Resident Evil finally understands that survival horror works best when the hero is underprepared, the ammunition is scarce and every locked door feels more threatening than another lecture about Umbrella Corporation lore.
The Weight understands that stolen gold is valuable precisely because it is difficult to move, turning every river, bridge and suspicious companion into another cost desperate men must calculate.
The Uprising is alive whenever Paul Greengrass throws the audience into the chaos, yet thin characterization and an overly explanatory script keep its spectacle from carrying real weight.
Bunker is strongest when it forgets about billionaires, class allegory and survivalist spectacle and simply watches Penélope Cruz and Javier Bardem test the load-bearing walls of a long marriage.
Practical Magic 2 finds genuine feeling in three generations of Owens women, yet its strongest relationships keep fighting for room inside a long, busy sequel that mistakes more magic for more enchantment.
Possible Love takes nearly three hours to ask who gets to observe suffering, who gets to profit from it and whether genuine intimacy can survive when every relationship begins with unequal power.
The Debut is Jesse Eisenberg's funniest and most formally adventurous film yet, anchored by a spectacular Julianne Moore and a Paul Giamatti performance pitched at exactly the right level of theatrical terror.
Elsinore occasionally brushes against the clichés of awards-season illness drama, but Andrew Scott refuses every easy note. His Ian Charleson is not a dying man learning to live; he is an actor furious that death has arrived before he is finished.
Liam and Noel Gallagher may be the reason the cameras are present, but the crowds become the soul of a concert film that understands an anthem can hold a family, a city and an entire generation at once.
Forbidden Compass is colorful, frantic and occasionally funny, but Tom and Jerry spend too much of their own movie serving a mythology that has little need for them.
By Any Means is uneven by design and sometimes simply uneven, but Yahya Abdul-Mateen II and Mark Wahlberg make its collision of civil-rights drama and revenge movie hard to dismiss.
Cocoon: One Summer of Girlhood is delicate without being timid, using friendship, painterly animation and an imperfect floral metaphor to mourn lives interrupted before they have fully begun.
Wild Horse Nine has all the barbed dialogue and bruised male friendship expected from Martin McDonagh, but John Malkovich gives the film a melancholy center that keeps its political cynicism from curdling into empty provocation.
Fall 2: Deadpoint finds a few genuine stomach-dropping thrills on Mount Kwan, even as a weaker script and more visible effects keep pulling the movie back toward earth.
Jack O'Connell and Guy Pearce are excellent in Danny Boyle's kinetic account of The Sun's transformation, even when the film's appetite for sensation begins to resemble the media culture it wants to indict.
Runner knows the appeal of watching Alan Ritchson turn every available object into a weapon, and Owen Wilson gives the mayhem an affable pulse, even when the movie around them feels assembled from familiar parts.
Hope begins like a mystery whispered through a rural town and gradually turns into a creature-feature stampede, losing some of its dread as its scale expands.
Onslaught has the cast, gore and Carpenter worship to be a midnight-movie blast, but its slow burn leads to a payoff that feels more familiar than ferocious.
The effects made Terminator 2 historic. The reason it still works is that Cameron never treats spectacle as a substitute for character, fear, or moral choice.
Buddy is at its funniest and creepiest when its smiling orange unicorn behaves as if murder is simply another lesson of the day.
Finding Emily borrows freely from the romantic comedies that came before it, but its best moments understand that being young and in love now means being watched, catalogued, and analyzed in real time.
Idiots has the rhythm of an early-2000s studio comedy and the dirt-under-the-fingernails sensibility of a Macon Blair crime story.
Wile E. Coyote takes Acme to court in a clever live-action/animation hybrid that understands the old cartoons worked because failure itself could be funny.
Jacob Elordi, Josh Brolin and Margaret Qualley give The Dog Stars a humane center, even as the film’s increasingly busy second half loses some of the emotional clarity of its quieter opening.
Noomi Rapace and Andrzej Konopka wander through a retro-futurist fever dream full of striking ideas, brutal textures and a murder mystery that becomes harder to follow with every answer.
Amelia Eve gives the series a sturdy new lead, while dental nightmares, collapsing spaces and a terrific pillow-fort sequence keep a familiar supernatural formula intermittently alive.
Mutiny is at its best when Statham has nowhere to go but through somebody. The fights are blunt and efficient; nearly everything connecting them feels preassembled.
A stacked comic cast can only do so much with a script that mistakes wellness satire, raunch and friendship speeches for a personality of its own.
La La Land still dazzles on the big screen, where Emma Stone, Ryan Gosling and Damien Chazelle’s carefully constructed dream of Los Angeles feels both more artificial and more emotionally honest.
Train to Busan remains one of the defining zombie movies of its era, marrying relentless action to a father-daughter story that hits harder on a theater screen.
Anne Hathaway and Ewan McGregor keep a lively prehistoric survival movie grounded, but The End of Oak Street is more fun as a throwback than it is distinctive on its own.
The Rivals of Amziah King tries to be a folk tale, crime thriller, musical and family drama at once. It does not always hold together, but its best stretches feel completely alive.
Kristen Stewart and Alia Shawkat make an easy, believable comic pair in a stoner comedy that is sweet, chaotic, and only intermittently as funny as it thinks it is.
SIX the Musical Live! is an energetic, sharply performed record of a theatrical phenomenon, led by six performers who understand exactly how to own an audience.
PAW Patrol: The Dino Movie delivers dinosaurs, rescues and a surprisingly sweet message about confidence with exactly the efficiency its young audience expects.
Dafoe gives one of those performances that removes acting rather than displays it, in a melancholy comedy that stays smaller than its own best questions.
A feverish reclamation of slasher mythology, powered by the charged chemistry of Hannah Einbinder and Gillian Anderson.
Not a biopic about discovering food but a coming-of-age story about discovering work, with Sessa and Banderas making the kitchen the whole world.
Monica Barbaro and Callum Turner bring charm, comic ease, and genuine warmth to a glossy New York romance.
Broken Lizard’s chemistry and the unexpectedly endearing Farva-Thorny wedding conflict provide enough scattered laughs for established fans.
A promising grief drama built around an artificial child becomes one of Kore-eda's most emotionally remote films.
Olivia Wilde takes command of Gregg Araki's bright, bawdy comeback, a sex comedy with more nerve than discipline.
A dense but absorbing samurai mystery that replaces swordplay with suspicion and makes a castle feel as dangerous as any battlefield.
A bruised, character-driven Spider-Man film gives Tom Holland his strongest material yet, even as Marvel begins crowding the edges again.
Flaco’s escape from the Central Park Zoo becomes an affectionate and unexpectedly complicated portrait of freedom in the middle of Manhattan.
A wonderfully grotesque practical Pinocchio and Robert Englund’s sinister Cricket give this public-domain slasher more personality than its disposable human story.
A committed formal experiment with a commanding Alan Ritchson performance and several viciously effective action sequences.
A carefully filmed stage capture that understands the turntable, the band, and the audience are not limitations to overcome, but part of the story.
Sophie Thatcher and Charles Melton wander through a gorgeous neon nightmare that too often feels like Nicolas Winding Refn remixing his own greatest hits.
Nolan's largest film is also one of his most human, a monumental journey home that never lets Odysseus forget what it cost to survive.
The 4K theatrical return restores the scale of Welles’ visual invention and confirms why Citizen Kane became a landmark, while also exposing the emotional distance built into its legend.
A strong ensemble and an urgent true story survive a respectful adaptation that turns complicated lives into overly tidy lessons about literature and resistance.
Catherine Lagaʻaia shines in a beautiful but overly familiar remake that mistakes physical scale for a new perspective.
A ferocious collection of practical set pieces gives Evil Dead fresh energy, even when its family trauma is more effective as fuel than drama.
A strikingly photographed erotic thriller turns caregiving and telephone scams into a study of control, then mistakes provocation for development.
A committed Zoey Deutch and a game ensemble keep David Wain’s absurd Hollywood comedy afloat when its joke machine begins running on fumes.
A gentle, beautifully assembled portrait of Mary Oliver that understands attention was both her method and her subject.
A sincere and occasionally rousing portrait of George Washington’s formative military failures, elevated by strong battle sequences and a seasoned supporting cast.
A lively tribute to silent comedy and old studio filmmaking proves the Minions are funniest when cinema itself becomes the punch line.
Milly Alcock is terrific as a damaged Kara Zor-El, but the film keeps sanding down the sharper edges of the comic that inspired it.
Four exceptional actors turn a provocative invitation into one of the year's funniest and most emotionally precise relationship films.
Pixar finds a real reason to return to Bonnie's room, placing Jessie at the center of a funny and unexpectedly moving fight for a child's attention.
Emily Blunt gives one of her finest performances in Spielberg's moving, uneven collision of government conspiracy and extraterrestrial awe.
Anna Faris and Regina Hall remain fearless comic performers in a revival that confuses naming recent movies with actually parodying them.
Hand-built corridors and distorted memories make Backrooms a remarkable horror debut, but explanation and character drama keep interrupting its strongest spell.
Grogu remains irresistible and the practical world looks terrific, but Star Wars returns to theaters with a side quest instead of a real event.
Keke Palmer leads Boots Riley's fashion revolution with swagger, humor, and enough visual invention to survive a plot carrying ten ideas at once.
La Bola Negra can be overstuffed, sentimental and occasionally too aware of its own significance, but its ambition is inseparable from its power. Javier Ambrossi and Javier Calvo turn erased history into a lush, wounded piece of popular cinema.
Inde Navarrette gives a fearless breakout performance in a darkly funny nightmare that transforms romantic fantasy into a violation of free will.
The cast still knows exactly how to wear these characters, even when the movie surrounding them feels like a familiar outfit in cheaper fabric.
A junior high science teacher wakes up alone at the far edge of the solar system and has to save the species. Somehow, the math checks out emotionally too.
