Dominick Suzanne-Mayer

Queen & Slim is a traditional road movie with decidedly untraditional inclinations, a romance framed against stark realities. But it’s equally a political act, a film whose very existence demands questions about the ways stories like it are typically told, from whose perspective, and perhaps most valuably of all, for what audience.

While the film’s intentions are noble, and its story worth retelling, it struggles throughout to lend a lasting weight to its straightforward plotting.

The Dead Don’t Die is a zombie movie of an odd stripe, and for all its blatant synthesizing of influences, it never shakes off the impression that it’s working out exactly what it wants to be as it goes along.

Fails is unsurprisingly exceptional given his relationship to the material, shaping the film’s overall tone as he goes along, portraying a kind of existential tour guide for a place that at once still stands, is being torn down every day, and never quite existed at all.

While the charm of Always Be My Maybe can and should be attributed to its performers, there’s a real sweetness in its reframing of the romantic comedy as the struggle of two people who already have fulfilling lives, attempting to add to them by rediscovering lost pieces of themselves in each other.

It’s a nasty piece of work, and one that at the very least stands as an active interruption of the escapist, family-friendly superhero fare currently dominating the industry.

The Souvenir‘s power is deceptive, in a way; it’s only at the film’s end, at the moment of its bracing final image, that its ideas and genre subversions come fully into focus.

As a family movie, Detective Pikachu is enjoyable enough. But if the Pokémon games drew players into the world through immersion, it’s then strange that the first major live-action adaptation frequently races through those moments of immersion in order to get to the next sequence of middling buddy-cop banter.

Endgame manages to effectively deliver reunions alongside farewells, fan service alongside the kind of storytelling which needs to occur in order for the whole billion-dollar machine to keep a’grinding, and a handful of sincere, honest-to-God surprises that make the grandeur of the whole thing feel justified.

Grass Is Greener may ultimately be preaching to the chorus, but its simple messaging could draw in people who enjoy getting high, but aren’t fully aware of the broader political implications. As uses for streaming services go, there are far worse ways to burn down an afternoon.

As with so many Laika films, you’ll come for the breathtaking animation, and you’ll leave both enchanted and surprised by the big, beating heart beneath it.

Sunset is difficult filmmaking, the kind which almost seems impenetrable at times. But if you’re willing to meet Nemes on his level, the film’s rich textures will eventually prove themselves beguiling.

Apollo 11 is a great documentary, and its greatness can largely be attributed to the stunning archival scenes compiled within it. It’s impossible for anybody who wasn’t there to truly understand what it felt like to see Apollo 11 complete its travels, but for at least 93 endlessly arresting minutes, Apollo 11 does its very best to put you right there.

Between its continuous insistence on broad humor and its lack of broader context about the industry period in which Paige came up (she was among the first womens’ wrestlers in WWE to break out when the division gained traction after years of public degradation), Fighting With My Family ultimately reveals itself as a shallow take on a genuinely fascinating story.

Like its unstoppable heroine, Alita: Battle Angel is something strange and unique and special, built from the finest repurposed parts.

While it’s a reasonably paced thriller, The Prodigy is almost wholly devoid of real scares.

Throughout Piercing, it’s never clear who’s getting played, at least except for the audience. Those with the stomach for what Pesce and his stars have to offer will likely give over to the rush of it, as the film plays fast and loose with expectations at every turn.

The little beats throughout Cold Pursuit are distinctive enough to cover for this gory caper’s periodic misfires.

Although its leads find the odd moment of charm together, even Kidman in what’s somehow the worst-shaded part of all three, The Upside fumbles far too often when it attempts to enlighten or edify its audience.

It’s also not all that good, even if it’s hardly the kind of “bad” that most would get riled about. Escape Room is cut from one of Hollywood’s most familiar cloths: the “mall horror” movie.

When people talk about Hollywood movies feeling more and more like product, this is what they’re driving at.

There’s not an ounce of wasted motion to be found throughout Cold War. Pawlikowski moves at a fleet pace, trusting in his audience to fill in the gaps that the film’s understated storytelling leaves along the way.

As with any number of popular YA novels-turned-feature films, Mortal Engines has a wealth of possibilities and curious ideas at its disposal. Instead, it tears past them in pursuit of some of the subgenre’s most exhausted narrative tropes, chewing up everything engaging as it grinds along.

There’s a breathless sense of discovery and play that makes the film seem new, even as it’s tap-dancing through the imprints of so many sci-fi stories throughout the years. Simply put, superhero movies don’t often carry this sense of possibility anymore.

There’s nothing particularly memorable about Robin Hood even when you’re laughing at it, and that may be one of the saddest fates a movie can meet.

The Front Runner is a naively misguided product of panicked, desperate modern times. But perhaps even worse, at least for the type of film it wants to be, it lands somewhere between irrelevant and a woeful misreading of the room.

There’s a thoughtful, kid-friendly parable about the hazards of internet fame somewhere in Ralph Breaks the Internet, but its aim is so scattershot that it only emerges in fits and starts.

Boy Erased finds its best stuff when it matches the unabashed earnestness of Jared, and of Hedges’ performance. The film isn’t so much preaching to the converted as begging the ones who aren’t yet to finally come over and stand on the right side of history.