Cukor does stage a crackerjack sleigh chase in the climax (the movies need more of those), while overall managing to capture Crawford at what feels like a crucial juncture of her career, just as the gloves were really coming off.

Bad in ways that are similar to 1989’s Road House—namely, an uneven handle on how seriously to take its silly premise.

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.

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.

I’m all for scaring kids at the movies, and even allowing dark magic to be a part of that. (I’m a fan of The Witches, after all.) But the indiscriminate application of intense horror tropes here feels both clumsy and inconsiderate. Kids deserve both more, and less.

Not quite one of the Disney classics, yet still delightful, this little ditty owes much of its charm to its precise anthropomorphization.

Wow, when this thing eventually curdles, it really curdles into something rank.

Plan 9 from Outer Space may not be pure bliss to watch, but you certainly can feel the bliss that writer-director Edward D. Wood Jr. must have experienced while making it.

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.

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.

Overall, the movie seems impatient to get to the gory set pieces, which read less as horrifyingly inevitable consequences of the story at hand and more like standalone, gross-out art installations.

If the movie, at times, feels exhausting, there are also painterly details to savor, like the flowing locks of a dragon or the shimmer of a seascape at sundown.

Death Becomes Her doesn’t really work on a story or character level at all, but the central idea is too tantalizing and the cast is having too much fun for that to matter much.

When Cryer eases up and lets Duckie’s vulnerability show, there’s an undeniable sweetness to the character. Ringwald, though, is the true wonder: Andie’s head is always held high—and she frequently backs that up with a self-empowering speech—but her facial expressions are constantly in flux, revealing the many other things she’s feeling: uncertainty, insecurity, her own vulnerability.

“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.

Old is vintage M. Night: a high concept brought ever higher by a filmmaker apparently incapable of second-guessing himself.

Wendy, director Benh Zeitlin’s follow-up film, works too—but just barely.

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

This bloated, big-screen take on the DC comic is dumb, but not nearly dumb enough.

There’s a soft, dim quality to the air in Clementine, the feature debut of writer-director Lara Gallagher. It sometimes blurs into murkiness, but mostly it gives the psychological drama an appropriately dusky glow. This is a movie about not being able to see others clearly, and how that distorts the way you see yourself.

Oddly inert, except when it’s blithely nasty, 52 Pick-Up may very well suffer from mismatched sensibilities: those of grim thriller director John Frankenheimer and witty crime novelist Elmore Leonard.

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

By its bombastic (and somewhat abrupt) final scene, you have to imagine that The Eyes of Tammy Faye accurately captures how Tammy Faye saw herself.

Shelley scholars will likely have much to quibble with here, but for Buckley admirers, The Bride! is a must.

V/H/S is icky stuff that doesn’t deserve a pass just because the awful men in it get what’s coming to them.

Pure horror fans might object, but I found this model of M3gan, also directed by Gerard Johnstone, to be just as amusing as the prototype—with a firmer sense of what it wants to do.

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.

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.