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!