over those moors. But it’s enough of Bronte’s.

Triangle of Sadness—despite the madness of that dinner sequence—is too controlled. As meandering as the overall narrative is, each individual scene feels like it’s placing its characters into an inevitable vice.

You can feel the warm ocean breeze against your cheek while watching Moana 2, so supple and visceral is the animated artistry on display.

While they’re enjoyable together, even Roberts on her own makes Ticket to Paradise worth watching; the movies have missed her ease on-screen, which is always tempered—just when it risks being flighty—with a quiet seriousness.

Once Wolfs leaves the hotel the charm begins to thin (though Austin Abrams has a giddily dizzy monologue as a third wheel they pick up along the way), while a last-act attempt to inject a moral dilemma into the proceedings feels false. Yet for a dad—and, let’s face it, mom—movie, Wolfs could have been way worse.

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.

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

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.

It’s no insult, though still true, to say that director Michael Pearce doesn’t quite have the Hitchcockian filmmaking chops to turn the silly into something sublime.

There is pleasure in Astaire and Rogers floating, a foot apart, to “Smoke Gets in Your Eyes,” as well as the elaborate, heavily furred gowns that the fashion setting allows.

Standing out among the cast are Pierce Brosnan, clearly enjoying his scruffy beard and potbelly, and Helen Mirren, who threatens to turn this into something sexier and scarier at every moment. Chris Columbus keeps things on the straight and narrow, however, directing as if this were an adaptation of Harry Potter Book 78.

Huntt is a talent to watch. Her psychic wounds now bared, it will be fascinating to see how she explores them, as well as things outside herself, in different cinematic formats.

The notion of a villain’s power being born of his own suffering is a comic-book staple that’s intriguingly reimagined from the ground up here, in a way that speaks to the originality that Shyamalan first brought to the superhero genre with Unbreakable.

As Starfish becomes a more obvious personal metaphor involving betrayal and forgiveness, it also becomes a bit less interesting—even as it still marks White as an ambitious talent to watch.

Make no mistake, Hall is terrific—sharply comic in the broader scenes, while also allowing little glimpses of Trinitie’s inner turmoil before she shuts them away behind her “first lady” facade. Brown, however, vacuums up the movie in a way that’s both entrancing and entirely true to the complicated character he’s playing.

Ungainly in many ways (inconsistent in tone, unconvincing in locale, contrived in its plotting), Where’d You Go, Bernadette manages two stellar sequences that are raw and truthful enough to salvage the movie.

Much of The Instigators feels a little lost somewhere between Ocean’s Eleven and The Town, but the movie—starring Matt Damon and Casey Affleck as desperate strangers who get paired up for an ill-fated heist in Boston—has enough camaraderie between the leads, as well as a sharply comic supporting turn from Hong Chau, to make for a breezy crime farce.

Miller and cinematographer John Seale deliver some stunning tableaus, especially in The Djinn’s lush memories, but it all begins to feel as ephemeral as the spectral, CGI dust that swirls out of the movie’s various bottles. In short I appreciated the craft, but never felt the longing.

Even as the movie itself unnecessarily spirals further into madness and attendant plot holes—perhaps inspired by the wackadoo escalations of recent horror such as Malignant, Barbarian, and Longlegs—Grant makes for a genially deranged host.

If the movie features one (or two) too many explosive chase sequences, I did like one of the ways it envisions its moral thesis (which is that we all have a good side): whenever Wolf inadvertently does something nice, his tail embarrassingly, uncontrollably wags, like a divining rod for redemption.

As for the two leads, they have charm to spare, and it’s startling to see Hepburn bring bitterness to bear on her trademark wit, but the relationship and all its foibles still feel prescribed by the overall structure, not borne of real life.

Maya Hawke, the director’s daughter with Uma Thurman, plays O’Connor. Her performance is one of the movie’s strengths.

Eventually a fatalistic torpor settles over the film, even during the increasingly gun-heavy action scenes. For all its early intoxication, The Old Guard has an aftertaste that’s deadening.

Not nearly as uproarious as I remember it being upon its release, when I would have seen it around the age of 10 or 11, Mr. Mom nevertheless has an endearing time-capsule quality as a slapstick consideration of gender roles in the early 1980s.

Emerald Fennell’s follow-up, as writer and director, to Promising Young Woman, Saltburn is another stylishly glib exercise, entertaining and engagingly acted until the bottom falls out.

As long as Harley Quinn is on the screen, Birds of Prey has a propulsive, rollergirl energy. Unfortunately the screenplay, by Christina Hodson, unnecessarily complicates things in various ways.

In a Selick film, every object has a rich inner life; perhaps Wendell & Wild just has too many objects

The movie has a self-aware streak that isn’t too self-impressed, as well as an amusing flair for the absurd.

Fly Me to the Moon, a breezily farcical variation on Apollo 11 history in which the truth prevails, is a time-capsule curiosity—marking a movie landscape that’s slowly fading, alongside our ability to tell fact from fiction in media of all kinds.

Erivo anchors even the hokiest scenes with exactly the qualities a faith-forward telling like this needs: conviction and fervency.

There’s no doubt that Fennell has made something that shows impressive filmmaking promise and pulses with real pain.

The Tuba Thieves doesn’t quite have the mastery of the collage form you’ll find in somewhat similar experiments like Leviathan or Cameraperson, so that some of its ideas and images can feel scattershot, yet it undeniably subverts the tools of cinema in a uniquely compelling way.

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 never really scary, but it isn’t quite funny either. The movie strikes its own demented chord.

Just enough insider detail to tantalize a hardcore basketball fan, but too much inspirational sports hooey to hook one.

Even though she’s playing a woman who is suffering, Lawrence brings a playfulness to the screen that leavens the depths of misery in which Ramsay’s movies tend to wallow.

Bugonia has its creative “pleasures.” . . But mostly it feels like we’ve been here before, with the same faces.

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.

There’s a lot of invention here, but as a complete film Barbarian lacks coherence.

Pinocchio manages enough charm, inventiveness, and—yes—technical innovation to be worth the effort.

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.

It’s a signature achievement and utterly exhausting.

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

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.

The movie’s dark magic occurs when the stop-motion story and the narrative proper bleed into each other (often literally), with goopy puppets invading Ella’s space while she—perhaps psychologically, perhaps in reality—finds herself trapped in theirs.

Only Driver seems comfortable—indeed, invigorated—by the apparently improvisational atmosphere and haphazardly operatic material.

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.

There is a sublime stretch of Thor: Love and Thunder—around the point where Russell Crowe, as Zeus, appears to be auditioning for either House of Gucci, My Big Fat Greek Wedding, or some combination—when the movie drops all pretense of being a coherent narrative, much less a portentous installment in the Marvel Cinematic Universe.

The Little Mermaid mostly takes place in an uncanny valley between imaginative invention and relatable live action. When we can see what’s on the screen, it tends to look like a cheapie commercial for Royal Caribbean Cruises.

The dispiriting truth is that Borat Subsequent Moviefilm’s staged pranks can’t compete with our awful reality. The movie is trying to expose people who have already been walking around the past four years with their pants down.

There is something unseemly in its choice to document the Beales at all. It’s not exactly that mother and daughter are being unwittingly exploited (though one wonders what a psychologist would make of their mental states). It’s that Edith and Edie – who both pursued show-business careers at different points in their lives – are such eager subjects, so willing to let the camera roll with little thought to what, aside from their immediate selves, it might be capturing. If Grey Gardens doesn’t exactly exploit that, the documentary certainly takes dubious advantage.

This has little of the insinuating nature of the best film noir, as Lana Turner and John Garfield go from 0 to 60 in their first scene together.

A goggling miserabilism defines Beanpole, making it hard to connect with the film on anything other than an aesthetic level.

The performances are sweltering...This isn’t a good thing. Yes, it’s fitting for the setting – a humid, suffocating Louisiana mansion where the family of an ailing tycoon (Burl Ives) connives to inherit his fortune – but the overall result is like watching a melodrama in a sauna. It’s just too much.

Kudos to Patel for not making a dull vanity project for his feature directorial debut, but Monkey Man is still a rough watch of its own kind.

This is a crazed and lurid character portrait that spends most of its time psychoanalyzing itself.

Women Talking reduces women to their words, as the title implies, a choice that is bold but limiting.

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.

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.

This is largely Dickens as farce, which is occasionally fun—Peter Capaldi is a delightful Mr. Micawber, whose creditors are so insistent they try to yank his rug out from under his front door—but it often feels forced.

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.

I suppose if you wanted to be really generous to the film, you could argue that this Dumbo takes a subversive swipe at Disney, its own corporate overseer.

A Woman Under the Influence made me wonder: What’s the point of only showing a mentally challenged character’s distress? Is it fair to reduce Mabel to her rock-bottom experiences?

Black Panther: Wakanda Forever suffers from a giant, Chadwick Boseman-shaped hole that it can’t fill, no matter how many characters, storylines, and muddled, chaotic action sequences it tries to throw on the screen.

The real problem, however, is that neither Molly, nor Newbury, nor anyone on her staff is very funny.

The animated action in The Bad Guys 2 has the deftness and ingenuity of a Mission: Impossible movie, but in terms of storytelling, this follow-up to 2022’s The Bad Guys represents a step back.

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

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

It’s all wild, but too intentionally amped up to be any fun.

In Drive-Away Dolls, almost every line is squeezed a bit too hard for cleverness, while the acts of violence frequently cross over into callousness. And although Qualley’s verbal dexterity is impressive (even if it owes a lot to Holly Hunter’s Edwina in Raising Arizona), her performance mostly made me eager to see what she might do in the future, with stronger comic material.

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.