Love and Thunder offers the usual lightning-streaked action and tossed-off gags, but this time, there’s not enough heft behind the flashiness.

The world was not built for the likes of Marcel, but he can help guide us through it.

Luhrmann’s approach works for one reason: Elvis should be a mess. Presley’s adult life was chaotic, and it unfolded almost entirely in public, from his spectacular successes to his ignominious decline. Watching it play out on film ought to feel a little disorienting.

What makes the first half of Spiderhead so compelling is that it’s injected with the unexpected; a shame, then, that the inventiveness drips out as the film’s running time winds down.

While all of the film’s visual excitement is handled with Pixar’s usual polish, the intrigue is only surface-level.

Nicolas Cage, even after all the memes and all the ridicule, still knows exactly what to do with the weight of his unique intensity, including when to dial it back.

Making dinosaurs finally feel dull was a rather revealing storytelling choice for Trevorrow—viewers aren’t bored of seeing them on-screen, but he sure seems to be.

The thrill of RRR is not the density of its storytelling, though—it’s the exuberance of it.

By framing her characters’ inventiveness with boldly bizarre imagery, Schoenbrun is getting at what makes internet horror such a unique mode of cinema. The viewer is unsettled not just by the content, but by their ambiguous relationship to who’s sharing it.

Men would likely drown in its own weirdness were it not for its dynamic leads.

Other films have skewered an industry that’s intent on bludgeoning audiences with their own fading memories, but only Chip ’n Dale actually gives those memories a new life.

I think Thyberg could have found even more to mine in a fully nonfiction movie; the biggest drawback of Pleasure is that it follows a fabricated protagonist who’s remote and one-dimensional. Bella is so defined by her stock story that it’s hard to grasp what’s motivating her beyond a desire for success, and the film gets bogged down in this staid narrative.

What surprised me about Multiverse of Madness was how much fun Raimi was allowed to have in the middle of it, turning every action sequence into something quite inventive and even delivering some cheeky scares throughout. This many years into the Marvel experiment, I’m heartened to see space for a real genre auteur amid all the multiversal machinations.

The final act of The Northman is as violent and intense as a story that inspired Hamlet should be, but all the gore and swordplay would leave no lasting impression were it not for the sincerity of Eggers’s vision.

If the series were to fizzle out, that would be a relief. No amount of movie magic can save it now.

If you’re buying a ticket hoping for a honed piece of cinema, you may be disappointed. Ambulance is instead a strong entry in Bay’s maximalist canon, his best assault on the senses since his underrated 2013 comic thriller, Pain & Gain.

The inclusion of other CGI characters actually helps balance out Sonic’s manic energy a little bit; watching them bounce off of one another is somehow easier than watching human actors try their best to interact with imaginary creatures that couldn’t show up to set.

Morbius is little more than an irritant, a grumpy, one-note CGI beastie who spends most of his movie pondering whether he should go full supervillain.

Weerasethakul is unpacking a sensation everyone has probably experienced at one point in their life: the feeling that something is cosmically out of whack.

This film is not a grandiose tale of love transcending all, but it does find all kinds of sweet, specific ways to portray a lasting partnership.

Deep Water is still a robust, well-acted thriller that lands most of its major twists gracefully; for that, all lesser sins can be forgiven.

The horror genre has, of late, been hijacked by purportedly “elevated” takes that avoid the simplicity of something like a slasher. X provides a map for how to do the classics right while still taking the formula somewhere original.

Overlook Turning Red at your peril. It’s the best thing Pixar’s produced in recent memory and perhaps the studio’s most emotionally nuanced and thematically clever film since Inside Out.

It is, in short, a film to scowl to. But if you can lock into that moodiness, it’s also quite enthralling.

Texas Chainsaw Massacre is full of elaborate, digitally created saw wounds far more shocking and anatomically bizarre than anything that could be achieved through makeup. These impressive-looking kills, however, have no heft; the CGI blood spurts are too artificial.

A depressingly routine affair that fails to replicate the joys of its source material.

The film can be unrelenting: Several graphic scenes make it challenging to watch, and more than once, I caught myself holding my breath. As the story’s weeks stretch into months, you can see the tension gather in Anne’s piercing gaze. It’s as if her eyes might set the screen aflame with her frustration, fury, and—eventually—panic.

The landscape of cinema doesn’t have enough maximalist costumed epics, and I’ll always applaud Wright’s ambition even when he doesn’t pull off his entire vision.

The Worst Person in the World swerves from bustling comedy to erotically charged romance to bittersweet drama, executing each tonal shift seamlessly even as plot twists seem to come out of nowhere.

Perhaps this really is the last Jackass; regardless, the series has survived so long not just because of the extravagance it conjures, but because of the camaraderie it inspires.

For all its cheesiness, the film is still entertaining—my entire row at the theater had fun cackling at clunky dialogue and absurd lunar lore. If you’re looking for a nice, empty-brained evening at the movies, Moonfall is the ticket to buy right now.

Kimi is yet another inventive blend of throwback suspense storytelling and current concerns; if Soderbergh wants to keep churning out one of these a year, he’s unlikely to run out of thematically ripe material.

We’re in silly–rom-com territory, and you simply have to accept every ludicrous development with calm rationality. Marry Me is a revived artifact from a time when Hollywood regularly churned out syrupy nonsense about people kissing under the most unlikely of circumstances. The presence of Lopez, once a reigning queen of the genre, only helps underline what a throwback Marry Me is.

The film’s long running time doesn’t feel indulgent at all, but electrifyingly necessary, the only way to draw out the restrained sorrows of its insular ensemble. Few filmmakers can make simple conversation a blockbuster moment, but in Hamaguchi’s hands, the audience is hanging on every character’s next word.

As a jolting piece of entertainment, Scream absolutely succeeds. It can’t reach the terrifying heights of Craven’s original, but none of the sequels could; each one always leaned a little more on meta-humor as the series went along.

The sparseness of the script matches the modesty of the staging. Because the film lacks lush period detail, or really any specific background visuals at all, the audience’s attention is thrown onto the performances, and the cast rises to the occasion magnificently.

The acting is good, while the story fails to really hang together. The same is true for a lot of Clooney projects—perhaps unsurprisingly, he’s attentive to the subtleties of an actor’s performance, but the scripts he’s chosen of late have been short on narrative propulsion.

The satire of Don’t Look Up is anguished and clear to the point of feeling bludgeoning.

Nightmare Alley is quite handsomely mounted and thematically resonant material for del Toro, but for a thriller to connect, it needs to deliver some real thrills along the way.

Wachowski’s gamble is that viewers will enjoy a film that’s heavy on philosophizing and introspection as long as it retains the emotional, romantic hook that powered the first movie. Reeves and Moss sell their reunion as Neo and Trinity persuasively, glowing with the overwhelming chemistry and affection that Wachowski needed to push the film beyond cynicism.

Spielberg’s West Side Story is a charismatic showcase for everything he does best on the big screen, and a genuinely thoughtful update, making gentle and incisive rearrangements to justify its brassy sashay back into cinemas.

Spider-Man: No Way Home unfolds as though it were written by a room full of children who had just eaten a whole bag of sugar; it’s a hectic series of plot twists and deus ex machinas that overturns an entire bucket of action figures and smashes them all together with delight. The film might be a new nadir of cinema—but it’s also an undeniably watchable good time.

Mikey is one of Baker’s most thought-through creations, and Rex brings him to life with terrifying honesty.

The spookiness of The Humans conveys a larger point about the intimacy of family life. The Blakes’ shaky dynamic—their passive-aggressive asides and nonchalant appraisals—could be considered normal, but by using filmmaking techniques usually reserved for ghost stories, Karam challenges that normalcy.

Campion never takes a side in the ongoing conflict between George and Phil, instead brilliantly capturing the purpose, and the futility, in each brother’s approach, making The Power of the Dog an inimitable viewing experience.

Licorice Pizza is an antic comedy about Alana and Gary tooling around the Valley, but it’s also a bittersweet reminiscence about how difficult embracing adulthood can be.

With Tick, Tick … Boom, Miranda celebrates the power and the pressure of the world he loves most, and he’s picked a subject who encapsulates those warring dynamics perfectly.

Despite the over-the-top performances and plot twists he juggles, Scott drives his ultimate message home—that wealth is tempting yet poisonous.

It’s a sweet and engaging movie, but one that sacrifices some profundity in order to faithfully capture the world through a boy’s eyes.

Ghostbusters: Afterlife is derivative but not unwatchable—until the horrible last act.

Anytime King Richard threatens to follow an anodyne sports-movie arc, Williams’s forceful personality rears its head again.

Hall seems to have grasped the story as a performer would, prioritizing the potency of the characters’ interior lives over the plot. And perhaps given her acting background, she draws from Thompson and Negga a pair of finely tuned and exquisite performances. In every scene they share, they radiate a tender but perilous chemistry.

Red Notice is a glossy but empty product that indicates the extent of the genre’s current crisis.

It’s a specific character study told with the ambition that small, arty projects are rarely afforded—a complex and deeply realized story that not only demanded a second film but actually got one.

Coupled with Stewart’s exposed nerve of a performance, the suffocating intensity of Larraín’s filmmaking, and Jonny Greenwood’s droning score, the movie brings a fresh sense of tragedy and loss to a tale that might otherwise feel familiar.

It moves quickly but exhaustingly; if you’re tired of one trope, there’s always a new one waiting excitedly around the corner.

While Wright remains exceptionally gifted at mashing up genres to create moments of real cinematic lightning, by and large, Last Night in Soho is all flash, no impact.

In brewing such precise discomfort, Kranz forces the audience to concentrate deeply on what's being said and, more important, unsaid.

Zhao's delicate examination of her characters outshines Eternals' duller and more convoluted moments.

Ferguson is the star of the show, imperious one moment and fragile the next, torn between nurturing her son’s purpose and protecting him from becoming a monster.

Scott has long made movies about how systems of power exist to serve only the powerful, from the faceless corporations of Alien to the indifferent cops of Thelma and Louise. As The Last Duel rumbles to its bloody conclusion and its two leading men clash, it’s clear that the filmmaker’s allegiance lies elsewhere.

Ducournau challenges viewers to find the humanity in a character who seems intent on rejecting her own, all while provoking as many laughs as gasps.

It’s ambitious, sprawling, and sometimes shockingly counter to tradition for the series. But it’s also hugely effective: In offering real closure for the first time, No Time to Die sheds Bond’s mystique. It cements Craig’s legacy of playing Bond not just as a reliable institution, but also as a flawed human.

A number of the observations about the strictures of gangland life that The Many Saints of Newark bumps up against are compelling, but the film is a victim of its own compression, telling a season’s worth of stories in two hours.

Venom may not have realized it was a so-bad-it’s-good cult classic, but Let There Be Carnage is striving to maintain that status from minute one.

Almost everything imaginable has gone wrong on the journey from stage to screen, and the result is a film that isn’t even “so bad it’s good,” like some other recent musical movies; mostly, it’s just painful to watch.

Watching the bureaucracy shift from a source of frustration to comfort gives the film its arresting tension.

Everything in Cinderella, admirable as its message may be, is soulless—and that robs it of any joy.

William is a strong character on his own, but he is also a metaphor for America’s struggle to overcome its grimmest failures and to break free from cycles of violence. Schrader understands that those are nigh-impossible tasks; still, he shows the value in trying nonetheless.

Cry Macho is almost like a Western paced at half speed, told with the deliberateness demanded by a 91-year-old movie star. That just helps underline its eulogistic narrative, one in which Mike is already a man out of time, and the more energetic Rafael tries to encourage him to enjoy the last act of his life rather than shuffle through it.

By the end of this new Candyman, little personal investment remains for the audience, just a miasma of provocative thoughts failing to cohere into something greater. The film has enough visual panache to make it an involving watch, but it struggles to live up to the audaciousness of its deeper ideas.

With Zola, however, the director Janicza Bravo has made a film that contends with the uneasy interplay between characters’ online and offline selves. And it posits that we use the internet to fool ourselves as much as to fool others.

The messy third act, and its insistence on making Natasha infallible, doesn’t ruin the film. But it does make Black Widow a missed opportunity; Natasha never gets to make the choices that could help her complete her portrait.

Sometimes Shang-Chi is a straightforward martial-arts drama, all fistfights and meticulous choreography. Other times it’s a high-fantasy epic, full of stunning scenery and complex lore.

The movie is weird and wrenching, asking the viewer to find humanity within the unreal tale of a puppet child’s rise to fame.

CODA is insightful and moving enough to be worth all the fuss.

The Suicide Squad is very funny, bleakly self-aware, and shockingly violent—a refreshing mix of familiar conventions and gory satire.

So what if this movie essentially forgets to have a coherent plot or any real stakes; look at all of the exciting crossovers!

Pig is a blend of absurd cooking melodrama, jokey revenge thriller, and allegory, and Cage is the connective tissue holding all those ridiculous elements together. He may have abandoned the brightest spotlight, but he’s lost none of his edge.

The central conceit of Old has so much juice, and Shyamalan gets to explore so many fun—if sadistic—avenues over the course of one very long day. It’s his most ambitious work in years, wrapped in the delightful, tawdry packaging of a pulpy thriller.

The Green Knight is most brilliant in its wordless sequences. Lowery is exceptionally skilled at conjuring otherworldly sights that somehow retain one foot in reality.

Stillwater is a mainstream work that contradicts preconceived notions, and is all the more fascinating for it.

Nomadland is a work of exploration, and not just across the sprawling American West. Fern is exorcising her darkest demons, which spring from the systemic neglect that has been visited on so many Americans in recent years. The odyssey makes Zhao’s film a transfixing mix of reckoning and catharsis.

Minari is a tale that will feel familiar to many, but Chung grounds it in brilliant specificity.

With Judas and the Black Messiah, King has made a thriller that speaks to history without feeling didactic, that keeps the audience in suspense even though the ending was written decades ago.

The clever script, written by Glass herself, is designed to keep the viewer guessing until the very last minute, and it’s the foundation of the first great horror movie of the year.

Even the most mundane moments in The Little Things aren’t enough to stifle Washington’s star power. Almost nothing is.

While Locked Down is an undoubtedly fascinating pop-culture curio, it’s also sloppy and cringe-inducing, and feels like it was made in a hurry.

Howard’s film is nothing more than a sensational snapshot, one that feels even less authentic than many of the think pieces that followed the release of Vance’s book in 2016. To Hollywood, J. D. is just another cookie-cutter hero, one who’s defeated the haziest of villains—adversity itself.

The Nest is one of the best films of the year: Though it’s set in the past, it’s about the feeling of one’s own home turning against you when the world outside feels all the more hostile—a theme that resonates far beyond its time period.

It’s a refreshingly silly and airy adventure focused on the emotions of one character, Wonder Woman (played by Gal Gadot), and a charming end to a tiring year of cinema.

Freaky knows it’s a farce and winks at the silliest of slasher tropes, but that satirical edge doesn’t keep it from being one of the most purely enjoyable horror works I’ve seen in a long time.

Fincher didn’t set out to make a movie about today’s politics; he’s telling a universal story about trying to change an industry (and a world) in which every system seems freighted with inertia. Mankiewicz isn’t quite a radical, nor is he especially principled. Still, in trying to make sense of his experiences with Hearst through a Hollywood narrative, he transforms a familiar tale about shattered idealism into a revolutionary work of art.

The movie’s best moments are the fully scripted ones between Borat and Tutar, who have a genuinely sweet bond forged mostly through crude humor. Cohen seems to understand that the film’s shock value is automatically lower because of how deadened audiences have grown to political satire, so he relies more heavily on sitcom jokes to compensate and largely succeeds.

This film is the slightest story Coppola has ever produced; it only brushes up against deeper insights during its brief running time. But the movie offers such a rush of unintentional catharsis and pure diversion that its flaws are easy to forgive.

Chicago 7 is a particularly shiny rendering of history, but Sorkin wisely places the focus on America’s failings, even as he celebrates the people striving to fix them.

The film is not gritty, unvarnished, or hard to watch; it’s an easygoing, charming work, buoyed by Blank’s excellent lead performance and suffused with snappy jokes and sparkling supporting turns.

76 Days is unvarnished and raw, a first draft of a history that’s still being written.