While the first hour or so is compelling, the problem with The Policeman’s Lineage isn’t so much the fact that it’s an amalgamation of various genres and tropes, but more that there is little coherency when the film transitions between them, creating a feeling of whiplash.

Following Pixar’s two most refreshing releases in years, “Luca” and “Turning Red,” both of which were deemed unworthy of a full theatrical release, it’s difficult not to perceive “Lightyear” as a far less compelling and safe bet. How tiresome it is that most studio productions must now exist as part of a larger multiverse in order to merit exposure. In the end, “Lightyear” reveals that today, given Disney’s business model, “to infinity and beyond” really only means to the inevitable sequel.

There’s simply too many stories to contain about the Chelsea, but “Dreaming Walls” does well to show how the ghosts of the residents past can, hopefully, inform the hotel’s future.

While you will get sturdy popcorn pleasures from Spiderhead, you’ll also leave wondering what more possibilities Hemsworth holds as an actor once he lays his hammer down.

Some of Novak’s camera sense, particularly early on, betrays his sitcom roots, and he commits the classic rookie mistake of going on three or so scenes too long, tying up inconsequential loose ends. But he crafts a good mystery, consistently engaging and entertaining, and the thoughtful turns of the last confrontation are sly, smart, and knowing.

While it is great that the documentary gives their commitment to direct action proper respect, it sometimes downplays exactly how important the work of activists who got abortion legalized in states like New York, or who got Roe through the court system was. Where it does succeed well is in showing the socio-economic disparity in access to safe abortions, which cost roughly 5 times as much as a month of rent.

Like a Spider-Man pointing meme doomed to continue eternally, ‘Dominion’ points to the terrifying possibility that nostalgia might serve as a renewable resource for Hollywood. (Ironic, given the fossil-fueled power of ‘Jurassic.’) Trevorrow gives audiences what they want – or, at the very least, what the studio bosses at Universal think they want. But at what cost?

Interceptor is about putting on a show, and Pataky has the muscular charisma to carry it.

There’s enough craft and heart involved in “Hustle” to keep it from feeling like just a league PSA or an algorithmically crafted Netflix product. Those elements go a long way, but solid execution can only take a well-worn playbook so far.

Dashcam delivers a relentless, evolving monster movie that utilizes familiar genre tropes from various influences, including “REC,” “Chronicle,” and “Paranormal Activity: The Marked Ones.” However, it brings enough to the table that doesn’t feel familiar to make it work effectively.

The film’s very long takes feel extremely rich with meaning and texture even as they often show a whole lot of nothing.

At its best, a welcome addition to the increasing number of contemporary Native American stories seen in the films such as “Songs My Brother Told Me,” “Wild Indian” and FX’s “Reservation Dogs.” At worst, it’s a disjointed narrative that sadly overstays its welcome.

It is a moving healing journey, but one that feels almost too smooth, a best-case scenario with few bumps in the road and, more significantly, very few surprises.

While the entire cast is superb, it’s the rich performances from Watson and Mescal who elevate the material beyond that aforementioned air of familiarity.

'Trouble in Mind' barely feels like a movie at all. ... Absent any contemporary reflections by either the subject or outside observers, we’re left with no real idea how anyone feels about Jerry Lee Lewis and his exploits on either side of the camera.

A consistently funny yet narratively undercooked coming-of-age story.

The filmmaker’s tart and scabrously funny (both literally and figuratively) sophomore feature is a pointed portrait of a toxic relationship and a razor-sharp evisceration of those warped by a victim mentality.

While More Than Ever spends much of its time concerned with Hélène’s way of dealing with her illness, the film is a love story at heart.

The Five Devils feels like the inevitable encounter of indestructible drives, which send sparks flying both when they are satisfied and when they are denied.

Like the discreet, uncluttered canvass of her works— minimalist, spare, and with just enough inviting details to inspire your curiosity—Reichardt leaves generous space and room for the viewer to contemplate. And I would argue the captivating and delicately considered Showing Up leaves much to consider about why we make art and what we’re trying to say while making it.

Dhont, who displayed an impressive artistic vision with his feature and slightly problematic debut “Girl,” has pulled off something miraculous with his sophomore effort.

Absorbing and heartwarming, it’s easy to forget that this tender drama is about human trafficking.

Despite its nearly three-hour runtime, it never overstays its welcome and plays out beautifully, maintaining a gripping tone and complex narrative about an ordinary family that doesn’t fall into cliches or repetition. Roustaee’s filmmaking is subtle yet leaves a lasting impression, solidifying him as one to watch.

The film ends on a slightly too simplistic, almost crass note regarding that point, but it cannot take away from its overall highly sensitive and formally rigorous exploration of nostalgia and of the other, different relationships people can afford to have with their past.

It is this direct line to the characters that keeps the film relatively interesting, even as it does become rather exhausting to watch these very kooky and carefree young people gallivanting about.

There may be romantic closure at the end of “Fire Island” but not a sense of finality, just a vision of endless possibilities—a horizon tinted by a sunset that stretches as far as the eye can see.

Tori and Lokita puts its characters through hell to elicit some tears and send an urgent message. You may consider this an empathetic film — exploitative might be the better word.

"Look at Me” provides a fascinating overview of Onfroy’s meteoric rise in the music industry, while also broadly touching on the various legal issues, including appalling allegations of abuse, that dogged his career.

As a straight-forward thriller, Holy Spider checks off all the boxes that make it an intriguing watch: it maintains a tense tone and has a gripping plot, it transforms into a courtroom drama halfway into its run, and features gritty and stylish visuals.

When you’re this good, the weakest entry in your filmography can still be largely inoffensive, far from fiasco territory. Even so, there’s only one person doing it like Claire Denis, and now we must wait even longer to be taken once more to the heights of insight, emotion, and style only she can reach.

Luhrmann sees the chief utility of Elvis (or “Booby,” as his loved ones called him) as a pedestal for his everything-all-the-time maximalism, the King of Rock and Roll’s taste for excess in harmony with the Aussie auteur’s desire to shove shock-and-awe cinematic effect down his viewers’ throats until we choke to death on whip zooms.

Eo is a joyful, experimental, and strangely moving piece of filmmaking that doesn’t always take itself seriously—yet it is nothing if not sincere.

The witchy atmosphere Jenkin conjures is spine-tinglingly devilish, the poetic manifestation of the subject’s deep grief, ever-ambiguous and frosty, taking on the aching melancholy of loss.

Saleh’s film works on many different levels because it’s a layered blend of various elements from different genres. He has crafted a spy thriller that succeeds as a coming-of-age narrative and can also be an entertaining film that keeps you captivated up until the final breathtaking moments.

The Eight Mountains is a sentimental ode to those singular friendships we make in our lives, the kind that can’t be severed by any amount of distance, physical or temporal. Even when there’s so much left unsaid, it’s the comfort they find in each other that resonates most.

Decision to Leave is ultimately a seductive romance, one made all the more fascinating by the boundaries the characters tread but never dare cross. Stories of longing are so tantalizing because they hang in that gray space of potential. The build-up is often more gratifying than the release, and Park wrings it for all its worth.

The scope shrinks in the final third, as Morgen seemingly retreats into a more comfortable linear chronology — the last twenty years of his life blast past as quickly as his first — but whew, this is one helluva technicolor starship.

Just as [Cronenberg’s] characters can live in a suspended state of rot, he can thrive within a world and culture in its death throes. In his reenergized perspectives on degeneration, he’s created one last safe haven for his fellow degenerates.

“The Bob’s Burgers Movie” is nevertheless satisfying for its undiminished comic brilliance throughout, and for how confidently its sensibility transitions into big-screen entertainment.

The power of Mungiu’s work is his writing. Like much of Eastern European cinema of the past decade, he’s crafted a morality tale that should prompt a viewer to take a look at themselves in the mirror wherever they may live. And if it ends without any hint of resolution? With barely a glimmer of hope? So be it.

Corsage succeeds precisely by ditching the myth of objectivity in favor of portraying a woman eternalized by the glory and dolor of her imperfections.

More impressionistic and less definite than a diagnostic, our understanding of why the two protagonists behave the way they do builds up cumulatively rather than didactically. It generously makes space for the entirety of their lives and histories and allows for the possibility of change.

Bold acrobatics in editing and ambitious creative choices feel all the more superfluous next to Mescal’s effortless charisma.

As Sandra, Seydoux puts forward a delicately incandescent performance portraying someone in an unstable state, whose conflicting emotions about what she can’t change overwhelm her.

In the past, Östlund has shown a deft facility in sending up meaty topics, applying granular attention to male ego in “Force Majeure” and art-world pretensions with “The Square.” Here, however, he stoops to the broadness ascribed to his work by its harshest critics, now more parody of himself than parodist.

Prior and Zagorodnii are at their best in casual conversation, either exchanging sheepish glances or knowing pleasantries under the base’s Big Brother-ish nose. But as soon as things get serious or even faintly sentimental, they talk like the guys in the movies.

We never get a full sense of what these people went through after finding out that Cline was their biological father, mainly because Jourdan doesn’t seem particularly interested in unpacking these issues, or giving enough narrative space to explore the psychological toll.

The cumulative merits on display in Miller’s museum of amazement, from the whiz-bang recreations of freakified old-world grandeur to the humbler miracles shared between two wayward souls, we hang on every word of the narration — as sure a sign of a well-spun yarn as any.

Compelling, yet lacking a broader perspective that would have elevated this from book report to a serious and groundbreaking new dialogue, “Diamond Hands” follows the lead of its most vocal subjects: in fast, out faster, and utterly out of its league in a scenario where it could make a difference.

With many successful technical elements that are a perfect fit for the premise, Serebrennikov certainly made an ambitious work, and perhaps there is a great movie hidden underneath this lacking final product, but its constant return to the same subjects without any further analysis becomes quickly tiring.

While the creators do their darndest to make an animated version of “Adaptation,” they’ve instead made an animated version of “Space Jam: Legacy”–a series of callbacks to IP that serves no other purpose than to remind you that they exist.

Wistfully looking back on the past with a mix of affection for those we have lost, a melancholy yearning for the more tender age of innocence, and anxiety and regret for our trespasses, Gray’s stripped-down drama is a clear-eyed and emotionally intelligent work of great empathy.

In “Final Cut,” the realism that grounded the humor of the original film turns into outright cynicism ... The film’s lazy, anti-intellectual and reactionary perspective is felt in the severe lack of laughs.

Despite its pedigree, “Downton Abbey” remains the fanciest of soaps — the kind that Martha Stewart and Oprah Winfrey use — but it’s still a soap. There’s drama and dalliances, and it would all seem so silly if it weren’t for its setting, cast, and budget. Some plot elements are so ludicrous that they earn giggles, but Fellowes makes it so purely enjoyable that it’s hard to complain too much.

It’s unsettling how every minute of this 94-minute flick delivers a new level of boredom. You have to feel for the actors.

As much as “Top Gun: Maverick” whips from a technical, visceral, thrill-making, supersonic-level, the entire endeavor and every little moment of introspection, suffering and determination is all the more accentuated, strengthened and fist-pumpingly good because you care so damn much about the story, the people and their very human concerns.

When Operation Mincemeat is focusing on the nitty-gritty, the clinical elements of the operation and how these people hope to pull it off in a way that doesn’t get people killed, it can be thrilling.

As the clock ticks, the film asks, who can this qualified woman trust, but mostly, we’re just looking at our watch, waiting for the dull torment to end.

In the end, Men works best as a surprising slice of cosmic horror and a showcase for Buckley in a near-constant state of emotional duress, particularly her on-screen screaming abilities.

For all its emotional horrors—witnessing the worst of ourselves and hoping for the best versions of ourselves eventually triumph over our inherent faults—Multiverse of Madness is arguably lacking the humanity, the heart, and soul of Marvel that works so well when balanced with humor and spectacle.

While Trocker attempts to connect the form to the content of the film, he gets lost in his formalist conceits, never creating fully realized characters to hold the weight of his structural choices.

The biographical and fictional afterlives of Monroe are particularly interesting, and probably tell us more about the authors who choose to dedicate their lives to researching her than anything new about Monroe, herself. One wishes that Cooper, and Summers, would’ve realized this.

Brunner puts his ability to invest anything and everything with a malevolent charge to chillingly effective use.

We’re a dozen action thrillers deep now, and you start to wonder: is Neeson really making these for us anymore?

Onoda – 10,000 Nights in the Jungle, which runs two hours and 45 minutes, is an achievement: a moving and multifaceted film about one man’s quixotic attempt at leading a meaningful life.

Writer/director Kate Tsang cleverly straddles childhood fantasy with the baser impulses of adolescence, drawing an angsty portrait of teenage girlhood in transition. But even as a movie geared towards young adults, Marvelous and the Black Hole feels innocent to a fault.

It’s a sweetly funny, damning, and poignant depiction of this very specific time in life–at once angsty and lovely–when anything is possible. And it has a killer soundtrack to boot.

Make no mistake: The Innocents is no young adult novel adaptation, and things get very dark very quickly.

A seemingly straightforward drama that details a complex portrait of a nation, through the journey of a single, determined man.

When the film drifts into the larger discourse of Abercrombie’s fall, it favors simplistic answers — namely the democratization of social media — over a more critical interrogation of why Abercrombie fell, and how they are still trying to claw their way back to relevancy.

Edralin’s Islands is a patient debut that reminds us that while our parents are important, our own happiness cannot be understated or ignored. In this sense, through its final seconds, “Islands” is a life-affirming achievement.

Even though it’s more of a vision board of what it could be, the film introduces a nifty premise that recalls not just “A Nightmare on Elm Street” but how that series was able to make multiple irresistible sequels. Choose or Die is also the rare mid-budget Netflix movie that gets better and better as it goes along, owning its weirdness and not playing it easy.

While a bit too opaque near the end, and perhaps not the horror show that one might expect, it’s nevertheless an impressive debut.

Charlie McDowell’s lockdown project Windfall is a farcical comedy that attempts to have some bite about capitalism.

By showing mainstream audiences what the everyday lives of these young women looks like, and by showing the metaphorical and political significance of reversing the racist tropes that dominate popular culture, the film makes a substantial contribution to the ongoing discussion of North American history generally, and more importantly, who gets to tell their own stories.

Soft and Quiet begins as subtly as its title implies. It sneaks up on you. By the time you realize what it’s actually about, it’s too late and you are swept into a narrative (and a world) that you do not want to be a part of.

It’s good without being elevated or necessarily great. But it has enough scares to qualify as a decent “dark place” movie without breaking the mold.

Meet Me in the Bathroom feels like a surface-level music documentary with little mindfulness for creative expression or the shades of reality outside the fame of its subjects.

A staggering feat of visceral filmmaking, The Northman, like Eggers’ previous films, warrants profound analysis while still delivering a high-octane action odyssey. Some of the flourishes the director opted for, as well as the film’s overall demeanor (neither entirely self-serious nor fully whimsical), may receive mixed reactions. Still what Eggers has ambitiously crafted lands as an invigorating beacon for an industry in need of studio fare with substantial ideas and artistry.

Although some of the emotional and familial nuances are omitted here, as is any attempt to recontextualize the group and its legacy in hip-hop today, the movie has a bounce and a buzz the entire time, as though the frenetic surplus energy of the ’90s had finally found a place to go.

People who hand-wring about movies being dead really need to check this one out. RRR proves that, yes, cinema is alive and well, but only if you’re willing, every now and again, to look past your backyard.

Unfortunately, as its title implies, Meat the Future is more glorified advertisement than deep-dive into the clean-meat movement.

Return to Space is a bit too neatly packaged and overly idealistic about what SpaceX might mean for space travel. By turning their focus up to the stars, the filmmakers, unfortunately, ignore the myriad issues that private space travel creates on earth.

Ambulance is absolutely ridiculous, and undeniably entertaining.

It’s all pastiche; all surfaces with nothing below. And it leaves one cold.

A need for speed works for Sonic the character, not “Sonic The Hedgehog” the franchise itself. The film never feels like it’s thinking beyond the next laugh line. It’s so caught up in the adrenaline rush of the present moment that Sonic The Hedgehog 2 completely loses sight of the endgame.

It can be said, with some certainty, that ‘Fantastic Beasts’ has finally found its footing. This latest entry is the most fun and most buoyant in the relatively young series. And it’s enough to make you actually look forward to a subsequent installment (should there be one) instead of actively dreading it.

A film that takes so many below-the-belt jabs at the idiocy of Tinseltown blockbusters must, at the very least, be a few IQ points higher than the stuff it makes fun of for being stupid.

While Donbass is far from perfect, hiding too much of its story and message in at-times dull and layered absurdity, it nevertheless presents a harrowing picture of how war and nationalism corrupt and degrade places nowhere near the battlefield.

The nicest thing I can say about it is that it’s short.

Lecoustre and Marre have the good sense to avoid ending the film on too positive a note — their protagonist has carried her grief for a long time, and she will not let it go overnight — but in delicate, truthful touches, they suggest for her the possibility of a future

This gripping, taciturn thriller set in a frozen landscape isn’t necessarily any different from the other titles, but the well-crafted drama is a good reminder of how tangible atmosphere can transcend predictable narrative. At least at first.

A thriller of divided ambitions, that earnestly wants to Say Something Important about the mistreatment of combat veterans by the very government that sends them to war, while also flirting with the opportunity for franchise potential, resulting in a film distinctly cleaved in two, unsatisfying halves.

There’s a vague moral here that it’s better to die than be in service to corrupt methods of governance, but “Black Crab” doesn’t do enough world-building for that point to feel adequate. If only Berg had some of Joon-ho’s signature class-oriented relish, this frigid journey might be more worthwhile.

Andrew Gaynord’s All My Friends Hate Me is an incredibly funny look at social anxiety and a send-up to those risks, mixed with a shot of cringe and a dose of horror.

"Under The Influence" gets more interesting once the doc shifts focus from Dobrik’s rapid rise to fame to peel back the performative layers of his act.

Ultimately Spin Me Round is like a bad vacation where even the gorgeous Italian seaside isn’t enough to make the time spent feel worth it.

By combining petty drama, deadpan humor, and the terror of human emotions, the filmmakers effortlessly straddle a liminal space between comedy and horror, never quite tipping their hand too far into either genre.