As ruthless as some of the deaths can be, and tongue-in-cheek as the movie’s heightened reality becomes, Y2K remains affectionate toward its characters; it has a surprising amount of warmth and sweetness for what’s essentially a comedy about teens trying to get laid that pivots to a comedy about teens getting hacked to death by robots.

The film chooses to excise almost all of the original’s supernatural elements, opting instead to tell a gritty tale about war and trauma that manages to feel surprisingly modern for all its spears and loincloths.

Nosferatu is a hell of a picture. If Eggers often appears to be reaching as far back as possible for his cinematic influences, riffing on a silent movie allows him – forces him, even – to reveal his more modern sensibilities, where men are repped by the contorted, strangled scream face of Hoult and the ineffectual Friedrich (Aaron Taylor-Johnson), whose wife Anna (Emma Corrin) is this story’s version of Lucy from Dracula. In a plague-ridden town, it’s Ellen’s visionary, full-tilt fever that allows her to more closely commune with the evil around her, maybe even finding a hint of sick ecstasy. Nosferatu, in its enveloping-shadow way, finds more than a hint.

All in all, Get Away becomes surprisingly effective by the time all is said and done, bleakly satirical, bloody and a far cry better than the trite parody of director Steffen Haars other 2024 collaboration with Nick Frost, Krazy House.

The missing ingredient here is no doubt Lin-Manuel Miranda, who lent his now iconic style to the first film (fret not, you can hear his work in the upcoming Disney film Mufasa: The Lion King).

At the end of the day, Sweethearts just feels wan and inconsequential as a result of its lack of focus.

A visually sumptuous and evocative, but uneven feature.

The Piano Lesson is an adaptation, and a directorial debut that absolutely has me excited for what he attempts next.

It’s directed and edited in totally competent fashion. But none of that justifies taking the time to watch an often tedious reworking of a story you’ve already seen so many times before.

This film is as good as this project could ever hope to be, and it bodes well that Part Two will live up to everything that’s been set up here. When granted the chance to see them back-to-back, we just may, as the song goes, all be changed for the better. After this first act, it’s already safe to claim that Wicked is frickin’ Oz-some.

Street Trash is having a blast as it turns most of its characters into puddles of goo, and that’s all you can really ask of it.

At the very least, it manages to remind us of how miraculous the commitment of human ingenuity can be, when it comes to making a new life possible.

All We Imagine as Light is both admirably restrained and deliberately poetic, painting its constrained women with nuance and empathy, before they light up a narrow path out of liminality.

If only Red One had a bit more respect for its audience. We can all use a reaffirming message this holiday season, but this stuffs stockings with little more than hot air. I’d have preferred some coal. There’s at least a use for that.

It’s to the film’s credit that its writer-director resists pretty much every one of those conventional impulses, steering his breezy but meandering story in unexpected directions, letting it simply develop into a character portrait of two emotionally polarized individuals.

Credited to being “based on an original idea” from star Daisy Ridley, Magpie works in fits and starts as a portrait of an unbelievably, almost comically toxic marriage, but never aspires to really plumb the psyches of its characters or present them with anything but the most obvious and unchallenged choices.

Enjoyable as it is, Scott’s movie is adrift in a closed system, a massive warship floating around a coliseum.

Despite the amateurish lack of comic or dramatic timing, Christmas Pageant does have some old-fashioned charm.

There’s something rattling around, somewhere in Heretic, dealing with the power and limitations of belief, a movie that aspires to the deviousness of something like Barbarian, to which its setting bears the mildest of superficial resemblance. At some point, it escapes into the night without much trace.

Ultimately, the ambiguousness of the conclusion can’t really dim the engrossing and nigh-mystical sense of enrapturement that Meanwhile on Earth can project when it’s really firing on all cylinders.

With a heartbreaking lead performance from Jean-Baptiste at its center, Leigh has crafted one of the most sincere slice-of-life films to come out of British cinema in recent years.

Eastwood, still so earnestly attuned to the mechanics of personal guilt and faltering systems, finds timelessness in that growing unease.

Like an unstable particle of antimatter–which beyond all reason becomes a major plot point, if you can believe that–Time Cut begins to rapidly deteriorate in legibility in its third act, before spinning totally out of control.

Through this adaptation, Mielants mourns the lives lost to these institutions while simultaneously providing a timely reminder of the danger of passive complicity.

Don’t Move’s protagonist may be rendered inert, but the film retains just enough energy and menace to spare.

The traditional, closed-door design of the election invites an inherent layer of mystery and conspiracy, and the staggered voting process – the tallies of each vote are announced in front of the cardinals, giving them a brief recess to reconsider who is worth throwing their weight behind before having another go – provides an attractive structure for drama.

As the final level in this game of go-along, Venom: The Last Dance is still figuring out what a Venom movie needs to be, a tricky juggling of tone and spectacle that will be amusing enough for those tuned into this series’ squishy, uncomplicated rhythms and a numbing headache for folks bewildered by the chaotic and often rudderless existence of a Venom trilogy.

Perhaps the film works better as a run-of-the-mill horror comedy about a woman who regrets sacrificing her career to start a family, but as a so-called revolutionary take on motherhood, Nightbitch is stagnant and spends too much time chasing its own tail to an unsatisfying conclusion.