David Fear

In a perfect world, viewers would get college credit after watching Lynch/Oz. You may not walk away any closer to a degree, unfortunately, but you will definitely land over this rainbow with an entirely different view of a maverick filmmaker’s work, as filtered through Hollywood canon fodder.

A movie that liberates your tears and makes you fall in love with it. It is almost assuredly predestined to be the single best movie you see this year.

Sweeney has finally got her serious-actor moment and delivered.

The thrill of the multiversal new is gone. Everything else, however, is extra-webbed for your pleasure.

It’s the perfect movie for Louis-Dreyfus to flex her comitragic chops.

To see this sui generis Amerindie star fall to earth with a resounding thud, leaving just a stunningly designed and studiously empty hole in its wake, is a cosmic bummer.

Above all, it’s a Martin Scorsese picture, brimming with reverence for a culture that survived a horrible trauma as it is filled with exhilarating flourishes, film history references, and explorations of the faultline between the sacred and profane. And yes: It’s a masterpiece.

That remembrance of Saturday matinees past is there for a bit in Indiana Jones and the Dial of Destiny. Until it very much isn’t, and you’re largely left with what you imagine you’d get if you programmed a 21st century A.I. program to write up nostalgia-bait for the children of the late 20th century.

There’s something so compelling about what [Howerton's] doing that he almost convinces you that BlackBerry is better than it is. And then you remember that it’s still a movie that treats “good enough” as the enemy of perfection and creativity, yet still feels it’s acceptable to be just good enough as a dramatization based on a true story.

So much of The Mother feels like a movie star doing an imitation of what they think a tough, serious, jaded hero is like rather than actually playing one. Lopez is an actor with a particularly deep set of skills. You wish she’d brought some more of her expressive ones to this revenge flick.

One of the movie’s major plot points hinges on the ability of some especially gifted psychics being able to erase their own memories. What we would not give for that particular power right about now.

Should you want to spend 90 minutes watching Nazis get shot, stabbed, gutted, blown up, run over, and beaten with a variety of inanimate objects, in the most violent and gory manner possible, this war movie is the answer to your pulp-cinema prayers.

The sounds are finite, yet the benefits of tuning in to the film’s wavelengths are endless. It’s the greatest documentary you’ve ever heard.

What was once an anything-goes sensibility now feels like it’s stuck in a nothing’s-sticking gear. Dark, wearisome and bombastic, along with an ensemble cast clearly radiating that they’d rather be someplace else, is not what we come to a Marvel movie for. We already have the DCEU for that.

Should you care to dig into a contemporary interpretation of a centuries-old canon work, you can skip this Carmen. If you feel the need to watch a sweaty sex symbol pound a punching bag while shirtless, we have a movie just for you.

There’s a lot of Big Cinema Energy pouring out of the screen, which alternates between thrilling and exhausting. Mostly the former, thankfully, yet you can feel where this fit-to-burst tableau of trauma takes a detour into Look-Ma-Check-This-Out territory.

That this moody, woozy character study falls closer to the “masterpiece” side of the fence isn’t a surprise, considering it comes from Kelly Reichardt and Michelle Williams, one of the best filmmaker-actor duos of the last quarter century.

How to Blow Up a Pipeline is a thriller, but it’s not just a thriller. It’s also aiming to be a Gen Z radicalization manifesto in the same spirit as the book, if not with the same rigor.

All you’re left with is Wilson’s exquisitely left-of-center take on the master of friendly trees, which keeps creeping toward the sublime before Paint knocks it back into the middle of an undefined road.

Come for the uplift of an underdog sports story centered around the guys who made you realize a shoe isn’t just a shoe, superstar foot or not. Stay for the film that Davis gives you when, standing unguarded, she’s suddenly passed the ball, effortlessly rolls it off her fingertips, and gets nothing but net.

Smoking Causes Coughing may or may not be designed as a straight parody of Power Rangers-style adventures and the sugar highs of such kid-friendly sci-fi/superhero entertainment. It most definitely is the sort of high-concept goof that, taken to such go-for-broke extremes, blurs the line between giggle-inducing absurdity and absolutely brilliant ridiculousness.

Enys Men is for us. It’s a cult classic that didn’t feel the need to kill time in order to be called cult or classic.

So much of this drama about interrupted lives, unexpected detours, and attempts at (re)connection requires a deep reading between the lines. That’s a big part of its power.

You don’t blame Braff for wanting to craft a movie around [Pugh]. But you can blame him for the movie itself that surrounds that performance, as well as a seriously ludicrous climax — one of several — set in a Williamsburg house party and a coda so self-aggrandizingly lachrymose that you’ll have to resist the urge to scream.

We came into this series tickled by the element of surprise. And we leave Chapter 4 with the distinct feeling of satisfaction.

It may hint that the bad guy at the center of if all wasn’t the primary villain. But the movie does prove, beyond a shadow of a doubt, that it is its own worst enemy.

Even an Oscar-nominated GOAT can’t escape something that seems so perfectly put together on the outside and is so flawed, easily trashed, and barely held together on the inside.

What Seligman, Sennott and Edebiri have given us is nothing less than a Heathers for this generation. It hits you, and it feels like a kiss.