46 reviews in this category.
There are animated films that earn their reputation and animated films that coast on it. Coco earns every bit of its 97% Rotten Tomatoes score, its two Oscars, and its place in the conversation about the greatest Pixar films ever made.…...
Critics destroyed this movie. 31% on Rotten Tomatoes. 'Dopey,' 'formulaic,' 'overstuffed.' The usual verdict when professional critics encounter a movie built entirely for an audience they don't belong to....
Sonic the Hedgehog 3 is a film that understands what made the original games fun. It does not try to be more than it is. It is fast, funny, and focused on the core appeal of Sonic: speed, action, and friendship....
Mufasa: The Lion King is a prequel that has no right to work. How do you make a film about a character who is already legendary? How do you create stakes when the audience knows the ending? Director Barry Jenkins solves this by focusing entirely on t…...
Ghostbusters: Afterlife is the most traditionally conservative blockbuster of 2021, and I mean that as a sincere compliment.…...
Here's the honest take on the 2019 Aladdin: it's better than the critics said and not as good as the box office suggests. It grossed a billion dollars worldwide and earned a 57% critic score.…...
Wes Ball's reboot arrives many generations after Caesar's legacy, and it works hard to honor that lineage without being enslaved by it.…...
Let me tell you what nobody expected in December 2022: that an eleventh-year sequel to a DreamWorks spin-off, featuring a talking cat from the Shrek franchise, would turn out to be one of the best animated films in a decade.…...
James Cameron has now made three Avatar films. Each one is technically extraordinary and ideologically predictable. Fire and Ash is both the best-looking film of 2025 and an almost proud repetition of every idea the franchise put on the table in 2009.…...
A Minecraft Movie is an honest film. It is not pretending to be Citizen Kane. It is not sneaking in a gender studies lecture.…...
Here is the thing about Flow: it should not be this good. A Latvian animated film made by one person over five years, using free software, with no dialogue, no human characters, and a $3.5 million budget going up against Disney, Pixar, and DreamWorks…...
Here's the thing about Paddington 2: it might be the most morally serious film of the last twenty years. It doesn't feel like it. It's brightly colored and funny and stars a CGI bear who gets into scrapes with marmalade.…...
Moana is the Disney princess film that refuses to be about a princess, which is either the most Disney thing imaginable or a quiet act of subversion, depending on your perspective. Moana (Auli'i Cravalho) is the daughter of a Pacific Island chief.…...
Here is the most charitable reading of Toy Story 4 I can offer: it is a technically brilliant film that makes a catastrophic moral choice in its final fifteen minutes....
Maximus is a general. He commands the armies of Rome, wins battles for a dying emperor, and wants nothing more than to go home to his farm in Spain, to his wife, to his son, to the smell of wheat and horses in the morning.…...
There is a moment in Jurassic Park that I have never fully recovered from. Alan Grant is sitting in a tree with two children he barely knows, watching a brachiosaurus eat leaves in the moonlight.…...
Uncharted spent fourteen years in development hell for a reason. The Naughty Dog game series is critically beloved and commercially enormous specifically because it transcended the video-game-adaptation trap by borrowing from Indiana Jones and creati…...
In the year of Barbie and Oppenheimer, Dungeons and Dragons: Honor Among Thieves was the best pure adventure film Hollywood released and the one most people forgot to include in that conversation....
Let me say something that will surprise you: Avatar: The Way of Water is a more conservative film than its politics suggest....
Everything Everywhere All at Once won seven Academy Awards including Best Picture, Best Director, Best Actress, and Best Supporting Actor and Actress. It earned $77 million on a $14.3 million budget. Critics called it a generational masterpiece.…...
The Super Mario Bros. Movie is the highest-grossing animated film of 2023 at $1.36 billion worldwide, and it earned that number honestly. It is not a great film by any measure of ambition or craft.…...
Seven films in, Tom Cruise's Mission: Impossible franchise remains the gold standard for Hollywood action filmmaking. Dead Reckoning Part One is not just the best entry in the series; it is one of the best action films of the decade.…...
Fast X is exactly what the Fast and Furious franchise has always been: a maximalist action spectacle built around the unironic belief that family is the most powerful force in the universe.…...
Guardians of the Galaxy is one of the most purely enjoyable films the MCU ever produced, and by our scoring system it is also one of the most traditionally coded. The margin is not close.…...
Avatar is the highest-grossing film in the history of cinema. It made $2.9 billion in its original 2009 release and over $2.3 billion more in its 2022 re-release. More human beings have paid to watch Avatar than any other movie ever made.…...
Andy Weir's Project Hail Mary may be the most eagerly anticipated sci-fi film of 2026, and based on the source material and everything shown in three trailers, it looks like exactly the kind of movie conservative audiences have been starving for: a c…...
The Electric State is a $320 million argument that money cannot buy a soul....
Zack Snyder is the most misunderstood filmmaker in the culture war. His fans think he is their guy - the anti-Disney, anti-woke auteur who makes movies for men.…...
Paddington Bear has become one of the strangest cultural Rorschach tests in modern cinema.…...
Elio is the most politically interesting Pixar film in years - not because of what is on screen, but because of the firestorm around what was taken off it.…...
Let's address the elephant in the Wasteland right up front: Furiosa is not woke. It's not even close.…...
Disney's 2019 Lion King is a technically stunning but emotionally hollow recreation of one of the most traditionally structured stories in the studio's catalog.…...
Guardians of the Galaxy Vol. 3 is the rarest thing in Phase Five of the MCU: a movie that earns its emotions without lecturing its audience.…...
Thor: Love and Thunder is a film at war with itself. It contains the raw materials for a genuinely powerful story about grief, faith, and the failure of the gods, but it buries that story under a relentless avalanche of jokes, self-aware comedy, and …...
Transformers One is the best Transformers film since the original 1986 animated movie. It does what no live-action entry ever managed: it makes you genuinely care about Optimus Prime and Megatron as characters before they become myths.…...
The Super Mario Galaxy Movie arrives April 1, 2026, as the sequel to the $1.36 billion juggernaut that proved Nintendo's most famous plumber could carry a theatrical film.…...
Doctor Strange in the Multiverse of Madness is the MCU's most interesting mess. Sam Raimi brings genuine horror filmmaking to a franchise that desperately needed it, Elizabeth Olsen delivers a villain performance for the ages, and the multiverse conc…...
The fourth SpongeBob theatrical outing arrives with the kind of refreshing simplicity that has become almost exotic in modern animated filmmaking: it tells a straightforward story about friendship and courage, delivers its moral without a lecture, an…...
Anaconda (2025) is a film that sounds better as an elevator pitch than it plays as a ninety-nine-minute movie.…...
Strange World is the movie where Disney finally stopped pretending and went full ideological accelerator.…...
Black Panther is the most culturally significant MCU film ever made, and scoring it requires separating the cultural event from the actual film. The movie tells a surprisingly traditional story wrapped in progressive packaging....
Black Widow arrives as Natasha Romanoff's belated solo film and the first entry in MCU Phase Four.…...
Shang-Chi is the most pleasant surprise in the MCU's representation era. Where many expected Marvel's first Asian-led film to be a diversity lecture, what we got is a deeply traditional family drama with spectacular fight choreography that draws from…...
Ant-Man and the Wasp: Quantumania had one job: introduce Kang the Conqueror as the next Thanos-level threat. It failed at everything except the Kang part, and then Jonathan Majors' conviction destroyed even that....
Dean DeBlois is a rarity in Hollywood. He directed all three animated How to Train Your Dragon films and insisted on full creative control for the live-action remake. That condition shows in the finished product.…...
Sonic the Hedgehog 3 is the best film in this franchise and, honestly, one of the most enjoyable family action movies of 2024. It does something Hollywood rarely manages: it gets darker in its third installment without losing its soul....
