Meet Me in the Bathroom’s depth is so cursory it can’t quite re-convince us how significant this all seemed at the time.

With a strong sense of authenticity and purpose, The Northman is designed to unnerve and repel. In a wide release landscape of easy-to-please, vaporous entertainment, such feats should be celebrated.

This is ultimately a picture that offers no answers. No clean resolutions. No overtly happy endings. This is a strength. Bialik is more interested in the journey to an ending, rather than the ending itself.

Like a good snoop, All the Old Knives works its assets to maximum effect. It knows what it’s doing with Chris Pine in a turtleneck or Thandiwe Newton smirking through a glass of rosé. What’s left is a sturdy version of something maybe too familiar but welcome all the same.

Although Lemercier isn’t a Dion doppelgänger, in the scenes where she lip syncs and moves to Dion’s tunes, she embodies that divinely picaresque energy Dion radiates. And just like a TikTok rabbit hole of Dion challenges, it’s impossible to take your eyes off her.

It’s not laugh-out-loud funny, but I was smiling for the duration, and its subversions of certain archetypes (see Noah Urrea’s Clay) kept things marginally fresh. Good and bad, it met expectations.

Minamata isn’t without its flaws, but a solid tale of art as power and citizens as heroes emerges.

As soon as the tone moves from drama to comedy, all the work that was done showcasing Ken’s emotional fragility—e.g. a great pattern built by morning coffee and the fluctuating ratio between caffeine and milk revealing how frayed he’s become—is wiped clean.

While Bay’s frantic approach is a double-edged sword, delivering pure entertainment from the get-go while lacking in any particularly ingenious set piece, it’s a refreshing proposition to see him return to the basics of action filmmaking.

Pirates is a fine film, and for Peters, Edusah, Elazour, and director Yates, it is undoubtedly a preview of even greater successes to come.

Bits and pieces work—an underused Maria Bakalova, in one of her first post-Borat roles, stands out as she contends with Dieter’s advances; there are a few laughs seeing Carol dealing with a crumbling relationship at home with no way to intervene; Dustin placing more importance over this franchise than his newly adopted son––but The Bubble‘s vast majority plays as Day for Night for dummies. Comedy can certainly be extracted from the strange new world we find ourselves in, but Apatow’s project is a meta experiment in search of a purpose beyond delivering a few scant chuckles.

Despite being almost objectively terrible, Morbius is sort of hard to get truly mad at. It’s a low-effort enterprise to the bone, like everyone’s dragging their feet around starting a franchise—the transparency of which might be clear to even the most casual moviegoers.

What is most fascinating about Walker’s feature is the intoxicating rhythm it concocts while taking certain narrative liberties as both Kris and Naomi, holding a shared history with secrets, find themselves within a certain comfort zone.

It’s compelling viewing, if a bit uneasy—not just for the flashbacks to those early COVID days of respiratory machines and people in HAZMAT suits, or the film’s second half, which covers the lack of egalitarianism in the vaccine rollout, and how those decisions ravaged non-Western countries and accelerated the rise in variants.

While billed as an action film, The Contractor proves more suspense thriller in the end.

While Bracken helps create the nightmarish mood, Doupe is left to suffer its wrath and humanize the ordeal by struggling to readily believe the unfathomable.

To say Soft & Quiet is designed to get your blood boiling is an understatement—it makes its intentions very clear when a pie for the meeting is unwrapped, revealing a swastika.

Where the narrative’s bookends highlight the psychological and emotional toll of what happens (along with the whys), the bulk of the runtime is spent pretending as though the survival aspect of the journey is as captivating.

The easy-breeziness of it all anchors this whole film’s appeal. There’s no brand to gravitate to or dopamine reward for recognizing things you grew up with––just charisma, comedy, and star power in spades. In that respect, the most wondrous thing about The Lost City is that it even exists.

A rare and elusive sense of myth is captured in The Tale of King Crab.

The film’s final revelations are underdeveloped and underwhelming, wrapping up events neatly in a way that lacked the humor of earlier scenes.

I Love My Dad is as funny as it is mortifying, with Oswalt as a kind of sociopathic Cyrano de Bergerac justifying his behavior in the name of becoming closer to his son.

There’s a sense of this being more of a first draft of a stronger picture, one that could have built out those concepts into something more substantive, as opposed to merely scratching the surface. Nevertheless, it’s an entertaining watch, with plenty of peculiar touches.

You can’t help be inspired by their courage under fire from all angles. Seeing these women smile in the faces of men telling them what they’re doing is wrong or refusing to understand the nuance of something as simple as filler shots for professionally edited interviews is as potent as them giving each one the middle finger since their presence in the news world is that and more on its own.

In 2022 it’s a true gift seeing a film so unafraid of being as lurid, provocative, and unabashedly horny as Deep Water. Perhaps it took a seemingly retired master of the genre to resurrect the erotic thriller, and hopefully this somewhat buried release won’t cause people to miss it, or for its cultural footprint to not stand the test of time as it deserves.

The stakes are low, drama minimal, structure formless. It makes for a viewing experience that is occasionally enjoyable and largely unengaging.

The film may be Linklater’s warmest and most nostalgic precisely because of its specifics.

The unassuming man in the corner is unexpectedly thrust into the spotlight and he handles the pressure with aplomb, ducking and dodging and building a new narrative. It’s a role that demands a presence such as Rylance because the whole is very theatrical in its one-set staging.