Vivid and bracing as the film’s swimming scenes are, Nyad crackles most when Nyad and Bonnie are grooving together on land. Bening and Foster have an inviting rapport, credibly playing old pals (and onetime lovers) who are in it for the long haul.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

Let Him Go is a swift entertainment, claustrophobic and anxious in its depiction of an impossible, frustrating situation, and satisfying in its gnarly climax.

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

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.

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.

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.

Trite as it may sound, we gradually accept that the beautiful boy of the title is not some innocent child, lost to the past, but rather the real and imperfect young man hunched before us. It’s Chalamet’s great accomplishment, and the film’s, that we feel that so keenly.

With its limp humor, canned sentiment, and over-egged efforts to gross us out, Beetlejuice Beetlejuice is a waste of a good cast and a defacement of a classic film’s legacy. Most galling of all, it was summoned willingly by people who should know better than to mess with what’s long been peacefully laid to rest.

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’.

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.

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.

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 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.

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.

It’s a solid nature movie, not quite factual enough to be a true work of scientific observation, but engaging and persuasively conservationist in its subtle way.

All the arch gloss that McKay covers the film with isn’t earned, not when the movie’s foundation—intellectually, politically, artistically—is so rickety.

Ocean’s 8 is fun. The sequel (of sorts) to Steven Soderbergh’s three Ocean’s films, this time with a mostly female cast of smooth criminals, is a lark and a laugh, an airy caper featuring a bunch of actors you love and a lot of great clothes. Who can argue with that, in June or any other time of year? In that way, Ocean’s 8 is a worthy continuation of a hallowed brand. So, breathe a sigh of relief. There’s no disaster here, no regrettable misfire to be chagrined about. Phew. That said, I do wish Ocean’s 8 were a little more than fun.

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.

The movie is compelling in the moment, but seems irresponsible with any afterthought.

It’s a fine movie: cute, clever, moving, and engagingly-told, an altogether painless confirmation of what we should all agree is Pixar’s basic aptitude for keeping kids’ asses in seats and parents from pulling out their hair.

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.

There’s something sweetly clumsy about how Stargirl invites us back in time, to twenty years ago, when such a made-up person might have surprised and delighted us. Stargirl is a strange but not unwelcome reminder of that fact. How quaint of us. How quirky, really.

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.

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.

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

S. Craig Zahler's controversial movie about a pair of racist cops gone rogue has more bark than bite—and that’s telling.

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

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

The movie is not trying to make any grand statements or reinvent any wheels; it is only trying to entertain.

The film has a sneaky momentum.

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.

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.

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

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

All the conversational ramble and social intimacy of Matthias & Maxime has the murmur of truth. It’s textured and specific; it slows and quickens with the cadence of real life.

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.

Pooh and his animal pals are wonderfully subtle feats of animation, textured so carefully that you can almost smell the cozy, woodsy mustiness of their matted fur.

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.

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

We can feel a richer idea tingling just beneath Sea Fever’s skin. But Hardiman never roots it out, opting instead for a restraint that is often admirable, but also dampens the film’s potential power.

Huppert, whose sharpness lends itself beautifully to ironic humor, is more than game. Mrs. Hyde is, among other things, a comedy of enlightenment—literal enlightenment, if the gold sparks coursing through Géquil’s body are any indication. Perhaps its greatest lesson isn’t within the movie, but rather the fact of it: rather than revise a stale genre, burn it anew.

I wish the movie was just a tad sharper, took a little more time to really clarify its stance on this whole social-sexual-commercial world of romantic aspirationalism, to make its commentary and its humor really sing—and sting.

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.

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.

The pleasures of Ol Parker’s film are simple and sensual, its riot of color and sweet, nostalgic songs proving wholly agreeable even without much of a plot to hold it all together.

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.

There are issues of trust between the two men. It’s unclear who is exploiting whom—and impossible to know what is being recreated for the camera and what is being captured “live.” This is all to the betterment of Voyeur, which, it isn’t too much of a spoiler to say, ultimately concludes that Mr. Talese and Mr. Foos aren’t all that different from one another.

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.

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

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

The film strikes a nice balance between serviceable, not-overly-slick action scenes—we’ve come a long way from those shoddily animated monkeys—and comedy that’s actually rooted in character, rather than cheap references or stereotypes.

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.

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.

An American Pickle proves a pretty good hang. It’s straightforward, well-paced, has fun-enough cameos (Lonely Planet’s Jorma Taccone and comic Tim Robinson, to name two). But it also sells its premise quite a bit short.

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.

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

Only 92 minutes long, Work It could use more space to move around in: to let these performers really strut their stuff, and to allow the movie to develop a bit more idiosyncratic texture. As is, Work It is an agreeable enough pastiche, clearly aware of its influences and not trying to pretend that it’s come up with these steps all on its own.

Ultimately, Wicked Little Letters turns out to be not much of a whodunnit—frankly, you can probably guess now and get it right. But the lack of a real mystery doesn't really matter when Buckley and Colman are as delightful to watch as they are in this film.

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.

For roughly its first half, Hotel Artemis glides nicely on all of Pearce’s world-building and the cast’s confident performances. But as the power flickers at the Artemis and dangerous foes close in, the movie starts to wobble. Pearce has maybe put too many variables in play and has trouble connecting them into a unified narrative.

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.

I’m a pretty easy scare, but I sat through this Pet Sematary mostly unbothered. Which is certainly not the takeaway one should have from an adaptation of a Stephen King novel, let alone the one that King has said frightens him more than anything else he’s written. In this new film, you almost can’t see what he was so afraid of.

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.

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.

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.

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 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.

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.

It succeeds by sticking closely to the important specifics ... It’s a small-scale human story, precious few of which make it to film these days. It’s also, if you’re in the market for that kind of thing, an extremely effective tearjerker.

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.

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

As a dancer to Hargrave’s violent tune, Hemsworth acquits himself beautifully—he gets a grim and maybe irresponsible assignment done quite well.

The film’s gaze is narrow and insider-y, but it somehow kind of works. Deadpool & Wolverine is an amusing reflection on the recent cultural past, and a half-cynical, half-hopeful musing on what its future might be.

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.

Intricately crafted as it is, Campos’s film is downright simple. It’s sloppy pulp packaged as prestige, which makes the meanness of its condescending gaze that much meaner.

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.

Yesterday isn’t nearly as fantastical, sweet, or light on its feet as it could be—and maybe that’s because of that darn premise. It’s somehow both too basic and too rich. There’s too much one could do with it, but too little vision in what Boyle and Curtis ultimately put forward—even as real tensions, real sticks in music history’s craw, populate the margins.