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.

As is typical of a Soderbergh production, The Christophers doesn’t waste an ounce of its limited resources; the director always knows exactly how to keep the viewer on the hook while allowing the story’s emotions room to breathe. The real heist of The Christophers is that Soderbergh snuck such a bittersweet tale into cinemas, dressed up as a silly caper.

The film doesn’t linger on its provocation, however; instead it sits with the moment’s ramifications in ways both darkly funny and sneakily challenging. Whether it tickles or offends, The Drama seems intent on generating a strong reaction from everyone who sees it.

Its advertising promises goofy hijinks amid an enclave of diverse species whose ecosystem is threatened by humans. The movie, in actuality, is refreshingly mordant about what might really happen if prey and predators were to try banding together: Their efforts would immediately devolve into a despairing, even political quagmire.

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.

The film sometimes dazzles in its ridiculousness, but there are simply too many appendages sewn on for it to make any coherent sense.

Fennell has streamlined the book’s narrative, yes, but not its white-hot melodramatic core—and she understands it well enough to create a worthy swoon-fest for the ages.

It’s a perfect bit of shlock.

Ratner seems desperate to find action, but there is none. The pace is stultifying.

That The Rip is such a bland venue for its charismatic stars’ reunion is a terrible shame.

The Bone Temple is gnarly, challenging, and an incredibly impressive swerve, with Garland’s grim worldview beautifully captured by the director Nia DaCosta.

Marty is vivacious, and the film around him is buzzing at the same frequency: itchy, anxious, yet unbearably exciting throughout, each minute defined by some hairpin plot turn.

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.

For Avatar fans, I have great news: The latest installment of James Cameron’s magical-alien adventure saga is here, and you’re going to love it. . . The bad news for anyone not already on board: This film has no interest in you.

For all its powerful elements, though, Hamnet rings a bit hollow at its core. Perhaps the grand tragedies are just too overwhelming for some viewers to see beyond. I cried, yes, but in the end, I felt no closer to the mysterious bard—let alone to the people he loved, all those hundreds of years ago.

The best I can say about For Good is that its two stars, Cynthia Erivo (as the green-skinned witch Elphaba) and Ariana Grande (her sickeningly sweet friend Glinda), are strong-enough performers to make the most bizarre turns feel functional. But even they can’t keep the film from collapsing under the lightest scrutiny.

Clooney’s a strong-enough star to sell Jay’s achy heart, even amid the glitz and glamour. Baumbach’s odyssey into more treacly territory is an attention-worthy gambit, though one hopes he doesn’t lock the grouchiness away forever.

Lawrence is superb at exemplifying Grace’s confusion.

For Frankenstein, Netflix handed him a massive budget to play with, and the money is all up on the big screen, if you can catch the movie on one. But just like del Toro’s previous reverent adaptations, all of that sumptuousness is hamstrung by his apparent desire to remain faithful to the original tale.

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.

Despite the wistful tone, it’s a bitingly funny viewing experience. Shrunken to Hart’s height and given his balding pate, Hawke is transfixing in the role; as Hart, he holds everyone’s attention whenever he’s monologuing.

Bugonia’s provocative premise doesn’t yield a sci-fi thriller. The film instead offers an intimate, unhurried exploration of human cruelty.

What J. B. has aced is clearly not the art of persuasion or thievery. His real specialty, The Mastermind suggests, is his ability to tune out everything but his own wants and needs.

Roofman deftly blends genres to create a low-key crowd-pleaser—one that avoids merely reveling in what made Manchester notorious in the first place.

It’s another superficial, techno-futuristic tale that emphasizes its glossy look over its heady concept.

It’s an emotional, visceral triumph.

In Caught Stealing, Aronofsky drops the viewer into an older New York as another artistic exercise, but renders it as a playground for bloody and one-dimensional silliness. His skill as a cinematic storyteller is on display—I just missed the narrative depth and danger that used to come with the elegant shots.

It’s a movie that gleefully kicks its characters out of their comfy environs to plunge them into New York’s rattling, noisy crowds—and it’s worth watching with the biggest audience you can find.

The most daring aspect of Weapons is that it answers all of its big questions.

Everyone plays it reliably straight, a contrast that helps the film maintain its zany energy—and, in the spirit of the original trilogy, maximize the number of jokes per minute. If one bit flops, another arrives in a few seconds to make up for it.

As an effort to breathe new life into a particularly moribund title—there have been four prior takes on these characters, all of them bad—First Steps is essentially successful. What it somehow can’t manage to do is have much of a good time in the process.

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.

For as expensive and action-packed as it is, this Superman is also stuffed with whimsical concepts and ridiculous side characters.

The action is also visually clean and easy to follow, and the film takes its time to showcase the ancient CGI-generated beasts in their environment. But my praise ends there: This is otherwise a plodding, disenchanting experience that adds some more roaring dinosaurs in exchange for any memorable characters or narrative stakes. It has little reason to exist, beyond cashing in at the summer box office.

Again and again, blood splatters onto the camera lens, producing gleefully gory images. It’s grimy, sometimes even ugly filmmaking, but it’s effectively disorienting. What’s most striking about 28 Years Later, though, is how it manages to hold together its freewheeling plot and tonal shifts.

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.

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.

The appeal of Flanagan’s take on The Life of Chuck rests on his understanding of this resonant quality of King’s writing; on-screen, as on the page, the story hums because it highlights the ordinary foundation upon which the supernatural can be built. Within the strange events is a core that is bittersweet and familiar.

Yes, visual-effects technology is up to the task of re-creating a cartoon on a larger scale and dotted with real actors, and yes, these redos tend to turn a profit for their makers. These shouldn’t be the only reasons for art to exist.

Ballerina ultimately succeeds as a piece of junky fun, however, because it attempts to expand the Wick canon rather than deepen its titular protagonist.

It’s wiser, and it has the looser silliness that comes with middle age—but it’s looking up at those imposing father figures, tycoons or no, with awe and fear all the same.

It fearlessly—and wackily—reckons with how confounding people can be in their bid for one another’s approval: at work, at home, at their new friend’s house while dressed in their finest Ocean View Dining clothing.

Bring Her Back is far more confident in its portrayal of Laura’s own story, building to a devastating and intense conclusion about the extent of her loss and her inability to deal with it. Hawkins is up to the challenge, and the rest of the ensemble is strong enough to keep pace. But many of those story beats feel perfunctory; the film comes to life in the nastier, grislier set pieces.

It’s a remarkable, lore-filled pivot from what we’d been made to believe about our hero for the past two decades. Over time, he’s gone from cipher to human being, from an excellent showman in the art of espionage to a model of the ideal man. This sense of self-importance, however, is one that the series can’t quite sustain.

Mostly, Thunderbolts* is just a fun action movie about found family among a bunch of hard-bitten mercenaries. It may not be the most original idea; the first Avengers entry could be boiled down in the same way. But I’ll take an iteration done this competently over a new adventure featuring the Red Hulk.

Sinners had me cheering for every thrill and spill, all while mulling the deeper concerns threaded through it.

Although Momoa does his best to inject some brash personality, it collides with Black’s more authentic brand of chaos; if either of them is on-screen at any time, rest assured that most of the dialogue is getting yelled. The visuals are similarly obnoxious.

That Warfare is, in dramatically rendering a true story, visceral is hardly a surprise. What’s fascinating is how so much of the film commits to the waiting that exists during battle: the taxing, dull tension of knowing that something might happen any minute.

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

The Electric State is so transparently eager to satisfy as many demographics of viewers as possible that it proves its own message: that a world dependent on business interests and technological optimization dulls artistic potential and human ingenuity. All that’s left is a wasteland of half-baked ideas searching for a home.

Although Soderbergh’s approach has an artfulness to it; he’s telling a sweeping story while keeping the excitement mostly confined. The result, while self-contained, is gripping, quietly sexy, and robustly acted.

Eephus is an elegy, but with just the barest hint of sentimentality—a shrugging send-off that simultaneously cares deeply about America’s pastime.

If Mickey’s life is suffocatingly bleak, Mickey 17 is anything but. Rather, it’s a wacky, satisfyingly strange romp that further reaffirms Bong Joon Ho as a singular filmmaker.

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.

Another kill is coming, and because we’re in this peculiar, mischievous film, it’ll be a playful one. But the outcome will always be the same: Someone who was once there is now gone. In the face of that chilling, prosaic nightmare, all Perkins can do is laugh.

Any subversive edges have been sanded off this script, which is credited to five people. It doesn’t explore the racial underpinnings of Wilson’s budding relationship with the government, despite its mistreatment of the prior Black Captain America, nor does it reckon with the president’s desire to use him as a patriotic prop.

Companion is at best a mean little confection, no matter how much you know going into it: amusing, occasionally thrilling, but not something with the capability to linger.

Hard Truths itself is astonishingly sensitive for a portrait of someone who often behaves monstrously.

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.

That unsettling feeling is communicated by Torres’s devastating, genuine performance.

September 5 is effective because it doesn’t claim to say anything original about the perils of reporting and consuming breaking news. It’s simply—and bluntly—showing how easily those familiar perils can be overlooked.

Williams has always thrived on the audience’s sympathy as much as their admiration, and Better Man finds a wonderfully goofy way to represent that with its charming, if unevolved, simian star.

The highest compliment I can bestow on it is that Corbet’s drive has paid dividends, leaving much for me to puzzle through.

The director’s meticulousness overtakes some scenes, crowding out any real sense of dread; occasionally his characters seemed to be drowning in the gorgeous, complex sets they were moving through. Eggers always manages to freak me out, though, despite the occasional lapses into tedium—he knows just how to evoke the simple fear of the unknown.

The film is, as a result, a portrait of how Rasoulof perceives the systematic oppression within his home country, from which he is now exiled. The government’s rejection of its citizens’ efforts for change is personal to him—as devastating and painful, the film suggests, as having a father turn against his own flesh and blood.

The resulting adaptation satisfyingly combines the grandiosity of a musical and the intimacy of filmmaking.

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.

Conclave also adds a few too many contrived twists in its quest for narrative drama, but the movie moves nimbly enough to avoid a collapse into pure fantasy.

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.

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.

A generic and plodding revenge thriller that’s nowhere near bold enough to justify the franchise’s resurrection.

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.

Good One shows that growing up can begin with a single conversation that illuminates, for someone like Sam, how far she has left to go.

Dìdi exudes a special kind of empathy and warmth toward the kids who grew up in the age of Myspace, as well as their families. Many coming-of-age stories examine a child’s relationship with themselves and their parents, but Dìdi also tracks how those shifts were made more jarring and strange in the early days of social media.

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.

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.

Feige’s mainstream instincts are easy to detect here. The prior Deadpool films were scuzzy and cobbled together, even as the budget grew; the cameos from other Marvel characters felt half-hearted and perfunctory, inclusions for Deadpool to roll his eyes at, not for fans to cheer over. Deadpool & Wolverine, on the other hand, has that bland MCU sheen that makes all of its movies look expensive but nonthreatening, happily accepting of mediocrity rather than attempting something artsy or daring.

With so many details pulled directly from history, along with scenes shot inside an intake prison that had housed the RTA alumni featured in Sing Sing, the film often plays like a documentary.

If you can see the film in IMAX, or in one of those 4DX theaters that jostles your seat around and sprays water in your face, I recommend it. Chung has a nice grasp of his supporting characters, and he takes pains to dwell on the aftermath of every horrible storm, but in Twisters, the action is the juice, and the bigger and louder your viewing experience, the better.

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.

Though Longlegs has plenty of atmospheric scares, it never descends into total surreality, instead charting a path right between vibes and rules.

I enjoyed plenty of its nearly three-hour run time, suffered through other parts, and was practically praying for the credits by the end. Most of all, I salute Lanthimos for getting back to his freaky roots, only this time on American soil.

What impressed me most about Janet Planet is what a work of cinema it is, visually alive and inventive even with a small budget and fairly languid plotting pace.

Although it’s often charming and relatable, it’s a letdown when you consider the heights such a project could reach.

The Watchers is carefully paced, character-focused, and quite sincerely emotional, interested less in the manner of the scares and more in how they’re affecting the ensemble gathered in the woods.

There are no quick cuts here, no goofy ways of hiding gore from the audience: Nash wants the viewer to engage with the pure terror of what’s going on just as much as he wants them to sit in the tedium of it.

It’s also just a sexy, fun movie for grown-ups that believes in its story rather than empty spectacle. . . this is a rare romantic comedy to see with a roaring crowd.

Challengers is a great example of how a director can temper his preoccupations just a little in order to reach beyond the art-house crowd.

I’d forgive anyone for thinking this all sounds a little too precious, but that’s Rohrwacher’s storytelling skill: She can make such a fairy tale feel familiar without sapping it of its dreamlike charm.

The result is a stylish thriller that’s also a cathartic unleashing of Patel as a performer and storyteller. With Monkey Man, he asserts himself as someone who can break the boundaries Hollywood typically establishes for actors like him.

Girls State is much more than a gender-flipped version of the previous project. Instead, the film offers a sharp study of how a supposedly empowering environment can simultaneously inspire and limit aspiring female leaders.

Its spectacle is even duller than its story, which is already nonsensical.

The result is a functional if unspectacular film that makes no outsize effort to speak to cultural conversations around the movie.

It’s a straightforward piece of genre silliness, an 89-minute thrill fest crammed with the requisite jump scares and creepy religious imagery. But it’s also part of a larger body of evidence that Sweeney, unlike the guileless characters she often portrays, is carefully constructing her career in ways that suit her skill set.

Within Problemista is a heartfelt core conveying something profoundly human. It’s a marvelous mixture of surrealism and social satire that depicts the American dream as a nightmare of bureaucracy and phone calls to customer service. There’s nothing more absurd, the film argues, than the mundane.

As with all of his movies, Garland doesn’t provide easy answers. Though Civil War is told with blockbuster oomph, it often feels as frustratingly elliptical as a much smaller movie. Even so, I left the theater quite exhilarated.

That willingness to shock sets Love Lies Bleeding apart from a lot of other neo-noirs, where cool, smoky restraint is the norm.

Villeneuve’s film is a grand success, working on an even broader canvas than the first Dune—but it’s tinged with deep mournfulness, a quality that sets it apart from its blockbuster contemporaries.