Spencer will break your heart, but it will bring it warmth, too.

As social commentary, it's weak. As a comedy, it's unfunny. As a horror movie, it's not very scary.

Chon aims for the pulse at the end, but he may not have realized that he didn't have to try so hard — he had already effortlessly plucked at the heartstrings.

The genius of Sundown is how little it tells us while keeping us glued to what we're seeing.

The Rescue is an edge-of-your-seat experience. Vasarhelyi and Chin shoot this thing like a thriller, combining both actual footage shot during the rescue with recreations featuring the actual divers, blending all this footage together seamlessly to create a wholly cinematic experience.

I'm sure Lakewood had its heart in the right place, and Watts, gosh love her, is really trying, since she's pretty much the only person on screen for most of the movie. But every step Amy takes towards the school is another misstep the movie makes, and by the time she gets to her destination, we've already mentally checked out.

The Forgiven runs the risk of becoming a thoughtless movie about a vile white man who is taught a lesson by wise brown people, but McDonagh, who also wrote the script, manages to (mostly) avoid that with a subtle touch.

In the end, Copshop is aggressively okay, and that'll probably be more than enough for most viewers. 

The Electrical Life of Louis Wain is often quite charming and sweet. But there's an undercurrent of sadness running through the entire affair, and even when the film tries to convince us that there were good times among the bad, it's hard not to think how awful life must have been for several characters here.

It's a handsomely-made film with a game cast, and it's clear that it's a very special project for Branagh. But the filmmaker is unable to convey to us, his audience, why it's so special.

Chastain gets some huge, showstopping moments – her final scene is genuinely terrific, and another scene that recreates Tammy Faye's on-air conversation with gay minister and AIDS activist Steve Pieters is effective and tender – but it would've been nicer if the movie itself was more worthy of her considerable talents.

Pedro Almodóvar's Parallel Mothers may at first present like a run-of-the-mill effort from the face of Spanish cinema, but there's a deceptive amount of variation here. It's both a perfect distillation of his artistic fascinations and marked evolution in the depth of his thematic explorations.

A foreboding tone blankets "The Power of the Dog," putting us on edge nearly from the jump. Even when mundane, harmless things are happening, the tension mounts. The harmless seems harmful. Silence speaks volumes. This is a subtle movie that manages to knock us flat. 

Ultimately, Scott knows when to let the script beguile the mind and when to let the action dazzle the eyes.

As a showcase for Gyllenhaal's talents, The Guilty is passable, but that's just not enough.

The lack of true scares may be a deal-breaker for some. And indeed, the overall outlandishness at work on the screen is going to flat-out annoy certain viewers. But then there will be those who revel in the audacity of Malignant, and boy oh boy are those folks in for a treat. This isn't even close to being James Wan's best horror movie, but cripes, it sure is a lot of fun. 

Vacation Friends" probably wouldn't work that well in a movie theater, but at least there, you'd have the potential of infectious laughter. At home, Vacation Friends falls totally flat.

There's good reason to be excited for how Green will bring this all to a head in his grand finale. Halloween Kills manages to put a playful but petrifying spin on mythology without resorting to cheap self-referentiality.

Queenpins boasts a cast of talented ringers, who elevate the muddled material far more than it deserves, without actually resulting in an all-around good movie.

There are moments of dread and tension, and as the narrative wears on it goes to some commendably weird places. But by then it's too little too late, and the movie ends with us wishing that the characters really had done something — anything, really.

Mogul Mowgli is an imperfect exploration of cultural identity and generational trauma, but in its messiness and chaos, it feels all the more genuine.

Last Night in Soho, with all its warts and wonders, shows you can teach an old dog some new tricks. Wright shows he still hasn't hit his ceiling as a filmmaker, but's heartening to see him stretch and reach rather than just keeping his artistic ambitions planted on the floor.

Audiences deserve to see the conclusion of an action film so immaculately crafted and patiently paced, one that's more focused on inspiring reverent amazement through the simplicity of durable storytelling structures rather than the complexity of cinematic universe building.

The element that keeps The Card Counter truly alive is Isaac, who turns in one of the best performances of his career here, using his eyes to convey things dialogue never could. To watch him work here is something special, even if the movie as a whole can't ever quite match his intensity. 

A dark, ominous undercurrent runs through "Candyman," signaling Nia DaCosta as a filmmaker with a firm, unique grasp on the genre. The original "Candyman" already had a few sequels, but none of them are as clever, as interesting, as effective as this. Go ahead. Dare to say his name five times in the mirror. "Candyman" will live on.

As Marvel remixes go, Shang-Chi is one of the more successful ones. Maybe not as stylistically strong as Black Widow and certainly not as much of a watershed moment as Black Panther, it is elevated by the strength of its hard-hitting fight scenes and the supporting performers — especially the Tony Leung of it all.

All in all, The Protégé is a dull assassin movie misfire that does no justice by Maggie Q and can’t be saved even by Keaton and Jackson making a meal of their scenes.

Reminiscence is so very, very close to succeeding. Joy has a great visual style – there’s a fight scene in a flooded room with a piano that’s genuinely stunning to watch – and the noir/sci-fi mash-up is often enjoyable. But Reminiscence never manages to feel like a memory worth revisiting.

Everything feels so sterile, filmed under cold, harsh lights. It’s one of the most horror-free horror movies in recent memory. Maybe Blomkamp should give sci-fi another shot.

A mesmerizing exercise in the mundane, Days is almost completely free of dialogue — and intentionally unsubtitled for this reason — inducing a kind of calm hypnotic state that makes the viewer even more aware of the sharp stabs of loneliness felt by his longtime muse Lee Kang-sheng.

Perhaps Don’t Breathe 2 would work better for people who haven’t seen the first movie at all – they wouldn’t be lost, and they wouldn’t be witnessing the total character shift from unstoppable killer to flawed savior.

Free Guy is the equivalent of a pop earworm – something a little tinny and artificial that nevertheless worms its way into your brain, whether you want it or not. Which makes it rather fitting that the big emotional crux of the movie is actually based around a pop song. And that the film’s star is epitome of pop likability: smooth, digestible, inoffensive — yes, even with all the curses that roll off his tongue.

Despite its very flawed ending and baggy structure, Stillwater goes against the tide of our expectations and offers us a disarmingly affecting character study, anchored by an exceptional performance by Damon. Not even his bad beard could distract from that.

Vivo is plenty colorful, with a bright pastel palette both when the film’s action takes place in Cuba and in Florida, though the backgrounds are far less detailed than would be ideal. It’s good, but not good enough. The same is true of the story, and of the songs.

At times, The Suicide Squad feels less like a movie than a mission statement from a director. Behold, look what I can do with a budget and all the comic book characters I can play with. But, the unexpected heart at the center of the film, a sneaky anti-imperialist bent, and Gunn’s wild visual leaps make The Suicide Squad a bloody, gory delight.

Jungle Cruise is, on the whole, not quite as enjoyable as Pirates of the Caribbean: The Curse of the Black Pearl, and of course nowhere near as good as the Indiana Jones franchise or even The Mummy, partly because it is entirely unable to shake loose of those reference points. But it’s still a solid summer action film, or at least a solid enough entry for this specific summer

For a debut to be this assured, and for a script to so deftly dance around the obvious challenges and result in a film that’s delightfully, darkly comedic, The Unknown Saint shows that despite all the obvious ways in which this work could have gone horribly, risibly wrong in these rare cases miracles can come true.

The enormity of this film intimidates me. And it hypnotizes me, and seduces me, and captures me until it feels as if the green has grown like moss over my entire body. But rather than threatening to choke, The Green Knight injects a new source of oxygen into the sword-and-sorcery genre.

For all of Old‘s flaws – and those flaws are bounteous! – it’s a film with energy; a film with life. Shyamalan doesn’t appear to have a firm grasp on this material, but again, he’s trying! He’s trying to give us something different. And these days, that’s the sort of thing we should all be longing for.

The worst sin a martial arts movie can commit is not properly showing its action. The second sin is casting martial arts superstars and not letting them fight. On both counts, the extraordinarily limp G.I. Joe reboot Snake Eyes is guilty.

Ambitious and yet quietly confident, Hamaguchi’s film feels an absolute treat. Drive My Car is a hell of a ride, the red Saab riding through the landscape like a beating heart, taking viewers along a journey that they won’t soon forget.

Souvenir Part II is an easy recommendation on every level, a film that stands comfortably alone and allows Hogg’s journey to filmmaking, and Honor Swinton Byrne’s capabilities as a performer, to finally shine in a light that almost every cinema lover will be drawn towards.

Casablanca Beats drums its ideas loudly and effectively. The result is a boisterous and crowd-pleasing delight, showing a community with deep specificity that nonetheless speaks to the concerns of young people all over the world.

Fear Street Part 3 is an absolute blast. But there’s tragic darkness prevailing here, as there has been through the previous entries. Yes, we’re having a good time with all this horror, but we’re also affected by the senseless death and dismemberment. There is no reveling in the spilling of blood here. There’s just a unique feeling of loss; the sense of cosmic injustice at young lives being cruelly snuffed out by thoughtless, uncaring hands. It’s oddly beautiful in a devastating way.

Space Jam: A New Legacy, both in its cravenly cynical development and release, is not a surprising film. The marketing didn’t lie. This movie is exactly what it looks like. And it’s a grim glimpse at a potential future of mainstream filmmaking. No thanks

The end result is a real pleasure, taking us along for a wild ride. Yes, it’s slightly too long, and Baker and his team could probably trim a bit to make things even tighter. Yet there’s so much charm at play, so much joy in watching even the moments of pain and embarrassment that it’s difficult to criticize.

There’s a lot of flash and style, and all in service of an empty story with unmemorable gunplay.

Pig is not the movie you think it is. It’s something far more beautiful, and far more painful. It is an existential meditation on the search for something. Anything. A kind of cosmic loneliness envelopes this film. It’s extraordinary.

This is a tonally rich, libidinously powerful, and psychologically complex tale told by a master filmmaker equally at ease with European art-film conventions and B-movie hijinks. It’s this exceptional balance between the profane and the profound that sets Benedetta apart, truly proving to be penetrating in its effect in more ways than one.

Followers of Carax will be warmed by his return if a little disappointed it doesn’t quite recapture the magic, while fans of Sparks (many newly minted thanks to Wright) may appreciate the foray into a different outlet for their art. For those of us open to the experience but without a baked-in attitude to love this sight unseen, Annette proves to be a deeply flawed picture that still has many moments to recommend it.

Fear Street Part 2 also thrives once it really gets going. There’s a certain rough patch at the start that the film thankfully shrugs off, eventually sucking us into its night-dark story of doomed youth. A potential – and potentially questionable – romance that blooms between Ziggy and Nick Goode (Ted Sutherland), the boy destined to grow up and be sheriff, is charming in its clumsiness. A side character like punk rocker counselor Alice (Ryan Simpkins) seems annoying at first, only to blossom into someone we’re actively rooting for. After two films, the real strength of Fear Street is in its characters, not its scares. No one is expendable meat here – but that doesn’t mean they won’t get ground up in the end.

It’s easy to enjoy the film’s light, airy charms, but once it’s over, you’re left feeling a little empty.

DreamWorks Animation can make solid family entertainment. But they haven’t this time.

The sentimentality threatens to veer into melodrama at points, which Pratt struggles to handle. But The Tomorrow War has got a trashy popcorn vibe to it that it wholeheartedly embraces, and a cornball machismo that you can’t help but get taken in by, even if just for a second.

The Forever Purge is at its best when it’s attempting to subvert the standard formula.

Fear Street is like a big soup pot full of everything – there are shades of Scream, A Nightmare on Elm Street, Stephen King’s It, Halloween, Friday the 13th, and more. Watching Fear Street brings back memories of wandering around musty video stores and browsing the HORROR section for the most lurid VHS box art you can find. There was something sacred about that experience, like going to church.

Black Widow is at its best when it’s a wacky family drama between Natasha, Yelena, Alexei, and Melina, with dashes of a spy thriller. But Marvel films can’t content themselves with staying small, and Black Widow falls victim to the big bombast characteristic of the studio. The result is a disappointing solo movie that ends up burying Natasha Romanoff once again.

There’s something here, beneath the glassy-eyed performances and the Instagram aesthetics, about class and privilege and the evils of men — and you could even make a case for False Positive being yet another effective display of gaslighting as horror — but any actual messages are too vague to parse.

Fuhrman’s performance is so unhinged, and Hadaway’s direction is so merciless, that The Novice constantly dances on the edge of character drama and full-fledged horror movie. It’s an impressive feat of incisively dark tone, even if the plot and characters are little more than shadows.

All These Sons falls short of Liu’s tremendous documentary feature debut, but shows that the Minding the Gap filmmaker is capable of tackling a complicated and knotty subject with the same kind of laser-focused intimacy that he showed in his first autobiographical outing. There may be a distance to All These Sons, but its clear-eyed compassion makes it a solid and effective follow-up.

Gaia is a dazzling bio-horror excursion.

The layered dynamics and pure, honest emotions underneath Luca‘s simple coming-of-age story are what elevate the film to one of Pixar’s best — and an example of what animation can be if they stop trying to race forward, and just stop and take a breath.

There’s nothing wrong with silly, even mindless action movies. There exists a whole slew of ’em that are an absolute blast to watch. But they get by on their entertainment value. There’s nothing entertaining about Infinite. It just sits there, lifeless, hoping to become a full-blown franchise with sequels galore.

Hitman’s Wife’s Bodyguard – a title, by the way, that is mostly misleading outside of a single scene where Michael serves as Sonia’s bodyguard – has a few brief moments of joy or wit. But most of those moments rely on the audience’s recognition of the all-too-famous cast (such as being delighted at seeing Banderas and Hayek share the screen once more, even with Banderas playing the bad guy). This film, even more than its surprisingly successful predecessor, is exhausting and obnoxious. A few good lines don’t save a slapdash, snarky mess.

I can’t remember the last time a film shook me like this.

Spirit Untamed is inoffensive, which both makes it far more tolerable than most other DreamWorks Animation titles and also not terribly good in and of itself.

After this solid set-up, The Devil Made Me Do It occasionally grows a bit murky.

Yes, it could’ve been worse. But as daring as this film’s costumes are, and as fun as Stone and Thompson (and Hauser and Fry, to be fair) can be, it can’t help but give into its lazier instincts.

After the empty soullessness of Fate of the Furious and the ribald nonsense of Hobbs and Shaw, F9 feels like Lin is pulling the franchise back on track. Whether that track is properly placed or not, or whether it’s actually a track that takes you off the deep end…well, your mileage may vary.

Despite its minor missteps, In the Heights is an unabashed delight. The cast all give deeply felt, deeply fun performances, with Ramos, Merediz, and Barrera as standouts. In the Heights is a celebration of a rich culture and a group of dreamers, who are messy and full of contradictions, but whose emotions always ring true.

It’s a dichotomy that makes up most of the movie — is it a horror or a post-apocalyptic adventure? Krasinski frequently rejected the “horror” label for the first A Quiet Place, presumably to make the film more accessible to all audiences, but it might be that he doesn’t have the interest in making a straightforward horror film. In the process, A Quiet Place II falls somewhere in between, with the effective thrills and jump scares of a horror film, but with an overly familiar post-apocalyptic plot that we’ve seen many times before.

Suspenseful, sinister and bittersweet, The Djinn is a cut-throat example of how effective horror can be with succinct decisions around dialogue and theatrics.

The Woman in the Window is so silly and broad that it begins to border on camp, and I have a feeling this could become the type of cheesy dreck that people get a hoot out of if they follow Anna’s lead and down one or two or ten bottles of wine. By the time the film climaxes with multiple predictable but utterly preposterous twists, you’ll probably be reaching for a bottle yourself.

Spiral blunders through its central mystery without grace or style, or even much thought. Even the death traps are weirdly uninspired.

Were it just slightly more entertaining we might have something special on our hands. As it is, we have a sturdy, mercifully swift action pic that fizzles out instead of burning bright. It’s nice to have a movie as simple as this for a change, but it would be nicer if it were better.

There’s a certain fun to be had in Army of the Dead, but it’s the mindless, ugly fun that you wake up the next day regretting. Come to think of it, it’s kind of like a trip to Las Vegas.

An ambitious, complex, and layered look at how the court system in America is virtually designed to keep defendants like Steve from every getting a chance at actual justice.

Despite the mostly younger cast, Without Remorse is a bland throwback to the late 1980s and early 1990s, hearkening to an era of such simplistic notions of good and bad that its script could have been unearthed from a time capsule. Sollima’s direction is journeyman-like, which wouldn’t be a demerit if the film he was directing didn’t feel so lifeless.

It’s a sturdy spy thriller from Zhang, a competent first outing in the genre for the filmmaker. But most of all, Cliff Walkers is safe.

This bleak and profound meditation on diminishing faculties results in a shattering work of cinema. I was left shaking with the results, drawn in completely to the film’s shifts in tone and character, anchored throughout by Hopkin’s impeccable performance.

Don’t expect any inspiring schmaltz from The County, but for those looking to understand the global nature of the struggles faced by those who dare to resist all-encompassing economic organizations, this movie delivers the goods.

The film develops not in grand gestures but in an accumulation of small, gentle moments.

And to cap it all off, Mortal Kombat commits the sin that so many recent Hollywood adaptations of existing properties make these days – it’s all set up. Everything that happens here can be written off as exposition laying the groundwork for a sequel, where the real kombat can begin. It’s a ruse; a come-on; a side-show with a very loud barker out front. “We can’t show you that stuff just yet, but come back next time and we might!” The thing is, we’re all suckers enough to probably fall for it.

It’s an unbeatable combination of humor and heart.

Thunder Force has too good of a core idea to be left so unexplored. Melissa McCarty can’t be stopped, but she continues to be content making films that leave her talent frustratingly untapped.

As a showcase for its legendary leads, and as late-night snack for those who like scores synthesized and their blood practical, it’s certainly a good enough time at the movies.

Whenever The Unholy wants to scare you, it simply enters internet screamer territory, complete with ghoul faces rushing directly into the camera as loud noises boom from somewhere. Outside of these admittedly startling moments, The Unholy unfolds sedately, and sometimes incoherently.

Touching, important, and surprisingly inspiring, this movie is a testament to the power of dialect and how it shapes our worldview and fuses and unites us. Willingness to dive in deep past surface level schisms broadens the range of our accepted capabilities and ambitions. Morales may be working with bare bones in her first feature, but she manages to say a lot with a little.

Godzilla vs. Kong is a film without pretensions. It knows exactly what it wants to do, and what it wants to do is have monsters smash buildings while they’re throwing punches at each other. It’s finally what this franchise has been building towards: a movie about monsters, not humans.

Filled with thoughtful commentary, lush visuals and a myriad of perspectives, Woodlands Dark and Days Bewitched: A History of Folk Horror is a must-watch that chronicles humankind’s most intriguing cinematic stories.

Gregg delivers an intoxicating and impressive directorial debut, so it will be enjoyable to witness what she does next. Here Before is a harrowing depiction of motherhood with all of its loving and painful experiences.

Nobody seems to think that if it follows a paint-by-numbers Wick formula, that’ll be enough. It’s not, and that’s a damn shame, because Bob Odenkirk: Action Hero deserves better.

I’m Fine (Thanks for Asking) is a vibrant and inspiring story to come out of the COVID cataclysm both in its narrative and also with its production. This film contains a powerhouse of talent from actors to directors, writers, and producers, many of which wear multiple hats. Filled with refreshingly vulnerable and relatable situations, I’m Fine (Thanks for Asking) is ultimately as validating as it is captivating.

This is a story of unlikely triumph. An uplifting coming-of-age tale about embracing whatever it is that makes you different from others, an example of how people can flourish past their inhibitions to thrive and shine when their talents are met with a nurturing environment. It’s a much needed serotonin boost that will have you grinning from start to finish.

At the end of the day, this is Izzo’s show. Her performance breathes new life into a story we’ve seemingly seen countless times before, now made anew.