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A Different Man
(2024)
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Alison Willmore
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It’s only really when Pearson shows up that it’s clear how much we needed the fresh air he brings with him.
Posted Sep 19, 2024
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Femme
(2023)
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Roxana Hadadi
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A volatile, sensuous revenge film in which the body and its desires don’t lie.
Posted Sep 17, 2024
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We Grown Now
(2023)
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Roxana Hadadi
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We Grown Now also houses James’s and Ramirez’s sensitive, compassionate, and fearless performances, and the pair’s efforts are precious.
Posted Sep 17, 2024
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It Ends With Us
(2024)
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Roxana Hadadi
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The movie wants to be a form of comfort food, assuring us that everything would be all right if only women embraced their traditional roles as nurturers, mothers, and healers, but it all just tastes stale.
Posted Sep 17, 2024
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Fancy Dance
(2023)
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Roxana Hadadi
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Fancy Dance becomes part coming-of-age story, part road movie, and part revenge thriller with Tremblay effectively guiding Gladstone and Deroy-Olson through the tropes of each subgenre.
Posted Sep 17, 2024
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The Piano Lesson
(2024)
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Bilge Ebiri
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What the filmmakers have ended up with instead retains enough of the wonder of August Wilson’s The Piano Lesson to be worthwhile and occasionally quite moving.
Posted Sep 16, 2024
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Girls Will Be Girls
(2024)
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Bilge Ebiri
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Girls Will Be Girls is a modest work, but like some of the greatest films, it comes to vivid life before our eyes.
Posted Sep 16, 2024
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Speak No Evil
(2024)
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Alison Willmore
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In the new Speak No Evil, the ineffectual nature of the characters becomes not a shortcoming so much as a teased-out joke...leaving us instead to wince at these bumbling fools as they strive, however poorly, to save themselves.
Posted Sep 16, 2024
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The End
(2024)
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Bilge Ebiri
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Despite the occasionally evocative detail, Oppenheimer clearly imagines this as a fairy tale, a simple story designed to explore a complex moral subject.
Posted Sep 16, 2024
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My Old Ass
(2024)
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Alison Willmore
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Park’s film is modest, but it’s grounded in the inner terrain of its characters in a way that makes it feel substantial.
Posted Sep 13, 2024
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Conclave
(2024)
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Bilge Ebiri
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Sinfully entertaining.
Posted Sep 12, 2024
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Relay
(2024)
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Bilge Ebiri
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The conceit of the telecommunications relay gives the movie a tense mood unlike any other.
Posted Sep 10, 2024
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The Wild Robot
(2024)
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Bilge Ebiri
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With The Wild Robot, Sanders has found another way to create a visual dissonance that almost subconsciously insinuates its way into our brains and feeds the central idea of the film. And it’s hypnotic.
Posted Sep 09, 2024
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Nightbitch
(2024)
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Bilge Ebiri
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So the movie goes in circles, constantly expounding on the same things. It has lots of insight, but little momentum.
Posted Sep 09, 2024
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Nutcrackers
(2024)
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Bilge Ebiri
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The familiar contours of Nutcrackers might deceive us, but its inspirations and interests crystallize its restless, independent spirit.
Posted Sep 06, 2024
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Familiar Touch
(2024)
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Alison Willmore
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Familiar Touch can be sad, without question, but it’s also salty and boundlessly tender.
Posted Sep 05, 2024
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Joker: Folie à Deux
(2024)
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Alison Willmore
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Joker: Folie à Deux is Arthur’s movie, and Arthur just isn’t that interesting, despite how much effort Phoenix puts into rendering the character in exquisitely anguished mental and sunken-chested physical detail.
Posted Sep 04, 2024
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Queer
(2024)
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Alison Willmore
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It’s an awkward combination of fidelity to historical research and wish fulfillment that doesn’t serve anyone except its creator.
Posted Sep 03, 2024
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The Room Next Door
(2024)
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Alison Willmore
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The Room Next Door is an alternately rapturous and ponderous meditation on mortality, though in a very Almodóvarian fashion.
Posted Sep 03, 2024
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Wolfs
(2024)
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Alison Willmore
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It feels adequate, never propulsive or clever enough, but exactly the kind of material that Clooney and Pitt know how to sell with their expert timing, their wordless exchanges of eloquent eye contact as the action heats up.
Posted Sep 03, 2024
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Reagan
(2024)
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Bilge Ebiri
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Without any lifelike characters, it’s hard to find oneself caring, and thus, Reagan’s dedication to such narrow themes proves limiting.
Posted Sep 03, 2024
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Saturday Night
(2024)
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Bilge Ebiri
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There’s another underlying truth here about the creative process: Sometimes, it feels like the whole world is against you. What’s more, sometimes you have to imagine that the whole world is against you in order to get anything meaningful done.
Posted Sep 01, 2024
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The Brutalist
(2024)
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Alison Willmore
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It’s impossible not to be impressed by the sheer audacity of The Brutalist’s existence, even if the finished product doesn’t end up matching its ambitions.
Posted Sep 01, 2024
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Across the River and Into the Trees
(2023)
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Bilge Ebiri
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Ortiz (and screenwriter Peter Flannery) remove what made the novel, for all its massive flaws, unique.
Posted Aug 30, 2024
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Babygirl
(2024)
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Alison Willmore
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It’s a self-love story, and part of that discovery is that it’s okay to let yourself be small for a while.
Posted Aug 30, 2024
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Beetlejuice Beetlejuice
(2024)
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Alison Willmore
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Beetlejuice manages to avoid the feeling that its only obligation is to dutifully run through everything familiar one more time. Instead, watching it is a small but significant relief, like reconnecting with an estranged friend...
Posted Aug 29, 2024
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The Killer
(2024)
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Bilge Ebiri
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Woo doesn’t disappoint.
Posted Aug 26, 2024
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The Crow
(2024)
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Alison Willmore
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The film may insist that Eric and Shelly’s is a grand romance of soul mates, but what it actually gives us is a burnout-detention boyfriend/rebellious-cheerleader girlfriend dynamic that doesn’t feel like it would last a long weekend.
Posted Aug 22, 2024
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Daughters
(2024)
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Bilge Ebiri
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Daughters could have easily been a standard-process doc, about the logistics and bureaucracy involved in organizing something like this... But Patton and Rae choose instead to focus on the indelible faces at the heart of their tale.
Posted Aug 19, 2024
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Blink Twice
(2024)
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Angelica Jade Bastién
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Blink Twice is a frustratingly timid take on the billionaire class, too busy swooning over Tatum’s figure to even realize it’s making that mistake.
Posted Aug 19, 2024
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Jackpot!
(2024)
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Bilge Ebiri
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Jackpot! is so shrill, so frantic that it doesn’t let you turn your mind off. Instead, it grates on the brain.
Posted Aug 16, 2024
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Alien: Romulus
(2024)
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Bilge Ebiri
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Alien: Romulus is diverting enough, but it’s also instantly forgettable — something I don’t think I’ve ever said about any other Alien film, good or bad.
Posted Aug 16, 2024
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Borderlands
(2024)
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Bilge Ebiri
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The choppy action scenes and the wan, lifeless incorporation of the film’s settings and backgrounds with the characters’ movements smack of postproduction shenanigans more than they do of on-set incompetence...
Posted Aug 09, 2024
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Alien Resurrection
(1997)
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David Denby
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Welcome to the movies of the late nineties: rage without purpose, threat without meaning, horror without relief.
Posted Aug 07, 2024
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Joe Rogan: Burn the Boats
(2024)
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Kathryn VanArendonk
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There’s no need for polish when the goal is outrage fodder past its expiration date.
Posted Aug 07, 2024
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Trap
(2024)
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Alison Willmore
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Trap, in other words, is as much a movie about the difficulties of staying present in the moment as it is about being a serial killer on the lam — and that, actually, is a twist worth savoring.
Posted Aug 05, 2024
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Harold and the Purple Crayon
(2024)
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Jen Chaney
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Harold and the Purple Crayon makes the classic Hollywood mistake of taking a story that was lovely because of its concision and simplicity and turns it into a movie that is overly long and complicated for no good reason.
Posted Aug 05, 2024
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The Instigators
(2024)
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Alison Willmore
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A mess that’s at war with itself for most of its run time.
Posted Aug 02, 2024
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Aliens
(1986)
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David Denby
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It's like a Romantic symphony that won't come to an end. But it keeps you high.
Posted Jul 30, 2024
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Mothers' Instinct
(2024)
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Alison Willmore
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The characters in Mothers’ Instinct have no convincing inner lives at all, but the exterior work of the actors playing them is choice stuff.
Posted Jul 29, 2024
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Dìdi
(2024)
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Alison Willmore
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It recreates the sensation of drowning in your own hormone-churned emotions so vividly that the film would be difficult to watch if its very existence didn’t serve as a kind of pressure valve.
Posted Jul 26, 2024
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Deadpool & Wolverine
(2024)
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Bilge Ebiri
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Honestly, it appears to exist solely to make money.
Posted Jul 23, 2024
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Skywalkers: A Love Story
(2024)
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Bilge Ebiri
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For all its problems, Skywalkers is often very watchable.
Posted Jul 20, 2024
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Twisters
(2024)
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Alison Willmore
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There’s no sadder sign of the times than a film whose moment of triumph involves an individual figuring out how to diffuse a single storm, but which refuses to acknowledge the larger issues buffeting its characters like gale-force winds.
Posted Jul 17, 2024
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Twister
(1996)
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David Denby
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The movie, of course, is preposterous. But Twister is also irresistible -- absurdly exciting and entertaining -- and though I didn't believe a single thing in it, and some of it made me cringe, I had a great time.
Posted Jul 16, 2024
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Sing Sing
(2023)
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Alison Willmore
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Sing Sing may be an awkward chimera of a film, combining vibrant source material with synthetic attempts to serve as a star vehicle, but its insistence on the healing capacity of art is enough to soften the hardest of hearts.
Posted Jul 12, 2024
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Longlegs
(2024)
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Bilge Ebiri
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Longlegs is terrifying for much of its running time, and it should satisfy most genre fiends.
Posted Jul 12, 2024
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Fly Me to the Moon
(2024)
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Bilge Ebiri
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Fly Me to the Moon could probably be funnier, or more romantic, or more visually resonant, but it’s so charming and well acted that we might not notice.
Posted Jul 12, 2024
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Beverly Hills Cop: Axel F
(2024)
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Jen Chaney
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Despite its reliance on the familiar, Axel F actually is largely a good time, so breezy and insistent on not taking itself too seriously that you can’t even get mad when the dialogue occasionally sounds like it got pumped out by ChatGPT.
Posted Jul 09, 2024
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Last Summer
(2023)
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Alison Willmore
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A family drama as masterfully propulsive as a horror movie.
Posted Jul 01, 2024
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