A.A. Dowd

Nocturne, like its brittle protagonist, is good enough at what it does to make you wish it were a little better.

After roughly 90 minutes of unbelievable behavior and botched suspense, the twist ending is too audaciously ridiculous to entirely resist. You’ll scream, but not in fear.

There’s a faint, unfortunate whiff of Tyler Perry melodrama to the deadly dull Evil Eye.

Black Box is no Memento. It’s more like a solid episode of Black Mirror, with some ideas and imagery pilfered from one of Blumhouse’s biggest hits, Get Out.

Red, White And Blue is stark and straightforward, further proof that McQueen has distinguished each entry in his bold foray into small-screen storytelling.

If Mangrove is contrived in the way lots of legal procedurals are, it also tackles its conventions with a conviction that makes you believe in them all over again.

The film’s artificial, stylized remove—what might be called his current style, a kind of half-ironic, half-romantic wooziness—seems an odd landing point for the scrappy DIY filmmaker behind Momma’s Man and the genuinely touching and hilarious Terri, which DeWitt also wrote and which was so human it hurt.

Bradley, who’s worked mainly in narrative cinema, lends a sharp eye for composition and a poet’s sensibility. This is a beautifully shot film that’s as interested in studying the changing faces of its subjects as laying out their struggle from end to end.

For all the minor creepiness Undine pulls from its inspiration (including some striking underwater shots), it also inherits a certain simplicity of plotting and one-note characterization. Yet I still wouldn’t hesitate for a second to recommend the film, because it’s been made with the superb economy of pacing, shot selection, and editing that’s become a Petzold specialty, nay a trademark.

The Woman Who Ran is ultimately a minor doodle, even by Hong’s standards; it lacks the games of nonlinear structure, cognitive dissonance, or lightly surrealist Groundhog Day cycles that mark his best work. But the film has its moments, too, most of them concerned with the way social propriety affects communication.

To watch Days in the context of this long-running creative partnership is to bring memories of the men, all more similar than not, that Lee has played before for Tsai; his weariness here carries the weight of a lifetime of relevant roles, almost a franchise arc of alienation and regret.

In the end, Possessor privileges the visceral over the cerebral. Which is not to deny that it lands somewhere rather provocative as a character study.

There’s something a little tidy about the resolution, closing a movie of messy emotional confusion on a note of affirmation and maybe even a kind of surrender. But On The Rocks shines brighter in the context of a career, especially in indirect dialogue with Lost In Translation.

The Trial Of The Chicago 7 wants to bottle the revolutionary spirit of its setting—the take-to-the-streets idealism of the ’60s—but its snappy montage-glimpses of demonstrations verge on costume-party kitsch. The movie is at its best and most persuasive in the courtroom, when Sorkin can draw on the clashes of ideology and personality.

You won’t learn much from Gunda. It’s an arty pastoral mood piece, not an educational tool. Which is not to imply it lacks a philosophy.

The Calming ultimately might have benefitted from an animating tension—from something beyond its sustained mood of lovely but unvaried serenity.

One is left to admire the literal and figurative wallpaper—to be blessedly distracted by the mise en scène and Puiu’s attempts to constantly vary how he’s filming each interaction.

Wahlberg, delivering a performance that feels like community service, just isn’t up to driving a drama whose conflict is almost entirely internal; his default setting of sneering irritation is the wrong tool for the job. It leaves you wondering if this should have more fully been Jadin’s story, especially given the sensitivity of Miller’s turn.

As always, Wiseman’s approach guarantees memorable encounters.

At times, we might be watching a deadpan workplace comedy; that it’s possible to laugh at this subject matter at all is a testament to its matter-of-fact presentation and maybe also to the extent that this virus has completely seeped into every corner of life.

McQueen has zoomed in on a very specific milieu, but he’s also tapped into the universal and suddenly inaccessible joy of an endless night of music and dance, a house party for the ages. You don’t have to know your reggae or have been born 40 years ago to long for the ache of communal fun on which Lovers Rock waxes nostalgic.

Hopkins methodically strips away every quality we’ve come to expect from him—the refinement, the silver tongue, the imposing intensity he lent Lecter and Nixon and Titus—until there’s nothing left but frailty and distress. In doing so, he helps convey the full tragedy and horror of dementia: the way it can make someone almost unrecognizable to themselves and their loved ones.

It’s a useful reminder not just that this American hero was a widely vilified figure during his lifetime but also that he accomplished everything he did despite nonstop resistance from intelligence agencies, the media, and the public alike.

The Truffle Hunters is more eccentric and lyrical than its logline might suggest.

The film may upset and incense multiple sides of the political spectrum: those who see protestors as dangerous chaos agents and those who might be offended by a depiction of them that risks reflecting those fears. Ambivalence aside, it works as a kind of gripping apocalyptic horror movie. There are no zombies, but the rich get eaten.

Preparations inspires intrigue, then curiously squanders it.

Everyone here is stuck in a movie that never lets its emotions breathe, in no small part because its director insists on gussying up a small character drama with plus-sized gestures.

While there’s little disputing Sharrock’s empathy for his dislocated, stranded characters . . . there’s something rather limited about his alteration of dry fish-out-of-water gags and scenes of people staring forlornly into the barren middle distance.

The droll Twilight Zone absurdism is not without its pleasures, many of them comic.

As this flinty, self-sufficient, and geographically unmoored woman, McDormand provides a blend of toughness and vulnerability that’s a perfect fit for the material.

For all the fascinating insight the film provides into a musical subculture passing slowly into the archives of history, its melancholy is more universal: Anyone who’s ever devoted themselves fully to a passion, only to discover that the rest of the world barely gives a shit, will smile sadly with recognition.

The film has its own celebratory, eccentric identity.

Rarely is a film of this budget and scope so proudly difficult to follow.

By the end of this strange movie — possibly his most uncompromising and discombobulating, which is really saying something — we have no guarantee that the world it depicts exists outside of someone’s head. The question may just be whose?

This may be the first role that’s really capitalized on Crowe’s celebrity reputation as a hothead, even if the unnamed lunatic he’s playing only barks threats into a phone instead of chucking it at anyone.

When the movie does turn to the predatory behavior, it mostly feels like an aside; one gets the distinct impression that the filmmakers had to scramble to insert some uncomfortable new material into their otherwise completed documentary.

This is something different: an acknowledgement that, for many young women in Iran, prison may offer an escape from everyday horrors, to say nothing of the paradoxical freedom it affords them.

Much of the first half of the film plays like a straight drama, establishing the conflicts simmering between two couples on a weekend getaway. This setup is so credible, in fact, that it’s doubly disappointing when the thriller elements do finally materialize and then promptly fail to thrill; it’s as if someone snatched the remote and changed the channel to a half-assed slasher starring the same characters.

All of this agony is captured with great skill and artistry. Shot in Cinemascope, in crisp 35mm black-and-white, The Painted Bird is beautiful just to look at, even when its content is unspeakably ugly; there are images that will burn themselves onto your memory, whether you want them to or not.

The kind of dread-infused slow burn that’s very much in vogue at the moment, Relic is so entirely, transparently, even explicitly about the horror of dementia and losing a loved one to it that the more traditional genre elements—like a potential supernatural presence in the house—feel rather redundant, maybe even unnecessary.

Conversely, a more straightforward documentary might address the bigger questions Herzog barely grazes in fictionalization. Family Romance, LLC straddles the line between the two tacts and finds no ecstatic truth there.

When the wisdom being imparted is this conventional, you better find a dramatically or comedically satisfying way to package it. Stewart hasn’t.

At least Bacon commits, putting all of Theo’s hangups on display and treating his scenes with Seyfried—including a humdinger of a subdued fight about Susanna’s own secrets—like the stuff of a genuine marriage drama, not mere emotional context for a ho-hum thriller. He makes Theo a real character, even as Koepp uses him more like a Rorschach test everyone would interpret the exact same way.

Becky is not without its grisly low-brow pleasures. But nothing in the movie makes a damn lick of sense.

At least everyone seems self-aware about how much they’re repeating themselves yet again.

Capone presents the man’s health problems as a different sort of comeuppance: a reckoning of the mind and body, though not necessarily of the soul. But that doesn’t leave Hardy terribly much to do but dismantle his intimidating presence; it’s a commanding physical performance in search of a richer characterization, of any sense of who Capone was.

Spaceship Earth mostly skims over both the findings and the failings, and neglects a lot of the logistics—understandable omissions for a two-hour documentary more interested, perhaps, in the social ramifications of those two years behind glass. Not that it totally illuminates that aspect either.

A potboiler that doesn’t break any molds or reinvent any wheels. Still, there’s something to be said for setting modest goals and achieving them; if this really was some lost relic of the VHS era, it’d pass the blind rental test: There is a witch, and she’s as creepy as the box art would surely promise.

It’s well-acted and reasonably intelligent, but also derivative enough to compare unfavorably to plenty of stone-cold classics.

Set in some indeterminate time and place rarely betrayed by modern technology or dress, The Other Lamb mostly operates in the realm of allegory.

If you can look past the gallingly obvious and derivative metaphor, Vivarium has its moments of effective "Twilight Zone" creepiness.

Resistance is like a maudlin Robin Williams vehicle inorganically fused with a by-the-numbers wartime thriller. In place of showbiz clichés, there are tacky WWII-movie tropes.

The real issue, though, isn’t that Bloodshot would fail an IQ test. It’s that its dumb fun isn’t executed with panache, smart or otherwise.

Just don’t mistake the lightness of step for a softness of philosophy. There’s a political dimension to all of Reichardt’s films, which almost invariably follow characters muscled to the margins of society.

Watching Onward, it’s hard to shake the feeling that maybe Pixar has overplayed the mundane half of its winning equation. They’ve made a movie about looking for misplaced magic in the modern world that, well, kind of misplaces the magic.

Thriller framework aside, Fantasy Island probably works best as a comedy. At least when it’s not trying to be one.

A nattering chore of a “family” comedy that feels written by committee and directed by indifferent machine.

Beanpole is grim, but it’s too superbly crafted, and too alive with human spirit, to be a truly grueling experience.

Unfortunately, the script by Ben Collins and Luke Piotrowski is clunky—in the convoluted nature of its reveals and also in the sometimes-baffling behavior on display.

It turns out to be something kind of special in its own right: a modern rom-com that’s funny and inventive and sweet and totally mainstream and a little deranged all at once.

If there’s a real draw to this bastardized variation, it’s Louis-Dreyfus.

By its nature, the film is uneven—Estrada shares screenwriting duty with a whopping 25 poets, and as with any poetry slam, some performances are better than others, both in terms of the words themselves and in the highly variable acting abilities of these mostly first-time stars.

Black Bear is the movie that proves, beyond any lingering doubt, that Aubrey Plaza has much more to offer than the best eye-roll in the business. Maybe that was clear already.

It suggests that Zeitlin, throwing more handfuls of fairy dust over an impoverished American South, is something of a lost boy himself. Like Pan and his posse, he stubbornly refuses to grow.

Fennell complicates matters throughout, toying with our identification by pushing Cassie’s tactics into some uncomfortably nasty places, even as she slowly reveals her motives.

The performances are a hoot . . . . But the film has perspective problems that extend beyond the slightly queasy, half-comic depiction of sex work.

Hittman isn’t really a polemicist. She expresses her empathy and political conscience through a refined version of what’s become her signature style, zeroing in on details of place and behavior, both magnified by the reliably involving scenario of two kids from the sticks navigating the hustle, bustle, and bright lights of the city. And moments of startling, unaffected tenderness peak through the grimness of the circumstances.

The Assistant is more of a spartan procedural, its narrative a methodical accounting of one day—typical in incident, atypical in dawning realization—for an entry-level employee at the New York production house of a Weinstein-like figure.

The impression is of a provocative logline that Simien never quite figured out how to expand into a satisfying movie; once you get the thrust of the story, it’s mostly repetitions on a theme.

Unfortunately, this handheld coming-of-age story is frequently interrupted by variably convincing stretches of channel surfing, as though someone recorded over much of the former with the latter. And even with pros like Charlyne Yi and Kerri Kenney lending their deadpan chops, real weird TV is funnier. Weirder, too.

This is a space opera animated not by joy but insecurity—the anxiety, evident in almost every moment, that if it’s not very careful, someone might feel letdown.

By the end, 1917 has positioned itself as a salute to the sacrifices of those who died for their country. Mostly, though, it comes across as a monument to itself.

Frozen II is just an echo, drawing prospective fans in without finding many new notes to hit.

For as much as the story concerns leaping into other people’s heads, Flanagan never quite gets into Danny’s; his tortured grappling with his memories is abstract at best, McGregor’s mostly functional performance failing to offer the necessary window into that process.

Where it fumbles is in the framing device.

In Countdown, it’s the audience that really gets cheated.

Lucy In The Sky ends up playing like some unauthorized Jackie Jormp-Jomp version of the Lisa Nowak story, as though they couldn’t get the rights to the names, or to the shit.

The Irishman is the director’s longest drama, but it never drags. The 200-plus minutes pass in a blur of dark humor and characteristically gripping incident . . . But it’s in the final act, when Scorsese slows things down to a purposeful crawl, that the film accumulates its full power.

In practice, it’s also really tedious: a slow death by nostalgia.

Waves felt to me like a bitching soundtrack in search of a movie. Maybe I’ll find one on rewatch.

Perhaps The Laundromat just runs into the limits of trying to merge agitprop and fun. Soderbergh’s assemblage of Hollywood somebodies is the sugar to make the medicine go down; he’s hoping, like McKay, that disguising this dissertation as a stylish, star-studded good time will help its lessons stick. But the result is occasionally as tiresome as an economics professor more concerned with being liked than with teaching you anything.

The strength of Jackman’s performance is that he hoodwinks us with his decency.

Jojo Rabbit, a very nice but thin crowd-pleaser about love conquering all, bills itself as an “anti-hate satire.” But true satire challenges and provokes. This one offers free hugs.

The queasy thrill of Sandler’s live-wire performance is the way he keys us right into Howard’s electric joy, putting everything on the line, consequences be damned. It’s a pure shot of the gambler’s high, and Uncut Gems gets us hooked on it, too. By the end, you want to hurl and cheer.

Marriage Story, unlike so many other breakup movies, offers venom in drips and drops instead of drowning us in it, because it knows that no matter how far apart Charlie and Nicole drift, the feelings that first brought them together are still there, informing their flawed attempts to move on without destroying each other.

Monos isn’t a social-issue tract, or just a lament for the beasts of no nation. It’s a fever dream of a war drama, caught halfway between realism and the hallucinatory intensity of an ancient fairy tale.

It’s an empty approximation of art, all gleaming surfaces masking a hollow center. And unlike a fake vintage chair, there’s no basic utility to this imitation.

There’s something tidy and even schematic about the story of redemption and forgiveness A Beautiful Day In The Neighborhood ultimately tells.

For all its novelty and craft, Joker is more of a stylish stunt than anything else.

Seeing the director’s usual style applied to a whole different culture provides fascination enough. Not surprising, maybe, but welcome.

While the act of gracefully condensing this big book into a coherent movie is indeed impressive, the truth is that said movie does end up feeling a bit like glorified cliff’s notes, albeit ones enlivened by Iannucci’s gift for volleying banter.

It’s refreshing to discover that True History has an actual perspective on the events of Ned’s formative years.

Far from empty sleight-of-hand, Knives Out twists its borrowed, rearranged mechanics into a timely, sincere, and ultimately moving celebration of decency in the face of moral failure. To paraphrase one of Blanc’s funnier musings, that’s the donut within the donut hole.

This Jacob’s Ladder isn’t likely to build much of a fanbase over the next 30 years. It’ll be lucky if anyone remembers it for 30 minutes.

Yet as with "Booksmart," the summer’s earlier riff on that Apatovian classic, there are times when Good Boys feels a little too nice to actually be uproarious. In more ways than one, it’s the training wheels for a better comedy — a slightly edgier and funnier one.

As gross and spooky and, yes, occasionally frightening as these terror tactics get, they never quite cross over into the deep end of truly grownup horror. That’s intentional, and a key to the film’s fun: It gets away with everything it can on a PG-13 leash, smuggling some real scares to the under-18 crowd.

It’s a remarkable, chilling performance: from Harrison, certainly, but also from his character, playing code-switching mind games with his teacher.

The movie itself sometimes feels a bit lobotomized. But never when Goldblum is on screen. He plays Freeman as a deluded fraud, horrifying but a little funny, too, in that stuttering, seductive Goldblum way.