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Vanity Fair

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Rating Title | Year Author Quote
The Naked Gun (2025) Richard Lawson At its best, this new Naked Gun is a dumb, loopy delight, a return to the kind of comedy that was woefully taken for granted in its heyday and now barely exists at all.
Posted Jul 30, 2025  Edit critic review
The Fantastic Four: First Steps (2025) Richard Lawson It’s yet another middling entry in the post-Endgame tradition, a film that doesn’t launch the franchise headlong at the future so much as it glumly drags us toward it.
Posted Jul 29, 2025  Edit critic review
Superman (2025) Richard Lawson It’s a shrewdly balanced film, a mix of flippant merriment and real dramatic stakes. Gunn would have a much harder time selling his new approach had he not cast smartly. Fortunately, he’s found an appealing Kal-El/Clark in TV actor David Corenswet.
Posted Jul 10, 2025  Edit critic review
Jurassic World Rebirth (2025) Richard Lawson There are worse exercises in IP-extension out there in the marketplace. But it is hard to imagine what possible basis there could be for an eighth Jurassic film.
Posted Jun 30, 2025  Edit critic review
Brokeback Mountain (2005) Richard Lawson Brokeback’s high emotion occasionally borders on the melodrama of classic Hollywood. There is plenty of aching nuance, but the film is, for the most part, generous and entirely legible in its pathology.
Posted Jun 25, 2025  Edit critic review
28 Years Later (2025) Richard Lawson Grim and strange, 28 Years Later finds Boyle once again following the irregular rhythms of his brain.
Posted Jun 18, 2025  Edit critic review
Elio (2025) Richard Lawson Pixar has begun doing what it once seemed it never would: repeating itself.
Posted Jun 17, 2025  Edit critic review
Materialists (2025) Richard Lawson Materialists is successfully seductive, eventually revealing a few potential deal-breakers but otherwise proving an engaging date. I wanted to fall in love, as I had with Past Lives. But a diverting, heady fling will do too.
Posted Jun 11, 2025  Edit critic review
Ballerina (2025) Richard Lawson One happily trots along with Ballerina as it ventures into absurdity. Its silliness is, at least, compellingly rendered. It helps immensely that de Armas is such a limber, confident action performer.
Posted Jun 05, 2025  Edit critic review
The Life of Chuck (2024) Richard Lawson It’s a lumpy, eclectic film, one grasping for deep meaning but never quite reaching it. Flanagan’s ambition fails him here, as it sometimes does in his ornately crafted Netflix shows.
Posted Jun 04, 2025  Edit critic review
Mountainhead (2025) Richard Lawson As Saturday night entertainment, it falls short. And it’s not as informative as a journalistic long read. But at least it’s something, the slightest of pushes back against the people trying so offhandedly to grind us into soylent.
Posted May 29, 2025  Edit critic review
Sentimental Value (2025) Richard Lawson Trier has once again crafted a film that is graceful and limber, thoughtful and surprising. Sentimental Value doesn’t land with the same wallop as "Worst Person", but it is plenty affecting in its own insightful, poignant way.
Posted May 21, 2025  Edit critic review
The History of Sound (2025) Richard Lawson At times, Hermanus’s style is effective, selling us on the film’s lonely, years-spanning heartsickness. But too often the film’s muted emotion feels more gimmicky than credible to Lionel and David’s circumstances.
Posted May 21, 2025  Edit critic review
Highest 2 Lowest (2025) Richard Lawson Highest 2 Lowest finds Lee both defiant of his age and proud of it, seizing our attention with the friendly insistence of someone with still so much left to tell us.
Posted May 20, 2025  Edit critic review
The Phoenician Scheme (2025) Richard Lawson The Phoenician Scheme quickly floats away into frustrating abstraction. But Anderson rescues his film from oblivion in the end, closing out his story with a disarmingly sweet -- and, in some ways, provocative -- moral argument.
Posted May 19, 2025  Edit critic review
Pillion (2025) Richard Lawson A film that deftly balances squirmy comedy with gentle pathos, social suspense with offbeat warmth. Pillion gives little indication that Lighton is a first-time feature director.
Posted May 18, 2025  Edit critic review
Die My Love (2025) Richard Lawson Ramsay’s jumble of pictures and sound is bound together by Lawrence’s confident, fearless gravity. It’s quite something to behold: a comedic performance that manages convincing notes of devastation, or a dramatic turn that is also screamingly funny.
Posted May 17, 2025  Edit critic review
Urchin (2025) Richard Lawson With Dillane’s invaluable help, Urchin paints a sad and compelling portrait of someone lost in the fringes, a victim of an often indifferent system and of the complex wiring of his brain.
Posted May 17, 2025  Edit critic review
The Chronology of Water (2025) Richard Lawson The film exists at a remove, more object for formal study than something deeply felt. What does emotionally resonate feels unspecific to any one author; it’s just a generic, if compelling, tale of hard-won recovery.
Posted May 16, 2025  Edit critic review
Eddington (2025) Richard Lawson Eddington is a strange, erratic film, coy about its motivations... But a revisit helped clarify things, and deepened my appreciation for what I think it is that Aster is doing.
Posted May 16, 2025  Edit critic review
Mission: Impossible - The Final Reckoning (2025) Richard Lawson If this is indeed the end of Cruise’s globetrotting and derring-do, Final Reckoning is a worthy send-off. It may not quite reach the vertiginous peaks of the series at its finest, but it scrapes fingers with greatness.
Posted May 14, 2025  Edit critic review
Thunderbolts* (2025) Richard Lawson Alas, downbeat little side adventures are not going to get the Marvel engine back up to full speed. And so Thunderbolts* must, inevitably, draw the rest of the universe toward it, which makes all of its discrete action seem thin and insufficient.
Posted Apr 30, 2025  Edit critic review
Sinners (2025) Richard Lawson Sinners is propulsive and stirring entertainment, messy but always compelling. The film’s fascinating array of genres and tropes and ideas swirls together in a way that is, I suppose, singularly American.
Posted Apr 10, 2025  Edit critic review
Disney's Snow White (2025) Richard Lawson Hm? What’s that? This Snow White is not a made-for-TV movie shot in Burbank but is instead a theatrically released feature film that cost upwards of $250 million to make? Oh. Oh dear.
Posted Mar 22, 2025  Edit critic review
The Electric State (2025) Richard Lawson The filmmakers are no doubt aiming for that Spielbergian mix of wonder, suspense, and melancholy, but it’s all rather synthetic. Save for a few likable robots, The Electric State is charmless and curiously dull.
Posted Mar 10, 2025  Edit critic review
Mickey 17 (2025) Richard Lawson If Pattinson doesn’t always land the joke, or if his accent falters, or if his performance (as, really, multiple Mickeys) sometimes strains legibility, we can at least appreciate the big swing. On the whole, though, Mickey 17 tests our patience.
Posted Mar 05, 2025  Edit critic review
Captain America: Brave New World (2025) Richard Lawson Brave New World is a bunch of characters wandering around in search of meaning, the Marvel machine creaking loudly as it tries to whip up some grand mythos around these B-tier figures.
Posted Feb 12, 2025  Edit critic review
Sorry, Baby (2025) Richard Lawson A meticulously crafted wonder, the most auspicious debut I’ve seen here this year. Victor maintains the oddball humor that first endeared her to her followers, but she also incorporates whole other, previously unseen facets of her considerable talent.
Posted Jan 28, 2025  Edit critic review
Kiss of the Spider Woman (2025) Richard Lawson Lopez clearly wants this to be a mighty Lopez showcase, and it is. Were Molina alive today and a diehard JLo stan, he’d no doubt approve. He might take issue with the rest of Condon’s film, though.
Posted Jan 27, 2025  Edit critic review
Peter Hujar's Day (2025) Richard Lawson Peter Hujar’s Day may be only a glimpse, but its smallness proves fascinating. This kind of seemingly banal information is not the sort that tends not to be preserved, but it is vital.
Posted Jan 27, 2025  Edit critic review
If I Had Legs I'd Kick You (2025) Richard Lawson It’s a towering performance, a feat of intelligence and energy that tightly binds to all of Bronstein’s heady, propulsive style. Let’s hope Byrne gets recognized for all of that hard work in some fashion, even if Linda never gets credit for hers.
Posted Jan 25, 2025  Edit critic review
Twinless (2025) Richard Lawson Twinless announces the ascendancy of a thrilling filmmaker.
Posted Jan 24, 2025  Edit critic review
The Brutalist (2024) Richard Lawson Brody and Pearce vividly manifest Corbet’s arguments about the clash between art and money, between the old world and the new. When they are blazing away on screen together, The Brutalist swells to epic size.
Posted Dec 28, 2024  Edit critic review
Nosferatu (2024) Richard Lawson Nothing is particularly scary, because most of the movie’s humanity is drowned out by the relentless churn of Eggers’s visual and aural mood.
Posted Dec 19, 2024  Edit critic review
Carry-On (2024) Richard Lawson The film is not going for total plausibility, but it is grounded in the logic and physics of the real world. Carry-On is refreshingly old-fashioned in that way; it is more interested in actual human capacity than in what modern technology can fake.
Posted Dec 13, 2024  Edit critic review
A Complete Unknown (2024) Richard Lawson A Complete Unknown is, much to the surprise of this critic, not at all staid and perfunctory. Even a skeptic can be swept away by its heady mix of laidback assessment and genuine awe.
Posted Dec 10, 2024  Edit critic review
Gladiator II (2024) Richard Lawson Most dismayingly, the grand emotional sweep of the first film is nowhere to be found in Gladiator II; the sequel is epic in length and spectacle, but not in feeling.
Posted Nov 21, 2024  Edit critic review
Wicked (2024) Richard Lawson Wicked succeeds because of some unreproducible, lightning in a bottle convergences -- of director, stars, craftspeople, and high-status material.
Posted Nov 19, 2024  Edit critic review
Venom: The Last Dance (2024) Richard Lawson Last Dance seems almost begging to solely be watched on airplanes, in the soporific 90 minutes between dinner service and uneasy, upright sleep. It functions best as an accidentally found object rather than something deliberately sought out.
Posted Oct 23, 2024  Edit critic review
Blitz (2024) Richard Lawson Blitz does not always skirt cliché, which oftentimes seems deliberate. McQueen is not reinventing a formula, he is instead extending it, widening its embrace to be more inclusive, and thus more accurate.
Posted Oct 11, 2024  Edit critic review
Nickel Boys (2024) Richard Lawson Nickel Boys is the most formally inventive of its fall-movie-season brethren, a bold swing of a literary adaptation that mostly earns its gimmick. Though really, gimmick is a cheap word for what Ross is doing.
Posted Sep 27, 2024  Edit critic review
Ellen DeGeneres: For Your Approval (2024) Joy Press A jokey non-apology that offers little in the way of vulnerability or insight.
Posted Sep 27, 2024  Edit critic review
His Three Daughters (2023) Richard Lawson His Three Daughters gradually blooms into one of the most stirring dramas of the year, a sad little family story that concerns a vast universal human experience.
Posted Sep 20, 2024  Edit critic review
Conclave (2024) Richard Lawson We can forgive a last-minute error in judgment because otherwise, Conclave is a literate treat, a movie that stirs the mind just enough to feel substantial.
Posted Sep 10, 2024  Edit critic review
Heretic (2024) Richard Lawson An alternately clever and silly horror-thriller that wants to have a kicky, pointed dialogue about faith vs. reason, free will vs. preordination. It maybe doesn’t arrive anywhere profound, but it has a good time laying out its thesis.
Posted Sep 10, 2024  Edit critic review
Hard Truths (2024) Richard Lawson Leigh makes the audience confront the long-held fear held by many people of us as we age, that we too might become raving cranks, made so bitter and unlovable by the steady erosion of hope and possibility, and the steadier amassing of disappointment.
Posted Sep 07, 2024  Edit critic review
We Live in Time (2024) Richard Lawson I like much of the film’s drifting and darting cadence, but it forces us into a more objective vantage point. The movie remains broadly appealing nonetheless, endearing us to two people and making us ache for them.
Posted Sep 07, 2024  Edit critic review
The End (2024) Richard Lawson The landscape of the film is richly realized, captured in chillingly elegant chiaroscuro by cinematographer Mikhail Krichman. Humanity’s final residence is a lovely one, and all the more frightening and contemptible for it.
Posted Sep 07, 2024  Edit critic review
Joker: Folie à Deux (2024) Richard Lawson It’s startlingly dull, a pointless procedural that seems to disdain its audience.
Posted Sep 04, 2024  Edit critic review
Queer (2024) Richard Lawson Queer is meant to be prickly, withholding, enigmatic. To want anything more from it might simply be repeating Lee’s mistake, grasping for something that could never be ours.
Posted Sep 03, 2024  Edit critic review
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