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Where other directors have gone small and safe, and studios have followed them, gripping their IPs like a child’s blanket, here comes Christopher Nolan to take big chances and go for homers instead of sacrifice bunts.

It’s propulsive stuff behind the camera. And this intensity of movement and angles and ever-shifting blocking that Spielberg can pull off in his sleep, playing off the manic energy of the actors (Colin Firth is borderline cartoonishly villainous, and it is a joy to watch), just barrels through every goofy plot point it comes across.

The name Cameron has not lost its association with extreme technical craft. Avatar: Fire and Ash’s is just as amazing a showcase of design and VFX as any Cameron movie. But the novelty, that particular power a James Cameron film event once had, has been irrevocably cheapened by this whole ill-conceived project.

All the effort you can see onscreen goes into apologizing for what we love about the Batman character, the Batman world, and the Batman mood.

Superman provides the exact sensation of opening a modern comic. You know, art that melts your eyeballs, but a story stuck knee-deep in 50 years of superhero muck. Superman might look like a cutting edge dream, but its pretty pictures are in service of nothing but this month’s floppy.

This fan project may have deserved a YouTube release, but as a feature film, it's just the latest example of how far the Summer Blockbuster has fallen.

Gladiator II is entirely built of empty clichés. Take any theme you’ve ever heard about power, revenge, corruption, honor, and Gladiator II will have pages of dialogue trying to encapsulate it in a neat little line.

Romulus has none of the big ideas or pretensions of Ridley Scott’s prequels. No grand mysteries or myth-making ambitions. It’s a group of kids in over their heads against our old friends the facehuggers, chestbursters, and Xenomorphs. With those easy aims, Alvarez comes up with a very exciting creature feature.

Had this been released on television, it would have been one of the best looking shows around. Horizon is warm and expansive in the way all westerns ought to be, but this is cinema we’re talking about, and at the movies, the bar is higher.

Nearly ten years later, Furiosa continues where Fury Road left off without expanding in any new direction.

Dune Part II, for all its enormous hype, doesn’t quite fulfill the promise of that first introduction to Arrakis by way of Villeneuve. This is a smaller, less monumental film that the first. It lacks the freshness, the wonder of discovery that defined the appeal of that 2021 film.

There is nothing altogether bad about Ferrari, if you can look past Shailene Woodley's dreadful attempt at an Italian accent, and there is some power to the picture, some lasting imagery. But Michael Mann never delivers more than a solid, reliable piece of machinery. A Toyota more than a Ferrari.

Ridley Scott's Napoleon, with its several intricate, complex, clearly defined, and incredibly rousing battle scenes is like an elixir. The movie would be an enormous success on the merits of the battles alone. Yet there is so much more here to recommend it.

[Branagh] is not a director of tasteful restraint, and bless him for that. A Haunting in Venice is a movie that wants you to gasp with delight at each and every shot.

The trick to a Matt Reeves film is to steal secondhand. His Planet of the Apes movies are total composites; there is nothing original about the stories they tell, nothing unique about how they look, no ideas in them that haven’t already been thoroughly explored elsewhere. They’re genre pastiches with the ape skin cheat code turned on.

Rango belongs more to the western than it does to the animated feature. It deserves comparisons to Sergio Leone before anything Pixar has done since 2010.

It is a movie entirely made up of critically important conversations, and for that reason, it is an actor’s dream project. The lineup here is about as good as it gets in this star-starved Hollywood era.

Forget Spielberg’s virtuosic way with movement and blocking. It’s like pulling teeth just to get Mangold to give us a single wide shot. Along with the Party City level production design and some of the dullest, brownest cinematography I’ve ever seen in a $300 million blockbuster, Indiana Jones and the Dial of Destiny is disqualified from comparison with Lucas and Spielberg’s movies.

The Nun's Story works much like Fred Zinnemann's A Man For All Seasons in the way it absorbs you in ideas. Anyone inclined to give faith a fair chance spends this film feeling immersed in an important and demanding intellectual discussion.

2009’s Avatar is itself a complete epic. A singular cinematic achievement with a beginning, middle, and end. I put my trust in the man to justify going back there, but what he’s given us here is a movie equal to Avatar in all technical departments—the action is huge, varied, uniformly outstanding, the special effects are awesome, even the writing, in the big scenes at least, matches the work done before—only, in the end, much less significant.

Jackson simply plays it seriously, with great love, and it all works. His film is an A+ special effects epic. A real story; something with dramatic purpose, something given actual care and attention.

Spielberg has brilliantly disguised these themes within his genre films; in alien invasion movies, dinosaur pictures, science fiction noirs, and family fantasy adventures. But with The Fabelmans, here comes the full reveal. It is a movie directly about family. His family. One must assume The Fabelmans is Steven Spielberg’s last word on the subjects that have bewitched him throughout his career.

There are theatrics we’ve seen many times before, and cloying tactics that hard-boiled movie-goers have learned not to fall for. Though, for those who can buckle in for a good long fireside epic, War Horse is as rousing a cinematic experience as they can get.

The achievement of Elvis is its epic translation of an epic figure. Elvis Presley is such a greater subject than Elton John, Freddie Mercury, Ray Charles, Ritchie Valens, Buddy Holly, Loretta Lynn, or even Johnny Cash. Elvis is a part of the American fabric. A mythic figure on the same level as Superman or Mickey Mouse. With that comes inherent drama and import.

Whatever this strange science-fiction, spy thriller, globe-trotting dinosaur adventure picture is, it feels like a far, far cry from Michael Crichton and Steven Spielberg’s vision of Jurassic Park.

What Spielberg does with Jurassic Park is a culmination of everything he had built towards since Jaws. After that highly effective but rusty first attempt at thrilling an audience out of their seats, Spielberg refined and molded. His techniques grew more sophisticated, more robust. His budgets grew, technology improved. By the summer of 1993, Steven Spielberg had perfected the art of the blockbuster. Jurassic Park is the zenith. The ultimate cinematic thrill ride.

The celebratory energy of Top Gun: Maverick will enrapture plenty. But even accounting for Tom Cruise, Jerry Bruckheimer, and director Joseph Kosinski’s shrewd spell—the influx of timing and properly placed ambition, giving a starved audience the kind of entertainment they needed—Top Gun: Maverick is still a super-charged rush of fresh air; a summer blockbuster both jaw-droppingly thrilling and emotionally fulfilling.

Sonic the Hedgehog 2 is indeed one of those franchise machines that chugs along exactly as the “family-friendly summer entertainment” blueprint dictates. And despite my gut reaction to such shameless, calculated, anti-creative anti-matter, I enjoyed my factory-made, computer-generated experience at Sonic 2.

It starts out at a high level of drama—the glories and tragedies of war being inherently affecting—and simply keeps turning the screws tighter and tighter. We think we know the sad trajectory of these men, and yet at each turn, the film becomes more and more tragic. It’s an emotional steamroller, crushing you flat by the end with an onslaught of feeling.

...The digital accoutrements filling up so much of the screen are distractingly bad. It’s a shame when you consider that Branagh also has a way with nice, neat, symmetrical framing that cleverly compliments its hero’s personality. He’s a good director, but while the second half of the movie eases into a colorful, filmic look, there are whole passages early on that look like they take place inside an Agatha Christie PS4 game (hold on, let me jot down an idea I just got).

The story is appropriately large, literary, and epic. The acting from Jackman, Crowe, and Hathaway is damn-near perfect. The rest are good enough. Yes, even Redmayne and Aaron Tveit, the most off-putting of the cast, get the job done. Les Misérables, despite the awkward sing-songy dialogue, ends up a powerful dramatic experience.

The Battle of the Five Armies—a completely superfluous, but joyously entertaining feature-length action sequence— is pretty much all you’re going to get in this third Hobbit film.

You get your money’s worth from Jackson, who still proves to be one of the tippy top action directors working.

Peter Jackson has defined his career as the fantasy-epic guy, but what makes him special is his robust cinematic ingenuity. He has a range of directorial skills, not just as a visionary or a special effects pioneer, but as a storyteller, actor’s coach, showman. His Hobbit is fittingly family-friendly, wonderfully full of charm and humor.

When your movie idea is nothing but hidden messages, I never become involved. And worse, I get frustrated, annoyed, and ultimately repulsed.

It’s a wonderful gift to be able to actually appreciate everything that Spielberg is doing here. Some people can’t see how much brighter and more living this mise en scene is than everyone else’s… but they can feel it.

Inside Out is the first and only Pixar movie of the 2010s worthy of standing alongside the studio’s classics. In comparison to Monsters University or Finding Dory, which seemed so small, tv-like, and insignificant, Inside Out feels like the real deal. A big, theatrical, Pixar event. The movie is not up there in the upper tier of the catalogue, but it comes from approximately the same creative place.

Spartacus, the Stanley Kubrick directed, Kirk Douglas produced story of slave revolt in ancient Rome, is a special experience; a classic epic with a distinctly modern sensibility. It’s a sharp, subtly risqué piece of work, in line with what I expect from Kubrick.

This movie, by Tom Hooper, understands the deep fear and humiliation such a thing has on a person. It is tuned directly into what is going on in its character’s head. It is one of the most inspirational movies I have ever seen. One that understands hopelessness, fear, embarrassment, and also the literal life-giving power that personal strength has to overcome the worst of what life gives us.

This is an After Effects demo reel, not a movie. Or perhaps more apt, a video game. A crappy, third-party Lord of the Rings ripoff developed by a British frat house.

Flight keeps the crash itself in the distance, on the periphery of the important story. The film’s real narrative focus is firmly on Whip, and it digs deep inward. Flight isn’t about airplanes or the FAA, it’s about addiction and it’s one of the great screen depictions of addiction I’ve seen.

This is a lovable little movie, the kind that renders any faults moot by the sheer charm of the production. I guess it's not a very good film, but its black magic worked on me.

The spark of inspiration that first brought us Borat is long dead. This Subsequent Moviefilm is a straining, tired ordeal.

This thing culminates with an emotional thunderbolt. One we see coming, but convince ourselves every step of the way can’t possibly come to pass until it inevitably does. In other words, a lot like real life.

The reputation Crash has gained since its Best Picture win is frankly shameful. This is a great film; an important film; a film with the power to change, however slightly, the way we might look at a stranger. It’s also some of the most electrifying filmmaking of the 2000s. An edge-of-your-seat adrenaline rush of ideas.

One might be tempted to review it with bumpers; because it’s for kids, give it a break. But George of the Jungle is better than that. It’s a smart, witty family comedy, bursting with charm and good cheer. It may be silly, but it’s a real film, with real filmmaking qualities, and a real heart.

It fulfills that old school Hollywood ideal: Classy stars giving great performances in a grown-up entertainment that masters gentle humor and touching drama to carry audiences along for a couple hours and give them plenty to think about after they leave.

The attempts to create tension along the way are woeful. At two separate points along the trail, two separate groups of men show up out of nowhere just to announce to Kidd, in so many words, that they will be the bad guys for the next bit.

This Henry V is a Movie movie. Not a quiet and respectful “film adaptation” but an engrossing, stand-up-and-cheer prestige action adventure. That it does this with all the Shakespearian elements intact is its greatest feat. No need for samurai stand-ins or translated dialogue or a modern day setting, this is Shakespeare, straight-up, and it rocks!

As an uber-sleek and spit-polished take on the 007 formula, it reminded me a lot of the newest Mission Impossible movies, which sacrificed unique auteuristic spins for premium-grade stunt shows.