That Together treats its body horror as just another wrinkle in the complexities of what it means to love someone else is writer-director Michael Shanks’s smartest move.

As The Home trudges along until its inevitable rug-pull, its obnoxiously loud and incessant score tries to convince us of the sinisterness at play at the retirement home. And by the time the rubber finally hits the road well into the third act, the twist is aggravating not only because it’s so patently absurd, but because so little in the previous hour feels remotely connected to what occurs in the homestretch. All of the horrific imagery and supposed clues that came before are revealed to be signposts signifying nothing. Even the outbursts of violence in the climax do nothing but remind us just how empty and cynical the whole charade has been.

It’s possible that a kind of objective moral ambiguity was the goal here, but given the sensitive nature of the material, it’s difficult to shake the feeling that the film’s vagueness is the calculated strategy of those unwilling to take a side.

In line with his protagonist’s ever-shifting whims, a spirit of restless reinvention characterizes director Giovanni Tortorici’s aesthetic approach.

This is a film that projects an unflinching sincerity and optimism, and the first in the MCU, a franchise that has brought much of Marvel Comics’s wildest flights of fancy to life, to really channel the spirit of Kirby’s creations and how that first endeared them to audiences.

After its opening act, the film gets silly fast, with a frankly stupid witchcraft subplot and narrative turns that are telegraphed with audience-insulting obviousness.

Uncertainty extends to the film’s mood, which fluctuates between dreamy ennui and slowly escalating dread.

Its pastiche of Into the Spider-Verse is revealed to be nothing more than window dressing.

Late in this reboot, a character states “Nostalgia is overrated,” and it feels like an indictment of the film we’ve been watching. Far from making a case for the original I Know What You Did Last Summer as one with its own identity and a legacy worth turning over, Robinson’s update is so cynically made and self-indulgent that it will at least leave you respecting the workmanlike scare-making that director Jim Gillespie brought to the 1997 film.

The film may be most powerful for how Reid Davenport subtly connects the experience of the disabled community with that of marginalized diaspora groups at large.

The film reveals—and urges on—a historical shift in how we relate to other living beings.

It seems unsure whether it wants to be a campy slice of macabre in the vein of Dexter and American Horror Story, where the religious imagery and bloodletting are played for both chills and thrills, or a genuine rumination on death, faith, and the morality of doing bad things to bad people.

Eddington is especially pointed in the way that it views our online connectedness as a social cancer rather than an engine for progress.

This film finally admits that Superman has been a mainstay for nearly a century precisely because he stands for things outside of faddish trends.

The film is at its best when it’s keyed to its main character’s breakneck energy.

The film adopts a diaristic, epistolary form that flattens its emotional topography.

Metaphysical implications about the nature of reality or the possibility of shared consciousness are left mostly unspoken, as the film spends more time developing a surface-level study of the desire for romantic possession and control.

There’s a grating meta-ness to Gareth Edwards’s Jurassic World Rebirth that speaks to the filmmakers’ knowledge that they’re at the mercy of pressures to bring something new to a franchise that’s now on its seventh installment.

40 Acres continually finds clever ways to either subvert familiar story beats or to make them land with extra impact.

Alex Ross Perry doesn’t insert himself into something he views as bigger than himself, and that sense of reverence lends an emotional anchor to even the driest, disaffected parts of Videoheaven.

Kill the Jockey’s originality consists not just in taking the clichéd metaphor of rebirth literally, but in casually ratcheting that literalness to ever more fantastical degrees.

Imagine John Waters at the helm of a Terminator 2 remake and you have an inkling of just how wild a pivot M3GAN 2.0 is from its predecessor.

Some accuse the director of succumbing to sentimentality, but he’s never less sublime than when he reaches for ridiculous, grandiose highs in romance, coincidence, and naked emotion.

In the absence of any overt commentary, the film’s more open-ended choices in editing and music take on added significance.

The film’s conception of the future, perceptively, looks back to humankind’s primeval past.

The film’s best trait is the one that permeates every truly great first-contact story—not just the hope that our first meeting with the strangest of strangers is benevolent, or that the universe is too vast to determine they all wish good or ill on us, but that connecting with humanity still has value.

F1 succeeds for many of the same reasons that Top Gun: Maverick does: for elevating familiar material with old-school filmmaking swagger.

The film limply gestures at ideas around women’s rights and athlete boycotts.