The film’s saving grace, as you’d expect, is Domingo. He conveys Ruskin’s inherent natural charisma so perfectly that no one will finish watching this film and wonder how such a flamboyant man became such a powerful figure in this homophobic era. Domingo’s performance makes you believe.

It’s not acknowledged enough how difficult it is to make a period piece that doesn’t feel staged or performative. Nichols genuinely captures the spirit of this particular era and keeps your attention even if you never gave a second thought to those packs of bike riders passing you on the highway.

Hit Man finds both comedy and refuge in the elusive nature of identity and acts as a balm in our confusingly performative, deeply unsexy times.

Although it is true that The Beast would greatly benefit from a gentle trimming in its first hour, it is easy to forgive the indulgence when the result is such a remarkable commentary on the looming threats of artificial intelligence and the dangers of glorified emotional numbness.

To call Aggro Dr1ft stupid or silly isn’t wrong, but it is missing the point. The dialogue is incredibly banal and hilariously repetitive, the story a thin assemblage of clichés. But the images!

Through subtle detail, a degree of convenient biopic irreality, and a pace that encourages viewers to think beyond first impressions, the film shows a relationship with elements of abuse that is much more complex than the label often suggests.

The movie is genuinely funny. The characters are well rounded. Giamatti inhabits Hunham so well he could crack zingers in his sleep. Randolph knows exactly what she’s doing and Sessa is just green enough to avoid the affected young actor syndrome.

David Fincher is rarely dull, and The Killer cannot take the director’s filmography in that direction, but it won’t push itself toward the top of his work, either. A competently realized crime thriller made by a technical team just as sharply attuned to details as the director at the ship’s helm, the Netflix production is entertaining but a little orthodox.

The Wonderful Story of Henry Sugar grants Dahl’s work a pop-out book feel in its theatrical storytelling.

This is a swinging-for-the-fences with the bases-loaded type of movie. An irreverent monster of a film that leaves you buzzing. We’re talking “cinema,” baby.

Not only is the film’s portrayal of Felicia tainted by ethnically inappropriate casting, but her character itself is often reductive—she is but the modern wife of a modern man, coming forth with a loose agreement on fidelity that inched Leonard across the finish line of a lengthy road towards marriage.

Not only is Poor Things one of Lanthimos’ most refined philosophical musings, but it is his most accomplished visual work, too.

We’d be reminiscent to not admit this is the sort of movie that’s hard to shake. We haven’t been able to stop thinking about it since. Considering how rare that is, maybe that’s just as gracious a compliment as admitting to bawling while the credits roll.

Like style, one expects an endearing earnestness from a Mann film, and watching emotionally stunted men discuss love or beauty, like Enzo does during the motor discussion with his son, is always delightful. But all this beauty and sincerity gets undermined by strangely unfocused, dispassionate storytelling. And coming from a filmmaker like Mann, that’s a big surprise.

If in his previous films about the regime Larraín often opted for subtlety, in El Conde elusiveness is a foreign notion. It is thrilling to watch the director repeatedly hit the nail in the head without much desire—or care—to engage with subtext.

If this E6 portrait gets anything right it’s the chaotic creativity that seemed to burst out of many of its members like exploding sunlight their bodies could not handle as if something out of a kooky sci-fi film.

It’s a weird movie, to be sure, but never an off-putting one. It’s also one that sometimes feels like a chimera itself, pushing various genres and ideas together without fully synthesizing them. But it’s consistently beautiful, watchable, and a truly memorable debut for Oren.

Normally, ego married with naivety is a bummer. In “birth/rebirth,” it’s gut-chilling.

There’s too much to make it really work.

There are a few rushes in this movie’s incredibly calculated rendition of Mardenborough’s tale, thanks to Blomkamp. But Sony is transparent with this adaptation, which has no ambitions to make Gran Turismo any more challenging than gamer bait.

If anything, the murder is tertiary to the gossipy takes and fanciful camera work — this film is built around vibes, right down to its pulsating score by the electronic musician Koreless and its dancehall end credits.

Heart Of Stone purports to have characters made of sturdy, gritty, golden, unbreakable stuff, but that’s a tagline, not a movie or story; it’s really just flimsy work easily tossed off and broken as it tumbles into the ever-filling bin of barely-one-use Netflix movies.

In this movie’s wise deconstruction of its characters, “Mutant Mayhem” does the seemingly impossible and makes the Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles cool again.

Gladstone manages to sell every emotion, moving from despair to wonder as the journey continues.

They Cloned Tyrone is far from bad, but does require patience and the ability to shed those feelings of “I’ve seen this before” that pop up from time to time. Fortunately, the cast is here to help usher one along and maintain some sort of momentum before the film starts propelling forward on its own.

Only time will tell if The Beanie Bubble represents the final dying gasp or merely the end of first-wave product-driven narratives. But, like Beanie Babies themselves, one hopes that this bubble will burst sooner rather than later.

It’s hard to say if this is worth a view, as die-hard Cage fans might not see anything necessarily new, nor does the overall arc of the plotline break any new ground other than to offer a platform for Cage to again roll out his usual bag of acting tricks.

Cobweb might just fill you with the sadistic glee that you can only get from horror films that push the boundaries of the genre. It’s not perfect. Hell, it might not even be “good.” But Cobweb is an absolute delight and a blast to watch.

Hamm makes himself look bland, which is no small accomplishment. But he’s also smothering much of what makes him an exciting actor.

Winner of the Caméra d’Or for the best first feature film last month at the Cannes Film Festival, writer-director Pham Thien An’s Inside the Yellow Cocoon Shell is a deeply felt three-hour spiritual odyssey about grief in its many forms.

Whether a viewer might be a fan of Wham! or not is ultimately irrelevant, as Chris Smith has produced something as incendiary as any of Wham!’s hits.

The Deepest Breath isn’t hiding the fact that there are daring hazards involved with athletes risking their lives for world records, but it isn't exactly forthcoming either, and the failure to effectively thread that needle is its biggest problem.

Oppenheimer lands with nothing short of the mighty impact suggested by its legendary stature. But Nolan is less interested in reifying myths so much as he’s invested in rectifying them.

Gerwig amplifies this feeling of liberation through understanding one’s confinement to Messianic lengths by the end of “Barbie.” Yet her and Baumbach’s screenplay foregrounds countless other intimate choices, too. It’s here where characters can opt to see the complexities of their identity as both complementary and independent. This is existentialism for consideration and consumption alike.

While the film elegantly considers the relationship between Feña and their father in the third act, it still feels like something is missing from that aspect of the picture. Especially after Feña’s anxious build-up to his arrival.

Crafted with stillness, empathy, and clever drollness, “Fremont” is so striking it will simply and calmly demand your attention. So seemingly introverted, humble, and unassuming, it’ll force you to lean in, listen and heed all the humorous words of wisdom in its many little moments of providence.

Mamacruz is finely crafted, if not particularly challenging. This film clearly wants to wrestle with taboos, but that revolutionary spirit doesn’t go much further than the basic premise. With such important themes, this film deserves to be a bit more memorable than it ultimately is.

While it may be time, and somewhat bittersweet, to say goodbye to the Lamberts and their parapsychological baggage, this is a well-conceived and impressively executed finale to the saga. It also proves that Wilson has what it takes both behind and in front of the camera. It’s a little scary how multitalented he is.

Largely exhilarating across the board, ‘Dead Reckoning’ is easily the best installment thus far (at least for this writer who has desperately wanted that aforementioned pulse), and perhaps precisely because the movie is actually about something this time.

It’s a striking and intimate piece of cinema, a heartrending tale of living with and battling neurological disorders, the love necessary to endure it, and the anguished dolor of remembrance.

Foster tackles this material in the high-velocity fashion common to many stranger-than-fiction documentaries about people gleefully living outside the law. There is a lot for him to work with, one vivid and outlandish anecdote spilling into another.

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.

The flaccid script, co-written by Stupnitsky and John Phillips (“Dirty Grandpa”), addresses timely subjects like income inequality, helicopter parents, Gen-Z’s addiction to screens, and the compulsion to record everything, but never actually seems to have a point of view on any of these subjects. Instead, this shallow film uses these topical issues to propel its characters from one preposterous comedy set piece to the next.

Hamm can be a stealth comedic force in any project, adding a slight escalation or modulation of the energy level to alter the stakes. He has a unique talent for somehow fusing the comic man and straight man personas into one. Yet Maggie Moore(s) gives him no chance to play either because Slattery cannot decide if his “Mad Men” co-star is the lead of a romantic drama or a heist flick.

He led a fascinating, complicated, often contradictory life, and Rock Hudson: All That Heaven Allowed does it justice.

Shannon’s first feature might begin to sag under the weight of this stilted dialogue and stunted duration, but there is still a lot to admire in Eric Larue. Those qualities are not necessarily all concentrated in Judy Greer, either. Even if the film moves in circles, at least it’s circling something honest and true about spirituality and society alike.

Users is too quiet to say anything provocative, too short to waste your time and too inconsequential to recommend to anyone searching for a fresh perspective on age-old material.

It has taken so long for a feature-length The Flash to finally hit theaters, and he’s too late. Barry is barely the lead character of his own movie.

Rise of the Beasts proves that Bayhem is still strong within the series. Worse, the parts that linger are not the visual signature of sweaty, sun-streaked bedlam. It’s the noisy, nonsensical insistence that submission to sensory overload should outrank any other storytelling consideration.

The filmmakers should take pride in what they’ve achieved, how they’ve earned it, the story they’ve told, and the impeccable, thrilling animation craft that’s collaged, fragmented, and leaps off the screen into your eyeballs. For that alone, they should take a bow.

Breillat’s film is devastating because it exposes at the heart of a seemingly normal family a black hole where empathy should be.

As with her other works, La Chimera is a gift of a film, a philosophically stimulating piece of cinema that has the rare capacity to genuinely transform the way we look at the world.

The people in Sang-soo’s latest are given the time to exist within the frame without having to respond to the sometimes constricting expectations of fiction, the director’s observational style a perfect match to the film’s titular purpose: to observe a not-so-regular day in the lives of regular people.

“Lost in the Night” functions as a study of absence — the absence of others, of talent, of answers, of peace, of love. By amalgamating all those lacks, Escalante reaches an unsurprising yet chillingly effective conclusion.

Unfortunately, Cailley’s conventional cinematic aesthetic is also often akin to a contemporary streaming movie (the first thirty minutes or seem like a television pilot) and while the visual effects are solid, there are few images that will stick with you hours after you’ve left the theater. What saves “The Animal Kingdom” is the genuine horror over this happening to anyone (Cailley gets that right, at least) and Kircher’s fantastic performance.

It is refreshing and endearing to watch as Gondry lets his protagonist, a version of himself, go to the end of his thoughts, even if they apparently lead nowhere.

Frustration is quickly diluted in service of reinforcing the central character’s enlightenment, a repeating arc that muddles the refined treatment of the film’s accompanying themes.

While this doc lacks a few crucial interviews, it nonetheless charts the course of one of ’60s television’s most recognizable stars. For fans of Mary Tyler Moore, James Adolphus’ doc is a must-watch.

Over the course of three and a half hours, Bang both refutes and affirms the criticisms over working conditions for these workers, many of whom are migrants, traveling hundreds of miles (or more) to make money for their families back home.

Its unflinching depiction of the brutal genocide of the Selk’nam people intermingles with pointed contempt for the egotistical yet pathetic colonists.

The couple’s pursuit of true, deep, sincere beauty in all things — in body and mind — despite these obstacles is infinitely touching.

Kubi is an outrageously exhilarating update of the samurai epic, dialing up the blood and guts and sprinkling in the sick humor to match.

While the filmmaker has a better grasp on conveying well-staged melodrama than many of his contemporaries half his age (Fabio Massimo Capogrosso’s score and Francesco Di Giacomo‘s cinematography assist), the heart of the story somehow still gets lost. Even a final scene that should capture the tragedy of this tale falls surprisingly flat.

There is a little bit of everything in A Brighter Tomorrow as it maneuvers through different narratives, jumping from the film production to Giovanni’s film to his domestic life. There are even moments when characters randomly break into song and dance, transforming it into a quasi-musical that doesn’t quite flow well.

In place of new, at least, we get to see Butler in his element as a man of compassion first and blazing guns second.

Despite Ben Hania sticking to her cinematic formula “Four Daughters” is genuinely hard to forget. It will linger with you for days afterward. That’s mostly due to Olfa’s heartbreaking perseverance to find her children and a wee bit of Ben Hania’s storytelling skill too.

Taken as a bone-dry satirical comedy, this would be a cruelly glib treatment of material sensitive enough to merit a trigger warning in bright yellow prior to the opening credits. But this agonizing tour through private agony deserves to be taken more seriously than that.

The use of body horror allegories in cinema to address the physical, physiological, and mental changes brought on by puberty could hardly be called original. However, by delightfully and intelligently remixing symbols and metaphors Malaysian director Amanda Nell Eu refreshes the concept in her zesty debut feature Tiger Stripes.

The film never returns to the strength of its opening scene, and by the end, the spark is gone.

The minor problem of it all is while what Anderson is trying to say can be read across the sky like a beautifully glistening moonbeam; it does often lack the craterous depth of feeling we know he’s capable of when doing his best creative and emotional astrography.

Shot in a way reminiscent of classic ’70s cinema while commenting on the woes of the contemporary, Williams builds a timely film that still feels timeless, an expansive chronicling of a slice of America ripe for many a rewatch.

Its radical sweetness arises from a wellspring of empathy. Its radiant colors and lucid conception of vulnerability in the face of a largely inconsiderate world, sink deep beneath the skin in the liminal space between the soul and the heart that can make animation such a wondrous medium. Berger’s “Robot Dreams” is its stunning reality.

Writer-director Rodrigo Moreno methodically unfurls a genius tragicomedy on the elusive nature of freedom: an idealized state in which, in theory, one does as one pleases at all times.

Its interweaving of powerful performances and spiritual complexity, eventually melded with local folklore, is nothing short of beautiful.

By bringing to the screen a conversation painfully reserved to private spaces built upon the frail structures of shame and guilt without ever losing the type of loving lightness one can only get through unwavering support, Molly Manning-Walker confidently steps out of the gate right foot forward.

At its best moments, the extremely straightforward construction of Cédric Kahn’s The Goldman Case allows for fascinating dynamics and images to occur apparently unforced, as if by themselves, for the viewer to seize on their own.

For a movie that seeks to establish the ferocious fire within the great, shunned Catherine Parr, it doesn’t take long for the flame to fizzle out.

Magic is something that children of all ages desire to experience, and The Little Mermaid has magic to share because Halle typifies that enchantment.

Black Flies offers plenty of nihilistic entertainment. But don’t be too tempted to look for any depth in a film far too comfortable in the formulaic confines.

Triet’s breathtakingly intelligent and subtly perverse masterpiece takes the long way through the cold and the snow to address, in nuanced but never ambiguous terms, the ineffable and irreducible mystery at the heart of deep relationships — between two partners, between parents and their children, between words and the world.

While the Turkish director seems ever-fascinated with gloomy, nihilistic anti-heroes, he does vest more hope in human relationships than usual.

Just because something’s make-believe, whether a creative rendering or the quotidian detail of a marriage, that doesn’t mean it’s any less real. With his masterly manipulation of tone and perspective, Haynes ensures that we can feel that much even as the characters can’t bear to accept it.

We’re implored to never forget through a format that makes particulars prohibitively hard to remember.

The Killers of the Flower Moon, a visceral epic, is the story of the wreckage of a people, the evil in white men’s hearts and the poison they spread, and the erasure that occurs when their stain touches you. It’s powerful, even when you’re left wondering if someone else could’ve spread the gospel.

This is a film you can dissect for hours. A movie full of details and creative choices that will spur debate and passion. Another work of Glazer’s full of images that may haunt you for weeks. And well worth almost the decade it took to get here.

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.

Taking a mental note of every loose thread “Monster” introduces is a demanding task that may confuse some viewers, but it’s an immensely satisfying and emotionally resonant watch to see how the pieces fit together.

Central to the success of Butterfly Vision, however, is Burkovska: she embodies Lilia with silent rage, her poise broken in fleeting moments, the steely facade dropped for mere seconds at a time.

Perhaps worst of all, the movie is light on the laughs meant to come from trash-talking; the comedy just doesn’t have the crispiness it needs.

If it wasn’t for the highly-publicized scandals that envelop “Jeanne du Barry,” it is likely the film would make a swift turn from the red carpet into ostracism, and while the hubbub certainly delays the process, it will do little to prevent Maïwenn’s dire latest from the merciless hands of oblivion.

Fast X is what it is, and that is an absurdly fun popcorn movie. That is nothing to be ashamed of. If you’re down with that, that’s great. If not, why are you here?

It’s all too passive, and lacking in incisiveness cleverness for its own good, barely served by Day’s nostalgia for better films and voluminous silent stars.

Unfortunately [Lopez's] hampered by a character that is simultaneously overwritten and underwritten, while trapped in a film that never gives any of its characters room for the type of nuance a performance at that register requires.

Everyone knows what a Disney+ movie like this can and can’t do with its young characters, but Alvarez and team push the limits just enough, giving “Crater” a sense of gravity that might just surprise viewers of all ages.

In digging up what seems to be his own personal history, Honoré doesn’t trust the audience fully to fill in those silences.

This is a controlled and impressive debut from Le Bon that hints at talent to come and offers a warm, if not always unique, approach to the growing pains of young love.

Above all, I Used to Be Funny is a fine showcase for Sennott’s considerable gifts.

The puzzling thing about Italian director Gabriele Mainetti’s feature set in 1943 in German-occupied Rome is that, rather than embracing tastelessness a la John Waters, it guns for earnestness despite not having a thoughtful bone in its body.