Reviews

This is one of the best-reviewed movies of the year, and calling it amateur hour would be an insult to amateurs who show potential.

Points at something without trying to understand it.

A rom-com without jokes or wisdom or the guts to lean into the thing it claims to value above all.

These movies are nothing if not a portrait in courage and cowardice, free will determination vs. cruel and mindless obligation. And hell if it won’t always feel good to see the former win.

Sometimes a movie is too funny for you to care if it’s also kinda working against its own premise.

Needs to be about twice as deep and three times as surprising for its trajectory to work.

If the 2025 “I Know What You Did Last Summer” proves anything, it’s that you can be totally emotionally disengaged with a movie and also want to boo at the end.

Good animation, reasonably uplifting story, absence of obnoxious and desperate lunges at humor — a mid-range jumper counts for the same points as a 360 dunk.

At only 84 minutes “Ladies First” just kinda shrugs and leaves, far from sincere or intelligent about the issue at hand and very much feeling like a relic long ago conceived to be the most controversial movie of 1981.

Both bonkers and unexpectedly wise about college-age mistakes.

Makes people who haven’t read the book presume things worked way better on the page and those who have be like, yup.

A movie that often looks painful for the characters and frequently is grueling to watch as well.

Might sound stupid if not for the filmmaking skill that helps this B-movie earn its rating.

Making Jack Black a movie star was a huge mistake.

A little funny, a little affecting, and moderately forgettable.

A filmmaker better at fun than social commentary struggles to mine much about the public’s susceptibility to suffering as entertainment.

Gets under your skin and stays there.

Wrong for the moment and no deeper than a T-shirt reading “Children are our future.”

A study of artistic connection and disconnection, swoony and old-fashioned but also plenty modern in its loneliness.

Too much like (the far, far inferior) “One True Loves” goes to “The Good Place.”