The film’s a lot of fun, but it’s more empty than it needs to be, and even the piercing intensity of Leto (who also serves as one of the film’s producers) doesn’t allow one to take this nearly as seriously as it takes itself.

The craftsmanship, framing, pacing, and droll humor are admirable, and yet the film is never quite subtle enough to hit home the way it needs to.

Even with a bit of a dip in “Kidprint,” V/H/S/Halloween registers as one of the series’ strongest recent efforts, buoyed by the joyfully demented humor and explosive bloodletting of “Diet Phantasma,” “Fun Size” and “Home Haunt” in particular.

Yes; it stars a dog–but it’s also one of the year’s most potently unnerving and emotionally resonant horror films at the same time.

Springsteen’s earnestness makes him seem like a nicer, more open-hearted sort than Dylan in A Complete Unknown. It also makes for a less prickly character in a less entertaining movie.

One could argue that the fairly straightforward biographical approach is meant to act as a primer for those have never once tuned into Turner Classic Movies; on the other hand, rapid-fire references to Godard’s contemporaries, including petty feuds and clashing reputations, are calibrated so that cinephilic savants can pat themselves on the back for getting the reference.

[Black] hands us a frenzied combination of action, comedy and criminal caper, patently absurd but well served by knowingly silly performances and solid jokes.

There are hints of The Life Aquatic, which Baumbach co-wrote with Wes Anderson, with its absentee father who may not be a great artist either, as well as Anderson’s train-set Darjeeling Limited. Gorgeous as Jay Kelly is, and as funny as it is in moments, it can’t help but feel a little minor by comparison – a little easy, even, on its man-who-wasn’t-there protagonist.

It’s not as sordid as it plays at, but Bone Lake is wickedly entertaining nonetheless.

Even Dafoe, seemingly incapable of a false note or forced delivery, ultimately must fall in line with the movie’s broad-arc predictability.

It speaks to Anderson’s skill as an architect of distended narratives that One Battle After Another’s parenting motif functions as a concrete pylon for action and political intrigue and rank human cruelty; it’s the beacon the film comes back to time and again.

Day-Lewis, as expected, is utterly convincing inhabiting this space, with two very different showstopping monologues, one grossly comic and one filling in a defining event in his past. It’s easy to forget, given his legendary status and reluctance to play the game, how much fun it can be to watch Day-Lewis at work.

The movie evokes retro genre coziness and unease in equal measure, one creeping up from beneath the other.

For roughly the length of a TV episode, it floats above its ugly franchise architecture in a dreamlike state of divine ridiculousness.

With a plot that likewise falls apart under the lightest bit of scrutiny, what we really needed was more judgement of our protagonist, and not less.

Kirk’s film is a surprisingly lyrical and quite gritty, intimate thriller, one that makes the best of its unorthodox choice of performers to tell a story that is equal parts tender and savage.

It’s like a TV pilot poorly dressed up as a character study.

Adulthood makes the occasional odd choice, setting up elements that seem like Chekhov’s gun-type instances that never get around to paying off, and it’s never quite as tense as Winter probably envisioned it would be, even when it builds up a head of steam. But there are enough moments of either well-calculated gallows humor or generational commentary to keep things moving briskly along, and both Gad and Scodelario find room to have a new definition of maturity thrust upon them.

Tipping approaches this dilemma but is too intellectually distracted to focus on the raw complexities that would otherwise give it shape or resonance. He opts for spectacle, which wears thin fast.

Although the premise teeters on being twee, A Big Bold Beautiful Journey mostly works because its self-awareness keeps it from devolving into cliche … until it doesn’t.

Where Predators becomes fascinating as a documentary is not in its rise-and-fall accounting of the titular series, however, but in the way it examines the evolution of empathy or vindictiveness in those who have been touched by abuse and tragedy.

For far too much of its bloated runtime, it becomes an incomprehensible slideshow of trauma and weakly executed horror imagery, only occasionally revealing the far more effective, character-driven psychological thriller it’s clearly yearning to be.

Fuller is in fine form with Dust Bunny, and with its goofy tone, and its unabashedly maximalist elements navigating between more subtle character beats, there’s a plenty to admire about this feature film debut from a well-established storyteller.

Beyond a handful of vaguely contemporary references – podcasts; crypto; Stormy Daniels – there’s little sense of the present in Spinal Tap II, not even of the band being particularly out of touch with it. It’s been four decades since the first film! Shouldn’t their resentments be pettier, their epic reconvening more desperate?

The Smashing Machine is sensitive, texturally rich, and technically strong. But the melodrama of Mark Kerr—the real one—was somehow more potent when we saw it unfiltered.

Heartfelt, gently humorous and possessing a keen understanding of the passage from juvenile to adult thinking, it’s a thoughtful and solemnly beautiful feature debut.

The Long Walk reaches for something profound and disturbing, while at the same time wary of risking a bad stretch.

Del Toro’s fables are always beautiful but sometimes irregular in connecting their artistry to fully cogent characters and themes. With Frankenstein, he has the freedom to reconstruct a story and motifs he knows by heart into a movie that’s intimately familiar with the soul of the original material, but reaches the conclusions on its own terms.