Rye Lane may verge on corny at times in much of its humor and certainly its ending, but thanks to Jonsson and Oparah, you’re rooting for these two in every moment.

This is scruffy around the edges, especially with the awkward insertion of its politics, but there is no denying the movie’s potency as a metaphor for alcoholism.

Formally straightforward and heavily reliant on the perspective of the oldest sister, Jaclyn, Bad Axe (whose title comes from the name of the town) nevertheless serves as a reminder of how ugly things got during that crucial year—and how the American dream is an unjustly contingent one.

I had no trouble believing all of the fantastic imagery that The Creator puts up on the screen; it’s the story I couldn’t quite invest in.

What’s missing from Johnson can be found in abundance in two brief, supporting turns. Zoe Winters, as one of Lucy’s clients, and Louisa Jacobson, as a skittish bride, knock out their slim scenes by bringing a unique verve and vitality to every second. Their characters pop as interesting, complicated, compelling humans, whose stories we want to hear. If Song had cast one of them in the lead, Materialists might have really been something.

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

Suspense mechanics and psychological horror don’t meld quite as seamlessly here as they do in the best Alfred Hitchcock thrillers, but The Wrong Man has more than its share of masterful moments.

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

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

Colman and Cumberbatch easily keep up—they’re comic talents too—yet the best parts of The Roses involve the two of them alone together, either happily or in detest, leaving dazzling trails of repartee as they zip along.

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.