New York Magazine (Vulture)

Whoever’s coming out on top in the industry battles, there’s no question that the action in Godzilla Minus Zero beats out the recent Monsterverse movies, and even its own predecessor, with kaiju carnage that’s all the more thrilling for how it’s shown from the perspective of the humans in danger of being crushed, either deliberately or incidentally. The movie may keep you waiting on its monsters, but when they show up, it delivers.

For all the film’s crazy performances, its directorial grandstanding, its wildly miscalculated rug-pulling, a genuine current of civilizational despair runs through Digger. That sadness, that horror, serves as Iñárritu’s ultimate justification, and this time, it’s a compelling one. Somewhere behind that camera, he acknowledges that he is just as lost as the rest of us.

Pitt may be one of the last certified movie stars, despite the ugly reputational problems he’s always just managing to evade, but he’s an unpredictable screen presence who is often at his best as a foil, not as the gravitational center of a narrative. He may look strong and admirably silver flecked in his camo pants and flannel onscreen, but he’s in the exactly wrong sort of project — one that relies on him to carry everything himself.

Ultimately, Unabomber has nothing to say — which, when we think about how much the Unabomber himself did have to say, feels like a mistake.

If Resident Evil is his least interesting film to date, it’s still a deftly done, bitterly funny riff on the absurdities of the genre.

White does as much as she can to make Prima Facie cinematic, but she’s not an inherently inventive filmmaker. Both she and Erivo ultimately run up against the limitations of the material, which ultimately treats Tessa not as a person but as a vehicle for certain themes.

Affleck has a feel for composition, and the evocative imagery at times hints at something the narrative fails to. Even so, it’s not quite enough. A movie that tells us to embrace sadness and meanness as well as joy and wonder should at least have some joy and wonder in it, not just sadness and meanness.

In the film’s feverish finale, orchestral music soars over a montage of physical agony and passionate performing, a prolonged battering of grand emotion. It is, curiously, the worst part of a good drama that otherwise trusts its lead to transmit the wonder and the horror of his situation himself.

The film slips in and out of reality, following a kind of dream logic that often disarms and disorients us. As a result, when the real emotional fireworks arrive — and they absolutely do arrive — we are left devastated.

There may not be a lot of there there to I Play Rocky, but its affection for the chaos of filmmaking and the way it sometimes produces magic is palpable, even when we know where this story is going. Especially when we know where the story is going, because the whole point of this enterprise is that we’re going to get somewhere familiar in the end, and we’re going to enjoy the journey anyway.