The painfully literal ending struck me as a somewhat risible disappointment, and though I admired the movie’s imagination and ambition, I can’t say I ever entered wholeheartedly into its story.

As for The Drama, it runs out of big ideas—and, seemingly, compassion for its characters—before the audience has had a chance to develop our own rooting interest in, well, the drama.

Like the space mission named in its title, Project Hail Mary pulls off a seemingly impossible task, combining big-budget Hollywood spectacle with small-scale craft. The story it tells, of two lonely but intrepid problem-solvers bridging the huge cultural distance between them to collaborate on addressing a shared cosmic threat, is unabashedly humanistic and hopeful, not to mention timely.

Hoppers feels a little less sanded-down than most of the studio’s recent movies, less content to coast on formula and hew to expectations about what Pixar movies do and don’t do.

Like the monsters at its center, it’s built from parts that don’t always fit together, but dammit: It’s alive.

For better or worse, it’s a Brontë adaptation for the era of Instagram and TikTok, second screens and viral memes.

While it digs deep into the eerie insularity of mediocre TV, Kelly’s movie is also informed by the understanding that some of the best children’s entertainment is driven by a powerful sense of the uncanny.

Wake Up Dead Man marks not just a return to form but an expansion of the series’ potential.

Is it OK if, as a critic who has at times found the director’s work to be astringent to the point of sourness, I enjoyed without unreservedly loving this foray into warmer, more humanistic territory?

A sensitive adaptation full of beautifully judged performances that nonetheless fails to maintain the essential appeal of its own source material: the quietly feminist retelling of one of the most retold lives in history from the perspective of a woman who was central to that life, while figuring almost nowhere in the record of it.

The resolution of these characters’ arcs, and of For Good’s several other subplots, feels unsatisfying, rushed through and at the same time too fussed over. But any sense of disappointment that Wicked: For Good doesn’t quite live up to the first movie pops like a big pink bubble the moment Erivo and Grande unite one last time to sing the showstopping duet “For Good.”

Though it’s only two hours and 13 minutes long, Sentimental Value packs a whole novel’s worth of emotional texture and telling visual detail into that run time; you leave feeling as if you’ve witnessed multiple generations of one family’s life, observing the way behavior patterns and trauma get passed down.

Nouvelle Vague is an affectionate portrait of the artist as a young nutjob with absolute faith in his vision, and an invitation for creators of all kinds to believe in their own similarly implausible dreams.

Blue Moon feels like the more major entry in the director’s filmography, if only because it marks a new epoch in his ever-evolving partnership with Hawke.

Like Ari Aster’s Eddington earlier this year, Bugonia invites us inside the internet-poisoned imagination of a lonely male protagonist who has “done his own research”—and, as with Eddington, the result is an allegory about contemporary life that’s as nauseatingly gory as it is thuddingly obvious.

Del Toro has made a version of the story that’s indelible, but not definitive.

Bronstein expertly infuses the audience with Linda’s negative emotions, as if we were the ones hooked up to a feeding tube. But as I wrote just last week in a review of Benny Safdie’s first solo-directed feature The Smashing Machine, I’m not sure that simply being drawn into a troubled protagonist’s frenetic mental state constitutes the highest aim of cinema.

A House of Dynamite...is a feel-bad movie, but a precise and well-constructed one, with a capable and charismatic ensemble cast that delivers the script’s grim message with many not-unpleasurable jolts of adrenaline.

Benny Safdie’s first solo film, to its credit, explores different psychological territory. Rather than entrapping us in Mark’s roiling brain, he seems to be purposely walling us off from both the character’s and the actor’s interiority.

The magnificent One Battle After Another stays true to the spirit of the reclusive author’s best books: It’s a brainy meditation on our dystopian present that’s also a whacked-out roller coaster ride.

Spinal Tap II’s scanty, improvisation-based script means that the story is short on suspense or forward movement; this is a gentle, nostalgic collection of sketches that riff on a four-decade-long experiment in musical and comic collaboration.

A delightful journey through the back catalog of one of the most playful and quick-witted bands in rock history. But its most important aspect is the way it restores the conceptual underpinnings of Devo’s music that half a century of radio play and contextless streaming has stripped away.

It’s devastating in its delineation of how brutally a determined and unrestrained state can strip citizens of their essential rights, and exhilarating in the way they draw strength from one another. In other words, it’s about as important and timely as it’s possible for a movie to be.

Highest 2 Lowest moves with a swagger and self-confidence that perhaps oversells what the script actually has to offer, but it’s hard to resist the draw of seeing Lee and Washington collaborate for the first time since Inside Man in 2006.

It’s a good movie for a late-summer legacy sequel, not a candidate for the all-time comedy pantheon. But every new generation of mothers and daughters, as they struggle to balance their love for each other with their quest to discover themselves, deserves a body-swap comedy of their—our—own.

Though The Fantastic Four: First Steps has all the elements in place to make it the keystone of a new Marvel era, the script (by Josh Friedman, Jeff Kaplan, Eric Pearson, and Ian Springer) never loses a vague, hand-waving quality that leaves its central characters as indistinctly drawn as the moral conflict they ultimately face.

Even if this Superman remains an anomaly in the superhero-movie cosmos, the discovery of the winningly un-macho David Corenswet—without a doubt the best Superman since Christopher Reeve, who like Corenswet was a hunky Juilliard graduate with a bashful, dimpled smile—is enough to lift this new version of the long-beloved character into the sky.

Rebirth’s dinosaurs are everywhere, but the more you see, the less it means. They’re good for a scare now and then, but the sense of awe is long since gone.

Pitt can mock his absurdly good-looking younger self in part because he knows he’s got something more valuable now: the kind of magnetism that mere attractiveness can’t compete with.

There may be deeper, more intangible fears buried beneath this rowdy, raucous thriller’s grody surface—luckily, you won’t have time to stop and ponder them while you’re being chased by a supersized zombie wielding a severed head.

There’s plenty to enjoy about Materialists, from the sparkling indie soundtrack (Cat Power! Harry Nilsson! John Prine!) to the flattering rose-hued glow of Shabier Kirchner’s cinematography, to Lucy’s enviable working-girl wardrobe.

For all its exquisite boxes-within-boxes compositions and cleverly designed sets (the production design is by longtime collaborator Adam Stockhausen, who won an Oscar for his work on The Grand Budapest Hotel), this whole movie unfolded for me as if behind a thick pane of emotion-proof glass.

Whether or not this one is really the last in the series, Final Reckoning is a noble exemplar of a dying breed: the big, dumb, fun action blockbuster with a bona fide movie star at its center, putting it all on the line—and hanging on for dear life—just to keep us at the edge of our theater seats.

Especially during its third-act descent into the surreal netherworld of its protagonist’s mind, Friendship plays out as if it were a 97-minute-long I Think You Should Leave sketch.

It’s both a wildly ambitious meditation on American history and a rip-roaring good time.

I couldn’t tear my eyes away from the screen during Warfare, even if they were sometimes half-covered during those many cutaways to lacerated flesh. But leaving the movie, my main sensation was relief that that brutal viewing experience was over, rather than reflection on the meaning of the Iraq War, on the experience of war itself, or on the success or failure of this particular attempt to represent it.

It appears to be relying on name recognition to garner an initial burst of curious viewers before word gets out about what a dud it is.

The movie suffers from a constant lack, not of resources but of imagination, of inspiration—of, to put it simply, fun.

It’s all so pleasantly familiar I might as well have been hanging out with these guys for years.

Above all, Mickey 17 is remarkable for the savagery of its satire of 21st-century capitalism.

If the latest escapade is not quite as sparkling as its predecessors—in 2021, the second entry briefly surpassed Citizen Kane as one of the highest-rated movies on Rotten Tomatoes—it retains their warmhearted and cheekily funny spirit.

True to the rom-com tradition, the film ends in apologies, tears, and redemptive hugs, but the sour taste it leaves behind feels less like victory than like morning sickness.

Sadly, You’re Cordially Invited eventually founders on the same rocky shores as many recent attempts to revive the rom-com.

Just 97 minutes long, Hard Truths is a deceptively slight movie that can barely contain its titanic central performance.

The magisterial (yet also often funny) performances from virtually every member of the cast, the rigor which with it explores complex characters and ideas, and the sheer painterly beauty of its compositions make this one of the few movies this year I almost immediately went back to see for a second time.

What keeps Babygirl from feeling preachy or self-serious is the film’s sense of humor and playfulness when it comes to matters of sex.

Mufasa was almost inevitably destined to be Barry Jenkins’ worst movie, and it is. But it’s not a black mark on his record, just a blank space on the timeline.

Scene by scene, there’s nothing not to enjoy about this lushly animated ode to exploration, teamwork, and pluck, especially if you’re a parent of small kids on the hunt for a fun family outing. But for all its verve and polish, Moana 2 seems more like a consumer product, in some subtle but unmistakable way, than the first film did.

Despite the movie’s arguably excessive run time, it takes seriously its mandate to keep the audience not just entertained but dazzled.

Gladiator 2 (or as it’s spelled in the opening title, GladIIator) sadly comes off as less a reinvention of the original than a curiously literal retread of its plot beats, characters, and themes.

Though Emilia Pérez is not a movie intended only for female audiences, it’s one that reflects deeply on the embodied experience of being a woman, a condition that some characters endure as a form of imprisonment—one unhappily kept wife sings of her life in the proverbial “golden cage”—while others look to womanhood as a potential site for personal and societal reinvention.

McQueen clearly wants to broaden the archetype of stiff-upper-lip Englishness into something more inclusive. It’s a worthy message, but one that sometimes seems to take precedence over the characters and story rather than emerging organically from them.

It’s a crowd-pleaser, funny and sexy and raucous, while also being startlingly wise and tender.

By any reasonable measure this is a terrible movie, too long and too self-serious and way too dramatically inert, a regrettable waste of its lead actors’ boundless commitment to even their most thinly written roles.

If this unusually thoughtful exploration of parenthood, emotional connection, and the coexistence of nature and technology is the only installment we get, load your offspring onto your back and tote them to the movie theater while you can.

I will say—with as much clarity as I can muster through the tears once again blurring my vision—that the final 15 minutes or so of His Three Daughters are what lifts the movie out of “impressively fine-tuned family drama starring three excellent actresses” into the stratosphere of “transcendent work of art whose insights into the meaning of human impermanence you may want to change your life to be worthy of.

After two hours and 20 minutes of flamboyantly repulsive variations on this well-worn theme, even the strongest-stomached and most feminist of viewers could be excused for muttering, We get it already.

As simply a genre exercise, Rebel Ridge would be exquisite work, but what elevates the film even further is its rare intelligence and conscience.

Burton understands what the Beetlejuice-loving audience wants (Keaton stirring up supernatural chaos, Winona Ryder glowering in goth-girl chic, jump scares with eyeballs popping out of heads) and provides it in cheerful abundance, without subjecting us to lengthy origin stories or cumbersome expositions of franchise lore.

Good One is a quiet movie, not because it has little to say but because it wants you to listen, to pay as much attention to what’s left unsaid as to its meticulously crafted dialogue, and to the way silence can be a power as well as a punishment.

Lee Isaac Chung’s reboot is a worthy successor to the original, a rollicking popcorn thriller with an appealing screwball romance in the eye of its fast-moving storm.

Fly Me to the Moon’s foundational silliness could have been compensated for, and maybe even turned into the premise for a lightweight but charming romance, if not for two things: the failure to grapple with the larger historical implications of the fake-moon-landing subplot, and the fatal miscasting of Johansson and Tatum as oil-and-water opposites.

Part road movie, part coming-of-age story, and part noir police procedural, the quietly confident Fancy Dance marks the feature debut of Erica Tremblay, a documentary filmmaker who also wrote and directed episodes of the FX series Reservation Dogs.

Subtitled “A Fable,” Megalopolis can be read as a parable of what happens when you let artists take over the world, and while that may not run more smoothly, it’s a heck of a lot more interesting.

For all its gritty genre elements, Hit Man is at heart a cozy hangout movie, a minor but thoroughly enjoyable entry in the Linklater canon.

If it lacks the narrative compression and nonstop forward motion of Fury Road, Furiosa never skimps on the other main features one comes to a Mad Max movie for: deranged production design and thrilling action.

Despite its impressive attention to craft—including exquisite motion-capture work by the groundbreaking digital-design studio WETA—Kingdom of the Planet of the Apes never fully establishes its reason for being.

Challengers may not be this director’s most psychologically insightful movie—the characters can at times feel like chess-piece contrivances rather than fully rounded individuals—but it’s almost certainly his most entertaining and fastest-paced.

Civil War often leaves the audience feeling trapped in an all-too-realistic waking nightmare, but when it finally lets us go, mercifully short of the two-hour mark, it sends us out of the theater talking.

Sure, Música stomps its way into some cheesy pitfalls, but it’s also an unusually refreshing rom-com.

Girls State’s most engrossing characters don’t wind up being those who prevail, but those who persist, who dust themselves off and find a way to keep going forward.

It captures what it’s like to live in this chaotic and deadening world so well it might be the movie of the year, and last year, and next year too. If a visitor from the future wanted to know what it was like to be alive right now, this is what I’d show them.

Wherever these two love-crazed lesbians’ poorly-thought-out plans take them, we’re along for the dizzying ride.

To his great credit, Villeneuve has followed through on the task he set for himself in Dune’s moody, enigmatic, and expansive first chapter: He now returns to the world he so painstakingly established, ready to orchestrate the grand-scale conflicts that are about to tear it apart.

It’s a travesty, a disaster, a blight on the history of superheroes and cinema itself. I enjoyed the hell out of it.

Come for the skyline-destroying radioactive dino, stay for the delicately etched portrait of recovery and self-forgiveness. Or vice versa. Just don’t miss the chance to remind yourself why the world fell for Godzilla in the first place.

The Zone of Interest is a movie about what you don’t see, and what you are forced to imagine.

Poor Things is a feminist recasting of the Frankenstein myth, a gorgeously designed setting for the jewel that is Emma Stone’s lead performance, and not just my favorite Lanthimos movie I’ve seen yet but maybe the only one of his I’ve really liked.

Life and death are two sides of the same coin; in embracing what it means to be mortal—and, by extension, human and imperfect—Beyoncé found a way, in this Renaissance era of hers, to celebrate life and liberation. She does it in a way that only a Beyoncé who has stepped down to earth from her pedestal after more than 20 years finally can.

The Boy and the Heron may not have moved me emotionally as much as some of Miyazaki’s earlier classics, but it left me intellectually and aesthetically dazzled, and profoundly grateful for this late-life glimpse into the autobiography of one of film’s great living artists.

Cooper’s sophomore film far outshines the common run of contemporary biopics in its artful construction and attention to emotional nuance.

I don’t know how long the boys can keep tapping the well of their surreal imaginations before they become exhausting. But I do know that The Treasure of Foggy Mountain made me laugh so hard I missed a number of jokes.

As it is now, Napoleon plays more like a hastily compiled highlight reel of a life than the full-fledged historical epic its director seems to have intended.

For all its cutting dialogue and its initially off-putting protagonist, The Holdovers is a cozy cardigan of a movie.

Killers of the Flower Moon is a cathedral of a movie, cavernously huge in ambition and scale, yet oddly intimate in its effect on the viewer.

The fact that an indie director like Gerwig chose, for her third film, to make a lavish blockbuster tied to a major studio’s IP has unsurprisingly caused some to dismiss her as a sellout. But watching her flex her filmmaking skills on this grand a scale, and succeed at creating sparklingly original summer entertainment, has me excited to see whatever Gerwig does next, big or small.

Despite its three-hour run time and the epic scale of its widescreen IMAX image, Oppenheimer is the most intimate movie the emotionally chilly Nolan has yet made.

It’s all captured vérité-style by the filmmakers, who, like everyone else in this utterly sweet production, display great affection for the totally foolish theater kids (of all ages) who inhabit this world.

Even at 163 minutes, it somehow moves with the no-nonsense briskness of a good airport thriller.

Though the action is often wittily imagined and choreographed, no one could confuse Mangold’s workmanlike direction with Spielberg’s kinetic instinct for how to place and move a camera. Still, Dial of Destiny clips along nicely: Even at 2 hours and 22 minutes, the pace seldom drags.

If Asteroid City had kept its focus more tightly on these two troubled families, it might have turned into the most emotionally truthful movie Anderson has yet made. Instead the story widens out to include a sprawling cast of less complex, if often amusing, secondary characters.

The problem with Elemental is that it is, in every way, the epitome of a Pixar film, except that it isn’t any good.

The main character of this movie expends enormous effort seeking affirmation that the words she spends her days trying to get down on paper matter. The movie’s writer-director, one of the most idiosyncratic and indispensable voices currently working in film comedy, needn’t worry about a thing.

Craig’s adaptation treats Margaret’s religious questioning with as much curiosity and respect as it does her budding sexuality.

To the film’s credit, nothing in Paint comes off as mean-spirited or patronizing, including the treatment of the town’s many less-than-sophisticated consumers of televised artmaking. But by the last half, the ambient niceness felt so pervasive and the film’s ultimate purpose so vague that, even when the performances and much of the dialogue remained sharp and funny, the movie around them seemed to dissolve into one of those happy little clouds.

It’s the sort of concept that could lend itself to disaster if handled poorly, so it’s a credit to everyone involved that Air is thoroughly entertaining, even if it never really maximizes its alluring potential. By the end it feels like Affleck’s movie has settled for a pull-up jumper rather than attacking the rim—a reasonable decision, but probably not one Michael Jordan would make.

Nostalgia may buckle you into A Thousand and One, but the ride you take is one of emotional turmoil, beauty, love, and terror. Yes, terror.

It is silly, sure, and it has its contrived moments. (There’s a big chase scene in a maze meant to resemble a dungeon crawl in a way that one only finds in movie adaptations of toys and board games, of which I am sorry to say this is far from the first.) But it is also eminently sincere.