Rental Family could have gone deeper, darker, and more boldly into the oddities of the human rental market. But that would be a different film. It seems silly to come down too hard on this good-natured comedy-drama––especially for offering a much more impressive performance than the one that earned Fraser an Oscar.

Something feels a tad icky when you’re exiting the theatre of a dispiriting true story and being told you’re supposed to actually feel good.

While Wake Up Dead Man fails to reach the highs of Knives Out and Glass Onion, it nevertheless solidifies Johnson’s reliability to deliver thoughtful thrills.

Van Sant imagines this tale in a way that echoes Dog Day Afternoon: an unhinged and stranger-than-fiction fable about good intentions gone wrong. It’s kind of a hoot.

That most of Hersch’s breakthroughs have been, in one way or another, reported on and drowned out in the media noise is also quite telling: without overtly stating it, the film also undercuts the image of him as a journalistic messiah or prophet-of-sorts: he was simply more persistent.

For all its grandeur and dazzling tableaux, I left the theater a touch agnostic. Unwavering fanatics, no matter their rationale, do not always great protagonists make; even with Seyfried’s remarkable voice, presence, and energy, the music starts to skip.

The most crucial thing that Ozon’s film gets right are the moral, indeed philosophical considerations that build its central character.

The majority of the film is driven by Riefenstahl’s own voice from various recordings. She often comes across as charming and intelligent. That is, of course, what makes her decades of denials and lies all the more disturbing.

A House of Dynamite is a ruthlessly effective thriller, nothing if not timely, and has the potential to be seen by a gazillion eyeballs. These are all good things.

This is a movie that exists for the sake of existing, art for the sake of art: the kind of thing that doesn’t need your attention and isn’t particularly eager to offer a huge amount in return.

For a director whose projects have always tested the medium’s capacity to conjure and make peace with the specters of one’s past, it feels like the kind of moment Romvari’s been working towards from the start.

Baumbach is making his Fellini film, and it’s a joy to watch. There are funny, recurring jokes involving cheesecake and a lonely man never being alone. There are heartfelt, regretful scenes that nearly always involve Sandler, this film’s co-MVP with Crudup. And Clooney is doing both sides of what he does best.

The film’s whole narrative set-up reveals itself flimsy and unconvincing––it doesn’t take much to realize that a conversation between a political advisor and a political expert could never in a million years be so toothless and dull.

The movie never achieves a real sense of urgency, but the fault is not Johnson’s to bear. The actor is relentlessly watchable, disappearing into the role while managing to locate Kerr’s towering vulnerability even as he’s felling doors with a single swing of his fist.

Ballad‘s third act is telegraphed within an inch of its life, and what a joy it is to watch it unfold. With Berger at the helm and Farrell as his lead, there is no semblance of subtlety. No chance of nuance. This is an alcohol-soaked opera, a morality tale dripping in bombast.

The film serves as a lovely reminder of why art is important, how watching something can make you feel, make you understand, make you consider.

Yes, the film is called Frankenstein, but it feels like he never fully deserved the title of protagonist, especially since Oscar Isaac manages to give such a strong performance playing a morally limp man who flew too close to the sun.

Whether it’s a new chapter for Aronofsky or a tangential dip into different territory, Caught Stealing proves the auteur hasn’t lost his touch.

There’s much to like here, but I never felt I was seeing a fully-realized vision.

Cooper makes the very smart decision to tap into the legend of Bruce while keeping things small and grounded. While viewers get some hits, focus remains on character.

After the Hunt aims to tackle our so-called cancel culture, but wrestling with that weighty topic isn’t the same as meaningfully reckoning with it; if there’s anything genuinely uncomfortable about Guadagnino’s film, it’s not button-pushing issues but the reactionary way it squanders them.

If there’s still any doubt that this is a Lanthimos joint, the final montage to wrap up the unpredictable misadventure observes our world with such loving, bleak honesty it can hardly be mistaken for anyone else.

MEGADOC elaborates on what we’ve learned from the clearly partial and biased trade reporting that documented its production. Yet it also isn’t a corrective to that run of media revelations; just by visualizing the mayhem that made Megalopolis can we see that those articles (in the Hollywood Reporter especially) didn’t arise from nowhere.

The style-substance ratio here is still not ideal, but the film offers enough of both for an appealing, intellectually, and emotionally tickling experience.

The film doesn’t work as a thriller for this reason, stretching credulity in how it finds new ways to keep Matthew returning to the fold, and doesn’t succeed particularly well in critiquing the vapidness of modern fame.

Credit to both Weinberg’s no-nonsense performance and the director’s surrealist instincts. There is a late sequence in this film, wherein Tereza visits a floating casino, that contains some of the most vividly beautiful images I’ve seen so far this year.

Terrestrial wears a pitch-black humor on its sleeve, a fact that won’t prepare you for how bleak the filmmakers are willing to run.

This film is often funny and sometimes introspective about this land of screens we find ourselves trapped inside. A bit long in the tooth at times, it is undeniably engaging and reliably weird.