To the disappointment of this once-enthusiastic ogler, Magic Mike’s Last Dance fails to capture the eponymous magic of the first two very different but both delightful movies.

Babylon is a defecating elephant of a movie: gigantic, often repulsive, but hard to look away from.

His passion is infectious and his enthusiasm for environmental causes commendable, but the movie’s metaphysical and sociological aspirations sometimes come off as cringe-inducingly similar to those that might be expressed by a white lady running a healing-crystal shop in a seaside town.

At times, the movie simply feels overstuffed, mimicking the episodic structure of the book—if very few of its particulars—to the extent that it can feel like you’ve nodded off and woken up in the middle of a different story altogether. But its inventiveness is so vivid that no matter where you are at any given moment, you’re happy to be there

Fraser’s all-in commitment to playing Charlie—300-pound fatsuit and all—put me in mind of Joaquin Phoenix’s performance in Joker, an act of faith so complete it managed to be the only transcendent element of a thuddingly bad movie. But Fraser’s beautifully judged performance isn’t enough to save this abject wallow through a mire of maudlin clichés about trauma and redemption.

If there were an ensemble acting award at the Oscars, Glass Onion would be a lock for a nomination. The dialogue is fast-paced and verbally dense, and everyone in the cast volleys it back and forth with as much deftness as apparent pleasure.

Embedded in this seeming valentine to the movies is something pricklier, sadder, and smarter.

While it’s frequently moving and occasionally thrilling, the gears sometimes grind audibly on the shift in between.

Though it wears out its welcome in one dreary stretch midway through, Weird: The Al Yankovic Story (which premieres on the free, ad-supported streaming service the Roku Channel on Friday) is an appropriately goofy tribute to its subject and co-creator: a movie parody about the life of a parodist.

As it moves toward an ambiguous and haunting finale, The Banshees of Inisherin has the fanciful yet gruesome quality of a folk tale or fairytale, a mood enhanced by Carter Burwell’s harp-and-flute-heavy score and Ben Davis’ painterly widescreen cinematography.

Cate Blanchett’s titanic, almost fanatically well-researched performance—she switches effortlessly between English and German with a soupçon of French thrown in, does her own piano playing, and conducts a real orchestra with utter verisimilitude—thrillingly embodies both Tár’s intense charisma and her monstrous skill at manipulation.

Barbarian doesn’t feel the need to signal that it’s better than genre clichés by constantly winking at them, nor does it deploy them with the punishing determination of David Gordon Green’s Halloween movies. But Cregger has thought about why they work, and he keeps paying them off in unexpected ways.

Once again, in trying to find our way past the icon to the woman underneath, we have only pushed Norma Jeane further away.

For the most part, Three Thousand Years of Longing reads not as an unintended allegory of contemporary race relations but as a thoughtful, melancholy, and sometimes mordantly funny celebration of the time-and-space-collapsing power of storytelling.

Prey dispatches with a great deal of the previous Predators’ baggage, and tries to pare the fat.

It’s Pitt’s wry presence, and his playful relationship to his own movie-star persona, that provides a still center amidst the CGI-smeared chaos and keeps this train from (metaphorically at least) going off the rails.

Sharp Stick is less a movie than a symptom, a tangle of would-be feminist ideas that, let us hope, needed to be gotten out of its creator’s system so she could get back to making something good

It’s such an original and idiosyncratic expression of its creator’s vision that sometimes the movie seems not to have yet made it all the way out of his head and onto the screen.

It’s the (Russo) brothers’ touch with comedy (they collaborated on the wisecrack-rich script with their former Marvel co-writers Christopher Markus and Stephen McFeely) that sets this hyper-violent, stylishly shot thriller apart from your average espionage-themed bone-cruncher.

Sadly Persuasion, not only the worst Austen adaptation but one of the worst movies in recent memory, delivers on all the agony and none of the hope.

If this particular franchise’s material feels at times a bit thin to be spun out even to two hours, it may be simply that three solo movies per Avenger is more than enough. But this weekend, if the lure of an air-conditioned summer blockbuster summons you like a sacred Asgardian hammer, you could do worse than this Easter egg–colored, classic rock–scored frolic.

Like the Maysles’ brothers documentaries about Christo and Jean-Claude, which followed the environmental artists and life partners over the course of several decades, Dosa’s movie makes the case that their private bond is inextricable from their public work, and it’s a toss-up as to which is the greater monument.

Marcel the Shell with Shoes On struck me as an animated film like no other I can recall. It’s a story about the difficulty and necessity of making yourself vulnerable that is itself the product of an unusually intimate artistic collaboration, literally a couple’s shared in-joke that took on a life of its—or his—own.

There’s a rueful irony to the fact that it’s this supposedly human inspiration for the beloved toy who feels more like a plastic action figure.

Obviously, one film cannot encompass everything, and as the filmmakers have themselves noted, RRR is sheer fantasy. I cannot fault viewers for enjoying RRR so much, whether they ironically lap up the superhuman stunts or get swept up in the thrilling anti-imperial action. I’m concerned more about the timing of it all, the global presence, the recipe for viral success that other filmmakers will be eyeing. It’s an ingenious form of soft-power propaganda, one that can be interpreted as positively asserting an otherwise-marginalized ideology.

Now, nearly 50 years later, Americans’ reproductive choice is again in jeopardy, making The Janes not only a crucial part of the historical record but a searingly contemporary film about the power of mutual aid and collective action.

At any rate, this movie’s insistent and unapologetic commitment to its own weirdness is evidence that the 79-year-old writer-director, like the ever-mutating human specimens he loves to imagine, is nowhere near done evolving.

Even if you don’t harbor fond feelings for the 1986 Top Gun, a movie that upon its release was seen by many as a glamorized recruitment commercial for the Reagan-era military buildup, it’s hard not to appreciate the care that went into this lovingly tooled sequel—a far better film on the sheer level of craft than the original.

It’s all a lot of poppycock, and yet! Despite all this carping, Downton Abbey: A New Era was as satisfying a filmgoing experience as I can remember. Perhaps the nonsensical narrative lowers viewers’ defenses so the emotional anvil can land all the harder.

This film’s honesty and urgency feel both providential and grimly prophetic.

For me the biggest disappointment of The Unbearable Weight of Massive Talent—a likeable if lightweight comedy that’s more than worth seeing for Cage’s and Pascal’s touching bromance and its Nick-confronts-Nicky fantasy sequences—was that it didn’t go even further with its central doppelgänger conceit.

At 137 minutes, The Northman can feel ponderously crammed with both mystic visions (however hauntingly rendered) and Mel Gibson–grade sadistic gore. Somewhere around the two-hour point, the endless bone-crunching battle scenes—while impeccably choreographed and breathtakingly shot in fluid long takes—start to become existentially wearying and even morally suspect.

It’s not that I wish Aline took more advantage of its fictional liberties to mock or undermine Céline Dion. I just wish it had much more to say about something—such as child stardom, what it’s like to move from working-class margins to opulence, or the simultaneously reverent and condescending relationship that pop culture had with Dion at her 1990s peak

Whether you find Deep Water deliciously preposterous or just … preposterous may depend on how much you miss that kind of movie. In my case, the answer is “a lot.”

That the studio gave a first-time director the freedom to explore these potentially sensitive themes, and to do so in a tone that is boisterous and playful rather than handwringing or self-serious, is a promising sign for Pixar’s future.

Reeves’ and Pattinson’s vision of the Batman as a Hamlet-like heir unable to move past the primal shock of his parents’ murder has a certain emotional power.

The movie’s best surprise in the end isn’t so much that lifelong fans got the chance to see such an unprecedented crossover take place: It’s that it managed to give not just a character, but an actor another chance to make a great mark on one of the best roles in superhero stories.

The fact that Marry Me contains anything so formulaic as a third-act separation montage should spell out clearly what you’re getting in for.

I Want You Back is a sometimes underwhelming vehicle for Day and Slate’s considerable comic talents, but it’s a pleasure to spend two hours in their company.

As a lifelong aficionado of sprawling, dopey disaster movies with plenty of character back story—your Poseidon Adventures, your Twisters, your Titanics—and as maybe the world’s biggest fan of Emmerich’s 2012 (2009), I was naturally inclined to enjoy Moonfall, and I did, though maybe with not quite as much glee as I vibed with the fevered conspiracy theories and lovingly preserved world treasures of 2012.

The Fallout doesn’t need fanfare or gore to make its point: In its starkness, the film is undeniably striking and reveals no matter how much healing takes place after a tragedy like a school shooting, its devastating impact will persist.

What lingers in the mind after this version of The Tragedy of Macbeth is not specific line deliveries or bravura acting moments—although the cast all acquit themselves well—but images and sounds.

Matrix Resurrections is a movie interested in collapsing binaries: the ones between man and machine, between digital and “real” life, between past and present, and of course, between genders.

It is filmed, perhaps fittingly for the subject matter, like a TV show. But on the heels of a Sorkin movie, The Trial of the Chicago 7, whose women were essentially hippie-styled set dressing, it’s a pleasure to see him putting some of his signature quips in the mouths of female characters, especially one as spiky, complicated, and powerful as Lucille Ball.

The most surprising thing about West Side Story, Spielberg’s most dynamic movie in years, is how at home the director seems in a genre he has never before worked in. The balance between realism and stylization necessitated by the show is so confidently handled you wonder why he waited until age 74 to start making musicals.

In a late scene in House of Gucci, one character labels another “a triumph of mediocrity.” That paradox and others like it might be applied to the movie itself: It is a glamorous slog, a fabulous bore, a pointlessly bespoke bit of silliness.

In large part thanks to its fresh-faced stars, the charming Hoffman and the wildly charismatic Haim, I’m hard pressed to think of a recent movie whose world I would have liked to stay in longer.

King Richard is a Will Smith vehicle, through and through.

The Power of the Dog is one of those films that, on first viewing, seems to have a story too thin to support the epic sweep of its setting. But watch it a second time through, and the tightly coiled thriller plot comes into focus, with no detail wasted as the movie hurtles toward a violent, psychically shattering, but narratively satisfying ending.

It’s a humanist crowd-pleaser with just enough historical heft to count as something more than a small family drama, and it’s also a deeply personal labor of love that, even if it never quite knocks your socks off, seems too sincere and too beautifully crafted to hate.

That over-the-top style, with its pulsating colors and generous sloshings of bright-red fake blood, is well-suited to this movie’s story, which folds crime, sex work, mental illness, and elements of the supernatural into a psychological thriller that, at its best, can be mind-bendingly intense.

The film, scripted by Zhao, Patrick Burleigh, and Ryan and Kaz Firpo, weaves plenty of jokes in with long stretches of intergalactic hocus pocus and equally long action set pieces. But the parts only sporadically cohere into anything like a whole.

This film is a curiously paradoxical achievement: a visual and aural marvel that is also a crashing bore.

The French Dispatch is a movie made with such deliberate, patient skill, and such brio, that its meandering structure and oddly low emotional temperature come off as intentional choices rather than errors of artistic judgment. Even if it’s not my favorite flavor of Wes Anderson licorice, nothing is there by accident.

Even viewed on a small screen at home, I found it rapturous. I can only imagine what it’s like in a theater. All of which makes it exactly the kind of documentary that fulfills Eno’s dictum, the sort that after you encounter it, makes you want to go out and create art yourself.

If Affleck and Driver at times appear to be on loan from a different, dopier movie, possibly one involving Monty Python, they both have such a cape-swooshing, mustache-twirling good time that it’s hard to blame them for going all in on their characters’ villainy.

Once you can get past this movie’s reliance on the audience bringing in a prior store of knowledge about, and queasy affection for, its troubled characters, The Many Saints of Newark is a worthy companion to the series and a fascinating watch in itself.

The movie can’t compete with the Missions: Impossible and Fast and Furiouses for visual spectacle, so what it offers by way of compensatory heft is a tangled plot full of double-crosses and hidden identities, combined with a ponderous gait that suggests that more than the mere world is at stake.

The movie seems to love its main character without bothering to understand her.

If you’ve ever watched a slasher movie and rooted for the killer, you’re ready for Dashcam, a found-footage horror movie whose COVID-denying protagonist is the scariest thing about it.

Kate gestures at being different, something fresh and subversive, but at the end of the day, it’s just reheating old clichés.

The first hour of Candyman does a bang-up job of mixing such audience-teasing popcorn thrills with trenchant, if sometimes too flatly stated, social critique. But by the last half-hour, there are so many themes, plotlines, and flashbacks in play that the movie’s message becomes muddled, and the forward momentum slows.

If you sometimes go to the movies to feel unsettled, perplexed, and amused—not to mention get a peek at an often-shirtless and always-brooding Adam Driver—Annette might be the weird one you’ve been waiting for.

In other words, while it might not return with previously unseen treasures, what it does rummage up pairs perfectly with a large bucket of popcorn and a slushy drink.

A New Legacy is much slicker and more appealing than the original Space Jam, in no small part because James is approximately 50 times the actor Jordan is. But it’s also because corporations handing a bag of unrelated IP and ordering screenwriters to come up with a story around them is the template for most studio filmmaking now, if not all of contemporary existence.

Pig is a small film with a few big surprises executed very well, and well worth going into as blind as possible.

Roadrunner is never less than fascinating to watch, but it is far from perfect.

One of the best things about Summer of Soul is its reminder that the joy of musical community is one of the great human experiences, a unifying truth in more ways than one.

The whole thing vanishes pretty quickly from memory once it’s over. But for that hour and a half of fluid, kinetic filmmaking, you are putty in the hands of Steven Soderbergh, a reliably pleasurable place to be.

The movie is at its best when it can revel in inventiveness, scrappiness, and camaraderie, and you feel the “We’re coming together! We’re beating the Big Bad!” vibes run through you.

Black Widow is too long, too loud, preposterously overplotted, and slightly headache-inducing—all arguably features and not bugs when it comes to big tentpole blockbusters. But walking out of it I felt like summer had finally—finally!—begun

Like the thread it’s based on, it’s easy to rush through, even if does visit some darker places. It’s only if you pause for a moment, and linger on it, that you might wish there were more.

Especially if you’re watching with children, you could spend a perfectly lovely afternoon diving into Luca’s refreshing blue-green waters. But unlike the two fish-kid buddies at the movie’s center, you may not emerge from the experience transformed.

All in all, Cruella is much better than it needs to be, and is hampered primarily by the fact that it’s a Disney movie, both in the sense that it has to heel to its animated and live-action predecessors, and in that making its main character a genuine antihero isn’t an option.

This movie succeeds at the hardest task a movie musical needs to pull off: the musical numbers, with few exceptions, soar in the way an in-story song has to soar to convince us that, given this situation and these characters, “randomly bursting into song” is a perfectly sensible thing to do.

And after Into the Spider-Verse and a handful of Lego Movies, it’s further proof that producers Phil Lord and Christopher Miller are an animation brand as reliable as Disney or Pixar, and a good deal more likely to provide something that’s not only sturdy but genuinely surprising.

Though the ending makes it clear that this movie’s purpose is largely to set up future Mortal Kombat movies, it still stands well enough on its own, and it benefits from not looking as cheap or as cheesy as its 1990s predecessors.

The film has an uncommon assuredness and eloquence, a keen sense of what makes its subject fascinating, and a grasp of shape and tone that, by Tina’s end, feels almost poetic. The sum result is a quietly revelatory work that achieves remarkable insight and intimacy while never feeling sensationalistic.

Watching Thunder Force, it’s baffling to remember that this is Falcone’s fifth film as a director. There’s a convenience store fight so ineptly staged I had to watch it three times to decipher what was happening, and running gags that aren’t funny the first time and grow worse with every repetition.

Snyder’s Justice League is more, more, more in a way that most films wouldn’t dare, and, after a year of no theaters at all, a movie that makes me long to return to a multiplex—to see more movies that commit so completely to a vision that it’s impossible not to be swept away.

If you’re a Biggie die-hard (I’m one), nothing in I Got a Story to Tell will trouble your conviction that everything you already thought you knew about Biggie Smalls is right. In other words, it’s fan service, a project that sees “what is this movie for” and “who is this movie for” as effectively the same question.

The chance to see the 83-year-old Hopkins in a role that forces him to confront the tragic fact of human mortality, and his own eventual demise, with such rigor, curiosity, and vulnerability would have been reason enough to send audiences to see The Father, even if we weren’t also witnessing the birth of a major film director in Florian Zeller.

"Why don’t you watch my film before you judge it?” Sia tweeted in November, when outrage about the movie’s casting started to percolate. Well, I have watched the film, I am judging it, and it’s awful.

Always and Forever boasts all of the Instagram-filter-style color grading and absurdly beautiful sets that fans have come to expect, as well as a soundtrack of suitably romantic pop songs—but it’s the last bite of a meal you’re already full from. You’re used to the flavors, and there’s nothing in the dish that surprises you anymore. If comfort is your aim, look no further, but to keep any franchise or genre alive, sometimes you need some fresh ingredients.

It’s not a perfect movie, nor a particularly innovative one, but the science-fiction adventure—touted as the first Korean space blockbuster—is certainly fun, with colorful performances and impressive CGI, and a worthy substitute for a new Star Wars or Marvel movie.

Though it’s early in the year, it doesn’t feel like a stretch to name it one of 2021’s best films.

Gorō is a talented director. The individual shots of Earwig are beautifully composed, the characters are delightful (the tiny demons who wait upon Mandrake seem destined to become merchandise hits), and the film’s flimsy plot isn’t necessarily a bad thing. But the visuals sink the entire enterprise.

Maybe the movie would work better if, like Se7en, it were set in an unnamed noir city instead of a real police department with real abuses, or if the script relied on more than genre shorthand to sell its noxious ending. As things stand, however, the only way to enjoy The Little Things is to ignore the big things.

Supernova is modest in every respect except its emotional impact. In the characters’ internal arcs, the title—the name for a stellar explosion—comes fully into perspective.

Glass has set herself a high bar to clear in one’s first feature: tackling hard-to-film ideas about faith, psychic trauma, and mental illness. Yet rather than seeming abstract or preachy, Saint Maud is visceral, sensuous, and tactile.

Malcolm & Marie is certainly stylish, shot entirely in black and white, with its leads in fancy clothes for a good portion of its runtime, but its aesthetic virtues are suffocated by all of its screenwriter’s hot air.

Hathaway and Ejiofor seem excited to play edgier, less nice people than they often get the chance to, and the early scenes of them locking horns in their claustrophobic (if posh) flat generate enough energy to carry the movie almost all the way over the finish line.

Thoughtfully directed, vividly written, and beautifully acted, it’s a hopeful film, universally appealing despite—or perhaps because of—just how very Korean American it is.

Like every Pixar movie, it’s entertaining, sharp, and visually inventive. But it lacks the thunderbolts of creativity that make the company’s best philosophical inquiries so electrifying. It never quite finds its spark.

It’s a meditation on life and a touching ensemble picture, smuggled in by Streep’s star power and Soderbergh’s constant quest for innovation.

Fern’s need for constant movement, McDormand implies in a performance of extraordinary depth and ambiguity, is both a search for something and an escape from something else, and not even she seems completely sure what either something is.

For all the familiar joys and comforts this holiday movie provides—maximally decorated homes, Christmas carols, a slapstick scene at a skating rink—its commentary on the agony of living in the closet, or loving someone who is, stakes out some entirely new territory.

This isn’t just a hand-drawn animated feature. It’s a movie that wants you to know it was made by hand.