Even though it suffers from tonal and narrative inconsistencies, Dora and the Lost City of Gold deserves just enough praise for working as a gateway action/adventure exotic exploration movie for kids to eventually get into Indiana Jones, while sporting a central performance that’s effortlessly charming and instantly lovable enough to almost carry the entire project.

Although the shooting style enhances the realism, the characters often struggle to reach the point of complete personhood. This shortcoming goes beyond direction, and can occasionally be felt on a narrative level.

For a designated last great hope of original sci-fi, this is a surprisingly programmatic picture.

Where Chicken Run once played off of the specific aesthetics of WWII POW films with dark humor, Dawn of the Nugget loses its identity in favor of a harmless playfulness interchangeable with a Madagascar or Ice Age sequel.

Jones suffuses slow-burn tension, disturbing visual elements and murky folk horror into a film that’s foundation rests on creeping uncertainties—making The Feast pleasantly obscure and occasionally quite upsetting.

Adapted from Find a Way, Nyad’s book about her experience, Nyad is an inspiring tale of perseverance and refusing to give up on yourself. However, much like Free Solo, it’s also an exploration of the kind of person it takes to do what Nyad did at her age—and it’s often not a positive picture.

Ash could be a rumination on the nature of identity, or the destructive colonial spirit of Americans, or the indescribable horrors of a world beyond our own ruined one, but despite all of its cranked-up imagery and sometimes-confusing storytelling, it’s tidier and less thought-provoking than any of that – a genre exercise, capably extended.

The Electrical Life of Louis Wain can’t quite live up to its magnetic subject, but it’s still a warm celebration of a renegade artist and revolutionary forbearer of the funny cat video.

Ritchie’s film is less infatuated with displays of All-American bodily sacrifice than movies like Lone Survivor and 13 Hours, but it still keys into a kind of performative, manly anguish.

Like its muddy multi-movie gamble, the ideas are there for Honk for Jesus. Save Your Soul. But like its characters, it’s happy to follow the path of least resistance.

This is a movie for the fans—almost a gift, really. The last two-plus years have been a lot for everyone, and to escape to late 1920s England and France in all its splendor is a delight.

For some, Piercing may be a sign of an exceptionally talented filmmaker still finding his stride, this expertly handled erotic thriller an imaginative, stylized headache. For others, Piercing may be all those things, but ultimately not worth the punishment.

You won’t find much of this particularly new or enlightening. It’s a little surprising, considering how much thought Leitch (no relation, by the way) has put into the action sequences, how perfunctory and even lackadaisical the rest of the film is.

Fundamentally, Banana Split isn’t about making unexpected friendships under antithetical circumstances, but about figuring out how to maintain them no matter what difficulties it encounters. It’s an honest film, and unabashedly fun, with a really kickass soundtrack as a bonus.

Released a little under two years since Shyamalan’s previous film, Knock at the Cabin plays like an old dog who learned new tricks. It’s a sharper, more propulsive and formally exciting dramatic thriller that has far fewer disappointments in storytelling and visuals than 2021’s Old while revisiting and expanding upon familiar themes of family that Shyamalan has explored his entire career.

This latest Kiss of the Spider Woman is nearly as ramshackle as its fictional namesake; it’s not the powerhouse it should be. But it comes together. And for Lopez, its artifice looks more like a form of honesty.

Put simply, V/H/S/94 is almost less an anthology than it is a vehicle for a single, deliriously creative segment from director Timo Tjahjanto, which dominates the entire center of the film. All the other segments simply orbit this central anchor, caught in the inexorable pull of Tjahjanto’s demented imagination, which manages to give V/H/S/94 at least 30 minutes in which one cannot look away.

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

The Limehouse Golem has costumes, and drama and an abundance of severed appendages, splattered gore and artfully dismembered bodies, and maybe that’s all any horror fan can ask for. Still: There’s nothing wrong with hoping for more.

Not all of Unsane’s twists and gambits work—you have to accept a certain amount of movie-movie ludicrousness to get on the film’s loopy wavelength—but Soderbergh’s vision of a smart woman eternally held down against her will has a wonderful, nasty kick to it.

I found myself undeniably charmed by a lingering warmth in the coldness of Fingernails, no doubt helped along by the performances of Buckley and Ahmed.

Villains is a workmanlike thriller with a pair of memorable performances and a simplistic premise.

In reality, Triangle of Sadness is neither as smart nor as interesting as it clearly thinks it is.

The history baked into Maria is fascinating, one of the film’s greatest strengths.

As a newsroom drama, Scoop succeeds with its taut presentation of the negotiations and the egos at play when executing an interview of this caliber.

At times, By Design is agonizingly opaque or borderline insufferable in its pretentious indulgences; at other times it’s laugh-out-loud funny as it skewers equally pretentious targets.

With In the Earth, Wheatley hits a brick wall, but he hits it hard enough that whether one sees the film as successful or not, the effort remains admirable.

Beau Is Afraid is very much a black comedy that utilizes well-placed horror techniques–Aster has a solid command of tension and loves to swing his camera to and fro to create a sense of vulnerability. Aster’s direction and sense of humor, the latter of which emerged more prominently in Midsommar, just seem more at home in a comedy.