Mother Mary takes a story that could be ripped from the gossip pages and transmutes it into a spooky campfire tale. It’s the furthest thing from the kind of mainstream-pop fame Mary seems to represent, but that dissonance is what makes Lowery’s storytelling so unique.

So many rom-coms rely on tiresome plot twists to keep their characters apart before getting them together, but all of the ups and downs in Bros’ romance feel emotionally necessary.

Blink Twice is not about eating the rich or satirizing the one percent. It’s instead a stylish, if tonally uneven, exploration of how being in the orbit of powerful people can produce an insidious sense of powerlessness that easily curdles into self-deception.

The result is a film that is slickly made but buggy in execution, like a premature software update.

In reality, Skinamarink is just a 100-minute symphony of the vibes being very, very off, a crescendo of creeping dread that eventually overwhelms the viewer.

It’s a perfect bit of shlock.

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.

How Scott is able to pump out these grandiose set pieces with such practiced ease (and a little CGI embellishment) is beyond me; he remains one of Hollywood’s finest craftsmen of action sequences, and I’ll miss him when he’s gone.

The film never interrogates why the early pandemic led to so many ideological conflicts, but it suggests that the prognosis is bleak for those who continue to venture too far into the internet’s noxious rabbit holes. Being too online, in other words, can be its own kind of sickness.

Green Book may supply little in the way of meaningful commentary on racial dynamics either in the 1960s or today. But thanks to Mortensen and Ali, it’s a perfectly pleasant way to spend two hours.

Like the trio of eccentric spell-casting divas at its center, this follow-up is bizarre, flashy, and chaotic. And yet, it’s also satisfying to take in.

The film doesn’t offer much wisdom about how we should deal with our growing unreality, but it is a charming diversion. In a way, its very shallowness is the point: Sometimes, the film posits, what we want to see matters more than what we actually do.

A punk-rock-meets-aliens story of young romance, it finds itself uncomfortably on the spectrum somewhere between Earth Girls Are Easy and Liquid Sky: neither good enough to be a conventional success nor weird enough to be a cult hit.

The movie is, in the end, deeply unserious and completely mindless, but still strangely sweet.

For all the fun it’s having, Gladiator II does require a working knowledge of its predecessor’s story to understand the stakes, which also means it magnifies the original film’s flaws.

It would have been easy to inflate Last Breath’s action stakes to make them fun and absurd, but Parkinson’s nonfiction instincts as a filmmaker won’t really allow for that. I’m thankful for the meticulous realism that follows instead.

It’s a diverting, high-energy romp, packed with a charming ensemble and armed with an unsubtle disdain for the one percent.

Hereditary is a great scare-fest and a middling domestic saga, one that probably needed to be either 90 minutes long and brimming with terror, or three hours long and suffused with glacial, Bergman-esque dread. Aster has charted a middle path, and for a first film, it’s hard to fault the skill he’s shown in doing it.

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.

The Nightingale isn’t an easy cinematic experience, but if you can handle it, it’s an unforgettable one.

Although the sequel’s running time is more sprawling and its narrative goals more diffuse than its predecessor’s, it shares the same strengths. Wakanda Forever is fueled by intricate world-building, stunningly designed sets and costumes, and an interest in the geopolitical implications of superheroism that’s far more nuanced than most Marvel movies allow.

Materialists falters most when it tries to mesh its competing aims: to deliver a throwback love story while also deconstructing the reality of modern dating. Instead, in the end, the film resembles the very world it tries to critique, offering a litany of observations about finding The One without ever substantially arguing for any of them.

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.

Though Crazy Rich Asians is rightly being lauded for its groundbreaking nature (as the first studio film with an Asian cast set in the present day since 1993’s The Joy Luck Club), it’s also a charming throwback to the kind of story Hollywood doesn’t tell much anymore: the high-society comedy, rife with family drama, acidic one-liners, and indomitable female characters.

The real star of Professor Marston and the Wonder Women is Rebecca Hall, who’s an absolute dynamo as Elizabeth Holloway Marston.

Monos is an undeniable wonder, but one that enchants the most when its head is in the clouds.

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

It’s a film looking to challenge America’s gauzy perception of the country’s most famous political family, loaded with all the bleakness that task requires.

Nouvelle Vague is a fairly straightforward making-of story—funny, considering how form-breaking Breathless was. But Linklater understands that his movie’s appeal lies in character-based humor.

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.

Mudbound is beautifully shot, well-acted, and surprisingly sweeping for a movie with a relatively small budget of $10 million; if it’s guilty of anything, it’s perhaps trying to do too much at once, which is understandable given its novelistic scope.

It's far from the director's richest or most interesting work (that would be Sideways or About Schmidt), but the movie is a pleasure to watch: a melancholic comedy graced with the trademark Payne balance of tenderness and irony.

The real fun in Ready or Not comes from the ways it subverts its time-tested story, balancing wry commentary and straightforward horror in its portrait of fumbling arrogance and curdled privilege.

What [Coppola] ultimately created isn’t the realization of his aspirations; it’s an unfinished work, waiting for our reality to catch up to his fantasy.

It’s almost charming watching the film find various ways to use the limited confines of a suburban commuter train in service of a nervy action thriller.

As it is, Greta is more of a Terminator movie, with everyone doing their best to get out of Huppert’s way for 98 enjoyable minutes—though that’s still worth a recommendation in my book.

Affleck communicates all of the movie’s emotional breakthroughs via little choices—an angry swipe at an empty beer can when he’s being pressed on his drinking, or slowly curling into a ball when he admits the extent of his problem. It’s the kind of subtlety I’ve never seen Affleck demonstrate as a performer. The fact that he brings his real-life battles to the movie may be uncomfortable for some viewers, but the actor insists he approached the role carefully.

Presence, like much of the director’s recent work, is less an entrée than a charming apéritif, albeit with a couple of smart twists worth ruminating on.

Searching is a clever update on a housebound Hitchcock thriller like Rear Window, one that can make a series of Google searches play out like a high-wire action scene.

The most crucial aspect of the role-playing game is community—the fact that it’s played with friends and relies on teamwork. The writer-director Dan Scanlon’s clear grasp of that makes for a warm, gentle film that doesn’t try to merely dazzle the audience with wild fantasy visuals.

No doubt most Hollywood executives are as baffled as I am that Detective Pikachu made it to the big screen. But even more baffling, and heartening, is how well it all works.

Ant-Man and the Wasp bets on everything that worked about the first movie—it’s a light and sunny entry in the ongoing Marvel canon that gets by on the cast’s easygoing chemistry. And, of course, on all the shrinking and growing.

Sonny’s quest to prove his doubters wrong resembles the arc of many a sports drama. But Kosinski elevates that journey by capturing racing in all of its gorgeous, peculiar glory—there’s never been a portrait of Formula One quite like it.

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.

To Eastwood, Jewell is a hero not just because he saved people’s lives, but also because he was an ordinary and imperfect man who rose to the occasion when the moment demanded it. That’s the story Richard Jewell should be telling, and it succeeds when it sticks to that path.

The film deploys its extreme imagery for a reason, interrogating notions of selfhood and agency through a plot where nefarious agents can tap directly into someone’s brain.

It’s the kind of dazzling-looking, all-ages adventure that’s become rare in Hollywood: a grown-up story that kids can also enjoy. Lord and Miller’s endeavor here should be easy to root for. But Project Hail Mary’s self-conscious grandeur does sometimes get in its own way.

Fyre is primarily a journalistic exhumation of the Fyre Festival’s ridiculous excesses. But via interviews with both dissatisfied ticket-buyers and nervy ex-employees, the movie also scrapes away the sheen of the flamboyant “influencer” lifestyle that McFarland leveraged to sell tickets and hook investors.

Though this latest project might feel like a trifle (it’s only 69 minutes long and was filmed at Cannes to take advantage of a press appearance Huppert was doing there), it’s also a clear statement of artistic intent.

It touches on all the usual clichés of this cinematic subgenre. It just manages to do so in the most fizzy, fun fashion, powered by an energetic lead performance from Taron Egerton that goes beyond mimicry.

The film is just different enough to stick out amid the studio’s backwards-looking slate, and Burton, for the first time in years, shows he hasn’t lost his love for the idiosyncratic.

The director, Chad Stahelski, has been with the series since its inception and is clearly working with his biggest budget yet, so he compensates for any story weakness by serving up a seven-course meal of set pieces.

Though Whannell started out as a writer, it’s clear that stylish direction is where his strengths truly lie. Luckily, The Invisible Man has more than enough of that to hold the viewer’s attention.

Swerving between thrill-a-minute action and intense, drawn-out suspense, Revenge has all the subtlety of a bazooka to the face, but it’s an arresting watch if you can stomach its most lurid moments of violence.

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

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.

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

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 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.

It’s filled with colorful characters, innovative creature design, and some of the most spectacular sets in Laika’s history.

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.

Eisenberg, Nivola, and a hilariously brusque Imogen Poots (as Sensei’s only female student) are more than up to the task of finding the comedy in scenes of nasty violence or brooding anxiety. Stearns, however, is less interested in balancing those tones than he is in exploiting their uneasy tension.

At heart, the film is mostly a buddy comedy, an odd-couple clash between an old-fashioned stick in the mud and his more easygoing replacement. That makes it a breeze to watch—one just wonders if a movie about the modern papacy should be so cheerful.

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.

Where the film succeeds, it’s because Feig and Thompson have remembered to mix in a little sour with the sweet.

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.

On some of those fronts, the film wildly misfires, but for a wide studio release headlined by one of Hollywood’s biggest stars, Red Sparrow is an admirably bold effort.

Does the movie, like its predecessor, rely on familiar tropes a bit more than it should? Yes, I think it does. Is it, at a solid two-and-a-half hours, considerably longer than it needed to be? Yes, that too. But it’s still a pretty damn good movie, arguably the best the franchise has offered since Empire.

The movie is too long, too violent, too silly—too everything. Yet for those who enjoyed the original Kingsman, it is a more than adequate second act. To put it another way: first time satire, second time farce.

Much of what does work is owed to Theron and Davis’s incredible performances.

You Were Never Really Here feels remote and somnambulant—a bad dream viewers know will end after 90 minutes, never to disquiet them again. Its emotional stakes are inflated so overzealously that they scarcely register as stakes at all.

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

Snow White chooses to be fearless. A studio can too—even if this one so rarely does.

While McCarthy does what she can with the material provided her, it’s not nearly enough to save the movie. As a result, Life of the Party doesn’t live up to either of the nouns in its title.

The Apprentice could have delved into the Trump persona or explored how it calcified. But by trying to avoid how Trump’s past reflects his current approach to politics—his zero-sum relationship to power, his pettiness and egotism—while simultaneously winking at viewers’ knowledge of him, the film lands itself in a trap.

It’s one of those projects that initially seems hokey beyond repair but quickly evolves into something genuinely unique. Serenity may not make it onto many critics’ top-10 lists come the end of 2019. But it’s certain to be one of the more unforgettable viewing experiences of the year.

The film is touching, sometimes saccharine, and other times bluntly honest, but it works best as a fascinating reminder that Rogers was trying to be more than a mascot of American politeness.

It’s that stealthy sense of guilt that turns Ella McCay into a rich, if often bewildering, document for me. Yes, it’s the kind of movie Hollywood doesn’t make much of anymore, but honestly, even back in the day, the industry rarely ever pushed out something this delightfully weird.

Van Groeningen isn’t too curious about what got Nic into drugs, nor how he finally pulled out of the spiral. Beautiful Boy largely exists in between those two stories and ends up feeling like a limited, grueling experience.

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.

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

The film picks and chooses what to carry over from its forebears in a way that’s both fascinating to watch and—as is typical with DC Comics movies—gives the sense of a plane being built in midair. But fortunately for Birds of Prey, that manic energy suits Harley Quinn just fine.

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.

A Quiet Place is a taut piece of genre filmmaking, to be sure, though it succeeds because it leads with a believable, if heightened, portrayal of a loving family.

Like any Park film, it’s pretty charming, the kind of kids movie that finds the right mix of slapstick humor and intelligent storytelling to keep everyone in the audience happy.

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.

The creative journey, and the magical bond between artist and subject, are what ignite Gilliam’s passion here. Unfortunately, the themes of The Man Who Killed Don Quixote are more compelling than the set pieces themselves.

It’s one thing to make fun of the repetitiveness of a second movie, but this one manages to do that while actually expanding its storytelling horizons.

Cronenberg has an obvious gift for making blood and viscera look inventive, even as they splatter across the screen repeatedly. But the film can’t outdo its initial hook.

The joy of the romantic comedy lies less in its mise en scène, and more in its witty repartee and character chemistry, which Set It Up is loaded with. The will-they-won’t-they tension is enough for the movie to power through the silliest moments.

MaXXXine has a bitchin’ soundtrack; lots of sultry, De Palma–inspired long shots; and a very engaging and salty performance from Goth at its center. It’s fun, but it’s unavoidably a bit of a style exercise, albeit a very good one.

This is a project that’s loaded with big ideas and worthy morals for its younger viewers, even if it has a little trouble streamlining them all into an easily digestible plot.

Horizon might not be “watchable” in the most traditional sense of the word, but it’s audacious enough that I’ll be heading back for more in August, in anticipation of what might happen when all of these tales hopefully, eventually, collide.

It has plenty of breezy fun probing the dilemmas of modern media, without abandoning the glitz that made the original so enduring.

Blindspotting has enough verve, humor, and passion to recommend it—even as it overplays its hand in its final minutes.

I have to applaud Goddard’s ambition, even when it overreaches. Yes, Bad Times at the El Royale is bloated and might’ve functioned better as a punchy bit of neo-noir. But it’s rare for a genre film to feel so sweeping and inventive.

Blockers ends up being a mirror-image coming-of-age film, where the kids have to help the adults make some grand realizations.

Had the film not taken an introspective turn, I still would have appreciated its skill with generating easy laughs. Happily, Good Boys has a little more to recommend it than gross gags.