A.A. Dowd

It’s shockingly humorless and glacially slow for a film featuring a bendy boy genius, an invisible woman, a human torch, and a talking pile of stones.

Bizarre rules and rituals, deliberately stilted dialogue, flashes of grisly violence that threaten to tilt the humor straight into horror: All of this could only have come from the warped imagination of Greek filmmaker Yorgos Lanthimos, here making his singularly strange English-language debut.

For once in a Dolan film, an actor upstages the camera moves. That’s a promising precedent, as well as a hint that artistic adulthood won’t spoil this hotdogging prodigy.

Sollers Point is easy to admire, abstractly and on principle. But you may still leave wondering if a little melodrama, a little bullshit, might have been preferable.

What resonates, in this smart but minor procedural, isn’t the harsh vision of a post-9/11 world, but the unglamorous depiction of governmental grunt work.

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.

The Killing Of A Sacred Deer doesn’t have as sharp an allegorical edge as his best work — it’s no Dogtooth in that respect — but it does find the director honing his command of unnerving atmosphere to a razor point, enhanced by a camera that glides menacingly down hospital corridors and gazes from above with the severity of a merciless god.

Driven by another of Nick Cave and Warren Ellis’ murmuring folk soundtracks, Wind River turns out to be the weakest of Sheridan’s loose trilogy — the one with the thinnest characterizations and the toughest time disguising its subtext as plainspoken townsfolk rapport.

The film has some lovely beats, and good chemistry between its leads.

In terms of mood, cosmetics, and rhythm, it’s a worthy addition to the great filmmaker’s canon.

Much of the film’s infectiously youthful spirit comes courtesy of its star. At 21, Tom Holland is only a hair younger than Toby Maguire was when he first donned the tights.

By going back to nature — and to his indie roots — the director of "George Washington" has reconnected with his poetic side. The Malick comparisons seem appropriate again.

At the end of the day, the pesky imperative to convey information is still a driving force; more than anything Wong has ever made, the movie chokes on exposition, its more poetic concerns stifled by its surfeit of plot.

This is actually a fairly conventional indie drama.

It’s a true star vehicle, practically a tribute to his enduring appeal. Yet for as comforting as Hanks is in the role, and for as much as he sells the poignancy of the film’s bittersweet final stretch, the film feels almost too built around his signature nobility to ever gain much in the way of actual drama.

This is a movie with a lot on its mind, from art to altruism to the so-called bystander effect, and it could function as a Rorschach test for its audience, reflecting viewers’ anxieties and insecurities right back at them. It’s also just really, really funny, at least for those who can find humor in humiliation.

This is no sympathetic drama of absolution, no portrait of forgiveness sought by sinners. Larraín is after something trickier and harder to pin down; he asks us to share real estate with these men, while offering few windows into their heads or hearts, or even a clarification of their crimes.

As entertaining as it is to watch Cold In July drift, the film has to eventually pick a lane — and that’s where this otherwise accomplished suspense picture runs into the ditch.

To those outside his bubble, it can look at best like a form of child abuse, at worse like a cult: the nuclear family as survivalist militia.

There’s a cumulative power here that transcends any rough patches. Boyhood isn’t perfect, but it’s an astonishing, one-of-a-kind accomplishment—and further proof that Linklater is one of the most daring, ambitious filmmakers working today.

It’s a fetish object, a juvenile art-installation stunt. It panders wildly, but also skillfully and effectively, to its demographic—and you probably know if you belong to it.

Barnard, who made The Arbor and The Selfish Giant, has an impeccable sense of grubby pastoral space, and her performers locate some truth in cliché. But this is a kitchen-sink drag.

With its sprawling cast of characters, digressive plot, and hit soundtrack (in this case, a boisterous Motown primer), Cooley High has been compared to another last-days-of-youth movie that came out just two years earlier, American Graffiti. Both films inevitably lace their fun with melancholy, chasing a long, wild coming-of-age bacchanal with the impending hangover of adult life. Difference is, Cooley High’s eulogy for childhood turns out to be much more sadly literal.

All The Money In The World is uneven prestige pulp: a kidnapping drama that also fancies itself a study of how money corrupts relationships and short-circuits compassion.

The results are akin to seeing the Nixon presidency through the eyes of his top aides; it’s as much a portrait of innocence lost as a behind-closed-doors exposé.

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.

Turns out that, every once in a while, wedding something old to something borrowed can make something new.

Happy End is far from the best Michael Haneke movie. But it just might be the most Michael Haneke movie — a kind of grueling greatest-hits collection from the reigning scold of European art cinema.