[SPOILER-FREE REVIEW:] If Abrams has topped himself, it's by making a Star Wars film that's even more of a multiplex-filling Hollywood widget than his first.

If The Next Level plays fast and loose, it also makes an effort to prompt viewers to reflect not only on the freedom of fantasy, but on the fraught but essential relationship of mind and body.

If the film’s psychology and dialogue remain frustratingly basic...the viscerally effective audio-visual approach amplif[ies] the story’s emotional intimacy in ways the situations and mostly platitudinous dialogue sometimes fail to do.

Knives Out cannot help but be fanciful fun, particularly for murder-mystery fans...Johnson adds ballast to what would otherwise be a lightweight tale by suggesting sociopolitical allegory.

Pointedly setting up its own Turkey Day-teasing Truth & Reconciliation Commission about a proud nation’s not-so-proud past...Frozen II arrives just in time for Thanksgiving as an entertainment parents and kids can be thankful for.

The Nicholas Searle novel Hatcher adapts features a shopworn story with easily anticipated plot twists, resulting in a soggy and largely pointless exercise that gets by on its consummate cast and some witty dialogue.

In some ways, Doctor Sleep has to feel like a pop cultural footnote, but that's not fair to what's a ripping yarn in its own right. 

Wild-ride entertainment that’s by turns funny, squirmy, horrifying, and poignant, all in service of a zeitgeist-y story of working-class frustration...boiling over in ways the blithely wealthy can no longer ignore.

Audiences can’t be blamed for turning off their brains and focusing on the aesthetic trappings...in this film featuring a flying protagonist, nothing really lands.

The filmmaker contemplating his own creation as a man and an artist...plays as a poetic remembrance of things past, a reconciliation of self, powerfully capturing the emotional essence of keenly formative experiences and deep loves.

Joker isn’t the film to seriously tackle the issue[s]--it's more concerned with flair than genuine inquiry--but Phoenix’s pained, raw-nerve performance is one for the ages.

A primer...proves most valuable by gathering a number of Miles’ friends, lovers, musical collaborators, admirers, and musicologists...to share their recollections and perspectives on Davis, his musicality, and his personality.

Forgive me for suggesting that Conservative peer Fellowes—or, as he’s sometimes known, Julian Alexander Kitchener-Fellowes, Baron Fellowes of West Stafford DL—might consider Downton the cake he’s letting us eat.

A deeply moving story of a remarkable woman, its only real fault an arguable virtue: adhering to the old showbiz adage of leaving the audience wanting more.

It’s a story worth shining a light on, Gun a hero deserving of a movie-star moment. And yet this docudrama struggles to give feature-length narrative shape to the story in a way that brings it to vibrant dramatic life. 

Thin characters...thinner satire...maybe best to think of Ready or Not not as trolling us but as gifting us a mosh pit for primal-scream therapy.

The film’s darkest-before-the-dawn middle passage honors the complexity of mental-health struggles for the sufferer and those who, unsure at every step, try to steer their troubled loved one down a path to healing.

Luce primarily concerns itself with African-American identity, plagued by withering lowdown stereotypes and polar-opposite pressures...In some ways, the film’s subtle political satire proves even more distressing.

Because of its hurried pacing, the film doesn’t quite make us feel the potentially Shakespearean sweep of this arc, and the leading performances feel similarly hemmed in by the script’s limitations. 

The setup makes for genuinely amusing light farce, but in their patient observation, Wang and cinematographer Anna Franquesa Solano conjure a heartfelt intimacy with the family...[and] the actors always offer up finely etched emotional truths...

Content finally joined by the movie gods to form—for at last, the moving-picture magpie has lighted on Hollywood as his setting and, in no small part, his subject.

Unexciting action and unfunny comedy...Bautista and Nanjiani have star power, and could’ve made a buddy comedy work, but not with this script and this little help behind the camera.

This Maiden voyage’s degrees of heroism and ugly behavior, of victory and defeat, illuminate a gripping and inspiring story that demands to be remembered.

Marvel deserves credit for the ways it has so far managed to freshen up formula, harness genres to its purposes, and hold a mirror up to contemporary society.

Make the mistake of considering this feature-length stunt’s many logical fumbles and obvious but ignored questions, and you’re likely to get angry... All you need is love...and a better script.

At a moment when studios and pundits have begun again to question the efficacy of sequels, Pixar’s graceful follow-up justifies the practice, when executed with smarts and heart. 

Outside of the win for representation represented by the likeable Tessa Thompson’s leading role, there’s no creatively compelling reason to tell this story, which...drags on seventeen minutes longer than the 1997 original.

Potent... Crawford's empathy and care for his subjects shine through, inevitably taking the audience on an emotional journey.

The CGI creatures impress—a star is reborn in Mothra...It’s just unfortunate that the picture as a whole lumbers a lot like its forty-story star.

Slyly addresses...how we think and how we consume media, how we tell stories to each other and ourselves, and what we need out of our personal connections.

The results aren’t exactly magical...Heck, I’d even take a low-rent theme-park version if it spared me this film’s descent into the uncanny valley.

An elegiac valediction for Shakespeare’s genius...a celebration of the centuries of scholarship that got us here...[and] an ode to parental love, complicated as it is by ego.

With Reynolds cracking wise and a number of frantic action sequences, this looks like an effective enough franchise launcher. But...it all feels a little too much like work.

Diverting enough for date night...good enough for government work.

Marvel tourists may surprise themselves how much they care...while fanatics will have a geekgasm of heretofore undiscovered proportions at what amounts to the biggest series finale ever. To put it more politely, they’ll love it “times 3000.&rd

Serves mostly as a vehicle for star Elle Fanning, who provides her own vocals in the film’s multiple vocal-performance sequences and, more importantly, provides the film its soul of quietly defiant determination.

[Leigh] bustles his audience into a time machine and transplants them to a time and place--1819 England--for full immersion into the physical and social landscape where a politically charged tragedy played out.

DC’s answer to Marvel's Ant-Man: a family-friendly, comical comic-book adventure that never crosses the line into camp.

Dumbo has morphed into a fable of modernized entertainment business models and the handling and packaging of IP...strange thematic material for a PG Disney movie aimed at families...and it gets stranger.

Peele’s messy stew of allusive ingredients and jokey allusions...can taste overwhelming, but it gives us a helluva lot more to chew on than a Halloween reboot.

I’ll be damned if I can detect a pulse...Proves deliberately withholding, as if to punish us, along with its unlikeable characters, for expecting too much.

To watch another obscure hero beget a franchise-building smash-hit movie means marveling at Marvel once again.

The little franchise that could is all grown up and ready to leave the nest, so wipe that tear away, and say your goodbyes, kids...For now...

Silly but...big dumb fun.

While Penna shoots and edits the material well enough, its familiar paces probably wouldn’t be tolerable were it not for Mikkelsen, whose grim visage crucially gives the film a racing mind and a beating heart.

While adults will probably find somewhat diminishing returns in The Second Part, its cheeky variations on all the constructions that worked so well the first time also work pretty darn well, and to a good end.

Labors a bit to create drama from what’s essentially a gentle, wistful story of two artists together eking out a last hurrah, but there’s a refreshing warmth to a family-friendly show business tale, one not about backbiting but about love...

A sweet romance this isn’t, but Pawlikowski (Ida) balances the flatfooted realities of maddeningly thwarted love with swoony moments: smoky jazz clubs and songbird reveries.

Memorable moments come from its series of penetrating philosophical conversations... Dafoe expertly plays the keenness of Van Gogh's intellect and creativity against his searing drive, his raw emotions, and the haunting that was his depression.

In Jenkins’ sure hands, Baldwin’s novel becomes an exquisite, impeccable, indelible piece of cinema of the ages.