Eighth Grade is an exciting directorial debut for Burnham, a precocious teen phenomenon who seems to have grown into a thoughtful adult—one who intimately knows of what he speaks. He’s made an alarmingly perceptive film that only rarely goes for the easy joke or verges toward cliché

Judas and the Black Messiah is missing that deeper personal aspect, some sense of the emotional force yoking O’Neal and Hampton together, dragging them toward ruin. The film is resonant regardless. Still, there’s such an opportunity presented here—to see these two sterling actors really working in harmony—that goes frustratingly unseized. As is, Judas and the Black Messiah is richer and more engaging than a standard biopic, but is not quite the Shakespearean tragedy of double allegiances and backstabbing that it could have been.

There needn’t be some deeper theme or intent behind a movie like this, but The Lighthouse is an awfully trying experience to end with such a sneering shrug of the shoulders. I couldn’t shake the feeling that The Lighthouse is simply an exercise, an overeager writing class project from a guy who’s just read Sartre, Beckett, and, I dunno, Stephen King.

Palm Springs endeared me to Samberg and Milioti quite a bit, and that's not nothing. The movie, though, doesn't amount to much.

The displacement Jimmie feels pervades most every shot of Talbot’s film and gives it all a slow-churning aura of foreignness and melancholy, a diasporic sadness that’s interesting to see in the context of a film about an African American, rather than a recent immigrant.

While it certainly stimulated and overwhelmed my senses, Blade Runner 2049 rarely got my mind whirring the way one always hopes this kind of artful, serious-minded sci-fi will.

It pains me to say this. I spent a good deal of Us straining to like it, to get on its slightly preening wavelength, to be nourished by its heady stew of tropes. I couldn’t get there, though. As loaded up on stuff as Us is, there’s not enough to grab onto; it’s an alienating idea piece that lumbers away just as it’s about to reveal its true nature.

Dano shows technical promise as a director, but I hope his taste in material has a bit more range. Now that he’s gotten a rather passionless passion project out of his system, hopefully he’ll lift his gaze up in search of other, more vibrant lives—out there in the vastness, hungry for perfect lighting.

A too-close-to-the-case ardor for the material does the film a disservice, as can sometimes happen when a cherished object is adapted.

Nosferatu is a sensory pleasure. But on a story level, it leaves much to be desired.

Rising to challenge viewers’ qualms about the movie’s existence is Deadwyler, whose stirring performance may be reason enough to see the film.

As Nope swerves and reels, it often seems distracted by itself, unable to hold its focus on any one thing long enough for deeper meaning, or feeling, to coalesce.

Horror movies need not have wholly logical explanations—shivers of ambiguity or contradiction are often appreciated—but Longlegs hurtles past compelling murkiness and lands in the realm of dull nonsense.

Polley admirably allows her fine performers ample space to bring Women Talking to life. But there are also the bigger needs of the film to be considered—sometimes Polley’s actorly generosity comes at a cost, when the film turns stage-y for a minute and we’re snapped out of its enveloping spell.

Watching Love Lies Bleeding becomes a trial of patience, as the viewer waits for the plot to rise to meet the film’s good looks, or for those stylish aspects to blossom further into elegant abstraction. Instead, the film hobbles along, revealing ever more contrivances.

It feels at times like a Tracy Jordan spoof of a movie, and not always for the better. But that doesn’t stop Dolemite from being funny, or from giving Murphy room to do the things he likes to do.

An action-drama sourced from history (while riffing considerably on that history), The Woman King is a sturdy testament to how renewed a staid form can feel when it’s stretched to include different narratives.

The film—structured as an issue of a New Yorker-esque magazine—is fussy and ornately detailed and difficult to grasp. Where Anderson’s past elaborate worlds have invited us in with all their cozy detail, The French Dispatch’s seems to haughtily sniff in our direction; it doesn’t much care if we get it.

Garland didn’t decide to make this particular movie on an un-sourced whim; its very existence is a response to something hanging in the air. Yet he refuses to connect Civil War with that obvious context—which feels more like a cop out than high-minded restraint or elegant equanimity.

Blindspotting never settles into a consistent cadence. This isn’t exactly a problem, in theory—movies can contain multitudes, of course—but in this trio’s overeager execution, all that chaos renders the movie curiously inert.

Bones and All has its merits, but the film is only a decent side dish at the feast of Guadagnino. You’ll likely leave the theater still feeling hungry.

With Dune, Villeneuve has the chance to right the wrongs of David Lynch’s 1984 misfire (a misfire according to some, anyway) and truly honor Herbert’s text. But Villenueve can’t help but lacquer it all up into something hyper polished and hard to the touch.

There’s great stuff in Joy Ride, the jumbled atoms of a classic comedy all waiting to be gathered into a cohesive whole. If they didn’t quite get it together on this outing, they certainly prove their potential.

The film never achieves lift-off, drifting instead through a series of scenes that repeat and repeat the movie’s few, basic themes before sputtering to a too easily resolved—and patly rendered—conclusion.

The film offers a small bit of emotional rescue at its very end—a graceful tribute to the escapes of memory and fantasy—but by then the dourness of its conclusions has blotted out any rounder sense of meaning.

Jordan’s absence from this film leaves a big, leaping void at the center. We’re forced to root for marketing executives instead of the phenomenon being marketed. Without its raison d’etre, there is not enough juice to sustain the film. It all feels a bit silly by the heartstring-tugging end.

The Killer is an experiment in economy whose results are lesser than the effort put in. Calculating efficiency is all well and good, but at least some life is required to make meaning of all of this killing.

In picture form, Cavalcade is a superlative newsreel, forcibly strengthened by factual scenes, good music, and wonderful photography. It is marred by pat and obvious dramatic climaxes, and by a conclusion which is anti-climactical and meaningless.

Whatever the truth of Anning and Murchison’s time in Dorset together was, Ammonite could have done whatever it wanted. It chooses instead to do close to nothing, and leaves us, quite like its central pair, helplessly grasping for more.

On the whole, though, Mickey 17 tests our patience. While the dispensable clones premise is intriguing, and opens a door to the kind of socioeconomic commentary so signature to Bong, the film quickly grows distracted by other matters entirely.

The nightmare that unfolds is certainly effective. At the same time, there's an emptiness at the movie's core.

While grandly moving at the close, too much of this Color Purple relies on memories of Color Purples past.

The film is so busy working through what it’s trying to say that it loses its specific pacing and texture, tumbling toward a finale that subverts its own rules and confuses its argument.

The movie is deliberately alienating, but Oldroyd has not done enough to earn our devotion before he pulls the rug out and flashes us a smirk. The movie is a provocative tease that doesn’t have the stuff to back up the joke, try as its game performers might to make it all mean something. I found myself wishing that Eileen was longer. Its fertile territory is woefully underdeveloped—so much of the film’s innate potential goes unutilized. At least there is Hathaway’s glowing star turn, both reminding us of what we knew she could do and introducing us to something new.

The reality is that there is probably nothing truly novel to be done with Batman at this point. He’s been thoroughly mined for both fun and pathos; try as Reeves and his co-screenwriter Peter Craig might, they can’t squeeze much higher-meaning blood out of a fatally depleted stone. Pattinson, moody and saturnine, does what he can, but he’s not afforded much beyond growling and scowling.

What I will say is that director Jon Watts handles this grand convergence of properties old and current with enough verve to almost sustain the long run of the film. But there’s so much brand Frankensteining to be done that there’s really no time for quirk and texture; much of the bounce and sparkle of the past two Holland films is lost.

The film’s self-seriousness bogs down what should be a mad and skittering thing, jangling us with all its agonizing silence. We should be having more fun as we watch through our fingers.

There’s no shame in a remake where the re-rendering is genuinely fresh—but del Toro’s take empties its source material of significance, taking us for a gimmicky ride.a, who are too complex for their underwritten characters.

Anderson rescues his film from oblivion in the end, closing out his story with a disarmingly sweet—and, in some ways, provocative—moral argument.

As this process unfolds, Reijn and DeLappe manage some moments of shivery suspense. Reijn makes expressive use of the house, tearing up staircases and down shadowy corridors with giddy abandon. But narratively, the film grows awfully repetitive, some version of the same argument taking place in one dark room after another.

Mostly, Tenet is a straightforward caper movie—maximally staged and very, very loud, but flimsy at its heart.

Climax feels like what happens when a provocateur grows up. Noé, a nominally outré festival regular three decades into his career, is unmistakably washed. The jig is up, as of Climax, if not even earlier.

On occasion the film is wryly amusing. But too often the humor is strained, playing as meek attempt to laugh through the pain—for the characters, the movie itself, the entire franchise, even.

Layton’s portentous style does the story no favors. It’s all mood, mood, mood: sharp angles, dark interiors, long pauses, and quietly thrumming background music.

There’s nothing wrong with a good soap opera—and when one looks as bespoke as this one, and has such fine actors in it, it should go down a treat. But Everybody Knows lumbers and frustrates as it goes.

Craig is certainly sent off in grand fashion, but it’s a grandiosity that isn’t quite fitting for his run of films.

It’s a lot of nervy construction built around very little substance. Driver and Cotillard are admirably committed, and the film does occasionally soar to giddily surreal, big-burst musical highs. Not near often enough, though.

The King of Staten Island is about growing and learning lessons—but not much is learned, and there’s little growth.

Where Coogler’s movie runs hot, Caple’s runs warm; where Coogler dwells, steeping every scene in a sense of shared history and a love of Philadelphia, Caple takes for granted that this ground has already been sowed.

Mulan is not awful. It’s just inert, a lifeless bit of product that will probably neither satisfy die-hards nor enrapture an entire new generation of fans.

Say what you want about Michael Bay, but at least his movies have their own identity. They occupy their own territory—albeit one I don’t necessarily want to visit often. But Bumblebee could have been made by anyone, as long as they were working from the right style guide.

There is a fine line between creating a laconic, closed-off character and simply not creating a character at all—a line that Causeway transgresses. Lynsey is a frustrating cipher, seemingly guided more by the beats of the script than by any internal impulse or logic.

The story’s themes—fear of death, societal atomization at the dawn of the information age—are clearly stated, but there’s little passion pulsing beneath the thesis. It’s a respectful, and respectable, film to a fault; it’s hard to locate the animating why of White Noise. Despite some alterations, the film seems to exist more as a recitation of the book than its own kind of invention.

What works best about Mid90s is what’s casual about it—but what makes it verge on being genuinely original is all the weirdo stuff at the margins, which is too pronounced to be subtext and too minimally handled to really mean something to the movie.

Elio is a spirited, engaging 98 minutes. But its tired attempts at the gentle profundity of old—that Wall-E wallop, that Up uplift—are emblematic of a studio that’s running out of ways to whimsically allegorize human experience. Alien experience, too.

Maybe the few moments when Mountainhead does take on a chilling relevance—when it seems to pick at something nightmarishly real—are enough to justify the sillier stuff. And, we must sadly admit, that silly stuff may not actually be that silly.

There’s no other way to put this: Deadpool 2 is a regular, shmegular superhero movie, distinguished only by an obnoxiously unearned dose of “see what I did there?!” It’s a drag.

The film may have just been a failed stab at inter-gender empathy, were it not for its wretched final act. This is where Men takes an abrupt turn into surreal horror, and when something bad starts glinting just beneath the surface of Garland’s apparent motivations.

The film looks away from that pure artistry too often, turning instead to its limited, and far less satisfying, view of Swift’s complicated star profile.

Eddington gradually shifts away from the hyper topical and into a despairing, bleakly amusing look at an America prone to violent fantasy and deed, entrenched in escalating conflict, caught in a terrible entropy. When Aster finally knuckles down and ramps up the action, Eddington takes strange flight.

If it hadn’t had someone of Álvarez’s care and attention at the helm, Romulus could certainly have been a lot worse.

While I admire the movie’s attempt to more deeply mine the identities of sister-princesses Anna (sweet, non-magical) and Elsa (restless, can control snow and ice), its discoveries are rushed and are served up half-baked.

Phoenix has always been good at depicting this kind of pathetic tyranny, deftly (and swiftly) shifting from bratty, toothless insouciance to genuine menace. The actor seems to get both the joke and the seriousness of the film, though I wish Scott were better at communicating that tone to the audience.

It’s an odd, lumbering patchwork of a film, occasionally fascinating but otherwise bloated and aimless.

Skywalkers might be the first of a new genre: extended vlog (or TikTok, or Instragram reel) as feature film, existing somewhere between fact and fiction and all in service of promoting a brand.

The sequel is epic in length and spectacle, but not in feeling.

Because Spielberg seems as eager as Wade to get back to the digital fantasy world he’s created, a lot of the human element is elided or glossed over.

The Lodge falls into the more common trap of spinning its wheels in a mudbath of obviousness and red herrings, dredging up anxieties and questions that it doesn’t quite know how to push forward, or inward.

Here is an opportunity for a wild and sorrowful confluence of gay dream and national nightmare. Alas, this Kiss of the Spider Woman gives us a competent but glancing rendering of the easier, more palatable aspects of a story that should be anything but.

Maria is the thinnest of the three, psychologically facile and overly mannered. There is something arbitrary, unspecific about the film.

There are personal fragments of interest here; it’s useful to see how a man like Bannon narrates the story of himself, mythologizes himself, if only for the glimpses of worldview that sneak through in his presentation of the details. But the failure of Morris’s film is that it snuffs so much of that out.

Had the movie pitched itself on a one-way trip into the black, Deutch would no doubt have been up to the task. She’s a squirmy wonder in the film, loathsome and pitiable and, perhaps, grimly relatable. At times, Shephard overstates Danni’s detachment from polite society, but otherwise she and Deutch keep things in frightfully believable bounds.

Free Guy has moments of dizzying action and offers up some intriguing sci-fi speculation, but it is decidedly not a cool movie.

Without the Shakespearean language, this is just an ahistorical story about a king and a battle. ... But it’s nothing fancy, really, nothing newfangled or inventive. This is a pretty straight-down-the-middle period war-king film, a true Boy Movie of respectable pedigree but no real distinction.

Babylon is unfocussed and overeager, continuously distracted by the burst of a new idea. That could be read as an apt rendering of the manic thought of a cocaine binge, but there is something awfully studied in how Chazelle conjures up that nose-scratching, high-speed verve.

The new film This Is Me…Now is a passion project, about passion, that curiously lacks that essential quality.

In this grim reality, The Front Runner feels quaint, almost a hopeful thing, crafted in the old ways with a pitiable naïveté.

The results are, understandably, thrilling at times, because violence is thrilling—vengeance even more so. But what it adds up to is a chaotic, misbegotten mess.

The Lost City has the bad tang of squandered potential, misusing its massively appealing stars and failing the possibility of its premise.

What they’ve visually pulled off in Lightyear is stunning stuff. The story, sadly, does not rise up to meet that work.

In its best stretches—the first hour of the film, let’s say—WW84 sweetly revels in its old-school trappings, its hokey mystery, its goofy villain, its resourceful hero. The film is light on its feet, colorful and playful in a way not seen elsewhere in the DC Universe.

I remain as curious as ever to see what Goddard does next. But this film, for all its canny presentation, is a mishmash of compelling narrative premises clumsily fused together. It manages to be both overwrought and under-developed, disappointing less for what it is than for what it could have been.

Mitchell has made a stylish, occasionally intriguing film, by turns idiosyncratically funny and downright scary. But he says and shows a lot of bothersome things throughout, which I’m not quite sure how to approach.

Though some zesty flair has been added—particularly a new heroine—this hyper-aggro spin-off of a beloved franchise over does it while under-delivering.

There’s some art to be found here, for sure. But there’s not nearly enough of the pop.

It’s funny to be watching a movie about nationalism—something of a hot topic right now—that gives off so little heat. Not because it’s unexpected—but because the missed opportunity seems both so obvious and so beside the point.

Lizzie isn’t a bad film, but it doesn’t accomplish all that it wants to—and all I wanted it to. We’re never as immersed in its psychological swirl as we should be, and every character in it is either such a creep or a flinching headcase that it’s hard to get our emotional hooks in any of them.

Chastain pulls focus whenever she can, operating as one of the film’s main resources of levity and acerbic bite. I wish the movie had more of that energy—McDonagh keeps the proceedings oddly muted given the circumstances—but at least Chastain is there, pepping things up a bit.

The movie is, for a good stretch, a troubling and arresting character study, one done with nervy conviction. Eventually, though, Phillips has to more tightly attach this downward spiral to the larger Gotham mythology, which is where the provocative ambivalence of the film gives way to veneration.

McCarthy’s sly, amoral performance is far and away the best part of the film. Every time she’s onscreen, the movie finally seems, well, animated.

Cruella is yet another act of co-opting by the biggest entertainment company in the world, an attempt to graft a cheap rebel spirit onto a naked exercise in I.P. synergy.

There isn’t truly standout work from anyone in the cast, even if the cast is what makes the movie work when it does work. Thank God for Hader’s unassuming sense of humor, Ransone’s jitteriness, Chastain’s steely, intuitive resolve.

F9’s attempts at classical drama, all its reckoning with dynastic sin, do weigh the thing down quite a bit. Those going to the theater simply for the kicky, bad-joke, MacGuffin charms of F&F may find themselves a little bored and distracted, as I was, by all the turgidity.

Jojo Rabbit has little to say about any of the things it dredges up, beyond the obvious.

We get a smattering of piercing thoughts about family separation as sanctioned by the U.S. government and a roster of deeply felt performances, but not the vision to see it through.

Now 80 years old, Ford still glows with that unique charisma. It’s a shame, then, that Dial of Destiny doesn’t do right by its heroes—both Ford and Dr. Henry Jones, archeologist adventurer.

The movie goes all over the place, attempting to map the world of this thing but really just chasing its idea into abstraction. Which is the opposite direction of where it should be going.

Little clarity can actually be wrestled out of Cooper’s dank creation, a shallow, dour film that pays rote adherence to the mandate that horror must and should offer profound personal or social commentary.