Dumb Money is a sturdy entry into the developing canon of docufiction that seeks to be lively and lucid and informative about the rotten state of the American dream. It’s often as crassly effective as Roaring Kitty and his cohort were in those wild months two years ago, when greed was good for the many instead of the few.

Green deals in the unexplicit, and those questions are the engine of the film.

As the film wears on, though, it gets weirder and sharper—particularly when musical comedy pros Lane and Mullally show up. Each actor is right on Jackson and Sharp’s line-pushing wavelength, saying and singing unspeakably disgusting things with a straight face.

The emotional punch of The Boy and the Heron is a heart-swelling assertion of cosmic purpose, even amidst sadness and ruin. But it’s delivered after a lot of digression, which can make this swan-song film seem like more a collection of Miyazaki’s disparate, previously unused ideas than a discrete film with a focused mission.

Hit Man is determined to be fun above all else, and it largely succeeds in that honorable, populist mission. It entertains, and generously pushes two game performers closer toward the movie-star pantheon.

Priscilla is not an emotional epic, nor is it a furious correction of the record. It is, instead, a convincing and humane sketch of a young woman caught up in something vast and eternally defining. She may as well be wandering Versailles.

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.

Stylish and intriguing, Saltburn proves an engaging sit for the majority of its run, and thus a stumble—even a big one—can mostly be forgiven. If anything, the film makes me curious to see what Fennell might do with another classic novel.

While plenty of scenes in Maestro have their discrete power—teeming with insight and impressive artistry—it’s only in an appreciation of Mulligan and Cooper’s full-bodied work that the greater whole finds resonance. In them lies the film’s true majesty, its best and most convincing approximation of what it is to love and create and, in so doing, reveal something transcendent.

At its best, the film is indeed piercingly clever, proud of its peculiarity to a degree just shy of smugness. Though, the 140-minute film does begin to wear out its welcome in the last third, when the jokes have mostly all been made before and the only fresh additions are cumbersome matters of plot.

For all of its piercing insight and arresting performances, its steamy sex, its devastating conclusions, the film operates at a remove, from behind a pane of glass. Perhaps because Haigh gives Adam so little tether to the realm of the real; so much of the film is lost in plaintive reverie.

Mann’s film is all the more pleasurable for its thoughtfulness and restraint.

The familiarity of RW&RB’s obnoxious indulgences are, in some ways, its greatest triumph: its version of storybook love is allowed to be just as annoying, in the same ways, as the heteros’.

It’s a piercing and often very funny character piece, a study of narcissism masked, at least in part, by bourgeois, Millennial understandings of progressive coupling. But Sachs, who is in his 50s, has not made some condemnatory thinkpiece about what’s wrong with a generation. The people of Passages could, in some senses, be from any time; mercurial partners have existed forever.

The movie is fun, which could be all we need right now. Let’s do it again next summer.

Meg 2 is confident in its schlock, piling on one ridiculous conceit after another at such a pace that the audience can’t help but be swept up in it. That is a harder needle to thread than many filmmakers seem to think—it’s not enough to just be stupid.

No matter its broader effect, Oppenheimer is a mainstream offering of uncommon resonance, sending the viewer out of the theater head-spun and itchy-eyed, ears ringing from all its sophisticated, voluble explosion.

There is plenty in Barbie to be delighted by, even moved by. I have no doubt that the film will be a massive hit, cheered for turning a cynical I.P. project into a loopy treatise on being. But the movie could maybe have been stickier, more probing and indelible, if it had reined in some of its erratic energy and really figured out what it wanted to say.

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.

That McQuarrie and Cruise are eventually able to get this hurtling, heavy plane level and pull off a rewarding climax is a testament to the fierceness of their commitment to these projects.

No Hard Feelings is a nice comedy, courting taboo here and there but largely rounded out with sweetness. It’s an amiable time at the movies—but I was hoping for more of a shock.

[A] quiet and lovely film.

Fuqua’s chosen technique only undermines his solemn intentions, rather than using starkness to make a salient point. Emancipation is overthought to its increasing detriment.

With Creed III (opening in theaters March 3), Jordan takes full control of the reins, making his directorial debut in calm and confident fashion.

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.

It’s an oddly moving film, this bright and quite literally stagey curio involving an extraterrestrial. At its best, Asteroid City evokes the memory of what it was to first see a Wes Anderson film, surprised and delighted by its singular vision of life on Earth.

How to Have Sex is a vivid and heartbreaking depiction of what is caused by the willful, dehumanizing disregard of women. May its lesson be taken to heart by those who need to hear it most.

May December feels like a return to Haynes’s outre origins, a stylish character study that, when inspected closer, may actually have an entire culture—its art, its sexual mores—on its nimble mind.

For all of the episodic ramble of Killers of the Flower Moon, not enough space is provided to restoring palpable personhood to people so relentlessly robbed of it. Scorsese’s film is nonetheless effectively rattling, a grueling delineation of events that gracefully eschews the melodrama and sensationalism of so much true crime.

Zone of Interest is a prodigiously mounted wonder, gripping and awful and terribly necessary to its time.

There’s a deep, and never pandering, empathy at work here, an allowance of confusion and moral error that keeps Monster from the smarmy and didactic lows of so many social-issues films.

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 is as engaging as it is sinisterly ridiculous. Its costumery is luxe and eye-popping, its courtly intrigue pleasingly low-stakes. The looming Revolution is only mentioned, in somber tones, in voiceover at the very end. Otherwise, Jeanne du Barry wants you to feel the fantasy.

Book Club’s four stars—and others like them—deserve material that’s specific, clever, surprising in some way. These plug-and-play movies have lost much of their charm at this point, feeling more like a slightly degrading duty than any kind of demographic triumph. Which may be overthinking it. But shouldn’t a movie about a book club feel at least a little bit literate?

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

The film . . . is at once light and serious, a warm and sensitive tribute to the book’s themes that avoids any unnecessary updating. Fremon Craig, whose last film was the excellent teen dramedy The Edge of Seventeen, gives the material just the right spin, letting Margaret and her friends exist wholly in their age.

Whatever LuPone is doing, it’s undeniable. Here, long into a meandering and fitfully rewarding film, is something worthy of fear—or maybe it’s awe.

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.

What a welcome rarity Boston Strangler is, even in its limits: a sturdy, thoughtfully constructed movie featuring a compelling story and host of great actors.

It’s homage and gentle parody at once, seeking to capture the energy of playing the game with friends rather than trying to seriously literalize an expansive world.

Your Place or Mine occasionally gives off a glimmer of something interesting, but all too quickly snaps back to the featureless drudgery that has, sadly, come to define its genre.

Sharper is sinewy and clever, a keenly acted and written B-picture of the sort that were once myriad but now only come around once every few years.

80 for Brady is a loosely structured hang movie, albeit one that culminates in a curiously affecting emotional climax.

The riskiness of that—the way Knock at the Cabin, accidentally or not, courts and even invites sympathy to one of the right’s most dangerous shibboleths—gives the film a surprising, alarming, but not unwelcome edge.

With the adult actors playing zany characters, the kids’ genuine passion and skills ground the movie. Their performances make you believe in the mission of the camp, and may even have you wiping away tears.

Flora and Son played more charming than cloying to me. It’s a nice movie about people who are mostly nice—deep down, anyway.

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.

Past Lives is not concerned with regret. It is instead a thoughtful, humane rumination on what may be fixed in personal history but remains forever fluid in the mind.

Holofcener weaves these people and their problems together in delicate fashion, guiding us toward her thematic conclusions in a way that never feels starchy, didactic, too lesson-oriented. She’s got a light touch, a humane one too.

It’s a performance that’s so far afield of the loud flash and melodrama of Star Wars that Ridley seems almost introduced anew.

Fair Play is a film responsive to internet discourse but not acting in service of it. It’s a grim, dynamic thriller, one that sets workplace and home crashing into one another in a small symphony of beautiful disharmony.

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

Who knows what, if any, instructive value a film like Magazine Dreams has in this day and age. Maybe it needn’t have any of that—a gruesome movie can just be a gruesome movie. But I suspect Bynum is trying for more than just a gnarly couple of hours. I’ll have to mull over his film, and maybe force myself to watch it again, to get a grasp on what I think Magazine Dreams is really doing and how well it succeeds in that endeavor.

It’s funny in ways anticipated and not, and there is enough suspense—or something like suspense—to balance out the coy winks to the audience. The irony isn’t overweening, the doll is equal parts creepy and yassified, and the human lead, Allison Williams, anchors things with an admirable commitment to the bit.

I Wanna Dance with Somebody is a mighty testament to Houston’s catalog, the cathedral highs and sultry lows of her singular voice. Those songs, at least, are eternal. If a movie that simply presses play on the mix tape is what it takes to remind us of Houston’s special power, then that’s reason enough for the film to exist. But the story behind the songs probably deserves more, and better.

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.

Watching The Way of Water, one rolls their eyes only to realize they’re welling with tears. One stretches and shifts in their seat before accepting, with a resigned and happy plop, that they could watch yet another hour of Cameron’s preservationist epic. Lucky for us—lucky even for the culture, maybe—that at least a few more of those are on their way.

It is a proper movie, one that probably would have fared decently in theatrical release. I believe there was genuine artistic intent put into the making of the film, which distinguishes Disenchanted from HP2 and so many other chintzy streaming endeavors.

It’s a story of reinvention for an actor trying to do the same. It mostly works a treat. Lohan’s performance is perky and agreeable, a shimmer of that old Mean Girls (or, hell, Parent Trap) charm dancing around her for the first time in a while. I’d happily watch her in more after this—though preferably in something a bit meatier than a Hallmark knock-off.

Lelio’s haughty piece of flair doesn’t diminish the impression made by Pugh, who fluidly projects compassion tinged with the faintest hint of menace.

You don’t need to be a fan of the accordion-toting Yankovic to get some enjoyment and laughs out of the gleefully absurd Weird, but it sure wouldn’t hurt either.

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.

Wright, Angela Bassett, Lupita Nyong’o, Danai Gurira, and others are commanding presences, standing proud and formidable in Ruth Carter’s glorious costumery. The film’s lush visuals—its rendering of bustling old-town Wakanda, of a mysterious city under the sea, of gleaming tech and natural landscapes—are sumptuous and considered. There is much to be admired here, a care for craft and detail on a higher plane than other Marvel fare.

The film isn’t merely some metatextual exercise, though. It’s deeply felt, a warm embodiment of a liminal time in life when our conceptions of ourselves and our loved ones come pinging into focus while also, somehow, drifting into new confusion.

If that storytelling decision was made so there was more room for the intimate human factor, then it was an understandable one. She Said has a calmly insistent moral clarity, earned through its patient empathy, its quiet awe not at the insidiousness of what Weinstein did, but at the mettle and courage of the women who endured it—and then spoke out about it.

Halloween Ends is a bizarre hash of tones and theses, stitched together into a movie that’s neither fun nor frightful.

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

Hocus Pocus 2 is sweeter, gentler, and pointedly more inclusive than its hilariously crass predecessor, trading in winking jokes about hell and sex for lite feminist jokes about the modern beauty industry.

Whatever Mendes’s connection to the material, he’s made something humane and nourishing, a picture of rare thoughtfulness and decency.

Farrelly shows us the formative experience, but only a little of its consequence. Perhaps too much consideration of that would make the whole thing seem something less than great.

Much of Master Gardener is disarmingly placid. It’s a warmer, more optimistic film than one might expect, even if it does at times creak with the antiquated perspective of a stalwart septuagenarian filmmaker unwilling to shake off some of the past’s bad habits.

Devotion is thoroughly well-executed, but it’s rousing when Majors gets to play outside the box and show you something new.

Even if Wendell and Wild, based on an unpublished novel Selick co-wrote, packs a little too much in, you can just sit back and enjoy the magic of Selick and his puppeteers' visuals. It's a good reminder of Selick’s visionary talent, and some of the creatures he has cooked up defy easy description.

His intricate craftsmanship is a pleasure to watch in motion, though a bad symptom of sequel-itis stalks the film: Johnson, facing all that daunting follow-up pressure, has decided to go bigger.

Not all memoir is generous. It can be intriguingly solipsistic, or maddeningly vain. But because there’s always been a curious blankness to Spielberg’s public persona—cheerful and engaged but never quite known—The Fabelmans does feel like something of a gift.

My Policeman is studied and plodding in its period-piece solemnity, a dirge of a movie about reckless people that is never warmed by their implied inner fire.

The Menu lands its joke about the Chef Table-ification of cuisine while also finding nuance in its “capitalism is a plague” messaging.

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.

Bros leans into the giddy little revolution of its own existence, inviting the audience into a good, gay time that hasn’t exactly happened, in this way, before.

Bratton, though, is not solely interested in a litany of struggle. He fills The Inspection with style, with spiky humor and alluring edge. It’s a promising feature debut.

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.

Blonde is a film partly about exploitation that might be exploitative itself. If the film is aware of that meta function, then there’s something interesting happening in it. If not, and Dominik thinks he is genuinely ennobling Monroe and expressing some kind of radical pity for her, then Blonde is a little perverse.

Director Olivia Wilde has made an obvious and intermittently entertaining sci-thriller, one that borrows heavily from many better things but uses those pilfered parts effectively enough. For a while, anyway.

Those wary of McDonagh after the bulldozer that was Billboards should seek out this film; at its best, The Banshees of Inisherin whispers and laments and amuses the way McDonagh’s best stage writing does. And it offers the invaluable opportunity to see Farrell in his hangdog element, as Pádraic scrambles about trying to find purchase in the world, ever creaking and groaning in motion.

What might have been a somber and carefully considered study of a lonely man grappling with his past becomes a posturing labor.

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.

Iñárritu has a lot on his mind here, weighing the sins and graces of personal and public history, and attempting to atone for some of it. But as Bardo stretches on and on and on, the film narrows into something solipsistic and meta.

TÁR is breathtaking entertainment, beautifully tailored in luxe, eerie Euro sleekness by production designer Marco Bittner Rosser and cinematographer Florian Hoffmeister, and ominously scored by Hildur Guðnadóttir (who gets a little meta shout-out in the film). That fine craftsmanship is all anchored by Blanchett’s alternately measured and ferocious performance, a tremendous (but never outsized) piece of acting that is her most piercing work in years.

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.

Every actor, bless them, works hard to sell the movie’s overweening moxie, leaning into the mannered quirk with admirable, if ultimately doomed, commitment. Pitt and Taylor-Johnson are perhaps best suited to the movie’s patter; they manage to give some actual fizz to leaden material. But those moments are short lived, and then it’s back to the awkward squirm of watching talented actors debase themselves for laughs that never come.

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.

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.

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.

If the film feels awfully familiar as it glides along these narrative rails, that same-ness is enlivened and given polish by Manville.

Rather than honoring any specific place, or people, or mode of living, Where the Crawdads Sing cheaply develops its land. It’s a pre-fab oceanfront condo of a movie that prizes a pleasant view over all else.

The studio has stumbled into what may be the worst film yet in its long line of spectaculars, an erratic and fatally dull morass of limp jokes and aimless plotting. The magic is decidedly gone, and the film left me wondering, on a more macro scale, if this whole cinematic universe machine has any idea where it’s headed.

Marcel the Shell with Shoes On both gets on little ones’ level and lifts them up to give them a better view out the window, presenting a world of thought and feeling to go along with the giggles and “aw”s of the film’s endearing landscape. Maybe quirky earnestness is back—so long as it’s done with as much care and insight as this rather marvelous curio.

Small as Good Luck to You, Leo Grande may be in its cinematic dimensions, Thompson’s performance is a big one, loquacious and multifaceted and unsparing in its let-it-all-hang-out-there frankness. She’s a marvel. There