The film doesn’t come across as ironic, satirical, or like a thoughtful analysis or commentary. It’s the first of the three that could actually be considered a new entry in the genre it’s referencing.

Balancing a mood like this, equal parts terrifying and funny, feels nearly impossible, particularly when falling too far to either side would topple the movie entirely. But Perkins never slips — he keeps the tension and discomfort perfectly measured throughout. That tone is exactly what makes Longlegs creepy, rather than scary.

By channeling the gravitas of Western sci-fi movies, Kalki 2898 AD loses some of the range that makes Indian movies special. Its ambition is to be applauded. Its self-seriousness, not so much.

The dialogue (by Ritchie and three other screenwriters) is lumpy and unconvincing, but that’s not why anyone watches a film like this. It’s a romp, disposable but sturdily made, with satisfyingly blunt action scenes that have been framed by a true master.

It’s likely the best Manhattan mayhem film since Cloverfield, and it’s also a downright excellent Hollywood blockbuster, if an entirely unexpected one.

The Imaginary isn’t as visually or narratively rich as Mary and the Witch’s Flower, or as transcendent as Miyazaki projects like The Boy and the Heron. But it does feel like a move in the right direction for Ponoc, an effort at finding its own voice and its own footing.

Ultraman: Rising offers much more than the average animated kids’ film: It rises to stand as not only one of the best Ultraman stories in recent memory, but arguably one of this year’s best animated movies.

Inside Out 2 is full of passion and empathy, letting the audience in on Riley’s inner struggle without always painting her as the hero, even in her own story.

With all these elements working in dreadful harmony, Kurosawa has made far and away one of the best horror movies of the year so far, and he sets a more complete and frightening tone in less than half the run time of most of those movies.

Regardless of what mode filmmakers lean into for a shark movie, they need to bring something worthwhile to that mode. Under Paris gets about halfway there on every front — drama, thrills, terror, character conflict, humanity-versus-nature messaging — and not much further than that.

It has its share of creepy moments, rising tension, and sudden-blast-of-music jump scares, but as a suspense story, it fizzles out surprisingly early.

Hit Man could have been a lot of different movies, and part of the joy of the film is in how playfully it gestures toward all those different potential versions of itself. But ultimately, that one perfect scene defines it as a great romantic comedy with a delicious bite.

If you already have an investment in the franchise’s volleyball teams and characters, this movie hits. And boy does it capture the epic highs of the show. It’s likely to fully reignite the fandom once again.

Ride or Die, the joys of Smith and Lawrence’s characters getting on each other’s nerves during improbably explosive shootouts is constantly derailed, as the script workshops or retcons every previous element from prior movies into the grand scheme of this one.

So even as Furiosa is inevitably compared with Fury Road, both positively and negatively, put your trust in Miller’s weird, wild filmmaking.

Hamaguchi slowly pivots away from dispassionate naturalism, building to an impressionistic, opaque finale.

It might be considered admirable how firmly Titley sticks to the facts, rather than trying to draw out a moral from the entire situation. But it leaves the story feeling more like a quirky, isolated human-interest story than a watershed moment in the development of exploitative, stunt-driven reality television.

Kingdom merely seems like an act of franchise maintenance, a reversal for a series of unusually thoughtful blockbusters. Every frame is a technical marvel. And every minute of it is probably better spent watching something else.

The movie represents months and months of sustained labor from hundreds of people, including many of the most talented and recognizable names in their field, in the service of a story that possesses no satirical edge, nor any human connection. It takes whatever pleasure that can be derived from a Pop-Tart, and chokes on it.

Turtles has familiar John Green touchpoints — a gimmicky story setup, a teen romance, a quirky best friend — but it turns the story inward and pulls off a fantastic character exploration, one that feels like a gut-punch in its best moments.

Mars Express is the rare example of an animated feature that warrants an almost immediate rewatch upon completion, if only to appreciate the craftsmanship of its presentation. It’s a densely layered sci-fi story that’s light on proper nouns, but heavy on subtext.

It’s a curiously specific movie, a gag aimed at fans of joyously culty, messy nonsense like Guns Akimbo or Crank — at least, until that final fight suddenly starts taking the narrative seriously. Even then, though, it’s best to watch Boy Kills World with the same snarky detachment the rest of its run time encourages.

No bodily function goes untapped in Sasquatch Sunset, which happens to be a meditative communion with North America’s glorious woodland.

It’s the single funniest movie of 2024, delivering punchline after punchline through its acute understanding of slapstick comedy and cinematic language. It’s the kind of singular cinematic experience destined to be a midnight cult hit.

Each half of the movie represents a different aspect of Spy x Family’s appeal, and each half is quite good for what it’s supposed to be. They just don’t gel together at feature length.

It’s a comedy about self-serious criminals for as long as it needs to be, a vampire slasher for as long as that’s fun, and a story about a vampire who craves love and attention by the end, fluidly shifting from one tone and genre to the next at exactly the right moment. Even more impressively, each version of Abigail is just as fun and bloody as the last.

Snyder’s background is fine arts, specifically painting, and you see it in the chiaroscuro speed-ramping that litters his filmography. But the closest The Scargiver gets to anything arty is that you could compare it to Goya’s Saturn Devouring His Son, in that it’s near monochromatic and feels like someone biting your head off.

One of the many things that makes Boys State entertaining as well as relevant is the way Moss and McBaine capture these kids’ different facets, and track how their combined ambition and naïveté play into the big picture.

The subjects of Girls State are trying to express their confidence about their power and impact in the world, while simultaneously watching their country deny them rights over their own bodies and emphasize their powerlessness. There’s a particularly uncomfortable irony in watching them working to piece together their own political beliefs and futures while their government is shutting down their options.

In a way, Monkey Man’s lack of composure is the point, and after it’s over, it’s easy to see Patel as an action star, but hard to picture him slipping into the role of a smooth agent of the colonial order. Maybe Bond’s not what he should be doing after all.

The movie is the perfect blend of silliness and serious, deep emotion that never becomes overstated, all told in bright, painted colors that deserve to be seen in theaters to experience their full glory.

Arcadian does a few things remarkably well for a sci-fi/horror movie, but it needed a lot more to really spark: more commitment to its vaguely realized setting, more energy between the two very different brothers at its center, and above all, more Nicolas Cage — either version of him.

Challengers is a sharp and snappy movie, full of big emotions expressed through fast-paced dialogue in some scenes and through silent, sensual physicality in others, all shot with creative verve and aggressively in-your-face energy. Everyone in this movie is chasing sex and success, and conflating those things with each other in unashamedly provocative ways.

Godzilla x Kong (yes, it’s styled like that, like a streetwear collab) is beyond “good” or “bad” or “movies.” It’s an arena show, a pro wrestler shouting in the squared circle, thumping their chest and raising the jumbotron hype meter before doing their signature move.

It’s a franchise reduced to nothing more than a parade of hollow, familiar images, lightly repackaged in hopes that we’ll buy another ticket and try to revisit the emotions we felt when we encountered this world for the first time.

The movie is full of mood and carefully paced terror that is more sustained than bolstered, with a plotty ending that never pays off the movie’s conspiratorial promise. The good news is, in true exploitation fashion, the movie’s final moments are grisly, pitch-black, and perfect.

It isn’t what those people will think it is. It’s something better, more timely, and more thrilling — a thoroughly engaging war drama that’s more about people than about politics.

It gets lost in a maze of awful storytelling and frustrating characters, all without offering anything more than the stock-standard horror tropes that have been done better in a million other movies.

It doesn’t fully cohere, but it sure is a party.

After four movies, it isn’t really a surprise that the Kung Fu Panda machine is running out of steam — thankfully, though, it has just enough power left to churn out some genuine laughs at the end.

The film is a bona fide wonder, and may claim the crown for the best movie of the year.

Dune: Part Two is exactly the movie Part One promised it could be, the rare sequel that not only outdoes its predecessor, but improves it in retrospect… One of the best blockbusters of the century so far.

Yet for all the boring set pieces, bad exposition, and faulty universe expansion, Johnson, Sweeney, Merced, and O’Connor still manage to find tiny spaces where their charisma can peek through.

What starts out as a sweet fairy tale turns into a metatextual romp that spirals in and out of itself, and gets deeply weird and weirdly deep. Sean Charmatz’s debut animated feature is an odd little gem that defies expectations.

With a patient, compassionate, but penetrating gaze, How to Have Sex maps out the dangerous, murky territory of teenage sexuality and friendships.

Even though this movie is sometimes haphazardly stitched together, like a dismembered hand added onto a corpse, Lisa Frankenstein is shocked back to life by magnetic visuals, engaging chemistry, and deliciously escalating motives.

Mielants is too tough-minded to be caught, it turns out, but that’s bad news for the rest of us. Will nurses a glimmer of hope in the darkness, only to snuff it out completely. This is a bleak, bleak movie.

Howard and Rockwell are both funny, charismatic actors, but it’s a struggle for them to build real romantic chemistry amid all Argylle’s layered artificiality.

It helps a lot that the filmmakers have footage of the couple and their climbs going back to 2015. That sense of scale does a lot to put their growth, both personally and professionally, on full display.

For horror fans, it’s a rare treat and a fantastic exercise in taking a genre in the opposite direction that everyone else has tried.

It’s a daringly weird debut, executed with real style and vision.

A Real Pain isn’t a movie about real conclusions or grand statements, but one about deeply personal relationships and how pain and history can affect them. In that way, it’s powerful, as well as deeply funny and touching.

The footage-forward approach does make the whole thing tremendously fun to watch.

It’s a movie made up of quiet moments: pauses in conversation, lingering glances, and outstretched hands. Lambert emphasizes the importance of these small interactions, and the ways they build up to connections. It’s a quiet story that aches in the best sort of way.

Miller’s Girl is a luxuriant meal for [Ortega], a chance to play a variety of facets of the same girl while finding the connections between them. For everyone else, though, it’s short rations, and more than a little underbaked.

The movie is a tepid botch on pretty much every level.

The movie, which chronicles the personal tragedies of Wilkerson’s life as she conceives and researches the book, is an awkward hybrid of these two approaches, neither of which fully succeeds. It’s a drama that wants to be a documentary, and it’s at its best when it’s just reeling off Wilkerson’s fascinating ideas at full flow.

Bolstered by a (mostly) stellar cast, who make the iconic characters their own and show off their spectacular singing voices, Mean Girls is a fun little update, though it never transcends the experience of the original movie.

The movie improves with distance. Days later, I mostly remember the good times The Beekeeper offers: Jason Statham beating on fools who deserve beating, bringing the pain in exciting and inventive ways, all while delivering bee-themed one-liners. Sometimes, that’s all you want from a bee movie.

The sequel to Aquaman is a total bummer for those of us who enjoyed Aquaman.

It’s got one terrifically creepy sequence, a genuinely fascinating family story, some solid jokes, and a thermal spring that’s also sort of an ancient god. And if that still isn’t enough for you, it’s also weirdly as much about baseball as it is about swimming at night.

Bayona’s approach to the “triumph of the human spirit” arc — often a broad, four-quadrant, feel-good cinematic flattening of real events — is both scrutinous and rigorous. It turns the concept inside out, presenting the ordeal of 571’s survivors as a murky scenario that we’ve been granted secret, intimate access to.

Nothing comes of anything either man says. It’s all noise — all passionless anger going in circles, captured by a camera that seems averse to lingering on the tremendous talents of Hopkins and Goode, who try their best to rescue Freud’s Last Session from itself.

Camera movements in perfect concert with the action plus fluid, grounded choreography performed by a former national champion kickboxer combine for a mesmerizing experience that easily would have been the best action movie of 2023 if it had come out just a week earlier.

By taking away the spectacle of violence, Glazer’s film shows another side of one of history’s greatest atrocities. The scale of the human catastrophe sets in not because it’s represented, but because the characters don’t seem to notice it at all.

A Child of Fire is not only a bore, it’s a shoddy-looking one.

It’s merely pleasant, a nice diversion that mostly suffers from the strong association with a much better film.

In its creation of a hushed, lonely idyll at the end of the world, disturbed by techno-biblical visions of disaster, what it recalls more than anything else is Lost. And like Lost, it’s most assured when it isn’t explaining itself or looking for climax or resolution, neither of which it really finds.

Through Durkin’s eyes, longtime fans and newcomers alike can see the paradoxical reality of pro wrestling — an entertainment that is both theater and sport, fake and real, and too often safer in the ring than outside of it.

In spite of its compactness and intimate focus, Oldroyd maintains enough ironic distance that the audience is never fully immersed in Eileen’s subjective viewpoint. In the way he lingers on details and nervous fidgets, the director invites the audience to speculate about what’s really going on with Eileen.

This isn’t a vanity project, or a narrative about a single standout auteur: It’s a story that centers collaboration, both in front of and behind the camera.

With Maestro, Bradley Cooper makes a metaphor of Bernstein through the lens of his tumultuous marriage. It’s less a portrait of a life than a depiction of the fulcrum creators pivot on, presented by a talented artist whose ambitions lie along similarly oppositional extremes.

Napoleon isn’t a movie about grand triumph, or about disastrous failure. It’s a story about masculine insecurity, and how it can reduce the world to violence.

Few movies have ever struck that balance quite as well as Craven’s four Scream movies. Thanksgiving doesn’t quite reach that series’ meteoric heights, but it comes far closer than anything else in recent years — including the Scream franchise itself.

Wish is all about the twinkling star in the night sky, the one many a Disney hero has wished upon. Perfectly calibrated for that Disney magic! Except this movie is a little too perfectly calibrated.

It’s a sharp, exciting movie — one that finally gives YA dystopias the ending that the genre trend deserves.

Director Nia DaCosta, who previously helmed 2021’s Candyman remake, has inherited all the downsides of a project set in a shared universe, and few of the upsides. But the good stuff she has to work with? She makes it sing.

Godzilla Minus One is the throwback movie that longtime Godzilla fans have been waiting for.

A movie that feels like it’s been machine-learned and reverse-engineered from YouTube fanfic, rather than rooted in any kind of recognizable human experience, behavior, or psychology.

Carried by a typically strong Blunt performance, Pain Hustlers is both watchable and eye-opening, even though its dramatic impulses do kind of cancel each other out.

Roth and Scorsese carefully seed Killers of the Flower Moon’s script with context, texture, and detail, even when they’re avoiding exposition and making sure every scene has a dramatic point. It’s an incredibly lived-in movie.

AGGRO DR1FT isn’t an enjoyable or particularly well-made movie, but it is the movie I’ve thought about most this year. For better or worse, that’s worth something.

Rather than copying the core premise of the short story, Bonello’s French- and English-language adaptation uses James’ dense, descriptive prose to weave detailed textures and sensations in each of his timelines.

It’s a laugh riot, with the potential to go down as one of the decade’s smartest and funniest comedies.

With this project, Rugna breaks plenty of horror rules and literally writes his own, turning his film into 2023’s most unnerving horror release — and a welcome revival for a subgenre that seemed like it was on its last spindly, clawed, wall-climbing legs.

Flora and Son excels in its humane yet prickly depiction of Flora’s relationship with motherhood.

In the process of stripping the series down to essentials, Green and co-writer Peter Sattler have made the most boring, uninspired version of The Exorcist imaginable: a regular old exorcism movie.

The Creator is a fully realized future in the service of a rote story and flat characters that only gesture in compelling directions; I’d rather not bother with that story at all.

Come for the fun gadgets and the kids saving the world, and stay for a message about recovery and kindness, delivered so earnestly that it isn’t saccharine at all.

No One Will Save You is not just a terrific horror-thriller, but one of the most surprising and entertaining sci-fi films the year has to offer.

The Expendables movies had one trick, and that trick has been played out. Director Scott Waugh has to resort to something else with Expend4bles: finally trying to turn one of these projects into a good action movie.

What’s especially strange about The Killer is that Fincher achieves almost everything he sets out to, but he sets that bar dispiritingly low.

It’s a short film, but its portrayal of inspiration, self-evident in both its artistry and homage, is simply enormous.

The lead actors carry the film, and the individual scenes are strong, though it never quite captures the deep longing that is threaded throughout the original.

Craig Gillespie’s Dumb Money is neither dumb enough to capture the bonkers nature of the story nor smart enough to turn it into an entertaining or even informative tale.

The ending doesn’t land, but there’s no denying the hilarious, poignant two-thirds that precede it.

There just isn’t much to differentiate Next Goal Wins from any other cliche-ridden underdog sports story. But what does salvage it is Taika Waititi’s ability to create quirky worlds filled with lovable characters.

The Blackening is a strange movie, and often a very silly one. But the creators can at least boast that they’ve put something on screen that horror fans don’t see often, and won’t be expecting.