2023's top film reviews from The A.V. Club
See how we graded out everything from Oscar contenders like Barbie and Oppenheimer to blockbuster pretenders like The Marvels and The Flash
As film years go, 2023 was surprisingly strong. Even during a time that saw the industry still struggling to recover from the after effects of the pandemic and wracked by lengthy actors and writers strikes, Hollywood produced some memorable work. That includes Oppenheimer, which we pronounced as Christopher Nolan’s masterpiece, and the blockbuster phenomenon that was Margot Robbie’s Barbie. Of course, 2023 wasn’t all hits and happiness. There were plenty of stiffs hitting theaters and streaming platforms (we’re looking at you Indiana Jones and Aquaman, to name just a couple big-budget disappointments). Now, as awards season marches on, and with 2023 still close enough in the rearview mirror to merit further discussion, we thought this would be a good time to flip back through many of last year’s releases and revisit just what our seasoned reviewers at The A.V. Club had to say about them.
Ferrari review: Michael Mann mythologizes motorsports and manhood
With Ferrari, director Michael Mann pops the hood and takes a look at the engine powering one man’s journey towards icon status during a tumultuous time. Through this titular, fallible protagonist, the audacious auteur explores many of his favorite recurring themes about the male identity, ruminating on men’s specialized skillsets, strengths, and vulnerabilities—especially when it comes to relationships with women. He also adds a kinetic, combustible beauty within gripping action sequences that put us in the driver’s seat as we ogle that gloriously seductive signature racing red. — Courtney Howard
Aquaman And The Lost Kingdom review: A farewell with a focus on fun
Aquaman And The Lost Kingdom did not set out for its sequel voyage knowing it would be a film to end an era. It’s been five years since Aquaman became a holiday hit for Warner Bros., and in those 60 months, the studio has again changed course with its DC Comics films, moving away from the DC Extended Universe that launched with Man Of Steel and concludes by either permanently retiring this version of Aquaman or shuffling him into a new paradigm. — Matthew Jackson
Rebel Moon — Part One review: Zack Snyder delivers a soulless dud
From his critically maligned but fan-favorite Sucker Punch to his infamous internet darling “Snyder Cut” of 2017’s Justice League, Zack Snyder is no stranger to drumming up discourse whenever one of his films nears release. His latest effort for Netflix, Rebel Moon — Part One: A Child of Fire, has already sparked discussions of an R-rated, three-hour director’s cut to give his fans an alternate taste before Rebel Moon — Part Two hits the streaming platform early next year. But while Snyder may do his best to invent a dark, gripping universe to engross viewers, Rebel Moon is a limp, soulless regurgitation of tropes stolen from much more formidable films. — Lauren Coates
Anyone But You review: Everyone is beautiful and nothing hurts
What kind of person flies from Boston to Sydney for a long weekend? The rich, hot idiots that make up the ensemble of Anyone But You, that’s who. These are the kind of people who would get on a 16-hour flight without knowing where they’re sleeping, or volunteer to swim out to a boat in the bay without being able to swim, or fly their daughter’s ex out to Australia halfway through the weekend as a surprise. There are leaps of logic aplenty, but does any of that really matter? No. Love matters. — Drew Gillis
All Of Us Strangers review: A fantastical, cathartic love story
Andrew Haigh is a master storyteller of love stories, both about budding connections (Weekend) and lifetime marriages falling apart (45 Years). He’s also one of the best contemporary chroniclers of gay lives (Weekend, HBO’s Looking). In All Of Us Strangers, he combines these elements to arrive at a story even richer than what he has done before. This is a film about a new and exciting love tinged with sadness, and it’s also about how to reconcile unresolved feelings between parents and their adult children. It’s a film about first and last chances at love, redemption, and healing wounds. All Of Us Strangers tells how continuing relationships—those that last a lifetime—can bring so much joy because of the strong connections they engender, yet also bring so much sorrow because of the expectations they come with. — Murtada Elfadl
The Color Purple review: An American classic gets yet another look
About 70 minutes into The Color Purple, there’s a scene that doesn’t appear in many Hollywood studio musicals. A big number set on a gorgeous soundstage with a full brass band showing two characters singing about love to each other. The novelty here is that the characters are both Black women, falling in love and sealing their bond with a kiss in this fantasy number. Then the fantasy becomes a reality as the scene cuts into another of them waking up intertwined in bed together. However, for most of its running time, this adaptation of the Broadway musical, itself adapted from Alice Walker’s novel, does something far more conventional. Hewing close to material seen before and loved by generations, it’s a clear nostalgia play hoping to lure in audiences familiar with the IP to its Christmas box office. — Murtada Elfadl
The Boys In The Boat review: Sports drama stretches for the finish line
A story like that of the 1936 University of Washington junior rowing team seems tailor-made to get the big-screen treatment. It’s got everything: thrilling races, affable characters, and, perhaps most important of all, a welcome positive message about improbable triumphs—all against the backdrop of the Great Depression and the 1936 Berlin Olympics. And while George Clooney’s handsomely mounted The Boys In The Boat delivers on all of those fronts, the period piece remains a rather inert proposition, a beautiful postcard of a film. — Manuel Betancourt
The Zone Of Interest review: A bone-chilling portrait of a Nazi household
The opening shot of Jonathan Glazer’s The Zone Of Interest is a pitch-black frame into which the film’s title slowly dissipates. Depriving its audience of a visual anchor, the first few minutes of the film force you instead to listen closely to Mica Levi’s chilling score and Johnnie Burn’s eerie sound design. It asks you to sink into a world where your senses will be enveloped with a fog of a tale that’s equal parts banal and insidious. Glazer puts out a call to pay close attention, to focus on details one may otherwise miss. It’s a powerful gambit that rightly sets the tone for one of 2023’s greatest achievements, a film discomfiting in its approach to the Holocaust, and a horrifyingly mundane portrait of a man, a household, and a country. — Manuel Betancourt
Chicken Run: Dawn Of The Nugget review: A sequel that’s worth the wait
On paper, the original Chicken Run sounded more like the sort of film a character in a comedy movie might pitch: “It’s The Great Escape ... starring chickens!” For better or worse, Chicken Run committed to the bit, and as a result felt more hamstrung at times than more original Aardman Studios animated films. Where a Wallace And Gromit adventure would usually feel imaginative and made up on the fly, in the best way possible, Chicken Run had a template to stick to. The company’s love of elaborate contraptions, sight gags, and rural English accents kept things reasonably entertaining, but a prison break movie as a kiddie adventure felt at odds tonally with the whimsical performances. — Luke Y. Thompson
American Fiction review: Jeffrey Wright’s best film role since Basquiat
Thelonious “Monk” Ellison is a serious writer. He’s an academic, disdains “airport books” and best-selling colleagues, confronts his students, and is advised by his agent not to “insult anyone important.” In just a few scenes at the beginning of American Fiction, writer-director Cord Jefferson and actor Jeffrey Wright give the audience a complete understanding of their film’s protagonist. Cord with economical, pointed writing, and Wright with a deadpan face that is both hilarious and solemn. — Murtada Elfadl
Iron Claw review: Zac Efron grapples with the curse of the Von Erichs
In pro wrestling, there are babyfaces (the good guys) and heels (the bad). The best matches tell the story of a babyface overcoming a dastardly heel’s dirty taunts and crooked tricks to win. The famed and supposedly cursed real-life Von Erich wrestling family of Texas was a brotherhood of babyfaces with a heel for a patriarch, and their tragic story is defined by adversity without comeback. — Matt Schimkowitz
Origin review: Ava DuVernay’s ambitious study of grief and growth
There’s a scene nearly halfway through Origin where the protagonist is advised by her confidant to simplify her new book’s sharp-but-unwieldy premise or risk losing potential readers. It reads like similar feedback given to writer-director Ava DuVernay in her development of this riveting feature, which gives voice to Isabel Wilkerson’s personal and professional struggles while writing her compelling novel Caste: The Origins of Our Discontents. Achieving a breakthrough for the character and audience members alike, the astute filmmaker drills into the dramatic core and lets the film’s magnitude push the picture’s heartrending sentiments to the fore. — Courtney Howard
The Boy And The Heron review: Hayao Miyazaki plays the hits
Watching Hayao Miyazaki’s un-retirement animated feature The Boy And The Heron is a little like watching Bob Dylan play the hits live: you have some idea of what you’ll get, even if it’s all jumbled up into a wholly new combination and style. Released in Japan under the title of How Do You Live, after a 1937 novel it’s mostly not based on, The Boy And The Heron neither had nor needed trailers there, or much promotion save a single poster design. Miyazaki-savvy audiences came with a degree of confidence in what they would get, as can American aficionados of Studio Ghibli. — Luke Y. Thompson
Poor Things review: Emma Stone comes to life in a feminist masterpiece
Director Yorgos Lanthimos (The Lobster, The Killing Of A Sacred Deer) is not what one might call a conventional filmmaker, crafting his films with deadpan line delivery that enhances the surreal quality of their premises to lay bare fundamental truths of the human experience. His previous collaboration with screenwriter Tony McNamara, The Favourite, was perhaps as grounded as Lanthimos gets, but his penchant for distorted wide angles and understanding complicated, hopelessly entangled relationships made the film a highlight of his filmography. Now the creative duo have reunited for an adaptation of Alasdair Gray’s superb 1992 novel Poor Things, resulting in a film that is simultaneously Lanthimos’ strangest—no small feat in its own right—but also perhaps his most humanist. — Leigh Monson
Wonka review: Timothée Chalamet concocts a delightfully infectious confection
The point of co-writer/director Paul King’s musically oriented origin story Wonka isn’t to answer the question of how a budding candy maker became the mercurial, withdrawn weirdo we met in the pages of Roald Dahl’s book Charlie And The Chocolate Factory and on screen in both 1971’s Willy Wonka & The Chocolate Factory and 2006’s Charlie And The Chocolate Factory. Rather, it’s to tell a character-enriching backstory capturing a time when Willy Wonka’s initial big dreams changed the world for the better. That’s a smart path considering the former narrative track, seeing a beloved Willy Wonka morph into a world-weary, workaholic recluse, would be a flat-out bummer. — Courtney Howard
Renaissance: A Film By Beyoncé review: Our greatest performer, preserved in her prime
During Beyoncé’s performance of “Alien Superstar” in Glendale, Arizona, last August, the power went out. With 56 dates to choose from on her Renaissance tour, it would be easy enough to leave this instance in the past, to not include it in your highlight reel-cum-concert film. But in Beyoncé’s world, a meticulously executed performance isn’t the only thing she wants to spotlight; she wants to show you the 10 minutes of chaos behind the scenes as the crew hurried to restore power. She wants to show you her decision to change her costume, just because she had an unexpected break. Beyoncé wants to show you the work, the grit, the ingenuity. She wants to show you, as she repeats, her renaissance. — Drew Gillis
Eileen review: Anne Hathaway and Thomasin McKenzie in a stylish thriller
From the very first few minutes of Eileen, the audience is clued that this won’t be your conventional mid-20th century set drama. The eponymous character masturbates twice, has a wild sex fantasy about a co-worker, and threatens to murder her father. All within the first quarter hour of the film. Directed by William Oldroyd (Lady Macbeth) and adapted by Ottessa Moshfegh and Luke Goebel from Moshfegh’s acclaimed novel, Eileen is a stylish wild ride that never lets up from its first frame to its shocking finale. — Murtada Elfadl
Godzilla Minus One review: The monster roars louder than ever
Nearly 70 years and more than 35 films into the series, it’s a testament to the enduring appeal of a skyscraper-sized lizard that Godzilla movies can still surprise you. He may not be the most flexible nuclear-powered dinosaur, but the concept is undeniably malleable. In this century alone, we’ve seen Big G square up against an alien race of Xilians in Godzilla: Final Wars and inspire the Kafaka-esque satire of Shin Godzilla. Whatever genre perches itself on Godzilla’s spiky spine will be well cared for, which helps explain the veritable Godzilla renaissance we find ourselves in. — Matt Schimkowitz
Wish review: This kingdom really needs some magic
It was probably inevitable that Marvel’s world-building virus would infect its Disney host. But it’s still startling to see how urgently the new Disney animated fairy tale Wish attempts to retcon 86 years of disparate animated features into something like a shared universe—one where Peter Pan, Thumper, and Pinocchio exist in semi-related plotlines, just like Black Widow, Moon Knight, and the High Evolutionary do. — Ray Greene
Napoleon review: Ridley Scott delivers a dynamite biopic
Outside of military colleges, where his strategic acumen is still lauded, many present-day folks might only have a loose sense of Napoleon Bonaparte, with a bicorne hat and hand tucked in his jacket, as a man of short stature and shorter temper. Director Ridley Scott’s Napoleon sweeps aside this caricature, craftily sidestepping the pitfalls of many conventional biopics and delivering a highly involving work of psychological portraiture. — Brent Simon
Maestro review: Bradley Cooper’s passionate, unruly ode to Leonard Bernstein
Bradley Cooper’s Maestro is an inspired ode to the late, great Leonard Bernstein. It’s also a thorny deconstruction of the man-as-tortured-genius trope, replete with a compassionate focus on his put-upon wife and the bond the two shared for close to three decades. Ambitious in scope and featuring two powerhouse performances at its center, the Netflix release makes good on the promise shown in Cooper’s debut, A Star Is Born, another behind-the-scenes musical romance two-hander that explored the promise and price of ambition. — Manuel Betancourt
Next Goal Wins review: Taika Waititi returns to his roots
The marketing for Taika Waititi’s Next Goal Wins promotes the film as an underdog sports comedy about an ill-fated South Pacific soccer team, full of the highs and mostly lows of a struggling squad trying to make good. Revisiting the fallout from the worst loss in World Cup history—when Australia defeated American Samoa 31-0 in a 2001 qualifying match—provides Waititi with plenty of predictably amusing opportunities to good-naturedly skewer the ineptitude of the Polynesian team, but he also has a parallel agenda. — Justin Lowe
May December review: An intoxicating portrait of an emotional predator
From its very first shot Todd Haynes’ May December announces itself as a wildly intoxicating, intentionally strident provocation. Close-up images of Monarch butterflies and their surrounding manicured flower gardens are scored by the theme from Joseph Losey’s 1971 film The Go-Between. The archly dramatic music lends a discomfiting feeling to the scenes of domesticity (a cookout for friends and family in Savannah, Georgia) that soon follow. Such a jarring juxtaposition, best encapsulated by said music leading into a character complaining about not having enough hot dogs, sets up a film that wants to suture the lurid and the mundane, creating in the process a masterful meditation on performance and predation. — Manuel Betancourt
Thanksgiving review: Eli Roth serves up a gory feast
Horror fans have been waiting more than a decade for Thanksgiving, director Eli Roth’s holiday slasher about a killer in a pilgrim mask terrorizing a small Massachusetts town. Ever since Roth’s fake trailer for the film showed up in Quentin Tarantino and Robert Rodriguez’s Grindhouse, we’ve been wondering what the finished version could look like, and how much Roth might lean on the vintage slasher feel of the fake trailer when it came time to make the real movie. That trailer, of course, is now the stuff of legend, with fan-favorite moments that just have to have an homage point in the movie itself. — Matthew Jackson
Saltburn review: Barry Keoghan and Jacob Elordi seek racy thrills
The darkly comedic and corrupt whims of the wealthy are on full display in filmmaker Emerald Fennell’s racy thriller Saltburn. The cheeky provocateur’s follow-up to her Oscar-winning directorial debut, Promising Young Woman, Saltburn wages war on the stuffy British elite by way of a lower-class scholarship student, who charms and smarms his way into an aristocratic classmate’s life. If this premise sounds familiar, it’s because it parallels that of The Talented Mr. Ripley, not solely with a similar overarching plot, but also within its sentiments. However, unlike that aforementioned film, Fennell’s feature all-too-frequently fumbles, misunderstanding character construction and misjudging the audience’s intellect in sussing out her anti-hero’s deviant actions. — Courtney Howard
The Hunger Games: The Ballad Of Songbirds And Snakes review: A sappy riff on Romeo And Juliet
What is the root of evil? In the YA fiction genre, storytellers often source it to bad breakups and torn friendships, which can transform Prince Charming into the Prince of Darkness. Plain evil isn’t engaging, but evil for evil’s sake can be wildly compelling, at least in this category, where a bad situationship is a go-to backstory for many a ruthless dictator. So it is both unsurprising yet disappointing that The Hunger Games: The Ballad Of Songbirds And Snakes, the latest adaptation from author Suzanne Collins’ young adult dystopian saga, leans heavily into this trope. — Eric Francisco
The Marvels review: The MCU does battle with itself
It’s no secret these days that Marvel is having something of a crisis behind the scenes, completely revamping their approach to continuity-critical storytelling in their television efforts and scrambling to draw audiences back into theaters in a rudderless post-Endgame world. It’s a massive machine with so many moving parts that course-correction is undoubtedly going to be affecting Marvel Cinematic Universe projects for quite a while, and The Marvels feels like an extremely messy start to that process. Which is a shame, because there’s a light, breezy romp buried in here, begging to be let out from under the pressure of being a tentpole event film. — Leigh Monson
Rustin review: Justice is mostly served for a forgotten civil rights leader
Bayard Rustin is not a household name in the same way that Martin Luther King, Jr. or John Lewis are in regards to the civil rights movement, though given the man’s contributions, he certainly should be. Credited with introducing Dr. King to the concept of non-violent resistance and for orchestrating the 1963 March on Washington, Rustin was a force within a movement that was nevertheless wary of him for his past Communist ties and unapologetic homosexuality, which made him a pariah among Black leaders seeking respectability for their movement. It’s no wonder, then, that writers Julian Breece (When They See Us) and Dustin Lance Black (Milk), and director George C. Wolfe (Ma Rainey’s Black Bottom), would wish to bring a story like Rustin to life. But as much as they succeed, there’s also a lingering sense that their examination better serves the man’s accomplishments than the man himself. — Leigh Monson
Priscilla review: Sofia Coppola paints an elegant portrait of a troubled marriage
Starring Cailee Spaeny and Jacob Elordi, Priscilla is adapted from Priscilla Presley’s autobiography, Elvis And Me, and chronicles the whirlwind life of Priscilla Presley as she goes from small-town army brat to global style icon and American legend. Tracing Priscilla and Elvis’ romance back to its humble roots on a U.S. Army base in West Germany, the film invites audiences to grow up alongside Priscilla, witnessing her starry-eyed infatuation with The King fade into a much harsher, crueler reality. — Lauren Coates
Five Nights At Freddy’s review: Game adaptation is light on fright
Five Nights At Freddy’s, a cinematic adaptation of Scott Cawthon’s uber-marketable video game franchise, has been in the works for so long that two rip-offs beat it to the big screen. There was The Banana Splits Movie, an oddly inappropriate Hanna-Barbera horror reboot; and Willy’s Wonderland, starring a non-verbal Nicolas Cage grunting and screaming. Five Nights At Freddy’s is better than at least one of those. — Luke Y. Thompson
The Holdovers review: A warm reunion for Alexander Payne and Paul Giamatti
Don’t let the wintry backdrop of Alexander Payne’s latest fool you, for The Holdovers is a warm honeyed cider of a film. That’s no mean feat considering the holiday-set comedy-drama is anchored by a crotchety instructor at a New England prep school with a habit of calling his students “rancid philistines” and who is tasked with looking over the students who have nowhere to go during the winter break of 1970. But beneath the prickly exterior of its central character (played by Sideways’ Paul Giamatti) is an unwaveringly gentle film about the very need for that gentleness—with others and, perhaps more importantly, with ourselves. — Manuel Betancourt
The Killer review: David Fincher shoots to thrill
To call The Killer, director David Fincher’s new thriller, aloof and cold to the touch is an understatement, despite the presence of near-constant voiceover narration from star Michael Fassbender as a seasoned assassin. And even if that detachment is part of the point, it doesn’t well serve this efficient but strangely disposable effort. — Brent Simon
Pain Hustlers review: Big pharma satire is a hard pill to swallow
It’s been a long 13 years since Love & Other Drugs made Jake Gyllenhaal’s pharma rep the lovable half of a teary rom-com couple. These days, such characters are more likely to be found in a film like Pain Hustlers, a satire that wants to serve as a righteous indictment of a pharmaceutical industry that’s long put profits over patient’s health and well-being. But in trying to give us a portrait of money-driven reps eager to cross ethical and legal lines to pad their pockets and those of their bosses, Harry Potter director David Yates reduces his protagonist to a familiar heroine we’re expected to understand, and even root for. — Manuel Betancourt
Killers Of The Flower Moon review: Martin Scorsese’s uniquely American tragedy
In a pivotal scene late in Killers Of The Flower Moon, a wife asks her husband a straightforward yes or no question. His hesitancy and inability to give her the answer she so clearly desires and deserves is at the heart of this complex character study from master filmmaker Martin Scorsese. Killers Of The Flower Moon derives its story from a very dark chapter in early 20th-century American history, the murder of the Osage indigenous people by white men for their oil wealth. What makes it fascinating is the specific angle the film takes to tackle this vast story; the film is a portrait of an ineffectual man who still manages to inflict a lot of harm. Someone who, against his better judgment and despite knowing all the facts, chooses to do the wrong thing time and again. It’s an epic tale told through the lens of an intimate, elusive, and ultimately tragic love story. — Murtada Elfadl
Nyad review: A swim legend’s epic quest makes for a crowd-pleasing sports drama
The beating heart of Elizabeth Chai Vasarhelyi and Jimmy Chin’s fiction feature debut, Nyad, lies in a Mary Oliver quote: “Tell me, what is it you plan to do with your one wild and precious life?” As well-worn and almost pat as Oliver’s poetry risks being in its simplicity and ubiquity, the query nags at Diana Nyad after stumbling on the famed poem that houses it. “The Summer Day” is an ode to the beauty of nature and the quiet power it can harness within us; in the words, Nyad finds a question she’s left unanswered for much too long. At 60, she’s not content to rest on her laurels: she wants adventure. She wants risk. She wants to attempt again the marathon swim from Cuba all the way to Key West, a feat she failed back when she was 28. — Manuel Betancourt
Taylor Swift: The Eras Tour review: A love letter to fans (Taylor’s version)
If ever there was a review-proof movie, it’s the Taylor Swift: The Eras Tour concert film. You probably already know whether you want to see it or not, and no critical analysis of its value as a film or a filmgoing experience is likely to change that. Advanced ticket sales have already surpassed $100 million and it’s projected to exceed $125 million at the box office in its opening weekend. Swift fans are treating this as a theatrical event, and for good reason. Watching the film feels like attending an Eras concert all over again. Or for the first time, if you couldn’t get tickets. Which is kind of the whole point. — Cindy White
Anatomy Of A Fall review: Palme d’Or winner dissects a death and a marriage
There’s a gruesome, bloody death in the elongated opening of director/co-writer Justine Triet’s Anatomy Of A Fall that leads to the murder case at the center of the film. However, the French filmmaker and her co-writer Arthur Harari start setting the scene long before the titular tumble, ratcheting up the tension within the first few minutes when an awkward interview at the home of author Sandra Voyter (Sandra Hüller) is interrupted by a steel drum cover of 50 Cent’s “P.I.M.P” played at an abrasive volume. This brilliantly puts the audience on edge and that perfectly calibrated suspense is sustained throughout the picture, even in the courtroom setting that dominates the film—an impressive feat given that procedurals can be staid and aesthetically dull. — Courtney Howard
The Burial review: Jamie Foxx serves up justice
The Jamie Foxx courtroom drama The Burial is inspired by the true story of African American lawyer Willie E. Gary, his funeral director client Jeremiah O’Keefe, and the seminal 1995 lawsuit they filed against the vast Canadian corporation The Loewen Group. The movie, much like the 1999 New Yorker article that brought the story to the attention of co-writer Doug Wright and director Maggie Betts (Novitiate), is a classic David vs. Goliath tale. And like many such stories, its big finale is preordained from the first frame. However, Betts manages to extract a lot of drama from forgone conclusions, along with the movie’s more salient notions about history, justice, race, gender, and our family legacies. — Timothy Cogshell
Totally Killer review: Horror-comedy offers a fun ‘80s ride
The slasher is a subgenre of patterns. There’s a rhythm to it, from the opening kill to the Final Girl, a pattern that fans can get happily lost in. But as much as we love those patterns, slasher fans also want to see something fresh, a disruption to the pattern that, if not subversive, is at least somewhat surprising. — Matthew Jackson
The Exorcist: Believer review: What the devil is going on here?
Legacyquels—sequels that come out decades after their original predecessor with the promise of recapturing its magic—are in no short supply these days, particularly in the horror genre. But how does one hop onto this trend with The Exorcist? The 1973 classic has never taken particularly well to franchising; it contributes more to the horror genre as the progenitor of imitators than as the first chapter in a serialized narrative. The Exorcist: Believer is an attempt by writer-director David Gordon Green and co-writer Peter Sattler to not only build upon the foundation of the original film, but to spark a new trilogy in the vein of Green’s recent Halloween revival. What a shame then that it’s never quite clear what they’re actually building toward. — Leigh Monson
Strange Way Of Life review: Pedro Almodóvar’s brief, queer Western
Throughout his almost four-decade career, Spanish filmmaker Pedro Almodóvar has created a wholly original cinematic world that is a playpen for him and for those who appreciate his work. It comes with lots of colors (particularly red), heightened emotions, and characters who are either verbose or silent but always manage to express their desires in loud emotional ways. In Strange Way Of Life, Almodóvar brings his trademark aesthetic to the most American of movie genres, the Western. The fact that it’s 31 minutes and produced by the fashion house Saint Laurent complicates the matter. Almodóvar acolytes might have to wait for his definitive take on the Western. — Murtada Elfadl
Dicks: The Musical review: The Parent Trap riff hits some of the right notes
All you need to know about Dicks: The Musical is telegraphed by its title. The Larry Charles-directed movie musical is all too proud to shout (sing!) from the rooftops that it’s a cheekily immature proposition, one intent on getting you to snicker at its lowbrow, balls to the wall humor. Aaron Jackson and Josh Sharp, adapting and expanding their two-man show into a feature-length film that’ll no doubt serve as their calling card for years to come, have created a fully bonkers riff on The Parent Trap that needs to be seen to be believed. — Manuel Betancourt
Saw X review: The Jigsaw Killer makes a gruesomely good return
Watching Saw X one might safely assume that Tobin Bell was lured back to the series with the promise that, for this installment, he would get to do everything he ever wanted in a Saw movie. A serious actor, Bell surely knows this bloody franchise will be what he’s best remembered for, and he treats the role of John Kramer, the Jigsaw Killer, like it’s Shakespeare. Though he’s typically heard more than he’s seen in these films, taking a backseat or relegated to flashbacks while others follow his prerecorded instructions, Saw X places him in almost every scene. By the time Billy the puppet shows up, it feels like a franchise obligation; Bell’s Kramer has finally upstaged his more merchandisable avatar. — Luke Y. Thompson
The Wonderful Story Of Henry Sugar review: A spoonful of Wes Anderson
By now you should know what you’re going to be getting when you sit down to watch a Wes Anderson film. His highly stylized worlds, full of muted colors, quirky characters, and deadpan dialogue, have become so distinctive and instantly recognizable it sometimes feels like he’s parodying himself. For his fans, his eccentricities are part of his charm. For his critics, they can be a bit tiresome (a common complaint about Anderson’s Asteroid City earlier this year). Both groups would likely agree that when it comes to Wes Anderson, a little goes a long way. — Cindy White
Fair Play review: In this riveting thriller, business and pleasure don’t mix
A lot of films that attempt to assay the traditional power imbalance of male-female relationships either make the mistake of staking their fortune to a definitive worldview, or get so bogged down in gender studies didacticism that they fail to deliver actual entertainment. The wickedly engaging Fair Play, though, lives and breathes. — Brent Simon
The Creator review: A thrilling and thoughtful take on A.I.
With the recent proliferation of artificial intelligence software like OpenAI’s ChatGPT, Gareth Edwards’ sci-fi epic The Creator arrives at a significant technological and cultural inflection point. And while current concerns about A.I. aren’t likely to lead to the global conflict depicted in Edwards’ thrilling film, which pits artificially enhanced intelligent robots against humanity, its reframing of often-dystopian depictions of machine intelligence reveals a more expansive and inclusive perspective. With few other comparable releases in play, The Creator is likely to stand as the most impressive and immersive sci-fi movie of the year. — Justin Lowe
Spy Kids: Armageddon review: Same formula, different family, still fun
Spy Kids is one of those ideas someone was bound to come up with eventually, a combination of two words that, in the right hands, reads like a license to print money. It’s no wonder, then, that franchise creator Robert Rodriguez produced four mid-budget Spy Kids features over the course of a decade, and they collectively earned more than half a billion dollars worldwide. — Matthew Jackson
Expend4bles review: Sylvester Stallone sequel is, well, expendable
Less of a deconstruction of ’80s action movie machismo and more a whole-hearted embrace of cinema’s bygone bombastic era, The Expendables franchise has varied drastically in quality throughout its 13-year existence. The first outing got the job done, but the filmmakers behind its follow-up, The Expendables 2, genuinely understood the assignment. The avenging assemblage even surprisingly triumphed at the box office over piracy, when a copy of their exceptionally weak entry The Expendables 3 leaked online a month before its theatrical release, and the film made money nonetheless. — Courtney Howard
Dumb Money review: GameStop saga stocks up on laughs
If there’s one thing HBO’s Industry and the Oscar-winning The Big Short have taught me, it’s that no matter how many times characters explain the ins and outs of the stock market, I will forever remain immune to its intricacies. I kept thinking about those two projects while watching I, Tonya director Craig Gillespie’s Dumb Money, which manages to strike a chord somewhere between the two as it recounts the GameStop short squeeze phenomenon from January 2021, when a group of amateur traders waged war against hedge fund managers and made themselves rich by leveraging their collective buying power—all in the service of a business that started in strip malls. — Manuel Betancourt
El Conde review: Dictators suck in Pablo Larraín’s vampiric satire
Somewhere along the line, vampires got sexy. But the original myth places its emphasis far more on the blood than the sucking. In early European folklore, vampires were bloated and decidedly gross. By the turn of the 20th century, starting in earnest with Bram Stoker’s 1897 novel Dracula, they were being talked about in a political context as blood-sucking creatures moving from host to host, killing in order to maintain their own tenuous grasp on life. This is the kind of vampire that Augusto Pinochet, the dictator who ruled Chile for 17 years, is—at least in Pablo Larraín’s new satire El Conde (in English, The Count). — Drew Gillis
A Haunting In Venice review: The mystery is why it’s so dull
Agatha Christie adaptations continue to prove popular in several mediums so it’s not surprising that Kenneth Branagh’s version of Christie’s Belgian sleuth, Hercule Poirot, is back for a third go-round. As with his previous two films, A Haunting In Venice is directed by Branagh who also stars as Poirot. And per usual, the ingredients remain the same; there’s a mystery, someone dies, and a plethora of familiar faces from TV and film play the suspects. Familiarity can draw in audiences but sometimes it also can draw their contempt if it’s not what was expected. No problem here; this is more or less exactly like its predecessors. Though it might have proven more successful if Branagh had offered a surprise or two instead of relying on a proven formula. — Murtada Elfadl
My Big Fat Greek Wedding 3 review: A family odyssey
Way back in 2002, a relatively obscure little indie film achieved the seemingly impossible, capturing the imagination of audiences and racking up more than $350 million at the worldwide box office, becoming the highest-grossing romantic comedy of all time. Written by and starring Nia Vardalos, My Big Fat Greek Wedding centered on the shy, single, 30-something character of Toula Portokalos, the daughter of Greek immigrants, who falls in love with non-Greek schoolteacher Ian Miller (John Corbett). But fast forward to 2023, with the arrival of My Big Fat Greek Wedding 3, and it seems fair to question whether moviegoers really need another extended visit with the Portokalos family, especially after the underwhelming 2016 sequel, My Big Fat Greek Wedding 2.
The Nun II review: Creature of habit is back for more
When the habit-wearing demon of the title actually shows up onscreen, The Nun II briefly becomes entertaining, if not quite coherent, as her power set appears near-infinite. Hitching a ride across Europe inside the body of a French groundskeeper named Maurice (a returning Jonas Bloquet), she’s by no means corporeally confined, breaking free with some regularity to strangle children and set priests on fire, while sending scary visions across hundreds of miles to her returning arch-nemesis, Sister Irene (Taissa Farmiga). — Luke Y. Thompson
The Equalizer 3 review: Denzel Washington remains charismatic—and deadly
In The Equalizer 3, we find our hero, a somewhat longer-in-the-tooth Robert McCall (Denzel Washington), doing more or less (more really) of what he did in the original film, The Equalizer (2014), which, of course, is what he continued to do in The Equalizer 2 (2018) and, what Robert McCall, played by Edward Woodward, did in the titular series from 1985 to 1989. Or, for that matter, what the reimagined character, Robyn McCall (Queen Latifah), does as The Equalizer in the television series reboot from 2021. All of these McCalls find themselves called upon to protect (and occasionally avenge) the weak and the wronged, which they do with great aplomb while often dispensing bits of “spy-losophy” along the lines of this from The Equalizer 2, “There are two kinds of pain in this world,” says McCall as he tortures someone who has it coming, “the pain that hurts. And the pain that alters.” So far, though, there has only been one kind of Equalizer film; whatever the story’s specifics, they are all the same. Bad guys get hurt in ways that temporarily convince us that there’s justice in the world. The fact that it’s extrajudicial, bloody, and inevitable only makes it more satisfying. — Timothy Cogshell
Bottoms review: A knockout comedy about a queer fight club
Everything is sex, except sex, which is power. So goes the famous quote attributed to Oscar Wilde, and reproduced in Janelle Monáe’s album Dirty Computer. If the main characters from Bottoms, the new comedy from director Emma Seligman (Shiva Baby), have heard of Wilde or Monáe, they’ve internalized the quote’s mirror image. In Bottoms, everything is violent, except violence, which is horny. — Drew Gillis
You Are So Not Invited to My Bat Mitzvah review: A teen movie charmer
Good teen comedies work because of their ability to capture, with empathy and warmth, the whirlwind that is being a teenager. It’s not just that everything is moving fast, changing constantly, and all burdened with the liminal force that is transitioning from childhood to adulthood. It’s that all of that is happening and everything feels like the Most Important Thing all the time. There’s no sense of triage in your brain, no ability to place things in the perspective that comes with aging and letting go of certain childhood visions of what your future is supposed to be. If you’re able to convey that particular emotional maelstrom, there’s a good chance your teen comedy will be not just funny, but moving. — Matthew Jackson
Retribution review: Liam Neeson hits the gas
For audiences who like seeing 71-year-old Liam Neeson do action stuff but find it just a touch unconvincing when he punches out bad guys twice his size and half his age, Retribution may be just the ticket. Sticking him behind the wheel of a car for most of the film’s running time, this script allows him to cause mayhem and destruction without straying from his seated position, and prove there’s sometimes nothing scarier than a senior citizen with a motor vehicle. — Luke Y. Thompson
Strays review: Will Ferrell’s dog comedy just chases its tail
Strays feels an awful lot like a movie written on a dare. Screenwriter Dan Perrault, of American Vandal acclaim, seems to be working with the kind of premise that could have been conceived in a late-night haze of juvenile giggling: what if those overly sentimental dog movies that teach profound lessons from a canine viewpoint were instead full of swearing and poop gags? But rather than unleashing jokes that practically write themselves, and despite a seasoned cast of comedy stalwarts, the punchlines here are kept on a short lead. — Leigh Monson
Blue Beetle review: DC’s Latino superhero gets an energetic origin story
Blue Beetle, the live-action onscreen debut of the DC Comics character and Warner Bros.’ first feature to center on a Latino superhero, arrives with much anticipation. After some major (and very public) wobbles earlier this year with the box office returns for Shazam: Fury Of The Gods and then the messy release of The Flash, DC Studios is clearly looking for a win this time out. Those inclined to read the tea leaves left behind by the previous regime may see the selection of Blue Beetle as a commitment to a more inclusive production slate, although others may view it as a calculated move to cash in on the entertainment preferences of one of the nation’s fastest growing demographics. — Mark Keizer
Heart Of Stone review: Gal Gadot accepts an impossible mission
On its surface, Heart Of Stone certainly has all the markings of an intriguing spy-thriller: A hero who’d sacrifice themselves for the greater good battling a villain who’d stop at nothing, a mystery revolving around a powerful artificial intelligence device, a handful of international locations that photograph well, and lots of death-defying stunts. Trouble is, we saw that mix a month ago, only constructed with greater efficiency and entertainment in Mission: Impossible—Dead Reckoning Part 1. Functioning as a third-gen mimeograph at best and a dull actioner at worst, Netflix’s bid to jump-start to a potential franchise lacks the inspiration and innovation it needs to truly impress. — Courtney Howard
The Last Voyage Of The Demeter review: New spin on Dracula has some bite
There’s something inherently, gleefully ballsy about a film like The Last Voyage Of The Demeter right from the jump, before you’ve seen the title card hit the screen. Anyone who’s read Bram Stoker’s Dracula, or seen certain Dracula movies, knows we’re talking about a doomed voyage, and at certain points in André Øvredal’s historical horror film, characters even say outright what the title implies. This boat is doomed from the start. — Matthew Jackson
Red, White & Royal Blue review: A fun and frothy fantasy
“When the revolution comes, it will be because of this wedding,” says first son Alex Claremont-Diaz (Taylor Zakhar Perez) in the opening minutes of Red, White & Royal Blue. A nod to a “revolution is coming” is a cliché at this point, vague enough to gesture at pretty much anything. In this case, at least, the vagueness is the point. Alex is referring to the conspicuous consumption before him, but anyone with at least passing knowledge of the story they’re about to witness knows they’re about to watch a gay rom-com, a genre growing in prominence but still relatively rare. Red, White & Royal Blue, ultimately, isn’t revolutionary. It’s more traditional than not—which means, thankfully, that it’s still a lot of fun. — Drew Gillis
Gran Turismo review: Racing drama spins its wheels
While it’s been ripe for mockery on Twitter—sorry, X—Gran Turismo does have a basis in reality. Indeed, Sony lucked out here, having an actual story to attach to a story-less IP, and an aspirational one at that. After all, what gamer doesn’t want to think their hobby isn’t training them for something real and worthwhile? Yet for all its laborious efforts to throttle past expectations, Neill Blompkamp’s Gran Turismo is too unconfident, too distracted, too rote, and simply too short on gas to earn a place on the winner’s podium. — Eric Francisco
Meg 2: The Trench review: Jason Statham survives a swim in choppy waters
Any film where one character reacts to a near-fatal undersea incident by saying “That was close” and another responds with “… Too close” should probably not clear space on the mantle for anything other than a Razzie Award. And yet there is another line of dialogue in Meg 2: The Trench that best summarizes how this lunk-headed slice of high-gloss B-movie cheese wound up—unlike the first Meg—on the right side of the divide that separates bad films from films that embrace how bad they knowingly are: “The impossible just got possible.” — Mark Keizer
Sympathy For The Devil review: Meet your new Nicolas Cage memes
In 2013, it was mostly serious cinephiles who saw the movie Locke, in which Tom Hardy traverses the highways at night, trying to get to his mistress who’s going into labor. It’s pretty much a one-man show, with Hardy’s Locke taking calls to try to keep everything running smoothly as he’s stuck in transit. While watching the new movie, Sympathy For The Devil, one assumes director Yuval Adler (The Secrets We Keep) and writer Luke Paradise were among those who saw Locke, and thought, you know what this needs? Nicolas Cage in the back seat dressed like Satan. — Luke Y. Thompson
Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles: Mutant Mayhem review: Sewer-dwelling heroes get the reboot they deserve
With its ridiculous-sounding premise spelled out in its title, Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles has long been a franchise that’s at its best when it embraces the absurdity of its own world-building. Their latest big screen outing (subtitled Mutant Mayhem and directed by Jeff Rowe, with Kyler Spears co-directing) understands this from the very first frame when a nebbishy scientist coos at the mutated fly he keeps in a crib and now fears will be taken away by a corporation intent on using his bioengineering talents (and attendant neon sludge) to create all sorts of animal soldiers-turned-weapons. The cheeky, earnest tone of that first scene, which extends to the way this reimagined classic takes on our four fearless martial arts-trained heroes and their rodent father figure, immediately assures you that you’re in good hands. — Manuel Betancourt
Talk To Me review: A gripping tale of adolescent dread
Between Ari Aster’s dueling horror hits Hereditary and Midsommar, Ti West’s X and its prequel Pearl, and a whole slew of now-iconic titles like Men, Bodies Bodies Bodies, and The Witch there’s no doubt about it: A24 is the incubator of up-and-coming horror. The latest title in the distributor’s impressive genre lineup is Danny and Michael Philippou’s joint directorial debut Talk To Me, which made the rounds with a buzzy Sundance festival release earlier this year. Though it leans on familiar genre tropes and stylistic conventions, a devastating script and charismatic cast (spearheaded by Sophie Wilde) make Talk To Me a terrifying and pervasively heartbreaking tale of grief. — Lauren Coates
Haunted Mansion review: Another frightfully unfunny Disney ride
It would be interesting to see the version of Haunted Mansion that star LaKeith Stanfield seems to think he’s in—one where his jaded, grieving, scientist-turned-wannabe believer in ghosts could see his grounded performance matched by an equally compelling setting, story, and fellow cast members. This, unfortunately, is not that movie. Only Jared Leto, who presumably did most of his work on a motion-capture stage as the unabashedly evil Hatbox Ghost, offers an equivalent level of commitment, imbuing his decapitated avatar with the sort of theatrical flourishes fans wished he had as Morbius. Director Guillermo del Toro would have made that character the protagonist; Justin Simien effectively makes him the ride’s Ghost Host, which may play as blasphemy to die-hard theme park geeks. — Luke Y. Thompson
They Cloned Tyrone review: Jamie Foxx comedy tackles blaxploitation tropes
At first glance, They Cloned Tyrone is a silly satire of early ’70s blaxploitation flicks like Super Fly or Willie Dynamite that adds what writer-director Juel Taylor and writer Tony Rettenmaier call a “… dash of Scooby Doo.” Fortunately, the filmmakers here have something more in mind, as they create a meticulously constructed world to tell a tale that uses age-old theories, myths, and conspiracies—some proven to be accurate, like the infamous Tuskegee experiments—to explain the woes of the Hood. — Timothy Cogshell
Oppenheimer review: Christopher Nolan delivers his masterpiece
It’s fitting that Christopher Nolan uses the opening minutes of Oppenheimer to evoke the myth of Prometheus, the legendary titan who stole fire from the Gods and gave it to humanity, only to suffer terrible consequences. Nolan’s film is, after all, adapted from Kai Bird and Martin J. Sherwin’s Pulitzer-winning biography American Prometheus. But there’s more to the allusion than a nod in the direction of the source material. For the filmmaker himself, the comparison to Prometheus is a warning of what we’re about to see, the announcement of a uniquely American tragedy that’s rooted in reality yet also mythic in scope and ambition. In other words, it’s Nolan calling his shot, swinging for the fences in ways that even he never has before. What follows is perhaps his most self-assured and passionate cinematic effort so far, a film so thunderous and heavy that it just might knock you through the back wall of the theater. — Matthew Jackson
Barbie review: A pink, plucky, and poignant rumination on womanhood
In 1959, a mere 64 years before the release of Greta Gerwig’s Barbie, Mattel’s signature doll hit store shelves for the first time and quickly became a Rorschach test for many girls and women as they transposed their own identity onto a plastic plaything. The small-scale doll was created by company co-founder Ruth Handler—pulling inspiration from Germany’s Bild Lilli doll—as a way to empower girls like her daughter Barbara (the brand’s namesake) to use their imagination in creating limitless worlds where they can be and do anything they want. It revolutionized play patterns for pint-sized consumers who weren’t just seeking the pretend solace of motherhood and domesticity. Yet for some adults, this tiny wonder represented an unattainable, manufactured version of perfection, subsequently transforming her into a lightning rod for controversy and feminist critique. — Courtney Howard
Theater Camp review: Small stakes lead to big laughs
There was a time when the adage “write what you know” was not only an instinctual starting place, but also sage industry advice. These days, many artists seem to recoil from those words, preferring high-concept ideas over simple, small stories, and stretching farther and farther past their own lived experience. But there’s a reason the above saying exists, and persists. And it is richly, rather thrillingly evident in Theater Camp, a small-stakes mockumentary that enjoyably skewers the idiosyncrasies of both adolescent performance and camp culture. While its various influences (one cup Waiting For Guffman, one cup Wet Hot American Summer, other assorted sprinklings) are abundantly evident, the movie is most defined by one element: its makers possess an authoritative knowledge of its world. They are also people who take what they love very seriously without taking themselves seriously. That combination proves a winning recipe, offering up no shortage of delights. — Brent Simon
Insidious: The Red Door review: Patrick Wilson fails to deliver fresh scares
After seeing Insidious: The Red Door, it’s hard not to feel a bit sorry for Patrick Wilson. It would be an unenviable task for anyone to take the directorial reins of a franchise from modern horror legends James Wan and Leigh Whannell—much less make it his directorial debut—but The Red Door is such a wrong-headed attempt to keep the Insidious franchise alive that it almost feels like a meandering fan fiction past its prime. Featuring a co-story credit from Whannell, the screenplay by Scott Teems (Halloween Kills) is a weak re-interpretation of the Lambert family’s struggles as bland trauma horror, and Wilson’s baseline competence as a director does nothing to elevate the material. — Leigh Monson
Joy Ride review: A hilariously raunchy road trip through China
Comedies with strong studio backing are something of a rarity in theaters these days, which makes Joy Ride one of the funniest theatrical offerings in recent memory, almost by default. This is not to damn debut director Adele Lim and screenwriters Cherry Chevapravatdumrong and Teresa Hsiao with faint praise; it’s merely an observation that another raunchy ensemble comedy in the vein of Bridesmaids and Girls Trip is more than welcome in a market starving for them, and Joy Ride deserves to be spoken of and remembered in the same breath as its forebears. It’s a comedy that stands on its own merits while also adding a surprising amount of pathos to its story of an American woman discovering her Chinese roots. But, ya know, with gags about shoving eight balloons of cocaine up one’s ass. — Leigh Monson
Mission: Impossible—Dead Reckoning Part One review: Tom Cruise runs, jumps, and delivers again
Mission: Impossible—Dead Reckoning Part One delivers on expectations. It is, after all, the seventh film in this popular franchise that started way back in 1996. The audience knows exactly what they’re getting with one of these films. There will be lots of action with huge set pieces in many international locations. There will be someone in peril or perhaps the fate of the world will hang in the balance. There will be characters taking off latex masks to reveal a completely different character underneath. And of course, there will be Tom Cruise, as spy extraordinaire Ethan Hunt, running as fast as he can, jumping off cliffs and ultimately saving the day after surviving many close calls. — Murtada Elfadl
Ruby Gillman, Teenage Kraken review: Animated tale needs to release the originality
Speaking at his Annecy Master Class earlier this month, Academy Award-winner Guillermo del Toro bemoaned what he saw as the ills afflicting contemporary (mostly American) animation. He was particularly despondent about how character emotions in much of commercial animation have been “codified into a sort of teenage rom-com, almost emoji-style behavior,” calling it “emotional pornography.” Del Toro’s words kept echoing in my head as I watched DreamWorks’ latest animated offering, Ruby Gillman, Teenage Kraken, a perfectly adequate fable about a teen girl who discovers she’s a descendant of a line of warrior queen krakens. It’s a discovery that throws the final days of her high school experience in the fictional town of Oceanside into disarray. — Manuel Betancourt
Indiana Jones And The Dial Of Destiny review: Harrison Ford goes to the whip
Forty-two years after he first donned his signature hat, whip, and khakis, Harrison Ford has finally returned to the big screen for yet another swan song as everyone’s favorite archeologist/adventurer in Indiana Jones And The Dial of Destiny. But while Dial may have all the right pieces on the board to make for another classic entry in the saga, Indy’s latest adventure is a lackluster attempt at reconciling the old with the new. Its lack of emotional stakes and perpetual struggle with pacing means Ford’s last ride as Dr. Jones is more of a whimper than a bang. — Lauren Coates
God Is A Bullet review: Jamie Foxx can’t save this revenge flick misfire
From the director of The Notebook, a sensitive, female-skewing all-timer of a love story, comes God Is A Bullet, in which every woman onscreen gets repeatedly punched, kicked, sometimes raped, or murdered by a shotgun blast. They’re not the only ones—ample shotgun shells and throat slashings rain down on the cartoonishly grotesque Satanists with upside-down crosses and “666” tattooed on their heads. Nick Cassavetes, who also wrote the script based on a novel by Boston Teran, seems to be trying to make his David Fincher movie, but he falls closer to S. Craig Zahler territory. Stretched out over two-and-a-half hours, this Death Wish-style revenge trip, which the pseudonymous author Teran dubiously claims is based on his life experience, stretches both the premise and the gratuitous nastiness too thin. — Luke Y. Thompson
No Hard Feelings review: Jennifer Lawrence carries a raunchy comedy that isn’t raunchy enough
Almost every month there’s an article somewhere bemoaning the death of the movie star. That giant charming presence on-screen that people will follow no matter what movie they appear in. If No Hard Feelings fails to find its audience, a few of those articles will surely appear. Yet as evidenced by the film and its lead performance, no one should be worried. The movie star is alive and well. Jennifer Lawrence proves, once again, that she can carry a film by the sheer force of her on-screen magnetism and performance agility. — Murtada Elfadl
Asteroid City review: Wes Anderson encounters 1950s stargazers, actors, and one peculiar alien
Wes Anderson is still using many of his old tricks. His latest, the 1955 set Asteroid City, will feel familiar to anyone who has seen any of his previous movies. It has many eccentric characters who all speak in monotone and a few carry around a precious prop that obviously means much to them and defines their character. A camera around the neck or a notebook and pen in the hand or back pocket. There’s some sort of narrator only tangentially related to the film’s main story. That plot is many layered; it’s about a play within a TV show within the film. The sets and costumes are intricately detailed and there’s always something sumptuous to look at on screen. Familiar things can be good, but can they maintain their appeal for decades? — Murtada Elfadl
Extraction 2 review: Chris Hemsworth returns for another nonstop action fest
In Extraction 2, Chris Hemsworth (best known as Thor) returns as Tyler Rake, a hunky, tough dentist facing an amazingly recalcitrant tooth upon whose removal the life of a family depends. — Andy Klein
The Blackening review: Slasher satire slaughters tired tropes
A satire that begins with its title, The Blackening relentlessly “uses humor, irony, exaggeration, to expose and criticize stupidity.” That is, of course, the Oxford dictionary definition of the word “satire” and the filmmakers may very well have referenced it when writing this wonderfully pointed film about the relationship between Black folks and slasher movies. It’s a relationship fraught with indignities, most notably the well-worn trope of the Black character always dying first or worst—if not both. If the latter, they oftentimes die worse than the killer, who may not die at all. The Blackening, with insight and humor, posits the question: when everyone in the horror movie is Black, can anyone survive, or must everyone die? — Timothy Cogshell
Elemental review: Rare Pixar rom-com doesn’t generate much heat
At its core, Elemental is a story about the challenges that come with being burdened with outsized expectations. Pixar’s latest follows Ember, a fiery young woman who finds herself veering away from the life her immigrant father dreamed up for her after she meets and falls for the affable and tear-prone Wade. Equal parts sprightly rom-com and moving second-generation tale, the story is set in Element City, where fire, earth, wind, and water beings live (mostly) in harmony. But the film only intermittently shines with the originality and emotion that characterize Pixar’s most beloved properties. — Manuel Betancourt
Transformers: Rise Of The Beasts review: reboot is long on action, short on ideas
It’s understandable why most critics and many fans of the popular Hasbro toy line view the five Transformers movies directed by Michael Bay with utter disdain. They’re narratively incoherent, and defined by a lazy, cynical approach to the IP. However, Bay is such a wizard of eye-popping, grand-scale action that he deserves more credit for nailing just how big these epics—centered on giant, robot-like aliens capable of shapeshifting into recognizable vehicles—should be. With IMAX-ready wide shot compositions and go-for-broke action sequences, Bay delivered maximalist spectacle so immersive that it intermittently eclipsed the films’ story and tonal issues, especially in series standout Transformers: Dark Of The Moon, the 2011-released third entry, which spent nearly the entirety of its second half on a thrillingly sustained “battle for Chicago” set piece. — Brett Buckalew
Flamin’ Hot review: spicy snack gets a tasty origin story
Flamin’ Hot is about—you guessed it—the hugely popular Cheetos snacks that currently comes in a range of flavors, including Flamin’ Hot Limón, Flamin’ Hot Asteroids, and Flamin’ Hot Chipotle Ranch, which are all nestled within the Frito-Lay/PepsiCo corporate multiverse. But Flamin’ Hot is not exactly an IP cash grab like The Lego Movie, Battleship, Dungeons & Dragons: Honor Among Thieves and, possibly, Barbie. The basis of Flamin’ Hot is Richard Montañez’s A Boy, A Burrito And A Cookie: From Janitor To Executive, a too-good-to-be-true, rags-to-riches tale that has been refuted by Frito-Lay and some of the company’s former employees, per a 2021 Los Angeles Times report. — Martin Tsai
The Flash review: DC superhero saga goes full speed
It’s been roughly a decade since audiences first heard that a big-screen version of The Flash would be part of Warner Bros.’ DC Extended Universe, long enough that the saga of the film’s development became one of the more fascinating aspects of the DC movie story so far. Now the film is finally here and it couldn’t have arrived at a stranger time, thanks to the impending overhaul of the DCEU, and the offscreen struggles and controversies of Flash star Ezra Miller. It’s enough to make the film itself feel like a punctuation mark at the end of a very long, convoluted sentence. — Matthew Jackson
Hollywood Dreams & Nightmares: The Robert Englund Story review: Freddy player won
In making a documentary about a beloved actor like Robert Englund—most famous for playing Freddy Krueger in the Nightmare On Elm Street franchise— a major dilemma for the filmmakers has to be how to balance presenting the information people want with making a good movie. For Hollywood Dreams & Nightmares: The Robert Englund Story, co-directors Gary Smart and Christopher Griffiths err on the side of comprehensiveness. Across two hours and nine minutes, their film covers most of Englund’s career highlights, from 1974’s Buster And Billie to Stranger Things and beyond, with a lengthy stop on Elm Street, of course. — Luke Y. Thompson
Shooting Stars review: LeBron James biopic scores with an assist from his friends
The best kings are benevolent; LeBron James (nicknamed King James from his time in the youth leagues of Akron, Ohio) displayed this trait from his earliest days, both on the court in real life and in fictional form in this movie, which isn’t about LeBron James, per se, at all. Shooting Stars is based on the biographical book by James and Pulitzer Prize-winning author Buzz Bissinger (Friday Night Lights). Both book and movie make clear that the legacy of the basketball star began in his pre-teens and includes several folks who will not go without recognition if James has anything to say about it—and as the producer of Shooting Stars he did. — Timothy Cogshell
Spider-Man: Across The Spider-Verse review: Ambitious sequel spins a dazzling web
When 2018’s Oscar-winning Spider-Man: Into The Spider-Verse introduced us to teenager Miles Morales (voiced by Shameik Moore), a new hero behind the web-patterned mask, it freshened up the by-now ubiquitous form of the superhero origin story in so many vital, bracing ways. As a strong, smart POC protagonist, Miles proved that you didn’t need to be as white as Peter Parker to master web-slinging. The sci-fi conceit of a multiverse in which every dimension contains its own different Spider-Man extended that inclusive, democratic notion that “anyone can wear the mask” in clever, creative ways. And most playfully of all, the dazzling eclecticism and style of the visual design, influenced by Miles’ passion for spray-painted street art, took full advantage of the liberated possibilities of the animation medium. — Brett Buckalew
The Machine review: Mark Hamill is the engine that makes this so-so comedy run
Shirtless, un-PC, and sporting the daddiest of dad bods, Bert Kreischer feels like the natural outcome of a Simpsons episode in which Homer Simpson, while drunk, shirtless, and screaming in public, accidentally becomes a popular stand-up comedian. While in college, Kreischer was the inspiration for the 2002 comedy National Lampoon’s Van Wilder, though he looks less like Ryan Reynolds and more like a cross between Home Improvement’s Tim and Al. Now playing a version of himself in The Machine, he finds himself in family therapy, where it turns out that a lifetime of comedy based on a party animal persona can be hell on the wife and kids when you live the gimmick. — Luke Y. Thompson
The Boogeyman review: Stephen King adaptation will scare you out of your seat
Stephen King’s 1973 short story The Boogeyman is not exactly a cinematic tale —it’s essentially a deranged man’s monologue to his therapist about the creature that killed his three kids—so it’s ultimately a wise choice for the film version to take extreme liberties with the term “adaptation.” This should come as no surprise to fans of King’s written work and the cinematic versions thereof, as King is a uniquely difficult author to accurately and compellingly translate to the big screen. So it’s heartening to realize that screenwriters Mark Heyman (Black Swan) and the duo of Scott Beck and Bryan Woods (A Quiet Place) aren’t even trying that angle, instead developing their own take on the “monster in the closet” thriller that plays more like a sequel to King’s work than a misguided attempt at realizing the same maladjusted character study. And the results are just as terrifying in their own right. — Leigh Monson
You Hurt My Feelings review: Julia Louis-Dreyfus shines in this low-stakes jewel
You Hurt My Feelings stars Julia Louis-Dreyfus as a writer named Beth sent into an existential tailspin over a negative response to her latest work. There is, however, a twist. The pan does not come from a stranger in an online pop culture journal, but, instead, from her husband. What’s worse—or, at least, what makes this an unusual situation—is that Beth’s husband Don (Tobias Menzies) is supportive and says “the right thing” to her face, but when he’s having what he thinks is a private conversation while shopping for socks, he tells his buddy (Arian Moayed) that he thinks Beth’s book stinks. — Jordan Hoffman
The Little Mermaid review: Halle Bailey excels in a watered-down remake
Another day, another Disney remake. The Mouse House’s decade-long trend of realizing their animated canon in live action—or whatever The Lion King was—has been commented upon ad nauseum, criticized for their revisionism of stories that didn’t need revising and their bland aesthetic that realizes the cartoony pleasures of the previous films in an uncannily realistic mode. Their crack at The Little Mermaid is better than many of the company’s previous attempts, as many of the changes strike a decent balance between homage to the 1989 animated original and what can—and should be—realistic sea creatures. But when it comes to picking out what parts of Ariel’s story to tweak for the new medium, the remake still emphasizes the wrong pieces, consequentially bloating a previously brisk story into a meandering pile of producers’ script notes. — Leigh Monson
White Men Can’t Jump review: this remake barely hits the rim
On the heels of his interracial romantic comedy You People, which arrived earlier this year on Netflix, comes Kenya Barris’ remake of the 1992 interracial buddy comedy White Men Can’t Jump, which arrives May 19 on Hulu. Race is often on Barris’ mind, as anyone knows who’s seen his television programs, from Black-ish to Black Lightning to #BlackAF. His frank and straightforward way of speaking to issues of race has been refreshing and occasionally enlightening. The blunt talk in You People makes you squirm as you giggle; the movie’s comedic currency is people saying the quiet part out loud, perhaps hearing themselves for the first time. The new WMCJ, though, is never particularly enlightening and is less funny. It depends more on crass humor and obvious ideas rather than the shared insights of people from different backgrounds. — Timothy Cogshell
Fast X review: From Vin-tage to Vin-sanity
What did we do to deserve Vin Diesel, that manly man of a vintage they haven’t been bottling since the heyday of Axl Rose’s first bandana? Vin’s tough but he’s tender. He puts women on the exact pedestal feminists thought they’d knocked over maybe 40 years ago. He’s loyal to his friends—the dead ones especially. And as he moves through the world as he knows it, powered by some unquantifiable mixture of ostentatious humility and laid-back self-love, he makes you believe that all the contradictions he embodies can be brought into balance with a crooked smile and the sound of his Barry White baritone crooning, “I don’t have friends. I got family.” — Ray Greene
Master Gardener review: Joel Edgerton broods in a drama that doesn’t fully bloom
A man sits at a desk, writing in his journal while the camera circles him. It’s an image that’s been repeated in every film of Paul Schrader’s recent loose trilogy. The three films are connected by this image and by the fact they are about lonely men afraid to connect while grappling with the sins of their past and dealing with a calamity in their current lives. In First Reformed (2017) the story was about a priest, in The Card Counter (2021) a gambler, and, in his latest, Master Gardener, it’s a horticulturist with a trove of secrets. — Murtada Elfadl
The Mother review: Jennifer Lopez packs a punch in a film that doesn’t
In the pantheon of female assassin films, many have shown grit and gravitas, but only a handful have nailed their targets. This is especially true in the case of original features for the streaming services. While recent international offerings from Netflix—like Kill Boksoon and Furies—have demonstrated a modicum of mettle, splashy English-language releases—like Gunpowder Milkshake and Kate—have proven frustrating and far from thrilling. And although director Niki Caro’s The Mother ranks as one of streaming’s stronger action titles, alongside Lou, it also sticks to a straightforward formula. It’s decent but a tad too restrained for its own good. — Courtney Howard
Still: A Michael J. Fox Movie review: Beloved actor’s vulnerability and spirit make for a moving documentary
As celebrity biographies continue to find success on streaming platforms, it’s easy to become disillusioned with the arguably critic-proof format as it solely appeals to an audience comfortable and familiar with the subject, and therefore presumably less discerning. And while it’s certainly tempting to lump Still: A Michael J. Fox Movie in with any number of projects with similar premises, documentarian Davis Guggenheim (An Inconvenient Truth and He Named Me Malala) finds room to work within this conceit to make some inspired storytelling choices. First and foremost, he recognizes the innate charisma that propelled Michael J. Fox to stardom and never faded in the years after his Parkinson’s diagnosis, and the decision to have Fox tell his own story allows for insight into his character that’s unique in this documentary subgenre. — Leigh Monson