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Rating Title | Year Author Quote
Resurrection (2025) Teresa Xie By making a film that is as much a dream as it is a movie, Bi paints cinema as a mélange of the past, present, future and beyond.
Posted Jan 27, 2026  Edit critic review
Mercy (2026) Bob Mondello A smartly choreographed chase sequence finally widens the focus and turns the last act of Mercy mercifully brisk. But the overall effect is derivative and secondhand.
Posted Jan 23, 2026  Edit critic review
Young Mothers (2025) Bob Mondello It's hard to imagine any viewer staying dry-eyed when one baby offers her mom the most beautiful smile at the precise moment it will hurt the most.
Posted Jan 09, 2026  Edit critic review
All That's Left of You (2025) Bob Mondello The film was in pre-production during the Oct. 7, 2023 attacks and Israel's subsequent invasion of Gaza, which forced filmmakers to shoot in Cyprus, Greece and Jordan. It's a fresh dislocation that can't help coloring how this wrenching film is received.
Posted Jan 09, 2026  Edit critic review
Magellan (2025) Bob Mondello A nine-hour version is in the works that will perhaps tie things together more clearly. For now, though, while the filmmaker almost always keeps the actual carnage offscreen, the less than salutary effects of colonial conquest are ever front and center.
Posted Jan 09, 2026  Edit critic review
Dead Man's Wire (2025) Bob Mondello The film is designed as a timely reminder that when financiers sell the American dream, there's often fine print that keeps it just out of reach -- and a gripping, often hilarious, and briskly entertaining reminder it is.
Posted Jan 09, 2026  Edit critic review
Marty Supreme (2025) Justin Chang The movies can be a wonderfully amoral medium, and I found myself liking Marty Mauser -- and not just liking him, but actually rooting for him to succeed. It takes more than a good actor to pull that off. It takes one of the greats.
Posted Jan 09, 2026  Edit critic review
The Voice of Hind Rajab (2025) Bob Mondello The actors on screen react in real-time with the recordings of that harrowing day, and the effect is at once painfully direct, and profound.
Posted Dec 20, 2025  Edit critic review
Avatar: Fire and Ash (2025) Bob Mondello With the second installment still sloshing around in my memory, my sense of wonder began to wander during this film's three and a quarter hours. The undeniably eye-popping action is non-stop, but it's also getting awfully repetitive.
Posted Dec 20, 2025  Edit critic review
Is This Thing On? (2025) Bob Mondello Everything Cooper has done here has an improv-like feel -- warm and funny and recognizable, which allows "Is This Thing On?" to amble around and sneak up on you like a great punch line.
Posted Dec 20, 2025  Edit critic review
Atropia (2025) Bob Mondello The setup's fun, the payoff less, but it's amusing.
Posted Dec 12, 2025  Edit critic review
Ella McCay (2025) Bob Mondello That is an indisputably impressive cast, which makes it all-the-more remarkable that not one of them manages to make the film's dialogue or motivations either plausible or comic.
Posted Dec 12, 2025  Edit critic review
Merrily We Roll Along (2025) Bob Mondello Yes, it feels stagey -- you were expecting realism from a musical? -- but the score is breathtaking, the lyrics scintillating, the emotions true, and as a Sondheim lyric has it, "that's the sound of a hit."
Posted Dec 06, 2025  Edit critic review
Fackham Hall (2025) Bob Mondello With production values high and music lush, it'll be a sweet watch for anyone game to overlook a joke that misfires, knowing another one'll be along in a few seconds.
Posted Dec 06, 2025  Edit critic review
The Secret Agent (2025) John Powers This smart, brutal, often funny thriller uses the travails of one ordinary man to capture a reactionary era in its daily realities and surreal absurdities, its public cruelty and private decency.
Posted Dec 06, 2025  Edit critic review
The Secret Agent (2025) Bob Mondello A rousing, suspenseful, occasionally hilarious, and ultimately unnerving 160-minute tale of battling political oppression.
Posted Dec 02, 2025  Edit critic review
Hamnet (2025) Bob Mondello If there's been a more staggering cinematic catharsis in recent years, I've not experienced it.
Posted Dec 02, 2025  Edit critic review
Wake Up Dead Man: A Knives Out Mystery (2025) Bob Mondello There are twists enough to tangle a spider in its own web, jokes and sight gags aplenty, and Daniel Craig's Benoit Blanc is as sharply etched as ever, in what is, to my mind, the most rewarding episode in the series.
Posted Dec 02, 2025  Edit critic review
Left-Handed Girl (2025) Teresa Xie It's a treat being immersed in the brightly-colored, and often overwhelming night market from the point of view of I-Jing, who interacts with each stall like it's her personal playground before dashing off to the next one.
Posted Dec 01, 2025  Edit critic review
Come See Me in the Good Light (2025) Bob Mondello [Gibson's] assertively affirmative outlook doesn't really brook tears, and the filmmaker's warmth and humor, even in times of despair, gives the story a radiance that makes mundane moments feel precious, while allowing hopeful moments to raise goosebumps.
Posted Nov 21, 2025  Edit critic review
The Things You Kill (2025) Bob Mondello The filmmaker's first name provides a not-insignificant clue as to what's going on, as his filmmaking deconstructs the story and his protagonist in initially confusing, and then riveting ways.
Posted Nov 21, 2025  Edit critic review
Wicked: For Good (2025) Aisha Harris This installment is far from a total misfire -- thank goodness Erivo and Grande are such captivating performers perfectly-suited to these roles -- but the over-padding and stuffing meant to justify this bifurcated packaging soon becomes readily apparent.
Posted Nov 20, 2025  Edit critic review
Jay Kelly (2025) Bob Mondello Baumbach has wandered into the territory of 8½ and Stardust Memories and he gets a bit lost in the woods, but Clooney's magnetism goes a decent way to making things palatable.
Posted Nov 18, 2025  Edit critic review
The Running Man (2025) Linda Holmes As an action movie that hits the gas, gets the running man running, and doesn't let up, it works quite well, and it's a lot of fun. But some of King's sharper-elbowed commentary... is blunted a bit.
Posted Nov 18, 2025  Edit critic review
Now You See Me: Now You Don't (2025) Bob Mondello Eisenberg's prickly snark is still fun, but with the tricks getting less convincing and the scripts more exhausting, it might be time for this franchise to go up in a puff of smoke.
Posted Nov 18, 2025  Edit critic review
Nuremberg (2025) Daniel Jonah Wolpert While it may serve a story about a maverick genius psychiatrist and a floundering prosecutor, this construct of Goering as a man of enormous legal intellect and demagogic prowess seems all too crudely established and easily dismantled when the time comes.
Posted Nov 11, 2025  Edit critic review
Peter Hujar's Day (2025) Bob Mondello Writer and director Ira Sachs' character-portrait two-hander will likely sound stagy and static, but it turns out to be not just resonant, but surprisingly cinematic.
Posted Nov 06, 2025  Edit critic review
Die My Love (2025) Aisha Harris The storytelling is too abstract and at a remove to fully lock in emotionally, and as Grace's descent takes unsurprising turns, I was reminded of other, more successful works conveying this delicate subject matter.
Posted Nov 06, 2025  Edit critic review
Bugonia (2025) Glen Weldon As enjoyable as I found the film, it only manages to qualify as mid-tier Lanthimos, chiefly because it doesn't register as a pure expression of his cinematic sensibility.
Posted Oct 31, 2025  Edit critic review
The Mastermind (2025) John Powers Where many male directors might find this heroic, Reichardt finds it deluded and often comical. She can spot a narcissist at a hundred yards.
Posted Oct 30, 2025  Edit critic review
Blue Moon (2025) John Powers Linklater understands how to use his camera in confined spaces to keep a talkie movie visually arresting. And he's helped by the snap of Robert Kaplow's screenplay and by an immaculate cast that nails every line.
Posted Oct 21, 2025  Edit critic review
Ballad of a Small Player (2025) Bob Mondello What he's not, though, is empathetic, and as the plot runs a course that starts to seem inevitable long before the finale, that makes his behavior harder and harder to watch.
Posted Oct 18, 2025  Edit critic review
Frankenstein (2025) Glen Weldon While [the film] captures the tone and spirit of the original novel in all its breathless zeal and hie-me-to-yon-fainting-couch deliriousness, the many narrative tweaks del Toro has made ensure that you'd never mistake his Frankenstein for anyone else's.
Posted Oct 18, 2025  Edit critic review
It Was Just an Accident (2025) Bob Mondello It's surprisingly generous in spirit, and in its assumptions about what retribution by people of good will looks like.
Posted Oct 18, 2025  Edit critic review
Good Fortune (2025) Bob Mondello The social commentary feels at once well-meaning and slightly out-of-touch. But with Reeves' guileless angel as his secret weapon, Ansari's made the film a fun hang.
Posted Oct 18, 2025  Edit critic review
Blue Moon (2025) Bob Mondello You'll realize at some point that while hanging with the smartest guy in the room is certainly exhilarating, it can also be exhausting after a while. Still, how often do you get the chance … maybe once in a Blue Moon?
Posted Oct 18, 2025  Edit critic review
John Candy: I Like Me (2025) David Bianculli Even if you know little about John Candy, by the time this film is over, you'll miss him a lot.
Posted Oct 15, 2025  Edit critic review
A HOUSE OF DYNAMITE (2025) John Powers While all of this is unnerving, it's also thrilling to watch. Bigelow directs with a maestro's lucid precision, perfectly orchestrating the complicated shifts from person to person, time frame to time frame.
Posted Oct 14, 2025  Edit critic review
Orwell: 2 + 2 = 5 (2025) Bob Mondello The filmmaker isn't subtle, but then, neither was his subject, and the film's points could hardly seem more prescient than they do in this moment.
Posted Oct 03, 2025  Edit critic review
Anemone (2025) Bob Mondello In his feature-directing debut, the younger Day-Lewis gives the dense Irish woodlands a claustrophobic majesty and elicits a furiously magnetic performance from his father. That the performance feels bigger than the film that contains it hardly matters.
Posted Oct 03, 2025  Edit critic review
The Smashing Machine (2025) Bob Mondello Having established its central foursome, the film doesn't take them anywhere in particular, but it's a sharp showcase for Johnson's remarkable physical transformation, and his acting chops.
Posted Oct 03, 2025  Edit critic review
One Battle After Another (2025) Aisha Harris It won't be an escape from the awful, absurdist realities we're living with now, but will serve as a reminder that Anderson knows how to make a damn good movie.
Posted Sep 26, 2025  Edit critic review
Materialists (2025) Aisha Harris Beneath the movie's shagginess is a spark of challenging ideas and the legible potential for a sharper film, if only the filmmaker could connect the dots without falling back on retrograde tropes.
Posted Sep 26, 2025  Edit critic review
A Big Bold Beautiful Journey (2025) Justin Chang It's a drama about love, loss and the fear of commitment, with a let's-go-on-an-adventure twist, like Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind by way of The Phantom Tollbooth. I wish it were remotely as good as that sounds.
Posted Sep 24, 2025  Edit critic review
Plainclothes (2025) Bob Mondello Lucas' self-loathing and panic are persuasively of their time, and the story, which could as easily have been set in the 1950s, can't help but seem a cautionary tale for the world we find ourselves in today.
Posted Sep 24, 2025  Edit critic review
Waltzing with Brando (2024) Bob Mondello Billy Zane's uncanny resemblance to a 40-something Marlon Brando is put to intermittently amusing use in this breezy, if scattered, comedy.
Posted Sep 24, 2025  Edit critic review
A Big Bold Beautiful Journey (2025) Bob Mondello The stars struggle to make their dialogue sound credible, and director Kogonada is stymied by generic, cloying, situational twaddle that cannot possibly have looked any smarter on paper than it does on screen.
Posted Sep 24, 2025  Edit critic review
HIM (2025) Bob Mondello The director's filming regimen includes x-ray-enhanced tackles, a lot of red lighting and some football-helmeted religious imagery. It all gets pretty tiresome after a while.
Posted Sep 24, 2025  Edit critic review
Riefenstahl (2024) Daniel Jonah Wolpert Where Veiel's film locks itself into a loop of attempting to show just how much of a Nazi Leni Riefenstahl was, it falls short. However what is revealed beyond that is much more disturbing.
Posted Sep 12, 2025  Edit critic review
Downton Abbey: The Grand Finale (2025) Justin Chang Fellowes wisely course-corrects, cutting back on the convoluted plotting and zeroing in on the emotional dynamics.
Posted Sep 12, 2025  Edit critic review
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