It’s a sluggishly slow murder-mystery without much tension, one holding a candle to Poe’s work Nevermore.

M3GAN’s most impressive feat, at the end of the day, is that it gives us cinematic sickos exactly what we want without sacrificing greatness in the process. And yes, what we want is a breakdancing, murderous doll. Is that such a crime?

When Donowho brings The Old Way back to the well-trod ground of old Westerns, it’s just plain old.

Brought to life through Kreutzer’s skillful direction and Krieps’ earnest performance, this surprising royal reimagining offers a fresh perspective on an elusive historical figure.

A movie like this shouldn’t be so ambivalent, much less so harsh on the eye.

Just give yourself over the utter weirdness.

Through all its filth, cynicism and poison-inked vengeance, Babylon cannot help but to be a devoted worshiper at the altar of cinema—and its admiration proves infectious.

It’s in-joke heavy, tailoring an experience that tears iconic dialogue from classic predecessors and slathers on the meta-overload like popcorn swimming in clarified butter.

While 3 Faces explores the social position of women in Iran through oft-whimsical encounters as Panahi drives across northwestern Iran with actress Behnaz Jafari (also playing herself), No Bears feels much more darkly prophetic, seemingly aware of the filmmaker’s encroaching imprisonment.

What could have easily been a hairball of half-digested nostalgia is transformed into a mature and cat-ivating story that positively purrs.

Even with intense performances from Anna Gunn (Breaking Bad) and Linus Roache (Law & Order) guiding the action, the film would be far more effective as a taut short than a filled-out feature.

The Way of Water’s true achievement is that it looks like nothing else but the first Avatar, unparalleled in detail and scale, a devouring enterprise all to itself. Watching The Way of Water can at times feel astonishing, as if the brain gapes at the sheer amount of physical data present in every frame, incapable of consuming it, but longing to keep up.

Despite Fraser donning anywhere between 50 and 300 pounds of prosthetic fat for his role, Charlie lacks a fleshed-out interiority that, unfortunately, reflects Hunter’s original material.

The stop-motion musical is an artistic triumph that colors Collodi’s cherished storybook characters with humanity and depth to craft a mature tale about rebellion, mortality and the love between a parent and child.

Throughout, Lears is all over the place. When To the End focuses on climate change deniers, it can be cathartically searing.

By the end of Light, Mendes has taken his message a little too literally.

It’s a lean, efficient, no-frills film, and that’s as it should be. Begos rejects pretense. He’s making his version of a psycho Santa flick, no more, no less. But the logline’s comic absurdity and the execution of his premise is so straightforward that Christmas Bloody Christmas feels fresh among the season’s horror canon. It’s a Christmas miracle.

Nobody expects all Christmas movies to be masterpieces. But it’s hard not to be disappointed by low-energy affairs like Tiffany’s, which is nothing more than a mindless attempt at adhering to the Christmas movie algorithm. Even the Grinch would probably ask for something more.

Lee’s making finely tuned action here; organizing history lessons isn’t his job. But the ferocity of Hunt’s combined action and momentum let him bristle over past atrocities even if those atrocities aren’t his focal point.

The Leech is a seedy, nefarious and scrappy morality tale that excels on the backs of its big-swinging performers.

At face value, Lady Chatterley’s Lover works well enough as a love story: It’s sweet, moderately sexy and sticks pretty religiously to Lawrence’s compelling story. But for a film based on a book that scandalized thousands, it will undoubtedly leave its viewer wanting more.

The movie isn’t quite evocative enough to work as effective minimalism. It averages out a stripped-down Smith and the more florid filmmaking touches to land squarely in the middle of the road.

While the conceit is clever, these are not new storytelling techniques for documentary or fiction, and in Framing Agnes, they lack a certain follow-through.

Even if it feels a bit too neat and tidy and predetermined a metaphor, one has to appreciate 2nd Chance’s ogling commitment to dissecting a perfectly American parasite.

As the film takes a turn into what it’s really about, A Wounded Fawn reveals that there’s something much darker and stranger than a by-the-numbers killer-in-the-house tale at work here, and what starts as familiar quickly becomes one of the most memorable horror films of the year.

Violent Night isn’t a great action movie, or even a very good one, but George Costanza’s old assessment of Home Alone rings true: “The old man got to me!”

Sick of Myself reminds us to question the ulterior motive and points out the inherent narcissistic intent behind the urge to “tell your story,” both within ourselves and in others.

It’d be disrespectful to those left behind if you gave your art anything but your best shot. The Fabelmans makes the bargain look painful, self-centered and utterly joyful—a genius embracing his regrets and in so doing, reminding us of how lucky we are that we all pay some version of this price, for ourselves and for one another.

Zeller is clearly more experienced as a writer than a director, but even his ability to extract the powerful (if stagey) performances we saw in The Father is missing here, as everyone just insists their lines upon each other with tones borrowed from shouty amateur theater.

In Glass Onion, everything is more. More jokes. More self-reflexivity. More twists and turns. And, undeniably, more fun.

Nanny seeps into your pores, stings like salt in a throbbing wound and doesn’t require what some horror fans might—conversely—wish appeared.

A deeply moving cinematic experience that entangles threads of Mexican history with one man’s surreal odyssey through life, death, success and grief.

With this deconstruction firmly in place almost from the beginning, and through wonderful central performances by Victoria Moroles and Segan himself, Blood Relatives isn’t just a very good first feature, but a deeply endearing horror-comedy that’s one of the best genre films of 2022.

The sparse action scenes are useless jumbles, tossing bodies in misblocked blurs of messy motion—like a human game of 52-card pickup—or encased in total darkness. If we can’t see anything, this gamble suggests, maybe we won’t think that what we see is bad.

It’s a simple film about complicated, often painful confirmations about the country we all call home, and about optimism for what that country can look like when people share it with each other; it’s about what happens when your worst nightmare come true; for Chun, it’s also about suffering a nightmare so dreadful that the foundational trauma of your youth seems preferable by comparison. But it’s especially about the way movies change the people who make them and the people who watch them. Bad Axe is a gift.

Strange World’s embrace and rejection of both tradition and modernity can be confounding, despite the undeniable beauty it finds along the way.

It’s light on the satire, and heavy on the fairy tale rules and aesthetics. There’s still plenty of charm to go around, and it’s ultimately a fun experience, but it undeniably avoids the original movie’s strongest aspects in favor of sincerity.

It’s not especially fair to criticize the movie that could have been made, rather than the one that was actually made. But even on its chosen terms of a family dramedy, People feels lopsided.

Orienteering from an unsure script, Slumberland’s uninventive visual language dithers around in unreality while leaving its feet firmly planted in the saddest parts of the real world.

Andrew Bujalski, the filmmaker behind “mumblecore” touchstone Funny Ha Ha and tender workplace comedy Support the Girls, tackles unexpectedly embittered subject matter alongside unique pandemic challenges with There There.

For Disney fans, the film’s insider access and easygoing themes will make it an enjoyable watch. For Disney skeptics, I suspect the overtly positive Disney-centered, Disney-made, Disney-streamed documentary can, at times, act as the perfect validation of one’s skepticism.

That it was made with some sense of care for the real-life figures at its center makes it slightly more admirable than other movies of its type. So also does the welcome depth that Majors, the script and director J.D. Dillard give Brown. But outside that sense of commitment, Devotion is an unremarkable experience.

After fits and stops, this sequel finds its nostalgic sweet spot midway through and lands an ending that feels earned and honors the spirit of Shepherd and the characters of A Christmas Story.

Even without the inclusion of Pugh’s character’s prejudiced thoughts, the film oozes a tangible distaste for the very people whose “story” we are following. These small-town Irish folk are depicted as barbaric yokels, prone to inbreeding, dim-witted fanaticism and senseless cruelty. As a whole, The Wonder conjures the abject horror of watching a rodent devour its newborn litter.

Insightful, kind and exceptionally well-acted, Marte Um reminds its characters that they’ll find what they need if they just keep looking.

It will especially appeal to the sensitive kids (and adults) in your life, and it most definitely meets the high standards Cartoon Saloon continues to make in the medium.

A more pungent concoction of community terror and conjured trauma would be able to hold stronger, not disappointingly drift away like a lullaby into the wind.

Despite the daunting challenge faced by Coogler and his team, Black Panther: Wakanda Forever feels like the surest step taken in the MCU since Thanos was reduced to ash.

Mitchell narrates in his rich baritone, taking his own audience back through the past, not only to appreciate the circumstances and struggle Black cinema has come from (and appreciate where it’s at in 2022), but to witness the incontrovertible proof of its appropriation by the movie industry through the decades.

Falling for Christmas feels less like a genuine chance to give Lohan a due shot at a re-return to acting as it does like some executive’s opportunity to capitalize on millennial nostalgia.

Though A Couple is [Wiseman's] first narrative feature in 20 years, the narrative structure documents history by fashioning Sophia’s diaries and letters as a performance.

Spirited, with its message of redemption, changing our behavior and doing a little good, arrives at the perfect time. Who better to tell us to start being nice than a singing and dancing Ryan Reynolds and Will Ferrell?

Paired with My Policeman’s agile writing and affecting direction, the undeniable chemistry between Styles and Dawson feels like a shining cherry on top.

A jolly romp filled with songs, jokes and clever twists on a well-known genre, it is plenty of fun—but only if you can forgive how frequently it repeats the same old joke, and, as a result, becomes guilty of overplaying its own gimmick.

While Lawrence and Henry imbue each scene they share with oscillating doses of humor and melancholy, the final product feels somewhat strained and stunted, particularly in its investigation into the hellish reality of actively trying to heal.

If Elfman’s destination is grim, the journey she takes to get there is palliative.

Without any actual classicism to accompany Craig’s outdated notions of outrageousness, the movie quickly turns fustier than its edgy posturing lets on. Craig simply watches a bunch of selfish people behave badly in predictable ways, and occasionally has them lunge at each other in anger. How perfectly droll!

In depicting the rapid escalation from closeted bigotry to outright hate crime, Soft & Quiet communicates the urgency of identifying and standing up to similarly hateful groups in our own communities, which are never as “secret” as they wish to be.

You Resemble Me starts as a coming-of-age story and mutates into the permanent falling apart of a woman invisible to society. Then, it redefines itself again as a documentary reckoning...It’s a brilliant turn that showcases the first-time filmmaker’s investigative background with bite.

Kramer’s filmmaking is vibrant, vital, easy to swallow while retaining astounding verbal density; you may wish for subtitles and a notepad to follow along with the near-constant back-and-forth between her characters. But that’s a feature, not a bug.

White takes care to illustrate that this isn’t just a riveting mission, emphasizing that—cushioned between spellbinding footage of a rocket piercing the atmosphere—real, emotional stories effectively double the film’s stakes by turning a story filled with science and space into something distinctly human and relatable.

Huesera may have needed more scares or a darker ending to push it over the top, but as is, it’s a thoughtful meditation on choice, love and the anguish of expectation, dressed in the clothing of a clear-eyed, anxious body horror.

Though I missed the larger context of Freddie’s life, Return to Seoul’s commitment to staying in the moment creates an engrossing cinematic experience, an inextricable character portrait both intimate and fathomless.

Ticket to Paradise has all the components for a successful rom-com: A strong cast, a playful and inventive premise, a beautiful location. But the cast isn’t given much to do, the premise gets lost along the way, and even though the film was shot mostly on location in Australia, its oversaturated and sterile cinematography makes it look like CGI.

While the film contains some impressive scares, a phenomenal lead performance and steadfast central message, Run Sweetheart Run is far too preoccupied with speaking to a cultural reckoning that is truly only occurring in terms of optics and vernacular.

Wendell & Wild could get weighed down by these heavy themes, but its combination of satire and silliness keeps it light on its feet.

Once The Good Nurse establishes that something undeniably fishy is going on, it quickly cascades into a perfect amalgam of a tense detective thriller starring dubious officers Danny Baldwin (Nnamdi Asomugha) and Tim Braun (Noah Emmerich), a gut-wrenching psychological drama, and a staggering showcase for Chastain and Redmayne, who deliver two of the finest performances of the year.

What makes How to Blow Up a Pipeline great, is that it so deftly wins us to its cause anyway. It’s absolutely electric filmmaking.

The documentary uses the brothers and their relationship with the carrion birds as metaphors for the state of the environmental and political climate of India’s capital, forming a subtle subtext to the main account.

EO seems to be getting at the rhythm of life—up, down, happy, sad, joyous, torturous, cyclical, always changing, never fully understood. That’s how we see ourselves most preciously in EO. We’re never in control, even when we think we are.

For better and worse, The Inspection seems like the movie Bratton had to make, a story so personal that some of its biggest emotional confrontations start to resemble a therapeutic exercise.

Through capturing victim testimonies as they were presented in court during this months-long trial as well as the dogged pursuit for justice by a ragtag team of bravely dedicated prosecutors, the film wholly resists sensationalization, opting instead to faithfully reconstruct the events that culminated in a landmark win for social justice amid a shakily budding democracy.

Just like the black ichor seeping into Laura, Matriarch saturates viewers’ senses until it pays off its many adumbrations with unexpected revelations.

The School for Good and Evil is juvenile, over-the-top and campy in all the worst ways. It’s too busy trying to combine TikTok fashion with Top 40 music and popular children’s fantasy films to create any visual, musical or narrative distinction for itself.

It all adds up to another frantic grab by a studio desperate to wring success from a superhero universe they’ve never fully understood.

Armageddon Time is a thoughtful examination of one’s own limited perspective of whiteness, expounding upon how a young child’s naivete can be as dangerous as a direct act of prejudice.

The feeling is one of depletion, as V/H/S/99 begins robbing past hits in a grim effort to keep itself mobile and vital.

At the heart of everything White Noise gets at in regards to the American condition (and the human condition, for that matter) is a searing, darkly comedic look at a nation’s fear of firepower and their somehow stronger intuition to do nothing about it. The only things more American than that are apple pie and Elvis.

Every baby deserves to be loved and taken care of, but so does every adult. Broker does an impressive job of articulating how these two truths are inextricably intertwined.

Rosaline gets some things absolutely right—the casting of Dever, the use of music to lampoon genre clichés, its creative point of view—but it misses the mark it establishes for itself. It’s a misguided work that highlights the insincerities that have emerged in Hollywood’s recent charge towards “inclusion” and “diversity.”

Posley balances Bitch Ass’ moral dilemma with clever, exuberant filmmaking.

The final product is visually and sonically luscious, but narratively and thematically lackluster—a frustrated misstep from a veteran artist that still deserves praise in the right places.

Bloodshed is structured into two intersplicing sections charging forward at a rate of devastation your tear ducts absolutely cannot keep up with.

McKee’s darker genre touches in titles like The Woman and All Cheerleaders Die are sorely missed in Old Man, which is too reliant on performances that outshine a story seen coming like an asteroid the size of Mars.

In truth, the entirety of Halloween Ends is suffused in some kind of magic or witchcraft, a gauzy layer of unreality that prevents a single character in the film from behaving like an actual human being.

Schrader pushes the somber score and just-the-facts cinematography as close to pure explication as possible. There is visual storytelling, but little in the way of mood or evocation.

While not Park’s best work, nor a masterpiece, Decision to Leave is an extravagant and hopelessly romantic thriller that weaves past and present into something entirely its own.

Violence, political strife, marital problems—the world keeps on turning, but Before, Now & Then explores what’s needed to hold steady through it all.

Leslie’s journey is at once unflinchingly intimate, aching and melancholy—qualities accentuated by Larkin Seiple’s sublime cinematography, which resembles a somber travelogue.

As-is, Scarlet is a beautiful loll, content with its self-made magic.

Bones and All is a heart-tugging portrait of wayward spirits searching for belonging that deadens the genre of cannibal horror into digestible, prestige-glossy arthouse.

While Palm Trees and Power Lines certainly functions as a cautionary tale, it derives the intensity of its power from the uncomfortable degree to which we’re compelled to empathize with Lea as she makes a string of increasingly perilous decisions.

As a story about a mother and daughter trying to move on from old wounds and contextualize their relationship, the film is perfectly adequate. But as a film watched on a chilly, damp fall day—not unlike the day I write this review—with a mug of hot cider, the coziest pajamas and Halloween just a few weeks away, I could not ask for anything better.

It’s not all brilliant or profound, and it’s certainly not all well-worded, but it’s always thoughtful.

Too much of a good thing becomes John Ross’ curse, as Grimcutty renders his demonic scowl impotent after the umpteenth close-up. Stick your landing, not your opening—Grimcutty works itself backward into a forgettable cyber-folktale fate.

What’s present is so incredibly promising that it’s almost disappointing the film doesn’t wrestle with something bigger than bullying.

There’s a worthwhile story in here about the long-term effects of trauma, how society disregards and casts aside adolescent girls, how quick we are to blame the victim, how bullying can lead to terror—but all these messages gets lost in translation.

Berk and Olsen take a big swing by overtly hailing far-flung influences—Spielberg, Aster, Kaufman—without overstuffing their film with incessant references. But they don’t quite follow through on their initial ambition, and the movie feels frustratingly restrained.