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.