100 minutes of joy. Nothing original in the plot, nothing great about the score, nothing illuminating in the cinematography. Just a joyous story told smartly and accessibly. Hikari knows which clichés most need avoiding, and she and Fraser know when to let his face to do the talking.
Josh O’Connor has the shoulders to carry any movie, but most of us are coming to see Benoit Blanc go toe-to-toe with this all-star cast of suspects, and ‘Dead Man’ delivers precious little of that.
A couple plot threads seem to exist just to give the stacked cast enough to do, but mostly Jay Kelly is an admirably delicate mediation on acting and **** and who pays the costs thereof.
With a small cast, a four-room set, and monologues galore, Blue Moon could have been a stage play devoid of life on the screen, but Linklater and Hawke make it crackle with discomfort and hilarity from beginning to end.
Most of the movie ensconces the viewer between a tapestry of lucid, vital cinematography and a wall of the rarest acting. It’s stingy with narrative arc, which makes the comparatively focused ending all the more of an emotion wallop.
‘Ares’ is a popcorn flick with an uncluttered script, a cool look, and a bananas-good soundtrack. Leto delivers an unexpectedly warm and appealing performance. That it doesn’t bother to pretend to make sense should be refreshing.
Like last year’s Nosferatu, Frankenstein relies too heavily on meticulous retro æsthetics to justify spending over two hours on a lifeless pre-Victorian tale.
Linklater knows that he’s providing all the ingredients that forecast fiasco, which permits him to allow the the lack of story to *be* the story. (The story is Abed?)
Impeccable acting and direction keep the stress level in the 5–9 range for the whole of this nearly two-hour film. There are brilliant moments, but maybe not enough to merited such a taxing experience.
Will Patton’s reading is magnetic, but the narration is still the little kernel of artifice that pulls the viewer back from total immersion in this gorgeous, heartbreaking experience.
The nearly exposition-free development of the two protagonists would be graceful were it not for stupendously poor editing. Time and again I found myself frantically scanning a beautifully composed shot, unable to tell if it exists to develop Wong’s luscious vision of 1960s Hong Kong or if it includes a meaningful narrative detail.
The second half’s examination of systemic corruption has a decided eat-your-spinach vibe, particularly after the crisp and lively procedural that is the first half, but the whole movie works on the back of technical mastery of the highest order.
‘The Baltimorons’ takes a simple story, a small cast, and an unglamorous city and absolutely glows with grace and humor. It’s a little movie and one of the great Christmas tales of this century.
‘Encounters’ is less a story than it is a carnival ride Spielberg built to use the latest and greatest in special effects. The early scene with Truffaut and Balaban in India is the only one that remains as effective as I found the movie as a whole thirty years ago.
‘One Battle’ excites with its kineticism, but it’s lacking substance at its core. Bob’s bravery in the face of tangible danger barely makes him a protagonist worthy of our support, and the villains’ readiness to kill seems to stem less from understandable motive and more from a need for the audience to be certain of their villainy.
‘Eddington’ succeeds for much of its considerable runtime thanks to its empathy for its broken protagonist, but it falters when it swaps that empathy for what feels like a Yorgos Lanthimos story minus the humor.
‘Weapons’ is explicit about its shifting of viewpoints, but it does some interesting genre hopping too, starting with horror, moving into mystery, and ending as a hostage thriller. It’s slow to get going but a torrent of pulpy fun by time it rounds the bend into the final act.
The cinematography, both in the we quasi-locked-room first act and the subsequent chases, makes this an impressive artifact of its time, but between the childishly constructed police-procedural and the half-baked morality play, ‘High and Low’ should be neither entertaining nor insightful to a modern viewer.
‘H2L’ lacks the cohesion of Lee’s tonally similar ‘Inside Man’ (and features what is easily the most detrimental score of 2025), but simply by knowing who its protagonist is and delivering a comprehensible message, it lands miles ahead is Kurosawa’s innovative but crude ‘High and Low’.
‘Caught Stealing’ is packed with interesting characters from seemingly disparate movies, and it feels like Aronofsky never quite figures out how serious he wants his caper to be.
‘The Toxic Avenger’ serves up a gleefully chaotic blend of exploitation parody, classic slapstick, absurd gore, contemporary satire, and nerdy wordplay. The satire is thin (screentime devoted to the villains can be draggy), but enough of the rest is riotously funny.
The first half uses a tightly curated collection of shots to paint a rich portrait of the politics and tensions within the bubble of tenuous fame that is the entourage. Cause and effect, hierarchy and emotion are so realistic that dialogue is almost superfluous. The second half requires a sudden suspension of disbelief and seems to exist to support a single monologue that can’t overcome the sudden shift in realism, despite Théodore Pellerin’s flawless delivery.
Too much story is told rather than shown for this to be a truly great addition to the comic-book-adaptation movie canon, but a melding of earnestness and silliness keeps Superman gliding through its problem points.
‘Sorry, Baby’ could have been darkly humorous without making its protagonist as witty as she is, but her wit provides a roundedness that lends tremendous power to the serious aspects of the movie.
Right at the end there is a terrible composite shot with fireworks in the background, and I’m not 100% sure they didn’t whiff it on purpose just to drive home the point that everything else in this movie looks goddamn fantastic.
This farewell tour to an uneven franchise is overlong, overpopulated, and too explainy, but its climax so brilliantly simple that it is stunning in the truest sense of the word.
‘Materialists’ has too many Very Important Speeches to feel as powerfully honest as Song’s ‘Past Lives’, but as a novel repurposing of the rom-com engine, it’s an admirable piece of cinema.
Anderson has tried to pack this one with a Grand Budapest mentor–mentee relationship AND a Life Aquatic epic quest AND an “Asteroid City” meta-narrative, and the result is an underwhelming version of each and a largely arbitrary climax.
Flanagan has deftly extracted a charming ’90s-style big-feelings movie from septuagenarian Stephen King’s increasingly clumsy hands. Even King’s tendency to make every decade before 2000 feel like the early ’60s works better than it has any right to.
Editing, photography, and sound-mixing all blunder with some frequency, and the story is a poignant tale of self-discovery fighting for time with a Tati-esqe urban farce, both of which are undermined by the frequent moments of cool shots set to incongruous American blues. That Sister Midnight works at all speaks to director Karan Kandhari’s instincts.
It starts with fantastically clumsy expository dialogue and goes downhill from there. The metaphors are as subtle as hammers, and the central character stops behaving anything like a real person the second the hamfisted plot demands it.
The Shrouds traverses a Lynchian road toward increasing unreality, and it succeeds in provoking thought about A.I., surveillance, and corporeality, but poor editing and Cronenberg’s tin ear for dialogue undermine it at every strange turn.
There’s a kernel of an interesting metaphor in this Jim Crow–era vampire tale, but it’s not enough to make a proper story or statement out of this puddle of tryin’-too-hard hero shots. The big musical number is the only real magic to be had.
The tensionless final chapter seems to be tacked on to the movie just as a treat for diehard fans of movie weddings, but the story that precedes it is lovely and frequently hilarious.
94 minutes, all of them fun. There’re some awkward improbabilities that occasionally reduce plausibility to below what a reasonable suspension of disbelief can cover for, but exposition is rarely blatant, and the viewer’s prior encounters with famous mysteries are taken as a given.
Extraordinary sound design isn’t enough to make a compelling experience out of this incoherent trainwreck of conflicting espionage tropes and character clichés.
It’s basically a given that Freaky Tales will appeal to those who love Quentin Tarantino AND Oakland AND the ’80s, but it’s such a lively and weird and freakin’ fun movie that appreciation of just one of those three is probably plenty.
Warfare strikes an awkward compromise by staying solely with one of its two SEAL teams for the first hour. The we-see-only-what-they-see approach is effective at creating an intense experience in the absence of any real narrative arc, but the spell breaks when we suddenly leave to join the second team.
Ingenious cinematography and an intriguingly ambiguous flow of time work make this dark venture back to the village so much more than simple indictment of tribal coercion.
