An incredibly stylized retelling of a classic fairy tale came out last weekend. It was pretty mesmerizing.

Weathering With You may not pack as much of an emotional punch as Your Name, but it’s still a beautiful and moving story nonetheless. Set in a Tokyo that’s facing relentless rainfall, it has a radical take on climate change: optimism.

Dark Waters is one of the many brilliant films getting snubbed this award season, which is a real shame. Both it and its spiritual sibling - The Report - are incredibly vital stories that need to be seen by as many people as possible. I wrote about the two films and what makes them so important.

The climax of this movie involves Robert Downey Jr. shoving a leek up a dragon’s ass to remove skeletons and bagpipes from its rectum. The dragon thanks him by farting in his face. In another scene, a tiger named Barry gets kicked in the balls by a gorilla and cries “My Barry berries!”. Dolittle is both the life and death of cinema.

It’s a mix of Alien and Dead Space, but set at the bottom of the ocean. A great setting for a survival horror movie, Underwater delivers decent thrills but never quite makes the jump from good to great.

My Hindu Friend is the final movie from Argentina-born Brazilian filmmaker Hector Babenco. He was the first Latin American to ever be nominated for Best Director at the Oscars. This movie details the time in his life when he underwent extensive medical treatment for cancer, and contemplated life, death, and the point of either one. Sounds like a downer, but Babenco infuses moments of grotesquely funny surrealism into the film. Thanks to a stunning performance from the always amazing Willem Dafoe, it’s a beautiful send off for a historical director.

I was deeply moved by Honey Boy. Vulnerable and honest in its writing, beautifully directed, and impeccably acted, it plays like a form of therapy not just for its creator, but for anyone who knows similar pain.

This Senegalese film, which won second place at the Cannes Film Festival, is really something else. It’s a bittersweet romantic tale, a chilling ghost story, and a howl of rage against unjust capitalist and patriarchal constructs. Showing a side of the ever-growing refugee / migrant crisis that isn’t normally seen, it’s a film that shouldn’t be missed.

It’s so rare that we receive an animated film this unorthodox. In I Lost My Body, the feature-length debut of animator, writer, and director Jérémy Clapton, a disembodied hand becomes sentient and escapes from a Parisian medical lab, setting out on a quest to find its long lost body, and become whole again. It sounds silly, even a little macabre, but this French animated picture is surprisingly beautiful, and deeply moving.

Frozen II bites off a good bit more than it can chew. The movie just isn’t long enough to bring all of its plot lines, characters, and conflicts together in a fully satisfying way. But it has far higher aspirations than the original, and its more mature and moodier themes and music, combined with stunning imagery and animation, make it hard not to feel something, or a lot of things, while watching it. It’s more of a sensory experience than anything, and I love and appreciate the more abstract approach it attempts. Very much worth the watch.

I am not the target audience for this movie so my opinion on it may not amount to much, but regardless, I still have one. This new Charlie’s Angels is missing all the campy, tongue-in-cheek fun of the ones that came before, most notably the 2000 version. That movie, amongst its hilarious and absurd sleaziness, is actually very clever about its critique of men and its representation of feminism. This movie, however, feels far too shallow, like it’s checking off boxes of what feminism is supposed to be without bothering to dig any deeper. It’s also just not very fun, or funny.

In which a review for a perfectly innocent, watchable, charming dog movie becomes a rant about creative freedom, safe vs risky filmmaking, and Disney’s stale, manufactured approach to movies.

Crown Vic has strong performances and some topical observations of modern day police work, but it never goes anywhere interesting enough with them. That, and your enjoyment of it will probably depend on where your politics lie.

Mike Flanagan has made an adaptation that surpasses the Stephen King source material. By staying faithful to the novel, the text’s triumphs become the film’s as well. But so do its problems.

Terminator: Dark Fate is the sixth installment of the franchise, but it's a sequel to only the first two films. This helps streamline its plot, and the establishment of three badass women as the heroes is a welcome change that helps the series reexamine itself and its roots. There's a good bit to enjoy in Dark Fate, but judging by its abysmal box office performance over the weekend, it was too little too late. Consider this franchise terminated.