Eggers’s action sequences are swift and brutal, filled with the crunch of life extinguished and tossed into the bone pile of time. Skarsgård, hulking and seething, is a fine vessel for the film’s opulent menace. He’s a fearsome, yet elegant, creature of destruction as he hacks and slashes away.

It’s a shrewdly balanced film, a mix of flippant merriment and real dramatic stakes.

Sinners is propulsive and stirring entertainment, messy but always compelling. The film’s fascinating array of genres and tropes and ideas swirls together in a way that is, I suppose, singularly American.

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

Wonka is, in fact, a lively, winsome pleasure, a film decidedly aimed at children that nonetheless incorporates some dark matter.

The Idea of You is glossy and smart, a cut above the slop so often served to its intended audience. It may force a neat ending, it may strain logic, it may leave some intriguing avenues unexplored, but The Idea of You is otherwise transporting, a fairy tale worthy of a big screen.

Rarely in Big Time Adolescence does anything feel canned or beyond the realm of the credible. All the characters in the film seem to have inner lives; we believe that they exist past the confines of the film. It’s a pleasure to be in their warm and appealing company, even as the proceedings take a turn for the mildly dire.

Whether 28 Years Later is a satisfying franchise followup, 18 years after the last entry, will have to be decided by the beholder. I found myself confused by the film’s unexpected tone, but also captivated by it.

There is also its nimble humor, its refreshingly frank and positive depictions of sex—perhaps we are finally turning a corner on that whole issue. And there is the remarkable Pugh, doing so much to deeply humanize a story of pretty people in pretty places and ever so slightly contrived circumstances.

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.

Ant-Man and the Wasp is firmly on the B-movie end of the Marvel spectrum, a happy enough place to be: clacking along with all its bug friends, for the moment unfussed about Thanos and geopolitics. It seems pretty nice. Would that we could wrestle the rest of the world down to that same agreeable scale.

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 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.

Its moral identity aside, this is a staggering piece of filmmaking. The Rosses have a keen command of picture and motion; their film is riveting from the jump, swiftly and totally enveloping us in the bonhomie of Michael and his bleary company. Maybe the non-reality of it all isn’t worth fretting about.

What saves Larraín’s film from perfunctorily treading well-worn ground is that he appears to be more intently interested in queer myth-making, collective refusal, and fantastical plotting.

It’s a patchwork that doesn’t always stitch together neatly, but is compelling and wrenching as a whole. The film is also a mighty vision of chaos and fire, of music and movement, of a city churning to sustain itself.

It’s a lively, messy coming-of-age story which turns the clashing elements of its title into reflections of a certain youthful folly and daring, a penchant for base gross-out humor and big, revolutionary thinking.

As is the case with most successful, spare horror films of late, A Quiet Place has much more to say about its humans than its monsters and is especially invested in the ways families fail to communicate even their most basic needs to each other.

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

Midsommar is a shocking piece of filmmaking—unnervingly competent even when the film yaws into silliness, even when it risks tedium. This film will alienate a lot of people (much like Hereditary, its audience exit polling is likely going to be abysmal), but there’s a wonderfully audacious confidence to the way Midsommar is built.

It’s a freeing movie, not without its flaws and missteps, but wonderfully alive with all the looseness of new possibility.

In a moment where no one in power seems to have quite enough shame, perhaps only the truly shameless among us can find a way to thoroughly embarrass them.

Beckett moves through the film not as an invincible badass, but as a man who is tired and in a great deal of pain. And there is indeed no rest for the weary: when Beckett has a brief respite from his physical odyssey, the grief rushes back in. It’s all pretty difficult to watch, as it probably should be.

On the Record itself is a thorough and self-aware film.

Lears’s lens captures not just the candidates, but the volunteers—scrappy, seasoned canvassers and callers, smoking cigarettes in Nevada or crowding on porches in West Virginia. This is the process.

Rourke does enough to both honor and reshape the hallowed mold to keep things interesting. Working with a script from Beau Willimon—the House of Cards creator whose smart streak is sometimes undone by hammier impulses—she steers an interesting course through cliché, both upending and satisfying the royals fan’s hunger for repetition, for familiar tropes staged anew.

Blackness isn’t a fixed identity or static community—it’s ever shifting, retracting, then proliferating, coming in and out of communion with itself. The Black radical tradition, specifically, says that by bridging past and present, such chaos can organize and revolutionize itself. The Inheritance stages an encouraging attempt at re-invention.

You can’t taste all the miraculous food the sorry men of The Trip to Greece are served. But you can, at least, relate to the feeling the film evokes. It’s the wonder of new experience giving even further gravity to all that’s come along and happened before—and will, on some dusty day in some impossible future, hopefully happen again.

How refreshingly nice it is to watch a summertime movie that lets us sit in our feelings and grim recollections this way, and figures that an adventure in its own right.

The Snyder of 2004 is utterly revived in Army of the Dead, a shrewdly mounted action film (as opposed to a horror one) that may be saying something about imperialism, or may just be a bloody, satisfying entertainment devoid of allegory.

My Friend Dahmer doesn’t present some rueful wish that, oh, young Jeffrey might have made it if only someone had reached out to him. But it does extend him some human compassion, letting us see how the tragedy of his loneliness, spurred by the horror of his dark compulsions, made pre-murderous Dahmer something of a victim himself.

Perhaps a new day of Cage has dawned. One in which he can get back to the business of acting, unburdened by all the constant, semi-loving demand that he just bug out his eyes and dance.

Despite a wildly uneven “Americarrr” accent (through which the voice of Queen Elizabeth sometimes shines), Foy is excellent in the film, rigid poise giving way to feral anger in always convincing shades.

I love how open and casual this film is about Colette’s budding queerness, how it eschews any awkward coming out or pains-of-the-closet stuff. Instead it simply revels in Colette’s sexual and romantic freedom, suggesting that it was just that looseness, that liberation that gave her writing such verve.

Black Widow is a prequel of sorts, and an origin story, a robust and satisfying glimpse into a defining interlude in Black Widow’s life that almost, almost pulls off the trick of being wholly its own thing.

It’s a genial, funny movie, not a mile-a-minute behind-the-cameras gag-fest (hyphens!) like 30 Rock, but an amiable workplace comedy that finds personal definition in its influences.

The ending of the film stuck with me for days, pushing me into a kind of melancholy existential funk that proved distressingly hard to shake.

The funniest of the Presley travelogues finds Elvis and his rock combo dispatched to Fort Lauderdale by a Chicago mobster during spring break to keep watch over his girls-just-wanna-have-fun daughter (Shelley Fabares).

It’s a rare treat these days to see Latifah in a movie (you can see her on TV on The Equalizer); perhaps we have Sandler to thank for this welcome, if brief, return. I’d gladly watch the pair in another project together.

The language of the film is found not in the thoughtfully restrained dialogue Ishiguro has written—which accurately reflects the collective repression of polite British society—but in the images Hermanus, cinematographer Jamie Ramsay, and editor Chris Wyatt have constructed, in collaboration with production designer Helen Scott and costume designer Sandy Powell.

It doesn’t take a dystopian future or a sci-fi bent to present a teenage girl who faces enormous stakes and near-constant potential for violence, and The Hate U Give represents Hollywood’s first real ability to recognize that.

The High Note isn’t an ecstatic, tenuously held burst; instead, it’s a mellow pleasure, sleekly directed by Ganatra, who turns Flora Greeson’s occasionally programmatic script into something of smooth, sensual warmth. It is, above all else, an inviting opportunity for two likable actors, Dakota Johnson and Tracee Ellis Ross, to simply exist on screen together, fluid in their casual appeal and gracefully bringing a sappy, aspirational story to mostly credible life.

The film offered [Monroe] the chance to deliciously unravel as a mentally disturbed babysitter, and she also gained real-world survival skills that she’d put to use nearly a decade later.

Decision to Leave no doubt deserves a repeat viewing. Even if the finale is still a slightly hard to parse bummer, there is all the other meticulous craftwork to appreciate and discover anew. In this instance, maybe there is no getting too close to the case.

Sorry to Bother You is a surreal ride.

The film is rich with male feelings and even manages to have a sense of humor about its own sadness. Phoenix is fine here—his usual loose cannon—as is Gyllenhaal, whose educated snob routine doesn’t overplay its hand an inch. Though I’m tempted to launch a federal investigation into his mutt of an accent. But it’s Reilly who really carries the movie.

The film shows—and says plainly, at one point—that people with extreme wealth are so divorced from reality that they become almost another species. Yet it doesn’t fully explore the weirdness of that, the chilling tragedy of it. Instead, Scott has made simply a competent thriller that dazzles only in the ingeniousness of its lightning-quick and proficient re-staging.

Clarke, too, shines as a woman who’s made sacrifices Han cannot imagine. To the extent that the movie is a western at heart, its smartest, subtlest influence is the Joan Crawford classic Johnny Guitar, about a woman who makes her way in the Wild West against all odds, and in the face of all morality.

The Map of Tiny Perfect Things knows its limits. It’s careful about when to be twee, when to strive for profundity, and when to hold back. The film has an agreeably modest scale, despite its lofty considerations of physics and the makeup of existence.

Godzilla vs. Kong competently, efficiently does its job, which is really all you can ask of the fourth movie in a rickety franchise.

The film somehow gets more interesting as it goes, swirling up into a climax that is mordant and corny and monster-movie fantastical.

Jon M. Chu’s film certainly delivers on the lavish trappings of the former interpretation, but if the latter is meant to be the mood of the film, it falls a little short. I wanted things to be a little crazier, I guess, wild high-society intrigue staged with the satisfying bite of mean, wicked satire.

We’re served both the galvanization and the despair, the victories eked out bit by painful bit and the looming defeat, as an implacable monolith dismisses puny mortal concerns like so many gnats. It’s tough stuff, but it’s worthy stuff too.

A New Era really, really should be the end of Downton Abbey, but I’d happily watch these freaks stumbling through the 1930s if they were so inclined to let me.

But the real star of this thing is Clemons, so natural and expressive, whether speaking or singing.

No matter how you may think you feel about child actors, the Temple infant will get you.

The film has a sneaky momentum.

The film is a winning reminder of the pleasures of the midrange movie, one stylish enough to feel distinct but not too caught up in an effort to sell some startling, singular vision. It’s proudly genre and fills its allotted space with humor and detail.

It Ends With Us is a tearjerker that indulges in its red-meat drama, but then gives it the grace of shading and complexity—and rare humanity.

It’s a fun movie, packed with escapades and just-shy-of-cloying cutesy humor, but there is a resonant depth, too.

Eurovision has its clunky stretches—Ferrell’s script, written with Andrew Steele, could be a little tighter, a little sharper, and still keep its rambling appeal—but the film is routinely rescued by a deftly staged music number or an invigoratingly off-color joke.

While Isle of Dogs is basically a fizzy, ornately mounted assembly of quirks and barks, the sheer artistry displayed—in everything from Alexandre Desplat’s taiko drum score to the occasional bits of stunning 2-D animation—is so expertly accomplished, and so clearly fueled by love, that you can’t help but grin.

Joel Edgerton’s earnest, solidly made film will be most effective on, and maybe necessary for, those immediately suffering under the crush of anti-gay bigotry, and those perpetrating it.

As is, The Bikeriders plays as if a longer, more robust version disappeared somewhere in the editing room. But a spell is lightly cast nonetheless, enough to make it sting when things start to go sour for Johnny and Benny and the rest.

Luca does, despite its vagueness, successfully pull off some of the usual Pixar tricks, provoking warm tears and weary sighs as one considers the familiar trajectories of life.

Honeyland is thankfully too interested in the particulars of Hatidze to reduce her to demographic trivia. What matters, the movie tells us, isn’t that she’s exceptional in the trivial sense, but that’s she’s exceptional in who she is. Another message, to be sure, but one that finally rings true.

Despite some distraction and not quite enough music, Soul manages to tap into deep emotion as its characters explore the limits of mortality and what it means to be passionate about life.

There are moments of high drama in Infinity War—between father and daughter, brother and brother, mentor and protégé, lover and lover—that these actors, as deep in this series as we are, deliver on with teary intensity. And there’s a haunting final sequence that is as grave and, I daresay, almost poetic as anything the film series has done.

What keeps us invested is the cast’s invigorating performances.

This curious fairy tale may not be the truth, and it may prattle on too long. But when its stars align, and they let loose with their unmistakable shine, Hollywood movies do seem truly special again. And, sure, maybe TV does too.

Captain Marvel feels as substantial as any of the other standalone Marvel Cinematic Universe films, even if it does things at a more relaxed pitch. The movie’s pioneer status is gestured toward some in the film, but mostly Boden and Fleck are focused on competently telling a tale that fits into the larger machine. It does, just fine.

I don’t find Bonello cold. I find him alert, alive, and frequently inspired—if unexpectedly limited, at times. Zombi Child amounts to a curiously fragmented display of his talent. But much of the good stuff is here.

The movie seems to be a study of the artificial limits we put on our desires—and the ways those desires naturally betray us. This being Denis, she of course goes above and beyond merely exposing those limits; she must also, of course, expose the audience’s limits in the process.

1917 is a rattling wonder of form, an audacious undertaking that nonetheless bobbles or cheats on a few occasions.

What works best about Belfast is what Branagh doesn’t do.

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.

It’s a rousing and moving enough film that one is compelled to excuse the limits of its artistry.

No film could fully capture the awfulness of this experience. But despite some of Bayona’s irksome flair, Society of the Snow does a sturdy enough job getting the point across.

Bergen is consistently the best part of Book Club: natural, dryly funny, and, in a non-pitying way, quietly heartbreaking.

Much of the movie’s charm rests on its lead. Gyllenhaal doesn’t have the same warm twinkle in his eye that Swayze always used to such lovely effect, but he makes do with the rest of his elastic face.

The documentary isn’t a masterwork of craft, but in the interviews, there’s always a glimpse of some broader story, be it the electric charisma of the women in the crowd, who are frankly just as fun to watch as the performers, if not more so, or the broader arcs of history and tradition.

Adapted from Rumaan Alam’s bestselling novel, Sam Esmail’s film is a dreary, harrowing sit—and all the more invigorating for it.

Winning and funny, while also a bit surface-level and predictable, it is an excellent case for the twin powers of Feldstein and Caitlin Moran, the author who adapted her own autobiographical novel to the screen. But it also fails to make the best use of either woman; Feldstein is significantly hampered by a working class British accent, while Moran’s unforgettable comic voice doesn’t come through nearly enough.

Reptile has a sense of tone and texture, elevating its clichés into something of distinction.

Mothers’ Instinct is fun, in a throwback sort of a way. The performances are big and appealing; the period stylings are relatively lush for a lower-budget movie. Sure, there’s some silly stuff, overheated moments that merit guffaws—but that’s part of the mission of movies like this.

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.

Directed by documentarian Matthew Heineman, no stranger to war-torn lands himself, A Private War casts a bracingly intimate gaze, and yet sometimes has the tinny, expositional clank of based-on-a-true-story cinema.

For several weird stretches, though, Venom is a bouncy good time. The movie doesn’t seem to care if you’re laughing with it, at it, or whatever. Just as long as you’re engaged, rollicking along as it doles out fan-service while still making a gleeful hash of so many serious franchise movies about very silly things.

Kinds of Kindness is clever and a bit snide, a curio cabinet not designed for beauty.

Colangelo grapples with all that is unfixed in this story with wise consideration. Worth finds its ultimate value in accepting what the film, and we, cannot ever determine for certain.

Good Joe Bell could have been schmaltzy, simplistic, too hungry for uplift. Green, though—and McMurtry and Ossana and, gulp, Wahlberg—keep the film in check. They don’t lose sight of what is really being spoken about here.

Promising Young Woman is not always surefooted in its style or substance, but Mulligan is consistently riveting throughout.

One happily trots along with Ballerina as it ventures into absurdity. Its silliness is, at least, compellingly rendered. It helps immensely that de Armas is such a limber, confident action performer.

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

Thelma is an example of a wonderful type of fantasy/sci-fi film, the sort of movie that both clearly deals in allegory and is still effective on its surface. But as the stranger aspects of its story tease out, the film manages not to get lost in the reeds of its own mythos. It finds strength in ellipses.

The pleasure and terror of Dark Web is, as it turns out, its unpredictability.

While visually and aurally stunning, James Gray’s latest film doesn’t explore anything new.

Van Gogh’s struggle with the world was one of pushing it away, and trying to pull it close—all at once. At Eternity’s Gate is good at capturing that dizzying contradiction—and the poor soul at its center.