It’s not just the premise that makes this work, but also the execution of light comedy and heavy horror. The humor is humorous, the horror horrific. Happily draws from genre conventions but feels completely fresh. It’s a trip, and if you’re willing to follow that trip to the end of the road, it’s a trip worth taking.

It’s missing bite, but you’ll appreciate its tender humors all the same.

Devos keeps her character’s unreliability and self-disappointment relatable, and falling backwards into a new lover is something that Devos captures beautifully with her uncertain facial expressions and hungry eyes.

Creative Control has a lot to say, and style to spare, but stronger performances and better-drawn characters could have made its message even more effective and enjoyable.

If giving the public more of what they want is the real game here, that could certainly be accomplished without all the puffed-up verbiage. Peedom’s greatest asset is her treasure trove of eye-popping nature photography — true reverence for the sacred rivers means allowing them to speak for themselves.

Taika Waititi’s self-proclaimed “anti-hate satire” “Jojo Rabbit” exists in service of a single idea, a notion so desperately idealistic that it lands somewhere between naïveté and disingenuousness.

The scattershot Mother Mary can never effectively find the connective tissue between different modes of storytelling. To put it in musical terms, this is less a mixtape and more of a playlist on a chaotic shuffle.

The difference between Lights Out and any other mainstream horror movie is that it actually uses the dark as the center of its plot, organically drawing out the majority of its jump scares in the process.

It is certainly too long and too messy, too indulgent in some parts and too starved in others to be an unqualified success. But the surprise of it is that there are times, like the inspired first act, when it really does work, when it seems to have a kind of manic energy, a sheer joy at existing, which certainly makes it a far more engaging picture than Gilliam’s last.

Clint may be playing the hits in Cry Macho, but boy, are the notes lovelier than ever.

Despite some creative missteps, there’s still some fight left in “Christy” and Sweeney to make it to the next round.

What My Best Friend’s Exorcism excels at is demonstrating that while demons are scary, a world without your best friend is even more terrifying.

Even with the real-life nature of the narrative, this is decidedly a minor tale with minimal stakes.

It’s not like “The Artist” was gritty, but Populaire is so cotton-candy breezy it makes the Best Picture-winner look like “The Panic in Needle Park.”

As a piece of filmed entertainment Snowden is certainly a watchable endeavor, but Stone and screenwriter Kieran Fitzgerald’s script is often an odd mix of hero worship, conspiratorial thriller and cringe worthy dialogue.

Mia Wasikowska and Jessica Chastain both shine as the love interests for Jack and Forrest respectively, allowing those characters to have something beyond their business to be fighting for, with the skill of both performers allowing them to be more than just window dressing.

It’s rare for a film to so boldly depict shamanic experience as Nocebo does here, where ritual and sacrifice open up relations with enigmatic and powerful forces in unseen realms.

Hanks brings to Clay a nervous energy, a sense of desperation to even his most outwardly optimistic of gestures, that nevertheless always seems tempered by a more sober inner awareness of his own failures. It’s a remarkable performance in a film that is unworthy of it.

The pleasures found in The High Note are many and often minor; Ganatra builds the film on casual chemistry between Johnson and Ross, with Harrison Jr., fresh off of his 2019 one-two punch of “Luce” and “Waves,” popping up as Johnson’s alternative foil.

All told, “Eden” is deeply engrossing throughout and is a compelling look at nasty, vicious characters cracking under trying conditions. The fact that all of this really happened makes this bizarre tale that much more intriguing.

It’s a reminder of what a tremendously talented writer and director Kiyoshi Kurosawa is, and hopefully we’ll see him venturing back to the big screen sooner rather than later.

The problem is that the movie becomes more focused on diagnosis than character, and so what eventually unfolds is a meandering picture that only too late in the game leans toward highlighting any kind of thematic undercurrent while introducing romantic interests for the leads that do little but pad out an already too long running time.

Knives and Skin presents an unsettling mix of girlishness, macabre, sweetness, and despondency best encapsulated in a nail polish color sported by one of the characters: Rotting Corpse. Its humans are alien, its script is bizarre, its visuals are gauche. But this so-wrong-it’s-right feminine dirge puts the “fun” in “funereal.”

Too much of Moana 2 is simply far too familiar to make it anything more than a convenient escape.

Chris Farley deserves a film that can see him for his gifts and his flaws. So, while I Am Chris Farley is an interesting portrait of a comedian, here’s to holding out for something more.

When given the space to explore the knottiness of being a gay man in a world taking but tentative steps toward recognizing the community’s full humanity, Luke Evans provides the complex representation that audiences are craving.

Each scene is a brisk vignette of deadpan reversal, often involving a running theme of miscommunication.

The problem, unfortunately, is that Hope Gap is based on Nicholson’s play “The Retreat from Moscow” and the proceedings never really leaves the theater. Despite the director’s attempts to throw in [a few] drone shots to break up the drama and make the affairs inherently more cinematic, there are few scenes that don’t seem as though they would be more intriguing played out in front of a live audience.

As epic, grandiose, and emotionally appealing as the previous pictures, The Hobbit doesn't stray far from the mold, but it's a thrilling ride that's one of the most enjoyable, exciting and engaging tentpoles of the year.

An old-fashioned tale of heroism in the face of insurmountable odds, The Finest Hours is never less than aggressively hokey and manipulatively sentimental — and, in the end, better off for it.

There are pockets of joy and wonder, but they’re not quite enough to let “Riddle of Fire” stand shoulder-to-shoulder with the cinematic classics that inspired it.

The Trust is many other things — darkly funny, flawed, with a eminently watchable dynamic between Cage and Wood — but from frame one it reasonably entertains, while its characters have nothing but contempt for one another.

A halfway interesting story with a few too many ideas and a lack of tonal cohesion.

Always energetic like the wild whoop of a bachelor party, the lights burn brightest when The Night Before indulges in big goofs and kooky tangents.

What Blue Bayou does wonderfully in these quiet moments is illustrate that being Asian is not a one-size-fits-all identity but a vast tapestry of different cultures.

Fading Gigolo is mostly an inoffensive trifle, slightly undone by its lack of focus and mishmash of genres that don't quite come together. But it's breezily told and acted, with some decent laughs and unlike many comedies these days, it actually cares and respects the characters and the consequences of what they go through.

Moore’s movie may not seem to make much sense...but he does set up bits at the beginning that do come to pay off in ridiculous ways, and cinematographer Lucas Lee Graham pulls off the commendable feat of shooting the film with some margin of legitimate composition in spite of the crew’s apparent guerrilla antics.

Still The Water is at its enchanting best when depicting the mysteries of death and the conflicts of trying to come to terms with it.

The Greasy Strangler is utterly honest, to the point of purity. For all its idiosyncrasies and blank lack of comprehension with respect to any taboo, this film believes in its corrosively yearning inhabitants, their unrefined desires and untrained bodies.

Charlie Harper is a fine romantic melodrama.

As much as Charlotte Salomon’s life is inherently worthy of admiration, and that it’s a valid creative choice on the directors’ part to make a tonally modest and straightforward depiction of the events, one can’t help but yearn for a version where her oeuvre and its stylized interpretation of her intimated universe had been a more deeply intertwined with how her prolific and unimaginably tragic story was told.

Gemma Bovery attempts to bring new heat to an old story, but mostly winds up cooling on the sill.

Not unlike the on-screen pair, Mickey (Sebastian Stan) and Chloe (Denise Gough), Papadimitropoulos excels in exploring the couple’s carnal journey but can never quite hit a groove when it comes to finding stability in their cohabitation.

The film plays nary a note of reprieve and the dank aesthetic does nothing to help the mood. “Low Down” is unequivocally a downer.

There’s never too much at stake for the princesses or the audience, but it makes for a fine diversion from the realities of life and history.

At every turn director James Mangold desperately wants to recapture the glory of old-school Hollywood filmmaking, but turns, painstakingly to the worn-out tools of present-day tentpole moviemaking.

A sledgehammer to religious hypocrisy, Retaliation uses symbolism to recreate, visually, the trauma a child endures when molested by a priest.

Will it win over people who didn’t get on board for the first film? Probably not. Will the film’s darkness appeal to those wanting more of the same? It won’t be everyone’s cup of tea but that’s not the movie’s fault. Breathtaking and bold, Wicked: For Good is an epic and emotional event that will delight and enchant fans.

In an era marked by omnipresent terror and universal doom, 7500 sparks fear and soothes anxiety in the same breath. Although the film utilizes violence as its foundation, 7500 promotes the idea that heroes exist everywhere, proving that, even amid turbulent opposition, survival, and endurance are sometimes the bravest acts people can ever accomplish.

The Lords of Salem is a product of Zombie’s better creative impulses, so it’s ok that it also features several of his worse indulgences, too.

It really is charm that drives the feature, with Walken pleasingly zipping around on screen while the rest of the cast gamely rally around him, particularly Heard and Garner, who would likely still be plenty of fun in even a Walken-less feature.

The longer There There goes, the more it meanders and never into the realm of anything particularly funny or compelling. Instead, it plays mostly like a series of exercises – in writing, acting, and covid-era production. It feels like a movie Bujalski made to make a movie. Which is fine for him but doesn’t offer much to the rest of us.

The film's got one of the cleverest, and most satisfying ambiguous endings of any film all year.

It's a very competent black comedy, one that should please audiences looking for something with some bite.

The meat of the film is sadly, a tedious misstep for a director who, even when he's experimented in the past, has generally come up with something more interesting than this. It is, however, still better than "9 Songs"

In the depths of the abyss below, The Gorge mostly turns into a high-concept action film that’s so dull, predictable and ugly to look at it’s extremely easy to tune out and have your mind go on autopilot while the otherwise charismatic Teller and Taylor-Jones are wasted.

An incredibly ambitious film that, at times, astounds and then somehow can’t completely stick the landing.

Freyne obviously intends all this as a grand allegory for refugee crises/immigration politics, but the logic applied to anti-immigration politics simply does not apply to anti-Cured politics. The allegory doesn’t track, and neither does the movie’s internal logic.

As compelling as R100 is in spurts, it's ultimately an exercise in excessiveness that only a niche audience will be able to fully stomach.

For as impressive and smart as the film is throughout, the weightlessness to the drama keeps it just out of arm’s reach of films that masterfully examine loss like “The Changeling,” but the craft at least firmly plants it in the upper-tier of contemporary horror remakes.

By the end of The Incomer, Paxton makes explicit that this is a story about making decisions from an outlook that favors hope over fear. And, at least for the duration of the film, he creates an imaginary universe where such a choice feels both logical and lovable.

Comparisons to Adam McKay‘s “The Big Short” and “Vice” are unavoidable. But though The Laundromat is similarly breezy, unsubtle, and disposable—it is not, we’d wager, one of the Soderbergh films that will best stand the test of time—it is still a better movie.

It’s not a bad movie by any means, but in its attempts to plant a seed audiences may remember in years to come, it’s a misfire.

Chastain is as good as ever, but it’s a shame that such a gripping, tender, and vulnerable performance is lost in a period drama as flat as this one.

If the audience can look past the maudlin conception, certain insights are definitely to be had from this flawed portrait of an autistic child and his family’s attempts to give him a good life.

Ultimately The Last Letter From Your Lover is exactly like the beach read from which it was adapted: lavish, breezy, and inconsequential.

While the film’s more artistic sequences feel out of place and not entirely thought through, Diana Silvers and Kristine Froseths’ performances make the ballet dram compelling, though not entirely en pointe.

The anger within this movie becomes muted along with its thrills. Anvari has proven to be a roller coaster horror filmmaker who should flourish with such freedom, but he loses the momentum here by his own design.

It is very much a first film, albeit one of rare ambition, and there's every reason to think that Benson will nail it next time around. The film's absolutely worth watching for the performances alone... But in and of itself, the "Them" version of The Disappearance Of Eleanor Rigby doesn't quite add up to the sum of its parts.

The trick the director pulls off is that “Lace Crater” weaves a comedic touch throughout the film, keeps the audience compellingly off balance when it pitches toward horror, and puts together a picture that slyly has much more going on beneath its laid back surface.

Sure, the story hangs on by the thinnest of threads, it loses momentum in the second act, and one or two of the songs are just a bit too repetitive. Then again, you’ll laugh. Likely a lot.

It's the sort of film where music montages are used like wallpaper to take narrative shortcuts and minimize messy conflict.

A minor effort at best, and disappointingly lacking a sense of energy or intent, Me And You is Bertolucci exercising his filmmaking muscles, but not flexing them.

Chunks of childhood trauma, a dash of the opioid crisis, a few drops of environmental distress, and Native American mythology swim together in a foggy concoction of a plot without meaningfully merging.

There is a kernel of an idea in Cano and Craig’s screenplay that’s worth exploring. The movie feels like it could or should be great, but it took a wrong turn somewhere on that dark road.

It’s all largely an ugly, vulgar, vacuous time that’s disposable and never as amusing as it clearly thinks it is.

The Grand Seduction reeks of a pleasantness that makes for a very soothing watch. The lack of character depth and the contrived plot won’t be placing it near any top ten lists, but there are far worse ways to spend two hours in a theatre these days.

Katz, with the help of an inspired cast and an emotionally intelligent and mature screenplay, has succeeded in depicting the trials and tribulations of adults who, all for respectfully different yet equally weighty reasons, often make a three-year-old the most mature person in the room.

Perez appears content with representing UFW's past strikes and boycotts like a segment from the History Channel, while having the interviewees—relatives, people who worked closely with Chavez—focus on how much good Chavez has done, rather than how he has impacted them.

A film which for the most part is enervatingly classic in format: stately, reverential despite the conflicting accounts the various narrators give of Hong's motivations, and often quite dull, despite its focus not on her work or talent but on the more salacious and controversial aspects of her personal life.

Marked with a conveyer belt quality, Kodachrome is every indie dramedy you’ve seen before, just like more of you’ll see after, and unlikely to create a cherished memory that you’ll want to revisit.

The film’s saving graces is not only Ahmed, who, as you’d expect, elevates the material every chance he gets, but his on-screen connection with Chauhan. Somehow, the relatively unknown Canadian actor gives one of the best performances from a young actor in recent memory.

Fey's work is strong, yet it's difficult to squash the impression that this could be a more powerful movie, and an even more significant showcase for Tina Fey.

It isn’t pretty — it’s by turns confusing, exhilarating, depressing and deflating. But then again, so is high school.

Snyder’s best movie since his debut, the zombie film “Dawn Of The Dead” (2014), Army Of The Dead is tremendously compelling and deftly navigates a lot of different tones, even if it quickly leaves more interesting ones behind. Largely captivating and thrilling, for all is gore, darkly twisted comedy, and delicious tension— surely something satisfied audiences will walk away with—there’s also a minor but palatable sense of loss and melancholy. One that echoes the hardships of the pandemic age and ruthless American capitalism and gives the film some socio-political edge.

Macdonald’s unique direction and Ronan’s jittery performance makes the film a worthy watch

What you’re left with is a mixed bag of colorful, bizarro superhero world-building and threadbare characters that leaves the viewer with little-to-no interest in what happens next.

Arcadian is more than a mere horror film; it’s a haunting meditation on the fragility of humanity and the enduring power of hope in the face of despair. It turns out that mixing heart with horror still works.

Bad Words wants so desperately to be funny that there isn't much time left to make any logic out of the story.

While stylishly capturing the verve, exotica, and free-spirited mojo of swinging '60s London, uber-prolific English director Michael Winterbottom's portrait of legendary U.K. smut impresario Paul Raymond is otherwise a shallow misfire.

Minghella surely knew that what he had here was a familiar story, but despite his gritty and admirable direction it fails to break the traditional formula.

A very routine twelve rounds of tragedy, resilience and redemption, the boxing film Southpaw is a conventionally told dramaturgy high on intensity, but low on human insight or novel ways to tell a familiar story.

Landon uses this winning sequel opportunity to not merely redo his refreshingly animated original film but challenge it— building upon its kooky, evergreen foundation and expand the story in scope, scale, genre, and tone.

With a film like Anniversary, any ideas formed from the jump best take occupancy at the door. This is not meant to establish an unexpectedly entertaining journey or incredible third-act twist, but rather something far more frustrating.

With a blitz of talking heads and graphs and technical jargon, Money For Nothing can be exhausting viewing at times, and it's certainly not the most cinematic experience... But it's never unclear.

This adaptation of Ransom Riggs’ children’s-lit novel offers up merely serviceable studio spectacle, minus any of Burton’s former malevolent mad-genius spirit.

It’s a sequel that, over a tighter running time, kicks against the law of diminishing returns, and only succumbs to it after a fight.

Though it delves into a number of topics beyond fashion, it refrains from going underneath the glossy surface. It will appeal to fans of Wintour’s brand and style devotees, but it likely won’t make too many converts outside her kingdom.