A lot of fun, even if it could have been better if it had taken itself just a smidge more seriously.

Mickey 17 may not be my preferred mode of Bong Joon-Ho, but it’s the mode we need right now.

Blow the Man Down snagged me right away with its bold, stylized opening.

Wunmi Mosaku (Ruby on HBO’s Lovecraft Country) has a fierce sense of determination, even if her character has to defer in this traditional marriage, and Sope Dirisu keeps revealing more and more layers to the husband, a man struggling to survive under what ultimately feels like the curse of assimilation.

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.

Like Shinkai’s metaphysical body-switching fantasia Your Name, Weathering with You works on multiple levels: as eco-fable, social commentary, and teen romance.

The best numbers in The Color Purple capture the anger and/or exultation of personal experience.

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

Possessor cranks up the aesthetic volume on two familiar subgenres—the hired killer psychodrama and the sci-fi body-snatcher—until they meld into a destabilizing case of extreme cinema.

Even for a 1933 movie musical, Flying Down to Rio is a vaudeville show shamelessly trying to pass for a feature film. Thank goodness, then, that it can get by on sheer showmanship.

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.

A light delight, even if you have no experience with the role-playing game, Dungeons & Dragons: Honor Among Thieves takes its fantasy world seriously, but not itself.

The result is a sci-fi fantasy that’s part Fantastic Planet and part Miyazaki.

Like Hereditary, Midsommar functions as an outlandish imagining of the effects of personal trauma, especially for someone who already struggles with an unsteady mind. Yet the psychology and the horror aren’t quite as holistically handled this time around.

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

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.

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.

Before it strangely peters out, lost in its own conspiracies, The Shrouds registers as a mournful, if macabre, meditation on losing a loved one—as only writer-director David Cronenberg could manage.

Moss shifts into another gear for the truly disturbing finale, when those eyes flicker with thoughts of revenge and events unfold in a way that remind us that Whannell’s big break was as the screenwriter of Saw. The Invisible Man ends on a nasty note, but then again the 1933 film was nasty too. Given the omnipotent power of invisibility, humans apparently do their worst.

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.

Still, the way art director Ryo Sugimoto, set decorator Yutaka Motegi, cinematographer Keisuke Imamura, and others contributing to the design both establish the nightmarish banality of these hallways and then intermittently disrupt it—from modifying signage to altering lighting—makes Exit 8 a thriller in which the space itself is the bad guy.

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.

One of Pixar’s smaller, sweeter efforts.

As Naru, a smart, skilled young woman who would rather be hunting than gathering, Midthunder is mesmerizing—capable in the crunchy fight scenes (especially a single-take standoff between her and a handful of Frenchmen), but also in the ways her eyes are always watching, consuming every detail about the way the Predator works and the weapons it uses.

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.

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.

In its erratic narrative, random assortment of characters, and omnipresent soundtrack, Car Wash captures something perfectly: the rhythms of a working-class work day.

There are two curious elements to The Land of Steady Habits: writer-director Nicole Holofcener centering a film around a male protagonist; and Ben Mendelsohn giving a regular-guy, mildly comic performance. I wish both experiments had paid off a bit more.