This is aggressively unsubtle, but I think that’s largely the point. The satire is broad, obnoxious, and occasionally pretty stupid, but the movie is so committed to making virtually everyone involved...

There’s something uniquely horrifying about being unable to trust your own perception, and this gets an extraordinary amount of mileage out of that idea. People change. Rooms shift. Conversations repe...

When Bonnie receives a Lilypad tablet as a gift and becomes obsessed, Buzz, Woody, Jessie and the rest of the gang's jobs become exponentially harder when they have to go head to head with the all-new...

For all of its excesses, I was pretty thoroughly won over by this. Digger is messy, occasionally exhausting, and probably too enamored with its own ambition, but I’ll be damned if I didn’t enjoy the h...

I was absolutely not prepared for how much this got to me. Spontaneous takes one of the most ridiculous premises imaginable—teenagers randomly exploding into blood—and somehow turns it into this funny...

God, this movie is fucking bleak. Not in some huge, operatic way either. More in the sense of suddenly becoming aware of time passing, missed opportunities, and how easy it might be to spend years tra...

This is basically two hours of Jason Statham being extremely pissed off, which, to be fair, works pretty well. Wrath of Man is cold, nasty, and almost aggressively self-serious, but I kind of respect ...

I’m deeply conflicted about this movie, and I could easily see it rising or falling in my estimation with time. For now, though, I think I’m mostly positive on it. What makes it interesting is the way...

This has all the ingredients of something I should probably like more than I actually do. Soderbergh is having fun with it, the cast is absurdly stacked, and there’s a loose, grimy energy to the whole...

I respect this more than I love it, but there’s a lot here that works. The whole Rashomon-style structure is obviously the big swing, replaying the same stretch of events from three different perspect...

Antlers is bleak as hell, and for a while, that really works in its favor. The whole thing is cold, grimy, miserable, and soaked in this oppressive sense that something is deeply wrong long before the...

I give this a lot of credit for pulling off something this fun and personality-driven on what was obviously a very small budget. There’s so much affection baked into the thing that I have to imagine B...

Wes Anderson is obviously operating on another level visually here. Every frame is packed with so much detail, so many little jokes, weird compositions, sudden shifts in color and aspect ratio, animat...

This is such a simple movie on paper, but it gets a ridiculous amount of mileage out of just putting four people in a room and letting them talk. The whole thing lives or dies on the writing and perfo...

I went into this expecting Nicolas Cage to wage some kind of deranged one-man war across Portland over a stolen truffle pig. Instead, Pig turns out to be way sadder, stranger, and more thoughtful than...

Codswallop. Just limp, corporate superhero sludge. Superman was messy, sure, but at least it had a pulse and some actual affection for the character baked into it. This mostly feels like smashing-cras...

This one was seriously kneecapped by its own trailers. So many of its most batshit insane, starkly unhinged images were already splashed all over the previews, which is a damn shame, because the sheer shock of seeing some of this shit for the first time on a massive screen probably would’ve bumped the experience up a point or two for me. I really wanted to like this more than I did. The big problem is that it never quite figures out the balance between gallows, swear-laden humor and full-on freaky-town, blood-soaked nightmare fuel. Sometimes that mixture works really well, but

I’ve read the book, and while I respect the sheer scope of what Herbert built, I’ve never been entirely in love with how much of it can feel buried beneath terminology, politics and mythology. Villene...

Rebecca Hall is incredible in this. Like, genuinely incredible. So much of the movie is just her sitting inside this enormous grief, getting angrier and more unsettled as she starts realizing her husb...

It is honestly kind of insane how much better this is. Obviously, four hours is excessive, and Snyder is still Snyder. There is an almost comical amount of slow motion, everyone is constantly being ph...

I learned some pretty grim shit from this about what the U.S. Navy apparently allowed to happen to its own shipyard workers for years, how much of that harm was concealed or minimized, and how badly t...

I get why this one got clowned on. The dialogue is bizarre, the performances are all operating at this slightly unnatural pitch, and Shyamalan keeps pushing the movie right up against the edge of tota...

Rick Grimes is back, and the second Andrew Lincoln is on screen again, the whole Walking Dead universe suddenly feels alive in a way it hasn’t for me in years. What really makes this sing, though, is ...

This is basically what happens when the hyperactive visual language of Spider-Verse gets filtered through a dysfunctional family road-trip movie, except the thing that really makes it work is how seri...

There’s a lot here I genuinely liked, even when the movie itself feels like it’s constantly on the verge of flying apart. It’s this huge, sweaty, disgusting, weirdly beautiful vision of old Hollywood,...

I think I mostly enjoy this as a very elaborate social comedy that happens to have a murder mystery running through it, because so much of the fun is just watching all of these obnoxious, self-importa...

Bleak as hell, but pretty damn effective. I really liked how completely this strips war of any grandeur and reduces it to mud, panic, exhaustion, and young men being fed into this enormous machine for...

There’s probably no point pretending this is trying to be anything other than grimy B-movie trash, and for a while I was willing to meet it there. It has the violence, sleaze, and deliberately tastele...

What makes this work so well is how quickly something that should be incredibly small and stupid starts to feel almost existential. One guy decides he’s done with the friendship, the other can’t under...

There’s something I really like about how little this seems interested in making Batman look cool in any conventional sense. He’s intimidating, obviously, but also kind of pathetic in this very human ...

I think what really works for me here is just the sheer scale and weirdness of it all, how Peele takes something as familiar as a UFO movie and makes it feel completely alien again. There’s a genuine ...

I like how this keeps getting bigger and stranger without ever really losing sight of how emotionally stunted Roy is. He’s traveling through all this incredible, hostile, increasingly surreal space, b...

This is such a simple revenge story on paper, and I think that’s part of why everything Eggers builds around it works so well for me. Amleth watches his father get murdered, grows up, becomes an absol...

What I found most interesting about American Fiction is also what I struggled with most. I understand the frustration at the center of it: the idea that Black artists can be rewarded for performing a ...

This is a very well-made little revenge odyssey, and I kept thinking about Kill Bill while watching it: two women on an almost Homeric journey toward one man, mowing down whosoever gets in the way as ...

I feel like this is Enshittification: The Movie. Cory Doctorow would be proud of our beloved Looney Tunes banding together against the stark, extortionate evils of a giant corporation with an enormous...

This mostly worked for me. I like how quickly it turns a relationship into this ugly little pressure cooker where money, ambition and insecurity start bleeding into everything. Alden Ehrenreich is esp...

This is probably at its best when Godzilla feels less like the point of the movie than the thing forcing everything else to the surface. Shikishima survives the war and spends most of the story treati...

I’m usually pretty susceptible to Wes Anderson’s whole thing, but Asteroid City kept me at more of a distance than I wanted. It’s obviously gorgeous, all sun-bleached desert, pastel motel rooms and pe...

If I had to pick one, this is probably still my favorite. Rewatching it again, I think what stands out more to me now is how often this movie lets its characters be wrong about themselves. Everyone th...

There’s something immediately cozy about The Holdovers, even when everyone in it is miserable. I liked the prickly little triangle at its center: Giamatti weaponizing irritation as a personality, Domi...

This is at its best when it just lets the weird shit pile up without immediately explaining any of it. The oil tanker running aground, the deer, the Teslas crashing into each other, the phones suddenl...

I had almost no relationship with the Ninja Turtles going into this, so the fact that I ended up having this much fun with it was a genuine surprise. A lot of that comes down to how loose and visually...

Aptly named! Everyone in this movie is mad as hell. I am so ridiculously easy to please with this kind of movie. It thrills, excites and animates me like almost nothing else. I apparently have no choi...

I think what interests me most here is how thoroughly Fincher strips away the mythology his killer has built around himself. Fassbender keeps insisting that he is disciplined, detached and totally in ...

The Covenant has a stronger political current running through it than I expected. Ahmed’s history with the Taliban, including the murder of his son, gives his role in the war a deeply personal stake, ...

There’s something painfully recognizable in the way Close understands how quickly a boy can become self-conscious about a kind of tenderness that once felt completely natural. I was especially struck ...

I’m admittedly not enough of a Napoleon buff to get hung up on the film’s historical liberties; beyond Waterloo, his exile and the broad strokes of his military career, I went in pretty cold. What I f...

It still takes me a few minutes to acclimate to Pattinson’s voice here without fixating on how bizarre it sounds, but I like the performance considerably more than I did the first time around. There’s...

His Three Daughters works best when it just lets these three women occupy the same cramped space and quietly grate on one another. Carrie Coon is wonderfully abrasive, Elizabeth Olsen is constantly tr...