It’s a charming, brightly animated love letter to Hollywood’s heyday and a celebration of the moviegoing experience.

A memorable coming-of-age story, at times beautifully realized and occasionally a little undercooked.

A big, sprawling romantic comedy with large emotions and messy characters and shoutouts to your favorite love stories. The enthusiasm comes across, and it’s infectious even when the movie doesn’t quite work. Which is most of the time.

Toy Story 5' is an easy movie to like. It’s just too redundant to completely respect.

Some cheap, stupid comedies are funny enough to get away with it, and Stop! That! Train! isn’t one of them.

It’s a movie that’s constantly telling you stakes and what the characters want but rarely letting you invest in a shared sense of wonder. Instead, you have a film that announces the connection between reality and imagination without letting the images speak for themselves.

[Michael Sarnoski's] latest isn’t deep enough or captivating enough to make the same impact as his previous movies, but it’s a mature work that makes a valid point, and Hugh Jackman gives an excellent lead performance.

The Furious hits like a sledgehammer — frequently with a sledgehammer — and it leaves a refreshing aftertaste.

It’s so bombastic and enjoyable that it’s easy to forgive that the story doesn’t work. I won’t forget that the story doesn’t work, but it has my forgiveness.

A funny and frightening, heartwarming and heartbreaking, confrontational masterwork that explores our shared experience of the present, and reveals what a morbid mistake it is to expect the frivolity of the past to heal our current pains.

In a genre where differences between most stories come down to small details, the film is a reminder that even seemingly worn-out formulas can work when they’re well executed—and that a seasoned pilot at the helm can make the journey especially enjoyable.

Critics aren’t in on the joke, we are the joke. A bad review for Scary Movie is like giving it five stars.

Travis Knight’s Masters of the Universe is so blah, and so embarrassed of itself, that it could very well be the final nail in the coffin for 1980s nostalgia.

If this movie was nothing but a sightseeing tour of disquieting office buildings Parsons probably could have gotten away with it. But the more 'Backrooms' tries to have a point, the more pointless it feels.

The Breadwinner' has more stale corny bits than a Kellogg’s factory dumpster.

Maras’ sturdy, competent direction isn’t enough to turn 'Pressure' into anything more than a nifty historical anecdote that can’t sustain a feature-length motion picture.

The focused way Wollner writes and directs this ensures that the drama, much like the one memorable early shot, is restrained, never once feeling exploitative of this grief.

A major work played in a minor key, cinematographer-turned-director Marine Atlan’s magnificent, melancholic and moving feature directorial debut La Gradiva is one of those true discoveries that you only get a few times in life.

There’s easily another version of this story that could have been the movie of the week on Netflix, but Mysius and her team are too talented, too adroitly adept at merging the universal emotions of their characters with the cultural specificity of this story, to deliver anything less than compelling.

Zombie projects can be smart, but this project seems too unsure of its own identity to fully commit to the zany ideas Yeon has in store. It would have been better to stick to being brainless.

This is a film of details and detours, digressive above all, cast with non-professionals native to the region. It plays as an ethnographic travelogue, using a potboiler hook for lightly applied narrative structure.

Thea Sharrock’s film effectively skewers institutionalized misogyny and sexist comedy movie tropes, but the message was clearer and more powerful in the original short, which was allowed to be disturbing without also having to be funny.

Even when it does start to eventually run out of steam, Monroe never slows down, making even the quiet moments feel like they could explode at any second. It’s a truly exciting, unpredictable performance that keeps you locked in.

A film about fathers and daughters, men and monsters, mountains of food and clogged toilets, Quentin Dupieux’s farcical pseudo body horror “Full Phil” is the type of movie you’ll either find yourself eating up every minute of or rejecting entirely.

With the help of some sterling actors that include Adriana Paz and Anna Diaz, he takes a small story, tells it without much embellishment and lets the results speak to the state of a fractured and hardhearted world.

It plays as an oral, musical history, rich in period research and detail, laying out its narrative and thematic concerns early and never really moving beyond them.

It’s rife with ingenious and technical marvels and sequences that rank among cinema’s best while also telling a very classical story about honoring those who’ve come before us, making space for the stories of those we may never meet, and acting as a celebration of those who never gave up on their love even when it was punishable by death.

That Marre shoots his bumbling middle-manager with an extraordinarily familiar shorthand of handheld cameras and rapid zooms only sharpens the film’s ironic bite. This is “The Office: Genocide.”

This movie is like a car ride through Cawker City, Kansas, that doesn’t stop at The World’s Largest Ball of Twine.

In Sachs’ spectacular, shattering vision, which he co-wrote with his longtime collaborator Mauricio Zacharias, we witness the stories and the memories that we can only hope our own loved ones will tell of us when we’re gone.

Anchored by raw performances from Léa Seydoux and Niels Schneider, who play various permutations of open wounds, it thrives on its terror by committing so fully to its high-concept thrills. You may feel tempted to pinch your skin, to make sure you’re still in the right body.

In each mesmerizing move of the camera or precisely-framed shot, he draws us in closer and closer until we can practically feel the grass under our feet while he simultaneously keeps his sharp eye on the bigger picture.

Morbidly humorous and shot with such patience as to conjure its latent anxieties up to the surface, Minotaur is a thriller about how the personal always intertwines with the political, and the damning reality that we can never deal with one crisis at a time.

Immaculate and inert, Orphan plays like a Spruce Goose power ballad too leaden to lift.

As that battle settles into stalemate, “Moulin” maintains a somber keel, never curdling into bleakness or hagiography. With escape and release dim prospects, the film plays as a controlled study in self-control — unpacking a form of resistance divorced from action and a kind of fatalism born of genuine hope.

It’s a deft and enjoyable blockbuster, easily the most purely entertaining Star Wars movie since the 1980s, even though it’s hardly the most meaningful or ambitious.

More than the bursts of visceral violence, it’s Refn’s vibrant command of visuals that proves most exhilarating. Even if there was less plot, the consistently dark beauty of the film would be enough to carry it forward.

It’s competently made and well-acted thanks to a blistering performance from Adèle Exarchopoulos, who perfectly embodies the pessimism and stubbornness of thinking you can give up a substance that you feel you’ve formed your soul around, but it doesn’t have enough of a visual or thematic identity to differentiate it from stories of a similar kind.

In Fjord, as in his best work, he builds entire systems that grind his characters down.

The film aims to scale things up with bigger stakes, a broader canvas and more immediate danger. But in doing so, it loses sight of what made this version of the character work.

Hope, the all-time great new action film from writer-director Na Hong-jin, is a glorious genre romp that contains more magnificent moments in its opening act than most do in their entire runtime.

At its best and worst, Butterfly Jam unfolds as a chain of idiosyncratic details and bemused observations.

Though Kreutzer never lets any adult character off the moral hook . . . she also refuses to shade these relationships with outright antagonism. Instead, they are all appraising one another, weighing others’ actions to balance their own ethical scales, and in doing so, trying to better understand themselves. That’s the same reason we turn to art.

Like the run-down carnival in which it is set, Pierre Salvadori’s The Electric Kiss is a little clunky, kind of messy and oddly entertaining.

There’s much to admire in its embrace of a thorny character, its judicious use of music and its control of pace and mood, but it rarely prompts the passion on display in its opening image.

There’s a haunted, ravaged beauty to the film, particularly in the homestretch.

It’s a rich experience for those who can settle into its languid rhythms and reams of dialogue.

For anybody who’s read the other interviews John and Yoko did around that time, there’s nothing terribly revelatory about the conversation in “John Lennon: The Last Interview.” But the immediacy that comes from hearing him talk about it can be thrilling, and Soderbergh’s and Nancy Main’s judicious editing fits plenty of the 165-minute interview into a 97-minute film.

A frequently stunning work of animation that’s also a haunting portrait of isolation, the destructive insidiousness of bullying and our own capacity for cruelty, Kohei Kadowaki’s formidable feature debut “We Are Aliens” is a film of fascinating layers.

Playing like an extended fever dream defined by shallow snapshots of memories, incessant narration by Travolta himself, a gallery of cartoonish, one-note characters, and a poisonous, perfunctory sense of nostalgia, it’s a disaster that leaves no survivors.

Yet for all the sadness at the core of its story, “Clarissa” is captivating in how honestly and openly it confronts that emotion.

It writes what can feel like the equivalent of a hate letter to the movies (or at least the potential for abuse that can come from how they’re made) before eventually coming to his own halting emotional upswing about the enduring power they still hold.

Paper Tiger is still a thriller, because the events that play out on screen wouldn’t allow it not to be. But rarely do you find a thriller with this much heart.

What [Kore-eda] offers is a new way to rethink holding our grief, and the end result is a slight and wistful poem of a movie.

It’s an earnest, heartwarming, and vivacious look at the realities of parenting and a celebration of the warmth and love in unconventional lifestyles. At the same time, Firstman often gets in his own way, commandeering the film to act as PR (or damage control) for himself, rather than following the natural path of this unvarnished story.

Despite being impressively acted and thematically compelling, it avoids wholehearted recommendation due to its uneven repetition of sequences and ideas that make this feel more lugubrious than cohesive.

Every once in a while it’s useful to take note of a film that’s technically competent but utterly uninvolving.

Much like the central sculptures that become the focal point of its best scenes, Kôji Fukada’s “Nagi Notes” is a film defined by a sense that the filmmaker is trying to chip away at something.

"Hit Me Hard and Soft" offers a fiercely personal — and uncommonly charming — look at the relationship that develops between a fan base and an artist whose music doesn’t just express their thoughts or share their sentiments, but makes them feel truly seen.

What happens to these spaces when we feel comfortable in our bodies again? Does resurrection always have to require a type of death first? Is there ever a point in our lives where it’s too late to transform? That the film manages to make room for these ideas while lacing it all with enough tacky genre thrills to make it all palatable and thought-provoking is a miraculous feat in its own right.

Curry Barker’s supernatural nightmare Obsession is a better version of Wonder Woman 1984.

So emotionally, dramatically, philosophically complex that it’s tempting to put on professorial airs and focus entirely on its depth. But it is also, just as importantly, electrifying to watch.

It scrolls past thoughtful ideas, too quickly to fully process them, and the experience is as cacophonous as the typical social media feed. I’ll grant you it’s thematically appropriate but it’s not cohesive filmmaking.

It all makes for a nice movie, and I can be a sucker for nice movies when they’re handled as well as this one.

Mortal Kombat II isn’t the best Mortal Kombat movie, but it’s hard to deny that it comes second. At least with the number 2 and all.

Swapped won’t change the world, probably, but it’s a step above a lot of similar films and an effective fantasy story for all ages.

So what if it could be a little shorter? The length of the journey makes RZA’s destination more meaningful.

It’s easy to forgive cheap aesthetics and a rushed finale when the middle of the flick, the sharktastic bloodletting where no character is safe, is such a hoot.

We like to joke about how "this meeting could have been an email" but if all The Devil Wears Prada 2 can offer is Anne Hathaway, Meryl Streep, Stanley Tucci and Emily Blunt on-screen together again, then this film could have been a Zoom call.

For a while, you think this is a test to see how long the film can extend the trick. But by the half hour mark, you realize that it’s not a trick, it’s the whole damn movie, which relies on the fact that action heroes like John should mostly shut up and that viewers know the beats of these films well enough to do without non-visual exposition.

As cozy farm animal detective stories go, it simply can’t be bleat.

The problem isn’t that the new 'Animal Farm' is unfaithful, it’s that the changes aren’t an improvement.

I Swear is the real deal, that rare biopic that doesn’t just tell a real human being’s story — or worse, give you the superficial, reassuring gist — but invites you into it.

The pieces of this survival thriller don’t work together in any meaningful way, they just occupy the same space, and that makes 'Apex' less exciting than if the filmmakers had just stuck to one of their guns. Any of them.

It’s just feature-length publicity, and it plays like damage control.

Questioning the moral fortitude of these comedies used to be something only critics did [...] Now Roommates is getting in on the act and I respect the film’s sense of introspection. I just wish it had funnier jokes.

Cronin has an uncanny knack for human mutilation, which would probably be a bad thing in any other context, but if you’re making gross-out horror movies, it’s practically a requirement.

The target demographic for Lorne is SNL fans who won’t benefit from a documentary like Lorne.

We’re watching extremely talented artists try to accomplish something grand and potentially embarrass themselves in the process, and it works because they’re committed to taking that risk.

Whether the love story completely works or not, ChaO is such a visual wonder that it hardly matters.

If logic had anything to do with it, that would mean 'Thrash' was a bad movie. But logic has no place in these soggy halls. 'Thrash' may be arbitrary but it’s too energetic to be bad.

Exit 8 isn’t just one of the best video game adaptations. It might actually be the best so far.

A subject as slippery as “cancellation” needs a firm grip, and Hill, who came in for his own public criticism a few years ago, seems to have little worth saying on the matter other than celebrities are as imperfect as anyone else. The lack of specificity makes Outcome painfully broad both thematically and comically where it seems more like a collection of half-sketched ideas of Hollywood life rather than anything substantive about the unique social relationships formed by fame.

You, Me & Tuscany delivers the rom-com meat and potatoes: The beats, the scenery, and the great-looking people consumers expect. But it’s strictly fast food, when the sun-kissed Tuscan countryside, with its porcini, pecorino and Cinta Senese pork was there to savor with a nice chianti.

On one hand, Goldhaber’s film is a terrifying, stark, oppressive horror film that outscares the other modern slashers. On the other it’s an intelligent treatise on the grim obsession we have with being obsessively grim.

So lacking in substance and purpose that after a while you can’t even hear the dialogue over the incessant sound of Aristotle’s ghost punching himself.

It’s disquieting, and even though it’s also riveting, it’s difficult to shake the sense that everyone is getting away with something they shouldn’t.

It’s a sweet, savory blend of oddball mythology and deadpan humor that’s easy to adore, worth many a healing smile.

Although this is a story about innocence lost, the overwhelming impression left by “The Friend’s House is Here” is one of sweetness and hope.

All the inspirational, kitschy parts of your favorite nostalgic fare in a mature, sensitive motion picture with indie credibility. Sure, it’s cheap, but it wears its cheapness like a badge of honor. If this is the future of cinema, I say bring it on.

One of the keys to executing a high-concept premise is knowing when to show restraint, when to say no to an impulse for something aesthetically “cool” if it means crafting a more compelling narrative. That subtlety is in frustratingly short supply here.

At the cost of trying to deliver vibes, it may lose some of the thematic weight that usually accompanies these kill-the-rich stories, but what it lacks in depth it more than makes up for with a thrilling sense of carnage. It’s a raucous joyride unlike any other.

The choreography is expectedly graceful and thrilling. It’s the elements in between the carnage, from underdeveloped characters to a confusing plot, that could have used a few more practice sessions to refine.

It’s only the plot that runs into trouble, since it leads Slanted to carefully tackle some serious issues, but overlook or airball some others. When viewed from different angles the film is either a fascinating success or a gigantic misfire.

There’s an underlying cynicism to The Fox that gives it heft.

It’s not only properly unsettling, making great use of darkness and sound, but also becomes a quietly poetic reflection on loss when you least expect it.

As has been the case with many a horror project she’s been a part of in the past, Samara Weaving’s guttural screams can cover a multitude of sins, but even her fully embodied performance and powers can’t save a movie that mistakes stilted recurrence for high-octane throwback.

The Gates' is constantly on the verge of getting better, sometimes on the verge of getting good, but it never quite gets there. It’s a missed opportunity for thrills, social commentary, humor and/or horror.