A.A. Dowd

It’s curiously flat and dreary-looking ... There was a time when I used to wish that Dolan would settle down a little—the manic energy of his work could be exhausting. But if this is the alternative, I take it all back.

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

It’s an elegy for a certain age of American pop-culture that may really be about the writer-director grappling with his own inevitable obsolescence.

Though it’s full of twists and turns, the most shocking thing about the film is that it’s been written and directed by Corneliu Porumboiu, the Romanian deconstructionist behind such exercises in intentional tedium as 12:08: East Of Bucharist and The Treasure.

This is a quantum creative leap for Sciamma, herself a keen observer of behavior. (Her previous films, like Tomboy and Girlhood, were rich with character detail.) Time traveling to an old world seems to unlock the full scope of her passion and insight.

Young Ahmed isn’t a folly, exactly. It’s reasonably gripping on a scene-by-scene level, and about as starkly unsentimental as any of the Dardennes’ lean, urgent moral thrillers. But its inability to shine a light on Ahmed’s soul leaves it feeling more like an exercise than anything the brothers have made, especially by its hasty, unearned ending.

What it’s really about is the interplay of shadows and neon, and the endless possibilities of bodies in motion—planted on speeding motorcycles and racing up and down staircases, always chasing or being chased.

The Lighthouse is more satisfying when viewed through the prism of its pitch-black humor; it’s fine as a thriller, borderline brilliant as a comedy of cabin fever and competitive machismo.

While I admired the one-day-in-David-Ayer-hell energy of the movie, I also found it bombastic and contrived. It’s the police drama as police baton.

Maybe Malick has committed so hard to his own principles, artistic as well as ideological, that he’s lost his grasp on drama. I’d love to see him step out of the church he’s built around his work and give us the world again, with or without a script.

Pain And Glory has are some beautiful passages ... What’s missing from the movie is any real sense of danger or subversion—qualities that used to basically define this once-radical filmmaker’s work.

Visually, it’s a total feast for the eyes, contrasting art-deco pinks and mint greens against sterile, symmetrically framed expanses of white, vaguely evoking the aesthetic of some lost sci-fi film of the ’70s.

For a good long while, anyway, it does offer the kind of involving quotidian texture that Loach excels at when he’s not simply steering the steamroller over his characters to make a point about society’s ills.

Deerskin is more of a twisted lark than anything else, but it hits on something meaningful—a first for a director who’s shown almost no prior interest in reality, even within a film called Reality.

Atlantics is most successful as a look at a particular milieu, which makes one wonder if Diop might have been better off just making a longer nonfiction film on the subject.

There are those who will surely argue that this is not a tonally coherent film. But I was nonetheless rather elated by the way Filho weaves in so many outside touchstones while still maintaining his core interests in social dynamics and anti-capitalist sentiment.

The film feels like a creative resignation, too, meeting the end of the world with a shrug of tepid postmodern shtick. It puts despair itself in quotation marks.

There are times when The Souvenir has the buttoned-up, removed manner of a costume drama. Certainly, it can feel like a movie from a different era, though that’s partially because Hogg shot whole stretches of it on glorious, grainy 16mm.

At least Long Shot acknowledges, more explicitly than usual, that it’s a kind of adolescent fantasy.

An earnest, overstuffed, fitfully funny superhero melodrama, Endgame hits the buttons it wants to hit, and sometimes affectingly.

Moss attacks the role with a fearless lack of vanity, daring to make this nosediving rock star not just unlikable but downright irritating — as hard to endure as chipped nails dragging slowly down a chalkboard.

This may look like the same story, but the soul of it is missing — lost on the way out of the ground.

The Beach Bum, by turn, seems to exist in the hazy headspace of its protagonist, a kindred spirit in less-than-lofty, party-till-you-puke ambition. But there’s a bummer relevance lurking in his fantasy of a rich idiot who does whatever he wants and faces no consequences for his actions.

This is an ugly, borderline vile piece of work. Thing is, it’s also been made with craft, wit, and a frankly exhilarating disregard for how films like this are supposed to operate, how they usually sound and move.

Us proves, if nothing else, that Peele has become a blockbuster visionary, fully in control of his craft. It’s a privilege to step back into the funhouse of his imagination.

It’s not unreasonable to expect something like excitement out of a story about freedom fighters plotting to take back the planet. Captive State does not clear that fairly low bar.

Transit doesn’t just freeze its characters in place. They’re stuck in time, too, on a continuum that connects today’s exiled lost souls to yesterday’s. Because when it comes to people without country fleeing for their lives across the globe, there is no old or new, no then or now, no past or future, just an awful present tense. Transit, meanwhile, looks from this present tense like an early contender for the best movie of 2019. Or wait, is it 1939?

As an act of storytelling, it’s curiously perfunctory, never rising to the level of effort and care put into creating its cornucopia of visual pleasures.