Carnage is for the most part, in ways that count, another dirtbag delight. It’s a lesser movie than Venom, but one that scratches many of the same itches and then some.

Chase has delivered something that walks the tightrope between social melodrama and fan service, and that sometimes teeters on the edge of falling. But he has also given us the foundation for the moment when a man from New Jersey will wake up one morning and get himself a gun.

Even with its familiar visual and dramatic approach — the extent to which we are firmly, subjectively pushed into Joseph’s world and made to tumble around for a while amid his unpredictable behaviors — the movie packs an odd little punch.

The movie has real moral terror at its center. It gets ugly: It gives that word fresh resonance. This is where it gets things right — what will, one hopes, make it worth remembering.

You see Evan Hansen, all of his flaws and desires and self-loathing laid bare. And there are enough of these goosebump-inducing, epiphanic moments courtesy of the actor that you see why people might love this film as well as cringe at it. Platt does not ruin the movie. He singlehandedly gives it a voice.

In a moral universe so keenly prescribed as this, the goodness we see in Cry Macho — goodness that seems to come with age or, as in the case of Marta and Mike both, after great sacrifice — resounds even as, scene to scene, the movie feels shaky.

Jessica Chastain isn’t just the reason to seek out The Eyes of Tammy Faye — she’s the only reason to see this curiously tepid biopic at all.

The promise of Shang-Chi, which is as much martial-arts movie as it is standard superhero origin fare, is that a lot of people will get their asses kicked: sometimes gracefully, even beautifully, and other times with the battering-ram power you can expect of a movie advertising 10 rings at play.

What the movie’s effortful attempts at symbolism and meaning do most effectively are undercut what’s smart about the questions it raises — and DaCosta’s fine hand at creeping us out. The movie wants to be more than it is. The result is that it winds up amounting to less than it could have been.

Screenwriters Ben Collins and Luke Piotrowski lay the foundations for a conventionally well-built haunted-house chiller. But Bruckner (a V/H/S anthology alumnus who also gave us 2017’s tight little wilderness horror The Ritual) and Hall herself occasionally deviate from the plan, forming something a little more strange and sculptural.

Reynolds is like a puppy dog who moonlights as a male model, or maybe vice versa. He’s the only reason to see Free Guy, but you already know this going in.

CODA knows how to work that conventional-to-a-fault indie feeling like a champ. You may exit smiling. Just don’t be surprised if you also experience the sensation of having just been Sundanced to death.

[Franklin's] music blows the movie out of the water — and the movie, at its best, is wise to let itself get blown away.

Homeroom’s power in is allowing us — encouraging us — to hear these students out for themselves, bearing witness to political identities in the midst of their formation, still molten and moldable and all the more useful to see for that fact.

The premise is ripe; the thrills are rich; the payoff doesn’t come together quite as easily as the rest.

Although Reminiscence doesn’t try to hide any inherent metaphors — what are most movies these days, really, but nostalgia machines, designed for those stuck in the past? — it doesn’t do much with the material besides fashion something like a dull-edged Blade Runner.

Even with its simple set-up and at a scant 71 minutes, there’s an entire buffet for thought laid out here. Alexandrowicz may have given us the single best documentary of the year; he has undoubtedly given us one of the most vital.

The movie is too much, too long, but not lacking in its glories. To find them, follow Harley. She’s leading the way.

An otherwise mild-mannered diversion from the American indie hinterland, Swan Song is the rare film to give this cult actor the center-stage spotlight, and a mirrorball-refracted spotlight at that. The fact that he’s in every scene of Todd Stephens’ sentimental queer comedy is, it turns out, the boldest decision in a film that doesn’t always honor its professed credo to live life out loud.

The movie’s attentive sense of noticing makes its flaws, its leaps in logic, easier to notice. But this seems to matter less to the filmmakers than what the style has to offer the movie in terms of a message; on this front, Stillwater is tellingly consistent.

It’s heavy, heady stuff, coming at you via a delivery system of catalog-worthy set design, magic-hour cinematography, and often tamped-down, deadpan performances. And somehow, it all works in harmony to create a ripple effect of feeling that reverberates strongly under its placid surfaces.

It’s something closer to an amusement-park attraction named Generic Blockbuster Cruise, where you slowly glide past a bunch of prefab set-ups — over there you’ll see some thrills, look out on your right for some spills and chills — and the whole thing moves inexorably forward on a track, while a skipper cracks the same corny jokes.

This being a Lowery tale, the monolithic, the overwhelming, are only more powerful for being rendered in intimate, miniaturized terms. The creepiness creeps just that much more; fear is heightened; fantasies, mysteries tingle with a sense of the unpredictable.

For Joe Bell to largely be a tale of one man’s inner journey rather than a dive into the unknowns of his son’s inner life and eventual tragedy is not out of turn. It is a worthwhile story to tell. The flaw is not in assigning gravity to Joe’s journey.

Old isn’t trying to be fashionable, low-fi, artisanal horror of the kind that seems to be setting the tone for the genre in the indie world. This is, instead, a credibly old-fashioned movie in some ways, a creature feature with something more diffuse than a “creature,” per se, a monster movie in which the monster is an unlucky pairing of longitude and latitude.

Val is simply the reflections of an actor with a knack for self-documentation, who has seen better days but remains buoyant by the prospect of making art in one form or another.

Not even the presence of Money Heist‘s Úrsula Corberó as a slinky villain known as the Baroness could stave off a sense of disappointment.

This hard-hitting doc is like Summer of Soul in reverse — instead of a feel-good music celebration, it’s a long day’s journey into “Break Stuff.”