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.

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.