Fresh is instead a grim slice of visceral entertainment, occasionally dressed up as something weightier. When the script indicates toward its intent—especially in the final climax, when a couple of clunky, theme-driven lines threaten to derail the whole thing—the cool flint of what’s come before loses a bit of its edge.

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.

Though the script, by Trevorrow and Emily Carmichael, does occasionally surprise with a little fugue of sharp writing, Dominion mostly seeks to drag us along for its indulgent 150-minute run in the hopes that it will exhaust us into thinking we’ve been served a rich, satisfying meal. There is at least some nice seasoning throughout.

Gentle, sad, and funny in a just-shy-of-cutesy way, Broker continues Kore-eda’s tradition of handling tough subject matter with a light touch.

It is the film’s bitterest irony that a story about a man controlled by a domineering force seems itself unwilling to give its subject true autonomy, lest that distract from its director’s aesthetic interests.

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.

It’s a movie full of ideas that are never quite unified into a thesis. A bunch of wild imagery and grim hypotheticals about what could become of us may be enough for some viewers. Others, like me, will be left prodding away, trying to locate more meat on all of these ornately assembled bones.

Triangle of Sadness needn’t be a fair film, nor one that readily delivers the simple righteousness of have-nots triumphing over have-lots. A more carefully shaped argument would have been appreciated, though. And one that didn’t dissolve so quickly into a juvenile snicker.

It’s a curious film, messy in all its ambition but consistently transfixing, an earnest labor of love—and one about love.

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.

Armageddon Time is a damning moral drama that is in thoughtful dialogue with complex matters of race and class.

Had Tom Cruise not been in the cockpit, I suspect very little of that emotional component would be so effective. Maverick—loud and dumb and occasionally thrilling—is an act of arrogance, sure, a veteran movie star happily strutting onto the stage so lovingly set for him. (And which he helped design.) But that proves to be a clever reflection of the character he’s playing.

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

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.

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.

Rather than weak imitation, You Won’t Be Alone is a bold and compelling—and reverent—repurposing of Malick’s technique, turning its gaze on matters more squishy, profane, and fallibly human than Malick’s high-minded considerations of the divine.

There is a chance that much more of Aline is played for comedy than I realize; perhaps the jolts of revulsion and fascination are meant to resolve into a giddy laugh. But the film doesn’t really wink to let us in on the joke, except perhaps for one scene that puts a full, slo-mo view on the results of this experiment.

Ambulance is a visual ordeal, but deliberately so. Bay wants us to feel the exhausted tension of his characters

The curious fun of Daniel Espinosa’s film is in how it embraces the gothic mythology that inspired it. Morbius does eventually become a cluttered slugfest, as all things must. But for much of its run it is a stylish, intriguingly toned story of a man trying to thwart mortality.

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

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.

That Decker is able to transmit a deep and compelling curiosity about this journey through each and every image is reason enough to follow a deeply familiar and sometimes overearnest plot.

Christie’s cool flint is swapped out for tearful ruminations on lost love in Death on the Nile, an intermittently entertaining but otherwise tiresomely lugubrious trip down crocodile-filled waters.

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.

Sharp Stick is deeply personal; a series of constellation-like animations that arise in Sarah Jo’s mind as she has sex serve as a reminder of those resonances. Like any artist worth her salt, Dunham yields to the farthest corners of her imagination and experience—backlash be damned.

Moonfall is all cobbled together financing and bad green screen, simulated locations weakly standing in for the real thing and a host of capable but wasted actors. What an accidental irony, that Moonfall should, after all that, prove so weightless.

The film looks pallid and cheap, with pretty much zero nod to the style and panache of Wes Craven’s original. The jokes are heavily telegraphed as Clever Jokes, the references to cinema culture and film structure landing as obligation rather than organic bursts of analytical wit.

Ali, in his first lead role, is let down with a hollow script and sanitized surroundings that his character barely struggles against.

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.

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.

Being the Ricardos reduces the physical comedy that made I Love Lucy work night after night to a series of explainers. Speech after speech drills into the workings of a comedy script or gag, yet nothing makes you laugh.

Where Don’t Look Up finds its strength is in its lead performances, which can’t be undone even by the film’s exhausting, rapid-fire editing and McKay’s aggressive indicating toward his own punchlines.

What’s most arresting about Flee isn’t its animated sequences, but Rasmussen’s detailed and attentive recording of Amin’s vocal expressions. However conversant he is in several languages, from Dari to Russian to Danish, Amin has a way of letting silence interrupt.

This new take on the material is more sinewy and sensual. It balances the property’s inherent melodrama with added grit, but not so much extra scuzz that it feels like an overly modern provocation.

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

Red Notice is limp and dull, and does more to showcase the shortcomings of each of its marquee idols than it does to highlight their bankable charisma. A globe-trotting heist film that heavily relies on zippy banter, Red Notice never finds its groove, instead jerking around between familiar action sequences and humor that never lands.

Much of what you see in Passing you’ll miss if you don’t really pay attention. This is, obviously, the entire idea. No matter the language we use or the identities we are assigned or take on, race is not material or fixed—it transforms and distorts.

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.

There is genuine familial chemistry between Hanks and Landry Jones, effervescing even through the layer of computer wizardry that led to Jeff’s final form.

From visuals to music choice, there’s a lack of style here that is only further emphasized by the film’s refusal to focus.

Samuel, who is also a musician under the stage name The Bullitts, makes an auspicious debut as a feature filmmaker. He knows when to deliver the expected punch and when to add his unique flourishes. The Harder They Fall trots along with invigorating confidence, a vision keenly realized.

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.

The gap between fact and fiction is where Bergman Island finds its murmuring potency. Its maybe unanswerable questions of self and creation give Hansen-Løve’s finespun film a sneaking weight. Perhaps one point of art is the guessing.

The Last Duel is a surprising jumble, a motley assemblage of tones that often work in perverse harmony.

The film has a sneaky momentum.

This is not a considered look at someone’s life; it’s a cash-in that just wants to get to the tragic end, hoping that the audience will convince themselves that they felt something along the way.

The result is an extremely thorough documentation of events, and a literal one. The Rescue is not so much a film as it is a record.

It sounds strange to say of a film about such impossible sorrow, but Mass is thoroughly entertaining. Or maybe engrossing is a better word. Its incisive dialogue and nuanced performances demand our attention, inviting us into a roiling weather system of guilt and sadness. The experience proves oddly nourishing, clarifying.

Let There Be Carnage tries to recreate the first film’s giddy shock while also upping the ante, taking what audiences liked and slopping more of that onto their plates.

Coen and his acting troupe make dense language wholly legible, bending famous phrases into intriguing new shapes. The film moves at a pleasant clip, eschewing cinematic digressions and driving, like a dagger, to the heart of the story. It’s an efficient little film, despite its fussy aesthetics.

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

Karam makes an auspicious directorial debut, one that captures all the tense, rattling mood of his stage horror while giving it a new, decidedly cinematic shape.

It would be easy to get lost in all that technical detail, to figure the impression—both physical and vocal—is enough. But Chastain digs deeper than the aesthetics, and locates something crucial in Tammy Faye. It’s a genuine, deep-seated, perhaps ruinously naive compassion, which Chastain illustrates with great care.

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.

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.

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

With The Lost Daughter, Gyllenhaal easily proves her talent and instinct as a director by unflinchingly infusing a great story with her own ideas and images‚ and assembling an unbeatable cast and crew (including Happy as Lazzaro and Never Rarely Sometimes Always cinematographer Hélène Louvart) to bring it home.

Perhaps the film’s thematic intentions are noble. But its execution is glib, never finding the right balance between compassion and leering.

As was true of the stage production, the Dear Evan Hansen film wants to have it both ways, to see the awful lie at the center of Evan’s message of hope and to still have it play as hopeful.

Mills makes this genre feel new and insightful, as if he’s one of only a few filmmakers who has tackled the complex dynamic between adult and child.

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

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.

You’ll leave the film unable to stop thinking about its dimensions.

While the core narrative is plenty compelling in all its creeping dread and curiosity, The Power of the Dog is not too concerned with being about any one thing. The film’s secrets are revealed while new ones bloom into being. Life tumbles after life in the ecosystem of all of us, seething amid the dust clouds we can’t help but kick up.

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 film doesn’t do much to distinguish itself, or to retain audience interest. Jackman, dutiful thespian as always, gives it his all, but the specter his character is running after doesn’t have enough shape, or meaning.

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.

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.

Director Liesl Tommy and screenwriter Tracey Scott Wilson do not let reverence for the legend trap them in an unimaginative limbo. In following Franklin from ages 8 to 29, they place a musically expressive yet interpersonally mysterious woman within multiple vital contexts, and with visual and sonic specificity and flair.

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

Annette is remarkable for its formal intensity—how every image and song is not merely reflective of, but tangled up in the ideas they give life to.

The Suicide Squad walks about as far up to the line of the indecent as is perhaps possible for a film of this size right now, which makes portions of it genuinely exciting. But we get inured to its provocations too quickly, and then the movie tries to soften itself and add emotional dimensions that aren’t exactly earned.

Jungle Cruise is a two-hour movie that has far less consequence than a ride that’s a small fraction of that length. The experience the film more accurately simulates is the standing in line: all that tedious waiting in the heat for the fun to start.

It’s an elusive film, in its plotting and allusions, but is still potent and immediate, as resonant as any of our own late-night quests toward the far reaches of our self-conception.

Shyamalan teases out new information in just the right doses, remembering all the while that this is, at its core, a B-picture. It isn’t gory, but it’s gross, and the camera knows just how much to show to keep us dialed in.

It’s all incredibly silly, yet undeniably honest.

The film is best viewed as a tricky character study, one about the undulations and relentless demands of self-worth—and, of course, of money, which is always a focus of Baker’s films.

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.

Benedetta is full of surprising tones shrewdly introduced by Verhoeven, who keeps us leaning forward to suss out just what his film is trying to be and to say. Cloister drama gives way to steamy soft-core romance gives way to camp comedy gives way to apocalyptic horror.

Trier pulls a lot of stylistic tricks in the film, but they somehow never play like gimmicks, like adornments merely there to show off the talent of their creator. The film has a lilting, lively rhythm; the glimpses we see of months and years in Julie’s life ably provide a whole picture.

From one vantage point, Stillwater may just be a sentimental and lurid riff on the infamous Amanda Knox case. But I think McCarthy has something bigger in mind, which he pokes at intriguingly throughout his movie’s considerable sprawl.

With Soderbergh and his collaborators, you can never complain that great thespian skills were left to wander, or that you were bored. I’m not sure that I ever really knew what was going on in No Sudden Move—something about redlining, pollution, and the American auto industry—but I was never taken out of the moment. Each beat pulsed with both anticipation and absurdity. If that’s not movie magic, then, well, it depends on what you think movie magic is.

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.

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.

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.

All Light, Everywhere is a tremendous work that anyone merely curious about the various relationships the government has to both private industry and an enormous public ought to see.

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.

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.

Those Who Wish Me Dead is missing an act, maybe, some of kind bridge between its drawn-out beginning and its hurried climax. What’s in the film is staged shrewdly by Sheridan, but there’s little sense of cumulative build.

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.

Basking in the film’s ceaseless swirl is as intoxicating a moviegoing experience as one could want these days, a burst of communal joy (and sorrow) that serves as an effusive welcome back to the world.

The movie is a pallid, dull slog of bad acting and worse storytelling.

It’s all pleasingly robust and cinematic, if fleeting.

The real trouble of the film is that it is stuck, like a spirit, between spaces. It’s cramped in the liminal room between “prestige horror” and something more slick, squalid, and satisfying. The balance is off, for which a strong cast—Rhea Seehorn is particularly sharp as a colleague of George’s—and stately aesthetics can’t make up.

Best to move past Without Remorse. assured that Jordan will find another, more fitting star vehicle for himself. Maybe one that’s a bit hipper to the mores and styles of the present day, and is more willing to let its lead express something beyond the wordless violence of so much canned fury.

Mortal Kombat is a disjointed, halfhearted trip to the past, where things probably should have been left finished for good.