Sam Adams

Sam Adams @sam_adams_critic Slate 3 days ago Lee’s stellar quartet of leads give us complicated humans rather than representative figures, people who may do things for good reasons or bad but rarely for only one. Go to Full Review Possible Love (2026) 98% - -

Sam Adams @sam_adams_critic Slate Oct 13, 2026 Unsurprisingly, Exile lacks the shaggy hangout charm of its predecessor... But we gain more insight into who they are as individuals. Go to Full Review My Undesirable Friends: Part II - Exile (2026) 100% - -

Sam Adams @sam_adams_critic Slate Oct 9, 2026 There is, technically speaking, a story in The Social Reckoning—characters, even. But they’re not there to engage the audience on a conventional dramatic level. Go to Full Review The Social Reckoning (2026) 54% - -

Sam Adams @sam_adams_critic Slate Oct 5, 2026 While the film’s accounts are gripping, at least to those not predisposed to believing that they were invented out of whole cloth, its real strength—a strength that is particular to filmed documentary—is in X-raying the psyches of the people onscreen. Go to Full Review NAZA (2026) 100% - -

Sam Adams @sam_adams_critic Slate Sep 29, 2026 Primetime is effectively scuzzy and succeeds in making you feel like you’ve committed some kind of transgression just by sitting in front of it. You don’t just watch the movie; it watches you. Go to Full Review Primetime (2026) 86% - -

Sam Adams @sam_adams_critic Slate Sep 24, 2026 After the bone-deep scares of Barbarian and Weapons, it’s a bit of a letdown to see Cregger blow his creative capital on a gory goof. But video games aren’t meant to be a good use of your time, and he’s done enough work to earn a few hours on the couch. Go to Full Review Resident Evil (2026) 96% - -

Sam Adams @sam_adams_critic Slate Sep 24, 2026 Watching Lamb assemble his team of frustrated Fleet Street hacks and incentivize their worst instincts is like running Citizen Kane at triple speed. Go to Full Review Ink (2026) 72% - -

Sam Adams @sam_adams_critic Slate Sep 18, 2026 Some may regard the rush of images and Stefan Gregory's swelling score as heavy-handed, but the sequence opens the floodgates as intended and brings us to the moment when Hamlet realizes that the uncertainty he feared above all has been pierced. Go to Full Review Elsinore (2026) 89% - -

Sam Adams @sam_adams_critic Slate Sep 15, 2026 Musk is at its most illuminating when it pushes back on, or at least complicates, the narrative that Musk was fine until his brain was broken by the pandemic. Go to Full Review Musk (2026) 96% - -

Sam Adams @sam_adams_critic Slate Sep 3, 2026 It Ends creeps up on you, works its way into your bones. It feels for stretches like little is happening, and you’re lulled by its rhythms, the steady drone of tires on infinite asphalt. Go to Full Review It Ends (2025) 93% - -

Sam Adams @sam_adams_critic Slate Aug 28, 2026 Burch’s script is sentimental and moralistic, qualities that simply don’t belong in this universe, and while the animators do a solid job of emulating the original cartoons’ style, they can’t possibly match their inventiveness. Go to Full Review Coyote vs. Acme (2026) 96% - -

Sam Adams @sam_adams_critic Slate Aug 13, 2026 It’s the work of a filmmaker who believes that movies can take us by the hand rather than grabbing us by the shoulders, even when we’re running for our lives. Go to Full Review The End of Oak Street (2026) 86% - -

Sam Adams @sam_adams_critic Slate Aug 7, 2026 The script occasionally remembers to confront the darker aspects of what a family running low on resources might do to survive. But then it skitters back to safer ground. Go to Full Review The Last House (2026) 23% - -

Sam Adams @sam_adams_critic Slate Aug 7, 2026 I don’t know if Teenage Sex and Death at Camp Miasma quite gets as far as its protagonist does. For all the fluids it spews—and it’s a lot—there’s something a tad studied about its excesses. Go to Full Review Teenage Sex and Death at Camp Miasma (2026) 94% - -

Sam Adams @sam_adams_critic Slate May 21, 2026 If The Mandalorian and Grogu isn’t the worst Star Wars movie—and it might be—it’s certainly the least: the least essential, the least engaging, the least necessary. Go to Full Review Star Wars: The Mandalorian and Grogu (2026) 60% - -

Sam Adams @sam_adams_critic Slate May 8, 2026 As wrenching as the episode can be, it’s also unexpectedly leisurely, because the only thing it’s concerned with is right there in front of us. It takes its time, and every second counts. Go to Full Review Gary (2026) 100% - -

Sam Adams @sam_adams_critic Slate May 8, 2026 The movie is endlessly charming and pleasingly clever, as well as surprisingly moving in spots. And, oh yes, it’s about death. Go to Full Review The Sheep Detectives (2026) 95% - -

Sam Adams @sam_adams_critic Slate Apr 27, 2026 The purpose of a biopic is to show us aspects of a public figure that the public never had access to. But Michael utterly fails at giving us any sense of who Jackson was behind closed doors. Go to Full Review Michael (2025) 38% - -

Sam Adams @sam_adams_critic Slate Apr 16, 2026 This isn’t just a giddy romp where a badass in high-tops channels working-class rage and comes out on top. It’s a little more brutal, a little uglier, with deaths that wouldn’t be out of place in one of Bettinelli-Olpin and Gillett’s Scream movies. Go to Full Review Ready or Not 2: Here I Come (2026) 75% - -

Sam Adams @sam_adams_critic Slate Apr 16, 2026 Hoppers feels a little less sanded-down than most of the studio’s recent movies, less content to coast on formula and hew to expectations about what Pixar movies do and don’t do. Go to Full Review Hoppers (2026) 94% - -