Splendor in the Grass may seem quaint, even silly. But anyone who’s thrown – or endured – a teenager’s temper tantrum will recognize the anger and confusion on the screen as genuine. In that sense, Splendor will never be out of touch.

The style is arresting and the leads are strong, but the story runs out of steam.

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.

Here and there, Coppola seems interested in poking that Murray persona. On the Rocks would have been much better if Murray had done some poking too.

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.

The movie’s most distinctive feature, especially as a family biopic, is the tragic nature of this story. The Iron Claw is a downer that ickily sticks with you.

Wise and witty, Inside Out 2 continues the Pixar tradition in the ways that matter most.

The Fall Guy isn’t perfect, but as a crowd-pleasing, romantic action comedy, driven by the magnetism of its stars, it feels like an increasingly rare treat.

Majors is easily the best thing in this third Rocky offshoot.

A powder keg of movie-musical performances, Wicked balloons the Broadway sensation in unnecessary ways—this is only Part I, despite the fact that it runs nearly three hours—but I hardly minded thanks to the dynamic force of its two leads.

You can feel the ungainly attempts to force that material into tidy little narratives.

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

In Parabellum, the shootouts—and there are two disastrous ones, that finale and a mid-film sequence featuring new costar Halle Berry—are less about Wick (his motivations, his anger, his technique) and more about the grandiosity of the violence.

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

The Killer is a gorgeously sterile, de-romanticized riff on the likes of Jean-Pierre Melville’s Le Samourai (which notably features a near-silent assassin) and countless other hit-man movies, peppered with sideswipes at capitalism.

The race itself is another of the movie’s astonishing set pieces; Mann and cinematographer Erik Messerschmidt give it a fresh sense of vroom, even if you think you’ve seen all the movie car races you’ll ever need.

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.

Good Boy is a harrowing experience for dog lovers—or possibly anyone who’s noticed an animal staring at something you can’t quite perceive—yet the movie never quite unearths the subterranean chills of the most potent horror.

One of Them Days is propulsively directed by music-video veteran Lawrence Lamont, who knows how to frame a punchline, from a sharp script by Syreeta Singleton, who wrote many episodes of HBO’s Insecure. The same mixture of hilarity and humanity is on display here.

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.

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.

When it’s clicking—and it mostly clicks—Athena balances aesthetics with import, even interweaving the two into something that has the grave intimacy of Son of Saul and the political potency of The Battle of Algiers.

Director Sian Heder had an obvious aesthetic card to play with CODA, and she saves it for just the right moment.

When experimenting with his own techniques—Shackleton gets ingenious mileage out of slow zooms and pans in those location shots—Zodiac Killer Project works as a provocative, meta consideration of the genre’s form. When dumping on other films and the genre in general, the movie comes across as a bit hypocritical and smug.

At its best, the movie captures the thrill of those moments, whether romantic or friendly, when you realize something special is happening.

Cooley High has the same youth-movie energy that defines some of the genre’s greats: American Graffiti, Ferris Bueller’s Day Off, Scott Pilgrim vs. the World. All of these films run on the mischievous, unfounded optimism that characterizes our teenage years. They make you nostalgic for naivete.

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.

I’m not exactly sure what tone Friendship means to set, but the movie itself feels confident in its own skin. And that counts for a lot.