It’s a testament to Yamazaki’s work as both director and screenwriter that Minus One feels like a wartime character drama first, kaiju film second.

Moore and Portman inject the movie with wattage, dramatic heft, and a push-pull dynamic associated with immovable objects and irresistible forces. Melton gives May December its slow-burn tragedy.

Yes, this look back at one extraordinary, joyous, painful year in the life is a music documentary. But American Symphony is also a love story, a look at the personal toll that illness takes on everyone involved (at one point, we ride shotgun during an uncomfortably intimate therapy session), a testament to leaps of faith, and a testimony to the idea that living isn’t a passive act even in the best of times, much less the worst.

Come for the class warfare and the occasional shots-fired zingers about the rich being different than you and me. Stay for Keoghan twirling in circles, with nothing but shafts of late afternoon light and the entirety of what God gave him expressing the bliss of going from pretender to predator.

Starting with the French revolution and ending with Monsieur Bonaparte’s no-bang-all-whimper exit from this mortal coil, the director’s sweeping, swaggering, occasionally stumbling history lesson is nothing more than an attempt to conjure up the road-show movie magic of yesteryear.

Thanksgiving is less a movie than a messy attempt to coast off an oldie-but-goodie one-off without adding anything to the party. It can 100 percent go stuff itself.

Like the movie itself, the performance doesn’t need to reinvent the wheel in terms of how a good man goes evil. But both the actor and Ballad seem to respect the fans and the franchise, not just in terms of investment but in building out things sideways instead of forward.

No one’s denying that American Samoa’s brief moment of victory — it didn’t make it to Cup playoffs, yet it’s never been in last place again — is a major coup. So why does this feel like such a lost opportunity for all involved?

If Rustin only gives you a slice of a story — you could make seven different films out of his life and achievements — it assures you walk away knowing who Bayard Rustin was. The same can be said for Colman Domingo. Attention must be paid a hundredfold.

The Boy Who Lived lacks the complexity and frisson that might have set it apart in an increasingly crowded documentary field, or pushed it beyond its feel-good parameters.

Seriously, this should have been either a “special episode” played out over 45 minutes or a six-hour miniseries, in which the relationships among this trinity could have been better fleshed out and the jarring tonal shifts relegated to separate chapters.

It announces right from the start that you are not just watching a movie. You’re experiencing an immersive portrait of a life and a landscape intertwined, and entering what feels like a feature-length sense memory.

As a portrait of a friendship, one tested by decades of high times and lows, successes and failures, bad behavior and forgiveness, Nyad the movie is trawling deeper waters. As a bio-dramatization of one human’s resilience — and thus a stand-in for the triumph of the human spirit overall — it comes perilously close to merely treading them.

It becomes more of an actor’s showcase, in other words, which has always been one of Payne’s strengths — he’s an old-school director of performers, with a penchant for conjuring memories of several old schools in particular.

As a narrative that pretends to plumb the dark absence of missing children, however, Five Nights at Freddy’s is curiously inert, unwilling to get under your skin even as it grows dense with explanations of what’s happening.

Last Stop Larrimah is ultimately a pitch-black comedy — a digressive slice of cultural anthropology that chuckles into the abyss.

The Insurrectionist Next Door is both comedy, thanks largely to the fact that Pelosi has no interest in hiding her incredulity, and tragedy, in that she locates the humanity in these people who made some horrible decisions on the basis of a loudly propagated fiction, and will be paying for the rest of their lives.

The movie itself ends up just hustling a stock redemption story window-dressed with issues as opposed to exploring them.

What should’ve been a major coup for Netflix, and audiences at large, comes off as a rank revival that will only sully the memory of a British classic.

There is such clarity of vision here, a rare feat from a first-timer, that it feels as though it was crafted by a seasoned pro. The script is tight and full of humanity, never falling into the trap of being too earnest, and blends some genuine comedy with sequences of pathos and heartbreak. Everything feels grounded without an ounce of pretension.

Taylor Swift: The Eras Tour is one of the all-time great live performers aiming higher — and louder — than ever.

The movie may ping between social drama and IRL courtroom saga. Whenever Foxx struts and frets — and bellows, coos, rages, and waltzes — his two hours upon this stage, you realize that it may simply work best as a star vehicle.

Though some may come for the murder mystery, it’s Triet’s way of using that genre to get at deeper notions of love turning to hate, and tiny marital fissures that turn into chasms, that really makes this something close to an anti-romantic masterpiece.

It’s the perfect goodbye from an artist who lived to jolt you out of a sense of complacency. Mission accomplished.

There are moments in this borderline incoherent mess of a movie in which fans may be convinced that its sole purpose is to try making the original follow-up, 1977’s legendarily godawful Exorcist II: The Heretic, look positively genius by comparison.

Foe knows the tale it wants to tell. But because of the often mannered, occasionally stagy way that it ends up telling it, this is a movie that has a tendency to be its own worst enemy

There is the slightly conspiratorial sense that the team behind this trip down movie-memory lane simply fed the scripts of various canonized sci-fi epics into an AI program and waited to see what sort of composite it spit out.

You can barely call it a movie. You can, however, recognize it as one of Wes Anderson‘s best attempts at transforming both his and his literary idol’s idiosyncrasies into something like art — and the most satisfying posthumous double act in ages.

It Lives Inside knows you can use the cover of monsters and things that go bump in your psyche to examine the real-life horrors. But when the message starts to eclipse the medium, it’s time to get out.

Williams and Bernal aren’t focused on making a dramatized ESPN-friendly narrative or a melodrama about a gay man suffering the slings and arrows of intolerance. They’re far more interested in what resides in the thin middle of that Venn diagram, in which a luchador finds his authentic self in the most outrageous, over-the-top way possible, and revolutionizes a sport in the process.

Even before the murderer is revealed, you’ll recognize the method in which the movie dispatches its victims: They, like us, were probably bored to death.

It may not be Larraín’s best film (we’d nominate No). But it’s unquestionably the movie he was, in so many ways, born to make.

Gillespie and his movie-star cast aren’t trying to short squeeze the topic for statuettes. They’re just laying out what happened, why it happened, and why it mattered in the most audience-friendly manner imaginable, then take the whole thing to the moon. And it’s the lack of pandering in the way that they do it while also drawing clear battle lines that make it a surprisingly safe bet. We like the stock here.

Part horror movie and part sideways swipe at cancel culture and social pariahdom, Dream Scenario is the sort of high-concept, surreal comedy that Michel Gondry, Spike Jonze, and Charlie Kaufman used to do on the regular — think Eternal Nicshine of the Spotless Cage.

No one needed further proof that he’s a master. This meditation on grief and growing up does solidify the position, however, that Miyazaki remains the greatest living animator today, period.

You can’t accuse Dicks: The Musical of phoning in a half-assed take on material that demands you bring the big-dick energy or GTFO. But there’s a big difference between being loud and rude and being hilarious, cutting, or even clever. The movie keeps it up for a good long while. It could just use a few more inches.

Coup de Chance is a pretty slight and minor film, but for an 87-year-old American working in a second language, it can’t help but seem impressive; it’s certainly as good as anything Allen has made since 2013’s Blue Jasmine.

The Killer is slickly directed and propulsive — this is a Fincher film, after all—amplified by an eerie electronic soundtrack from regular collaborators Trent Reznor and Atticus Ross.

People may fault Coppola for dipping her toe in familiar terrain, but it’s hard to argue with the result: a transportive, heartbreaking journey into the dark heart of celebrity, and her finest film since Lost in Translation.

Maestro is every bit Felicia’s story as it is Bernstein’s, and all the better for it. Through her, we see how convivial, how magnetic, how cold he could be.

Fremont is neither game-changing nor revolutionary. It’s merely a throwback, in the best possible way, to a low-fi aesthetic and low-key way of storytelling you thought had gone the way of the Triceratops. That, in fact, is what makes this deceptively placid, supremely wry movie so damned moving.

Frankly, Cruz’s turn alone is worth the price of admission.

It’s a great excuse to watch Washington be a Movie Star in the most natural and unfiltered way. If this is the last of this duo’s brand-name vigilante thrillers, at least it’s going out on a properly pulpy high note.

It’s actually exciting to watch a star whose stock-in-trade has been arrested development flourish in a mature midlife period. Now he seems to be setting up future Sandler generations for success. Bat Mitzvah is about a girl growing up. But her dad seems to be doing some of that as well.

Retribution is not the worst of his thrillers/action movies — that honor belongs to either last year’s god-awful Blacklight or this freezer-burned turkey — but it does suggest that Neeson may want to consider retiring from the everyman action-hero beat for good. What once felt like a niche being expertly filled now resembles a formula beaten into submission, like so many nameless thugs threatening the safety of a tough guy’s offspring.

If you wanted to get the scoop on the when, where and how the Bishop Sycamore scandal happened, BS High is a good primer.

What gives birth/rebirth its dark, subtle, painful sense of humor, as well as its horror and its thoughtful gravity, is the sense that even the most profound problems of life and death can be approached like problems of science — that the act of trying to give someone you love more life can result in basic trial and error and scientific problem-solving.

What Soto and company have done with the saga of Jaime Reyes, however, suggests a formula that may save this whole genre from simply going down, down, and away

The Last Voyage of the Demeter is a threadbare high-concept story given the high-thread-count treatment — a lovely piece of luxury pulp. It’s also the creepiest and classiest bit of late-summer counterprogramming you’re likely to find, which may say more about our current landscape of cinematic pleasures than the movie itself.

With Red, White & Royal Blue seemingly attempting to straddle the line between BookTok virality and on-screen sensuality, the film is content with being merely rewatchable.

As you try to piece the various bits of information together, the whole thing starts to seem less like a movie and more like an exercise — a one-shot wonder doubling as a one-note narrative. There’s lots of hair there in Hardiman’s debut, but no there there. You leave feeling more teased than the models’ wigs.

The actors, working from a script by Sachs and Mauricio Zacharias, and swept up in Sachs’s characteristically perceptive, subtle dramatic style, make the whims and wills of these people feel consistent and predictable, which is to say, true to life.

James approaches A Compassionate Spy with a compassionate touch; this is more a profile of a man and a 52-year marriage than a History Channel-style march through events. And it is certainly not an indictment.

How much self-inquiry Park himself has put into Shortcomings is pure speculation, but you can’t deny he’s put his soul into bringing his vision of a movie that explores everyday identity politics — but isn’t just about identity politics — to life.

There’s a lived experience pulsing at the center of this slice-of-life tale, which helps guide it over some of the more generic elements and weaker patches, especially when things threaten to detour directly into poverty-porn and/or Amerindie miserablism territory.

As a horror movie, Talk is cheap thrills, done cleverly and with an abundance of voltage. As a proof-of-concept for what these gents can do, given some time and a couple extra gallons of Karo syrup, this is a hell of an introduction. Hands down.

A corporate I.P. Easter-egg hunt posing as a movie, this horror-comedy raids the House of Mouse’s resident spoooooky ride’s signature bits while nudging your ribs as aggressively as (in)humanly possible. Even for die-hard Disney fanatics, it’s still about as fun as waiting endlessly in line for something permanently closed for repairs.

It could be tighter, tenser, a little sharper with its satire. Yet there are enough big, better-than-decent movie moments, from shoot-outs to impromptu elevator sing-alongs, that not even a small screen can dilute. That’s entertainment!

The line between suspense and manipulation can be mighty fine. But The Deepest Breath walks it well. The filmmakers know they have a good story on their hands, and they shape it with sensitivity to the star-crossed divers and to the viewer. In the end it is well worth the plunge.

Oppenheimer is one of those shoot-for-the-moon projects that feels thrilling and wonky, brilliant and overstuffed, too much and yet not enough. It’s also a movie that brings to mind the difficult era-spanning epics of yesteryear, from Reds to The Right Stuff, and is a movie made by adults for adults yet done with the sweep and majesty we now associate with movies made for kids and teens.

This is a saga of self-realization, filtered through both the spirit of free play and the sense that it’s not all fun and games in the real world — a doll’s story that continually drifts into the territory of A Doll’s House.

It’s a fast, not as cheap, and much better than decent cover version of another song, one that knows very well that it’s a cover version.

20 Days in Mariupol gives you a sense of life during wartime that isn’t an abstraction, some distant thing happening to people thousands of miles away. The intimate feeling of what it’s like to have your country invaded, your living spaces demolished, and your closest family members killed before your eyes is palpable, and also gut-wrenching.

Apart from its relentless messaging, the movie is hobbled by a near-total absence of procedural logic.

Savanah Leaf’s slice-of-life movie is full of these revelatory moments — sometimes lyrical, sometimes gritty, often swirling the two together — and the former Olympian-turned-filmmaker‘s feature debut pitches itself somewhere between the detail accumulation of cinéma vérité and the feeling you’ve stepped into someone’s dream.

Sex, drugs, profanity, penises, puke, poop, the use of “party” as a verb — Joy Ride embraces these reliable gross-out-comedy standbys with a gleeful sense of gusto. It’s also out to prove that you can make something novel without reducing it to being a novelty.

Dead Reckoning never rises to that best-in-series movie’s level, though McQuarrie (and cowriters Bruce Geller and Erik Jendresen) concocts set pieces and the cast carves out stand-alone moments that stick with you past the credit roll.

It’s capable of quickly upshifting from tense to intense, and also of having the appearance of a scary movie rather than being one.

It’s best to look at All That Heaven Allowed less as a Rock doc and more as a chronicle of Hollywood’s system of subterfuge and suggestion, all built around protecting and/or punishing those who preferred the company of their own sex.

Not even J-Law off the nice-young-lady leash can save something this lazy and desperate to offend, however. The movie simply isn’t on her level. Or really much of any level at all.

The Stroll is a vital work of recent urban history. Even if you wouldn’t want to have lived there, you won’t regret visiting.

With the hospital and its primary representative in the case, Dr. Sally Smith, refusing to cooperate with the filmmakers, Take Care of Maya is necessarily one-sided. That side is rendered with sympathy and sensitivity, and a lingering, frustratingly unanswered question: How exactly does something like this happen?

That’s the Lee you get in this near-hagiography: a peek at the man, a whole lotta the myth, and almost none of the messiness. Definitive isn’t the goal here, clearly. Printing the legend on a splash page is. It’s less a doc than a Stan Lee infomercial.

The fact that Elemental can’t seem to get past its own elevator-pitch premise or avoid tripping over its teachable lessons, much less wring laughs and sobs from an opposites-attract love story, is a bit of a shock. It’s so busy trying to pen an op-ed that it forgets to give it a narrative structure and make it emotionally resonate. That’s just elementary.

Blue Jean manages to take an ancient anti-LGBTQ+ law and use it to foster a story of personal liberation. But it also knows that when your basic rights are threatened, no matter who you are or how you live or who you love, everything most assuredly is political.

Beasts puts its audience on cruise control, easy and painless. It makes the toy aisle look pretty good.

This much-beleagured cinematic universe has finally hit upon a winning film, and one that will be forever tainted.

In a perfect world, viewers would get college credit after watching Lynch/Oz. You may not walk away any closer to a degree, unfortunately, but you will definitely land over this rainbow with an entirely different view of a maverick filmmaker’s work, as filtered through Hollywood canon fodder.

A movie that liberates your tears and makes you fall in love with it. It is almost assuredly predestined to be the single best movie you see this year.

Sweeney has finally got her serious-actor moment and delivered.

The thrill of the multiversal new is gone. Everything else, however, is extra-webbed for your pleasure.

It’s the perfect movie for Louis-Dreyfus to flex her comitragic chops.

To see this sui generis Amerindie star fall to earth with a resounding thud, leaving just a stunningly designed and studiously empty hole in its wake, is a cosmic bummer.

Above all, it’s a Martin Scorsese picture, brimming with reverence for a culture that survived a horrible trauma as it is filled with exhilarating flourishes, film history references, and explorations of the faultline between the sacred and profane. And yes: It’s a masterpiece.

The updated, oversized mayhem is emblematic of a culture and a movie in which the outrageous is too often deemed an improvement, and showbiz suits can’t seem to leave cult classics well enough alone. Thinner than Victor Wembanyama and ever eager to please, the new White Men tries way too hard and acts like a teammate more interested in hamming it up than hitting the open man.

It’s a numbing collage of fiery, stitched-together spectacles. You can feel your IQ draining with each passing minute.

That remembrance of Saturday matinees past is there for a bit in Indiana Jones and the Dial of Destiny. Until it very much isn’t, and you’re largely left with what you imagine you’d get if you programmed a 21st century A.I. program to write up nostalgia-bait for the children of the late 20th century.

You Don’t Know Me, directed by Ursula Macfarlane (who made the 2019 Harvey Weinstein exposé Untouchable), doesn’t quite know what to do with this tension, saving much of its complexity for the waning moments rather than giving its heroine’s story deeper shading from the start. But it remains a visually engaging portrait that depicts Smith as more than just a little girl lost.

Whatever the movie’s sporadic charms, it’s simply too small for Celine, who can only be matched by a drama with the sweep and scale of Titanic.

There’s something so compelling about what [Howerton's] doing that he almost convinces you that BlackBerry is better than it is. And then you remember that it’s still a movie that treats “good enough” as the enemy of perfection and creativity, yet still feels it’s acceptable to be just good enough as a dramatization based on a true story.

So much of The Mother feels like a movie star doing an imitation of what they think a tough, serious, jaded hero is like rather than actually playing one. Lopez is an actor with a particularly deep set of skills. You wish she’d brought some more of her expressive ones to this revenge flick.

One of the movie’s major plot points hinges on the ability of some especially gifted psychics being able to erase their own memories. What we would not give for that particular power right about now.

Should you want to spend 90 minutes watching Nazis get shot, stabbed, gutted, blown up, run over, and beaten with a variety of inanimate objects, in the most violent and gory manner possible, this war movie is the answer to your pulp-cinema prayers.

The sounds are finite, yet the benefits of tuning in to the film’s wavelengths are endless. It’s the greatest documentary you’ve ever heard.

What was once an anything-goes sensibility now feels like it’s stuck in a nothing’s-sticking gear. Dark, wearisome and bombastic, along with an ensemble cast clearly radiating that they’d rather be someplace else, is not what we come to a Marvel movie for. We already have the DCEU for that.

In the hands of director Kelly Fremon Craig (The Edge of Seventeen), Are You There God? It’s Me, Margaret isn’t just about adolescence — it’s about the state of womanhood in general, with all of the accompanying sacrifices and vexations and humiliations that come with it.

What When Harry Met Sally made clear is that the keys to a good romcom are a tight, witty script (RIP Nora Ephron) and likable leads that can make it sing. Ghosted, like so many modern-day romcoms, opts for the everything-but-the-kitchen-sink approach. Sometimes less is more, Hollywood.

Should you care to dig into a contemporary interpretation of a centuries-old canon work, you can skip this Carmen. If you feel the need to watch a sweaty sex symbol pound a punching bag while shirtless, we have a movie just for you.