A.A. Dowd

Explicit lesbian lovemaking aside, Blue is, at heart, a somewhat ordinary coming-of-age romance, pulled and stretched nearly to its breaking point.

I reserve the right—as I do at every festival, where I tend to hedge my bets and temper my praise—to decide that, never mind, everyone’s right, this is a masterpiece. For now, what I see is staggering formal prowess that is maybe just a little at odds with the small, even modest character drama it’s supporting.

A fiendishly clever, sinfully funny con-job melodrama, the kind that keeps yanking the rug out from under everyone on screen and off.

That’s a lot of ground to cover, and the film can be as exhausting, in its flood of information, as it is exhaustive. But DuVernay keeps it all chugging and churning along, propelled by the force of her montage and the sheer volume of damning, gripping material.

Moving like the lit fuse that blazes brilliantly across the opening credits of both the original Mission: Impossible television series and its first big-screen adaptation, Fallout turns out to be a breathlessly exciting action spectacular: the blockbuster spy thriller as sustained endorphin rush.

Thoroughbreds...has been made with diabolical craft and intelligence, the kind that marks Finley as a major new American talent. But it’s no empty exercise, no mere calling card. The style all comes in service of the central relationship and the superb performances that bring it to bewitching life.

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?

There are no sentimental easy answers or shortcuts to uplift in this unusually prickly buddy comedy. Like Kyle and Mike, it just keeps peddling forward, in the hope that some kind of clarity might materialize at the top of the hill.

Jackie shows us the facade and the beneath, which is just one way this boldly off-kilter movie puts its biopic brethren to shame.

Burning simmers. For nearly two-and-a-half perfectly measured hours, it turns up the heat without boiling over: a drama becoming a thriller in slow motion, intensifying little by little minute by minute, until finally it reaches a shocking, powerful crescendo.

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.

If Widows is pulp, it’s pulp made with intelligence and craft and an urgent social conscience. One might even call it a throwback to a richer era of American studio movies, except that the story also feels attuned to a very contemporary anger, aimed at powerful men and the corrupt systems that sanction their abuses.

The potential for a tryst hangs heavily in the humid Mediterranean air; every look and line of dialogue drips with subtext. But Call Me By Your Name’s erotic tension wouldn’t crackle so loudly without the chemistry between its leads.

If this is a superficial tribute, it’s also an affectionately dense one. Most accurately, what we’re seeing is an Andersonian alternate universe: a Japan as old and new, real and unreal, steeped in pastiche and invented from scratch as the brownstone New York of "The Royal Tenenbaums."

There’s a cracked logic, a genius almost, to the film’s amped-up irreverence. Maybe laughter isn’t just the best medicine, but the only sensible response to this much brazen amorality.

Hell Or High Water is the kind of movie that makes you fall in love again with the lost art of dialogue, getting you hooked anew on the snap of flavorful conversation.

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.

If there was any doubt that this is a horror movie, Hans Zimmer’s score pounds and roars with dread — the appropriate soundtrack for the madness of history.

The film fares best when Jenkins just trusts the expressive force of his filmmaking, when he uses his own tools to evoke, if not match, the magic of Baldwin’s writing.

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.

Under The Skin is rich with menacing atmosphere, so much so that viewers could probably tune out the narrative and still get on the proper wavelength.

Anderson’s most diabolical trick is woven into the fabric of his style: He’s used perfectionist craft to celebrate the value of imperfection.

Just about every scene in Lean On Pete, the sensitive, unvarnished, at times powerfully sad new drama from writer-director Andrew Haigh (Weekend, 45 Years), reveals something small but important about the hardscrabble lives it chronicles.

Parasite isn’t just thrillingly unpredictable. It pivots with purpose, the class politics setting the trajectory.

Bucking the current company mandate of churning out lesser sequels and prequels, it’s not just a brilliant idea, but maybe the most conceptually daring movie the Bay Area animation house has ever produced. And that’s really saying something, what with "WALL-E" on the books.

What Chazelle has made, in other words, is a nitty-gritty procedural that treats the NASA odyssey as a window into Armstrong’s unknowable mind, an inner space as mysterious as the outer one he blasts himself into.

Burshtein shoots in extreme shallow focus, framing her actors against a sometimes-blinding blanket of white fuzz. It’s a decision that, coupled with Yitzhak Azulay’s stirring, chant-driven score, lends each conversation a near religious aura.

What’s surprising about A Quiet Passion, given the writer-director’s own incurable melancholy, is how lively, how flat-out funny, it frequently is. The film sometimes flirts, even, with becoming a full-on comedy of manners, at least before characters start keeling over and breathing their last breaths.