When you hit a home run with Gadot, who was so thrilling in the 2017 film, you might want to make a sequel that keeps her at the center.

All in all, Tomorrowland suffers from the quality that defines many of its characters: outsized vision and ambition.

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.

Coffy is at once a notable moment in female-empowerment cinema and a pervasive exercise in the objectification of women. It’s as if Gloria Steinem wrote a screenplay that was then handed off to Hugh Hefner to direct.

A mostly meaningless film about meaninglessness, Under the Silver Lake nonetheless has enough fetid charm to justify wasting a few hours on it. After all, the movie ultimately suggests that wasting our time is the best we can do in this rotten, rigged life.

I laughed a great deal at the bad-boy banter during Fast & Furious Presents: Hobbs & Shaw. I also thought the action stood up alongside anything else in the franchise. But the thing I enjoyed the most about this riotously ridiculous movie is that way it functions as a near-brilliant exercise in cinematic parallelism.

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.

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

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

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

In The Drama, it never feels as if the two main characters are in conflict with each other as much as they’re in conflict with the film’s form and screenplay.

Yikes! I understand we can’t always hold films from earlier eras to the social standards of the current moment, but even beyond the rampant offensiveness of Murder by Death, the fact that this whodunit spoof relies on race, ethnicity, sexual orientation, gender, and disability for the vast majority of its jokes speaks to a paucity of comic imagination that’s timelessly disheartening.

Jaundiced and judicious, deeply cynical yet not quite ready to leap into the abyss, Joker is a provocatively toxic time capsule for an era of misguided rage. It’s galling, and pretty great.

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.

Exhaustingly over-directed (Craig Gillespie zooms in from an establishing shot to a close-up in nearly every other scene), the movie is also a nonstop parade of grating, obvious needle drops.

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.

It Chapter Two has structural problems, character problems, and aesthetic problems.... But the movie’s main issue is an unexamined streak of cruelty.

Director Justin Lin (making his fifth Fast film) nicely balances chaos and clarity in one early chase scene through the jungle, but later lets the visual bombast take over.

There is no doubt the material is elevated by the interplay between Fey and Poehler.

This is either the worst time for a movie like Jojo Rabbit or the best time. I lean toward the latter. I’m perfectly willing to concede that the film may come across as gauche in the coming years, but in November 2019—as an irreverently comic middle finger to idiotic, irrational tribalism—wow, does it feel good.

A collage of religio-goth gestures, Mother Mary never adds up to quite as much as it promises. But the movie has a somnambulant pull, thanks to its woozy imagery and cloistered, two-hander structure, in which Anne Hathaway and Michaela Coel circle each other like figures in a hazy dream.

The Deer King offers the personal touch of a hero’s journey alongside a more expansive vision of how to live in community. It’s a stunner.

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

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

Joanne Woodward won an Oscar for her title performance in The Three Faces of Eve, but what she’s doing here feels like an exercise you’d see at theater camp.

Director Joe Dante provides a loving, detail-filled snapshot of youthful camaraderie and creativity – I love how their cockpit is a Tilt-A-Whirl – before indulging in the sort of bizarre satire that can be found in most of his films (especially Small Soldiers and Gremlins).

Crystal Skull (which I liked) didn’t really feel like a proper goodbye, however. Dial of Destiny does, allowing Indy to nobly, creakily hang up his hat and whip, leaving the rest of us in an increasingly exhausted multiverse of capes and cowls.

It’s ugly and tuneless, with characters whose actions are so arbitrary as to render any consideration of what it means to be “good” or “wicked” meaningless.