It doesn’t feel as fresh as the winning original, but it also never plays like a desperate cash-in, which immediately makes it better than a lot of Disney’s recent output. But is it worth seeing? Sure. Why not?

As usual with the Knives Out series, Johnson stays well out ahead of his audience, and Craig gets more than one delightful drawing-room moment when he pulls together the elusive facts of the case.

Sweeney’s transformation is more than just physical. She’s convincing as both the scrappy kid no one expected to go anywhere and the swaggering superstar who began throwing verbal blows at opponents.

Trier gives all four of these characters—and the actors who play them, all brilliant— the space to process their related sets of unsettled emotions.

Die My Love is ultimately a more insightful film about motherhood than marriage, but the sheer force of Ramsay and Lawrence’s collaboration turn Grace into an essential woman under the influence.

There’s another level to it as well: Even while laying bare the mechanics he would use to tell a story likely to trip viewers’ bullshit meters and calling out one genre cliche after another, Zodiac Killer Project almost works as a compelling true crime doc anyway, up to the way it repackages a crushing anticlimax as a thrilling conclusion.

The sturdiness of Elphaba and Glinda’s bond throughout these tragic miscues—and Erivo and Grande’s fine dramatic and vocal performances—give this rickety enterprise a solid foundation.

One of the film’s greatest strengths is its refusal to oversimplify the matter and a script that allows Turner, Teller, and Olsen to make their characters more than mere type

Though Baumbach lays the groundwork for a satire of Hollywood excess, he instead delivers a familiar but elegant depiction of successful men reflecting on choices they can’t undo, the damage created by those decisions, and the limited time they have left to make right what they still can.

The singular word “portrait” isn’t quite right, however. Both Whishaw and Hall deliver lovely, tender performances that capture the friendship between the writer and her subject.

Predator: Badlands may be formulaic and a little cutesy, but its relentless crowd-pleasing instincts wear down your defenses. You feel like the Dek to its Thia.

Though told largely in chronological order, Train Dreams conveys Robert’s experience less by a story with a beginning, middle, and end than a collection of moments from his life, puzzle pieces Bentley renders with great beauty and occasional moments of horror.

It’s fitfully inspired in stretches, as Jude runs various creative scenarios through a mirthless AI generator, but as a viewer, being inundated with crap still hurts, even when there’s a satirical purpose.

That Nouvelle Vague looks like it could have been made alongside Breathless is its most immediately striking feature. From the aspect ratio to the film stock, it’s virtually indistinguishable from a contemporary production. The tone, however, is wry, knowing, and resolutely comic, even occasionally sentimental.

At once uncomfortable and compelling, Bugonia builds toward a wild and misanthropic final act that plays like nothing less than a sincere rejection of humanity itself. By that point, Lanthimos has kind of made it feel like we have it coming.

Cooper leans toward a chronicle of Springsteen’s depression, which makes sense given his emotional state at the time, but too much of the film is explained when it’s better dramatized. The act of turning angst into music is more dynamic than finding every source for it.

Derrickson’s instinct to lean on a low-res, Super 8-style camerawork in the film’s frequent dream sequences is fitfully effective, rendering nightmares like spools of home movies that have been decaying in the attic. But here, he’s having to reanimate a dead property.

It Was Just an Accident is both typically uncompromising and, for long stretches, disarmingly funny.

Once the film finds its true hero, it becomes exactly as good as the idea of a del Toro adaptation promised: the defining 21st century cinematic Frankenstein.

It is shocking in its revelations, thrilling in its possibilities.

Through it all, Reznor and Ross keep the music pulsing in time to the action and for some thrilling, surprisingly long stretches, that’s all the movie needs.

While Luna and Tonatiuh play characters transported by movies, the film in which they appear never quite summons the same power.

The cast does well to make the button-pushing read like complexity—Stuhlbarg, the secret MVP of Call Me By Your Name, acquits himself best here, too— but it all looks a bit like Guadagnino is pleading for mercy for adults who should know better. No, thanks.

The film’s structure comes with some built-in restrictions, limiting how well we can get to know House of Dynamite’s many characters, who range from low-ranking soldiers to the highest rungs of power. But it also challenges a first-rate cast to tease out their characters’ hidden depths.

Turning Manchester’s story into more of a drama than a comedy feels counterintuitive, and Roofman can feel a little slow and gloppy for missing the laughs. Yet Tatum and Dunst are deeply invested in their roles, and Cianfrance loads up on ace character actors.

Portraits of maternal ambivalence are rare in cinema and Bronstein pushes it to the limit, turning motherhood into a white-knuckle experience with the highest of stakes.

It’s the work of someone who didn’t take the time to realize he had nothing to say, then decided to say something anyway.

Hawke’s ability to convey flashes of self-awareness elevates his performance from a brilliant impression to a fully realized tragic portrait.