| | | Fancy Dance (2023) | It’s a sluggish effort that combines elements of a social-problem story, a mystery, a child-custody drama, and a coming-of-age tale but doesn’t bring any particular depth or feeling to any of this. - Wall Street Journal |
| | | Kinds of Kindness (2024) | It’s a film that demands to be watched several times to figure it out, but although I occasionally enjoyed its mordant humor, it’s so unpleasant that it’s hard to sit through once. - Wall Street Journal |
| | | Inside Out 2 (2024) | A pointedly funny and observant parable of teen angst that has a lot to say about the state of youth today. - Wall Street Journal |
| | | Fresh Kills (2023) | Fresh Kills could have been a psychologically penetrating character study but settles for merely reiterating that it’s unpleasant to be a gangster’s daughter. - Wall Street Journal |
| | | Bad Boys: Ride or Die (2024) | How can so much chaos be so dull? - Wall Street Journal |
| | | The Watchers (2024) | Both Shyamalans habitually make everything dependent on the grand finale, but neither of them seems to be able to tell the difference between a satisfying conclusion and one that makes two hours in a theater feel like a total waste of time. - Wall Street Journal |
| | | Young Woman and the Sea (2024) | Mr. Rønning (a Disney stalwart who did the maladroit “Maleficent: Mistress of Evil” and the unspeakable “Pirates of the Caribbean: Dead Men Tell No Tales”), pollutes even the best scenes with oil slicks of overbearing music. - Wall Street Journal |
| | | What You Wish For (2023) | Without straining to make an obvious point, Mr. Tomnay uses black comedy and shocking splatters of gore to tweak the class of jaded plutocrats who are as asset-rich as they are morals-poor. - Wall Street Journal |
| | | Furiosa: A Mad Max Saga (2024) | At its best, Furiosa is like a more fun, less ponderous and mysticism-free Dune, with every pedal properly to the metal. But it’s closer to numbing than enthralling, like a long ride with no shock absorbers. - Wall Street Journal |
| | | Kidnapped: The Abduction of Edgardo Mortara (2023) | [Edgardo Mortara's] tortuous journey gets the respect it deserves in this sensitive and beautifully realized drama. - Wall Street Journal |
| | | Back to Black (2024) | The film is detailed, vivid, enthralling -- and necessarily full of pain. The performances are top-notch, led by Ms. Abela, who does her own singing in an amazing re-creation of Winehouse’s muscular soul vocals. - Wall Street Journal |
| | | IF (2024) | Aspartame is 200 times sweeter than sugar, sucralose is 600 times sweeter than sugar, and “IF” is considerably sweeter than either. Chemically if not cinematically, it’s noteworthy. A drop of it would sweeten a swimming pool of coffee. - Wall Street Journal |
| | | Kingdom of the Planet of the Apes (2024) | The element of gravitas in “Kingdom” amounts to a cerebral dramatic core that sets it apart from other effects-driven fantasy films. It’s also a rarity among blockbusters in that stringing together one spectacle after another isn’t the point. - Wall Street Journal |
| | | Time of the Heathen (1961) | Time of the Heathen was evidently made on a very low budget, and the sometimes histrionic acting is among its unpolished qualities, but at its core it is an impassioned and haunting psychological journey. - Wall Street Journal |
| | | Jeanne du Barry (2023) | Overlapping with Sofia Coppola’s “Marie Antoinette” but minus the mischievously anachronistic touches, it’s a finely wrought story of palace intrigue enriched by lush sets and decors. - Wall Street Journal |
| | | Evil Does Not Exist (2023) | Luxuriating in long, patient scenes of chopping wood or filling containers with water from a brook, it glows with appreciation for living off the grid in an otherwise hectic time. There should be more to a film than a mood, however. - Wall Street Journal |
| | | The Fall Guy (2024) | The Fall Guy may be the bargain of the season at the multiplex; for the price of one ticket, you get many bad movies. - Wall Street Journal |
| | | Challengers (2024) | [Luca Guadagnino] does his best to give substance to a thin, soapy story, but he relies so heavily on gimmicks (several montages feature electronic dance music) that he starts to seem desperate. - Wall Street Journal |
| | | Boy Kills World (2023) | Boy Kills World should have stuck to gonzo comedy and been 15 minutes shorter. But Mr. Mohr exhibits the kind of flair for comic action that makes him an obvious choice to direct a big-budget Hollywood superhero epic - Wall Street Journal |
| | | We Grown Now (2023) | The heartfelt performances, especially by Blake, Ms. Smollett and Ms. Merkerson, give the film a sad, lovely glow. - Wall Street Journal |
| | | The Ministry of Ungentlemanly Warfare (2024) | Mr. Ritchie’s hyped-up re-creation might be forgivable if it weren’t so lazily written. - Wall Street Journal |
| | | Civil War (2024) | That is mindless fantasy, not mordant commentary. Civil War is superficially silly, but it’s also deeply silly. It’s a statement movie that contains no insights at all. - Wall Street Journal |
| | | Sasquatch Sunset (2024) | The gags seem fun and refreshing at first, but they get stale quickly. Moreover, since there is no plot and no dialogue, the quirky central idea never takes on any narrative momentum. - Wall Street Journal |
| | | Coup de Chance (2023) | Woody Allen’s best work in many years. - Wall Street Journal |
| | | The First Omen (2024) | The First Omen may have a noble predecessor in one of the scariest films of the 1970s, but it has little to distinguish it from the last 665 mediocre horror features I’ve seen. - Wall Street Journal |
| | | Wicked Little Letters (2023) | The audience is left to feel sorry for characters we’re meant to find amusingly contemptible and to groan at the way the writing keeps taking potshots at the most obvious targets. When the film thinks it’s being wicked, it’s closer to being trite. - Wall Street Journal |
| | | Godzilla x Kong: The New Empire (2024) | Spectacular? I guess, if you're wowed by soulless CGI chaos. Thrilling? Not really. At the end, I was left feeling the way Kong does at the beginning: tired and bored. - Wall Street Journal |
| | | Ghostbusters: Frozen Empire (2024) | A blunt Gen X nostalgia play -- a tribute act grinding out the oldies on a cruise ship to nowhere. - Wall Street Journal |
| | | William Shatner: You Can Call Me Bill (2023) | Who doesn’t love Bill Shatner? The theatrical documentary “William Shatner: You Can Call Me Bill” reminds us why, - Wall Street Journal |
| | | Arthur the King (2024) | Film by film, Mr. Wahlberg is using his pull to create a tribute to the world’s tough, decent, humble working guys. - Wall Street Journal |
| | | The Animal Kingdom (2023) | There’s an opportunity for a turn to the satirical... Instead of being expansive in its imagination, however, The Animal Kingdom retreats into the fangless realm of cliché. - Wall Street Journal |
| | | Cabrini (2024) | Its visual splendor is matched by the strong moral convictions and absence of cynicism that characterized many movies of the 1940s, when Catholic heroes were all over the screen. - Wall Street Journal |
| | | Dune: Part Two (2024) | Instead of a theme park, it's more of a cathedral -- solemn, sober, beautiful and forbidding. Greig Fraser's photography and Hans Zimmer's score are full of majesty. - Wall Street Journal |
| | | Asleep in My Palm (2023) | Asleep in My Palm is a virtuoso debut feature from writer-director Henry Nelson, Mr. Nelson’s son. The younger Mr. Nelson has fashioned a powerful fable, something like a contemporary take on John Steinbeck. - Wall Street Journal |
| | | Drive-Away Dolls (2024) | [Ethan Coen] makes these points indirectly, via genial goofiness. I certainly prefer that approach to stern didacticism, but Drive-Away Dolls is so lightweight it’s hard to recommend it. - Wall Street Journal |
| | | About Dry Grasses (2023) | About Dry Grasses is characteristically extravagant and tiny at the same time, like a 10-story museum devoted to paper clips. - Wall Street Journal |
| | | Bob Marley: One Love (2024) | If the film is ambitious, it is also inert. - Wall Street Journal |
| | | Madame Web (2024) | It collapses so pathetically that studio executives might as well have dialed 911 to rescue it. - Wall Street Journal |
| | | Ennio (2021) | The bad news about the Ennio Morricone documentary “Ennio” is its length: 2 1/2 hours. Far too short! - Wall Street Journal |
| | | Lisa Frankenstein (2024) | The movie seems long, though it’s barely 100 minutes. As bright as Ms. Cody’s imagination is, she deserves a director who understands comic tempo. - Wall Street Journal |
| | | Ibelin (2024) | Strangely moving. - Wall Street Journal |
| | | DEVO (2024) | Another engaging offering... The band’s delightfully odd costumes and visual aesthetic were so lighthearted and silly that they came across as the antidote to politically infused rock. - Wall Street Journal |
| | | Porcelain War (2024) | A combination of whimsy and devastation, it looked at the continuing war in Ukraine through the eyes of eccentric artists who carry on with their craft of making adorable little figures even as the Russian invasion disrupts everything. - Wall Street Journal |
| | | Dìdi (2024) | Served as a refreshing antidote to all of those youth-patronizing movies in which kids are portrayed as hyper-confident quip machines... Mr. Wang’s honest self-appraisal yields a richly detailed film. - Wall Street Journal |
| | | Suncoast (2024) | Forswearing anything like a pedantic message and giving the audience plenty of reasons to be sympathetic to the viewpoints of all three characters, Ms. Chinn has created a heartbreakingly real coming-of-age story. - Wall Street Journal |
| | | A Real Pain (2024) | Mr. Culkin’s “Succession” fans, of whom I am not one, might enjoy the way he dominates the story. But his fast-talking performance... struck me as merely obnoxious when it’s meant to be hilarious and tortured. - Wall Street Journal |
| | | Argylle (2024) | A movie is like a politician: The more desperately it tries to explain itself, the less appealing it becomes. Mr. Fuchs upends the narrative so many times it becomes a kind of unpleasant mania. - Wall Street Journal |
| | | The Peasants (2023) | With its feel for both beauty and ugliness, the film transports us to this unfamiliar milieu with a richness rarely attempted in the cinema anymore. - Wall Street Journal |
| | | Miller's Girl (2024) | Only a generous grader would award this script anything better than a D-plus. - Wall Street Journal |
| | | I.S.S. (2023) | At its best, it combines an exploration of awe-inspiring technical detail with breathless suspense as convincingly as Alfonso Cuarón’s “Gravity” did a decade ago. - Wall Street Journal |
