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.

Running only 84 minutes long and stuffed with chaotic plot twists, Drive-Away Dolls is a perfect winter trifle.

I almost admire the sheer lack of effort on display in the acting, storytelling, and set pieces. To say that Johnson in particular phoned this performance in would be an insult to Alexander Graham Bell.

It’s scary. I’ve seen plenty of Godzilla movies and enjoyed most of them, but the title character has rarely been so frightening to behold.

It’s all perfectly agreeable nonsense.

As a film that attempts to honor its victims while simultaneously offering graphic details, it both improves upon previous iterations of the material and exposes the limits of the story itself. The result is a movie that wrestles with its very existence—and, perhaps, the existence of based-on-a-true-disaster tales.

This latest adaptation may not hit every note established by Walker’s text and Spielberg’s drama, but it tells Celie’s story sensitively. It understands, in other words, that she comes with a uniquely imperfect, profound rhythm.

It’s rich with feeling, shrouded in darkness, but not despairing as it digs into the trials the Von Erichs faced, without merely dismissing the family as cursed.

Wonka is saccharine, yes, but if you’re going to indulge, it’s better to be in the hands of a master confectioner.

What’s important is that the film is alive and awake with energy. This is no marble mausoleum of a movie—it’s more of a bold reinvention than a somber farewell.

May December begins grotesquely . . . It ends delicately, as a portrait of fragile, shattered human beings and the mundane entertainment they inspire.

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.

It’s a celebration of the man, but also a quiet tragedy, with many regrets piling up to a muted and devastating conclusion.

It delivers many of the ingredients expected of a Marvel movie—cheer-worthy cameos; cute, fuzzy sidekicks courtesy of the catlike Flerkens, and a truly exciting mid-credits scene that’ll spawn countless speculative blog posts about the MCU’s future—while also keeping a keen focus on its characters.

It’s undeniably the worst film Waititi has ever produced, a hash of lazy jokes and “random” humor centered on one of the most uncomfortable lead performances I’ve ever seen in a comedy.

Again, Fallen Leaves is a comedy, and a consistently funny one, even if most of its laugh lines are gruffly delivered.

By making Nyad a narrative film, the movie succumbs to a lot of boring biopic-storytelling shorthand; Nyad sometimes states her goals and fears aloud in the middle of conversation. Much of the thuddingly expositional dialogue cannot escape the sense that it sprouted from an expanded Wikipedia page.

Dream Scenario morphs from a Charlie Kaufman–esque cringe comedy into a simmering nightmare thriller, staging some genuinely unsettling hallucinations but failing to knit them into any larger narrative.

For all its whimsy, Fingernails is delicately profound. Its characters aren’t making bold romantic moves; they’re interrogating their assumptions of what is ultimately an unknowable phenomenon.

Priscilla is more than a story of a young woman in a gilded cage; it’s also an examination of how adolescent beliefs can be hard to shake.

A few belly laughs abound, but it’s the deep care for its characters that makes The Holdovers really sing.