No one on-screen is to blame for the failure of The Family Plan. They’re all fine, but they’re swimming upstream against a script that doesn’t give them enough to do and a director who fails at blending an average family and uncommon action into one vision.

American Fiction trips over its own feet in its final act, stumbling between daydream sequences and multiple storylines before finding a final, underwhelming resolution. But the attentive lens that the film devotes to its concept and themes is what will be remembered.

Foster is at his best in roles like this one, where his emotions are tightly coiled and always close to exploding, but the storyline does not give him much to work with and Wallace cannot make much out of a blandly-conceived role.

Viewers will find themselves entertained and curious to get home and see just how many of the records in their collections bear the creative imprint of these guys.

“Rebel Moon” often looks more like an animated pitch for a movie than an actual movie with human characters, urgent drama, emotional stakes, and so forth.

It’s a disturbing work, guided by a discomforting sense of immaculateness that chills the viewer. It is the sanitation the film performs, which speaks to the now, in a way few Holocaust films have done before.

In "The Taste of Things," no distinction is made between cooking for someone and loving them. It's "all one."

The Archies celebrates its protagonists’ character-defining youth by letting them be cute, doofy, and mostly self-absorbed.

It’s as if “Barbie” were actually about Weird Barbie, but even that idea doesn’t quite do it justice. A more apt description is: It’s the best movie of the year.

Rich in thought, Origin is a dense, forceful masterwork, and, quite simply, the most radical film of DuVernay’s career.

A lack of ambition, just-off comic timing, and inferior world-building keep this bird from flying, despite there being just enough bits that work to make it worth a look, especially if you forget who made it.

Wenders chooses to illuminate indirectly, and to compel the viewer to concoct questions of their own.

This is the farthest thing in the cinematic firmament from a world-changer you can imagine, but as an evening’s entertainment, it’ll more than do.

The End We Start From is down-to-earth, beautifully conceived and thoughtful, a shrewd piece of filmmaking in support of the story’s thematic preoccupations, particularly motherhood.

Overall, Concrete Utopia is more ambitious than its execution, but nonetheless sustains its suspense with an emotional journey into the depths of what scarcity can do to humanity.

There’s not enough cold sweat ambience here, and that makes it even harder to root for a modestly budgeted chiller whose creators clearly started their project from a place of cinephilic affection. Even sympathetic genre fans will have trouble finding something new about such old hat material.

The show is smoothly staged before an appreciative audience, with well-chosen theatrical touches.

Sometimes, the work of an artist being unpacked by that artist’s relative can lead to bland hagiography, but Nicky’s daughter Sara uses her personal angle to an advantage, never hiding her love and admiration, making it easier for us to feel the same.

It’s a film that somehow plays as both a child’s heroic journey and an old man’s wistful goodbye at the same time, a dream-like vision that reasserts Miyazaki and Studio Ghibli’s voice and international relevance. It’s gorgeous, ruminative, and mesmerizing, one of the best of 2023.

Similar to other disaster flicks, this film worms through oddball characters, takes interest in the disintegration of society, and the tension that arises from disparate people pushed to survive with each other. But Leave the World Behind struggles where it matters most, fashioning real stakes to accompany the turmoil.

Some people might enjoy a solitary clip from a Henry Rollins interview, as well as occasional anecdotes from “Rescue Dawn” star Christian Bale (another Batman!). Others might wonder why we’re watching a chaotic docu-salute to Herzog when we could be watching a Herzog movie instead.

Renaissance is both intimate and vast as it basks in Beyoncé’s impossible beauty but also turns the camera toward the audience to emphasize the powerful sense of community the Beyhive provides.

It’s a well-made, purposefully ugly treatise of America as a broken-down theme park. But its charm wanes whenever it’s just not as funny, smart, or edgy as it thinks.

Woo is a virtuoso. This movie is music.

Yamazaki’s style, like his movie’s politics, only looks conservative when compared to his predecessors. He made a good Godzilla movie, if not a great one.

In his feature debut, writer and director Paris Zarcilla proves he is a master storyteller. He carefully builds his suspenseful tale with a horror twist layer-by-layer: showing us Joy’s hardships, establishing Grace’s rebellious phase, immersing us in their problems until what looks like divine intervention arrives that’s almost too good to be true (and it is).

Thankfully, Eileen doesn't betray its source material by turning Eileen into something more palatable and sympathetic, but the film loses something in the transfer.

Regardless of its shortcomings, Candy Cane Lane is a frenzied family friendly film as overstuffed as a Christmas stocking, as nutty as a chestnut, and, ultimately, as warm as an open fire.