Alison Willmore

It’s whimsical and bold and also easier to admire in the abstract than to get deeply emotionally invested in, though it features a late-breaking burst of beauty that will soften the hardest of hearts.

Highest 2 Lowest is an old man’s movie, and I don’t mean that as a criticism.

A generous film that’s ragged at the edges but manages bursts of the sublime.

Seriousness does eventually descend on Afire like the check at the end of a meal, but until then the film, the latest feature from German filmmaker Christian Petzold, is a beguilingly funny affair about getting in your own way.

A fascinating movie for kids, but it’s an improbably effective and tear-jerking one for adults as well.

Washington manages the near-impossible feat of delivering his lines as though he’s putting the words together in the moment, speaking some of the most famous sentences in the English language as though they’re actually being dredged up out of Macbeth’s roiling consciousness.

Creed III’s greatest achievement is demonstrating that there’s more story to be told about Donnie, who after two films had been looking pretty thoroughly explored as a character.

While The Rivals of Amziah King is as overstuffed as a comfy sofa, if it’s about one thing in particular, it’s about the work that goes into holding together a community.

Bring Her Back is a more emotionally ambitious movie than Talk to Me, though it’s also messier. Hawkins’s performance as a woman who was destroyed by the death of her daughter, more so than anyone around her seems to realize, both powers and unbalances the film.

Freaky, an unabashedly gory but also oddly sweet feature from Christopher Landon, is a riff on slashers that really owes more to the meta-horror trend than it does to any of the original films that inspired it.

Jonsson, despite some worrying initial forays into a twangy accent, is the stand-out as Peter, with his crumpled smile and his insistence on solidarity, however much it goes against the spirit of the competition.

Jackman gives his best dramatic performance since he played the obsessive, hollow Robert Angier in "The Prestige."

Never Rarely Sometimes Always isn’t agitprop for an era of increasingly restricted abortion access, though it’d be entirely justified and effective in being so. It is, simply, a depiction of a reality of our present, and the fact that it often feels like a thriller is a damning reflection of how much peril those restrictions have created, especially for the already vulnerable.

Matthew is a ruthless worm who demonstrates in disturbing ways how far he’s willing to go to preserve his place at Oliver’s side, and Pellerin — who was previously seared into my mind as the persistent creep on the bus in Never Rarely Sometimes Always — delivers a masterful performance always riding the edge of cringe.

It’s uniquely pleasurable in how self-contained it is.

It delights in its characters’ rule-breaking and playfulness and experimentation.

It doesn’t water down her voice. Instead, the self-lacerating, self-consumed filmmaker seems liberated by the act of adaptation, as though tempering her distinctive creative impulses gives her rein to make a movie that’s tender and more broadly crowd-pleasing, while still very much her own.

Fear Street Part 1: 1994 is a nasty, effective slasher.

Good Luck to You, Leo Grande is a boundlessly generous and frequently surprising two-hander.

My Old Ass has the premise of a broad comedy and the soul of a bittersweet coming-of-age story. And one of the reasons that it works so disarmingly well is that it doesn’t treat the former as a means of sneaking in the latter.

Palm Springs would have been a scream and likely a word-of-mouth hit in theaters, but maybe there’s something fitting about its going straight to streaming in the middle of a pandemic. What is quarantine, anyway, if not waking up and going through the same routine over and over without end?

The Human Voice is all about the muddied lines between the fabricated and the genuine, and about how much a performance can be divorced from the sincere feelings that might be undergirding it.

In addition to being a film about soulless jet-setters as a new form of walking dead, grounded in and caring about nothing, Infinity Pool is a phantasmagoric ode to the sensation of staying too long at the party.

Raya and the Last Dragon is a reminder of the things that Disney has always been capable of doing so well at its heights, a marvel of character design, world-building, and canny choices. It unfurls a richly realized Southeast Asia–inspired fantasy realm called Kumandra, made up of craggy deserts, snowy bamboo forests, floating markets, and canal-shielded cities.

[Shyamalan] still knows how to manipulate an audience with an original story, and with “Split,” we don’t mind him pulling the strings again.

Tomas is the film’s most captivating element as well as its limiting factor because it’s only possible to bear so much time in his company. It’s a testament to Rogowski’s performance that Tomas’s appeal remains apparent despite his behavior, that his gravitational pull is understandable even as you long for the others to escape it.

Being the hero of the story has never looked so poisoned, and that alone is thrilling enough to hope Villeneuve gets to make part two of this impressively batshit venture.

More than anything, Aline feels like a kamikaze act of wish fulfillment, wildly indulgent but so deeply committed to what it’s doing that it can’t help but be compelling.

It feels like a fist that won’t close, its elements never intentionally coming together.

The most interesting parts of this baggy, inevitably indulgent, and often spectacular work find him grappling with the idea of putting himself onscreen versus adapting part of his life into the stuff of a movie.

Lowery — who made A Ghost Story and The Green Knight, and whose last film was a live-action Peter Pan remake that Disney shunted directly to streaming — is too compelling a stylist and has too earnest a heart for what he’s made to be easily shrugged off.

It plays like a movie-length bout of aversion therapy aimed at our instinctive fondness for motor-mouthed strivers with Mikey’s every small victory creating more dread.

Agrelo steers clear of the straight-up hagiography that plagues so many docs framed as tributes to their subjects.

Sing Sing may be an awkward chimera of a film, combining vibrant source material with synthetic attempts to serve as a star vehicle, but its insistence on the healing capacity of art is enough to soften the hardest of hearts.

This winning coming-of-age comedy understands that, when you’re 13 years old, the world really does feel like it could end if you’re not able to wear the dress of your dreams to your bat mitzvah, or if, God forbid, your crush expresses interest in someone other than you.

To watch director Justin Lin, who returned for F9 and the two subsequent films that will close the series out, wind things back to the start is to feel blessed relief that this improbably good gearhead daddy-issues opera may very well stick its landing.

It delivers the goods, thanks to Washington’s performance and Fuqua’s zest for going graphic.

Undertone is creepy enough without needing to knit its haunting into its main character’s background so clunkily; ironically, its most effective moments are ones of stylistic indifference.

Thunderbolts* recaptures some of the magic of the early Marvel productions, when they felt like some alchemical phenomenon of corporate entertainment, and not just slop. The secret, which should have been obvious, is taking pleasure in the people these movies put on screen, rather than just treating them as marketing materials for future installments.

The film itself is just fine, a nimbly directed but clunkily scripted action movie that follows a young Comanche woman named Naru (Legion’s Amber Midthunder) who aspires to defy the gendered roles in her community and become a hunter. But the concept is liberating,

There’s a touch of “The Ones Who Walk Away from Omelas” to Weathering With You that makes the direction it ultimately veers off into both surprisingly abrupt and darkly pragmatic. It’s also, in its own way, optimistic. Maybe, the film suggests, before anyone can think about saving the world, they have to figure out how to live in it.

Elvis is bloated, hectic, ridiculous, and utterly shameless in all it glosses over to present its thesis on Presley as a talent too beautiful for this earth — the Christ of show business, sacrificed to our rapacious desires and the cruelties of capitalism at the age of 42. And you know what? I liked it, though my corneas did feel a little crunchy afterward.

Sure, the vertiginous shots up the side of the tower are stomach-turning, but what’s really satisfying is the message that sometimes it’s better just to stay home. It’s Fall, get it? Summer is over.

While Ballerina doesn’t start off as a real John Wick movie, it sure ends as one.

If the grown-ups in this coming-of-age story keep drawing all the focus, it’s no shade on Margaret — they just have so much more going on.

If there’s a complaint to be made about it, it’s only that it feels like another sign of a stylistic trend that’s inexorably cohering, as seen in other recent (and enjoyable!) work like Emerald Fennell’s "Promising Young Woman" and like "Killing Eve," a show Fennell wrote for and that Murphy has directed episodes of.

As a statement on a decade of consumerism, The Nest doesn’t have anything particularly new to say, but as a fable of familial dysfunction, it’s resonant and, yes, frightening, with nary a ghost in sight.

Architecton comes across as a more plaintive depiction of our desire to imagine ourselves able to leave a lasting mark on this planet.

It’s so unapologetically absurd and so very fun.

It’s impossible not to be impressed by the sheer audacity of The Brutalist’s existence, even if the finished product doesn’t end up matching its ambitions.

All of the miseries that are revealed as the two men go about their day may be bleak, but the humor comes from the small indignities inflicted on them even as they try to go out with a bang.

They don’t feel like black characters grafted onto roles that were initially conceived of as white, but they don’t always feel entirely formed either, an impression that’s not helped by the choice to keep the siblings in largely separated narratives.

Licorice Pizza — a movie as exasperating as it is delightful — could be described as an exploration of the unstable ground where Alana’s arrested development and Gary’s precociousness meet.

Despite the mercenary nature of its existence, Road House is better than it has any right to be — perfectly enjoyable schlock that’s helped along by how unserious it is.

Where the film really shines is in reuniting Bridget with her faithful friend group (Shirley Henderson, Sally Phillips, and James Callis), her withering gynecologist (Emma Thompson), and, of course, with Daniel Cleaver (Hugh Grant), the red flag-laden lothario who represents everything Bridget knew she shouldn’t be attracted to.

The weirder its treatment of the treat becomes, the better the movie is, cutting through the script’s more potentially sentimental tendencies. It never reaches the singularly compelling strangeness of the source material, but it lands somewhere close enough to be mostly satisfying.

It’s not a seamless combination, though that’s not the fault of McDormand, who, with her wary eyes and careworn expression, slots in easily alongside actual travelers like the nature-loving Swankie and the savvy Linda May. Fern is just more obviously a creation, her utility evident when she’s stringing together episodic encounters with strangers or enabling someone to make a point that didn’t need to be spoken aloud.

At its best, it’s effervescent. Leads Taylor-Joy (an inevitable future star) and Flynn (perfectly sad-eyed) are lovable and surrounded by some very funny supporting performances from Mia Goth as Emma’s friend and underling, Harriet, Miranda Hart as the garrulous Miss Bates, and Bill Nighy as Emma’s adoring dad.

Green has a talent for depicting the way women constantly recalibrate their behavior when moving through male spaces, trying to figure out how to attract enough attention but not too much, to come across as pleasant without inviting unwanted intimacies.

The pleasant surprise of Dumb Money is that it’s such an effective entertainment, even if it oversells the revolutionary impact of what it’s depicting.

On the Rocks isn’t a great movie, but it’s one overflowing with feelings that it tries to squash into something tidier.

This variation on the demon child subgenre has enough of the familiar and the new to be a decently good time at the movies.

The pleasures of Flow come from the expressiveness of its animals, whose personalities come through so distinctively that, blessed absence of celeb voices aside, it becomes a fun game to start casting the actors who would play each type if they were human.

It is an unabashed platform for basking in the rapport of its two leading men, who are in familiar and fine form as a pair of hypercompetent cleaners, and that makes it a consistently enjoyable watch even when the pacing gets a little slack.

Raimi indulges Send Help’s gore and gross-out moments with the zest of someone returning to his cult-favorite roots. But when it tries to cast Linda as a figure who, in her own way, is just as uneasy as Bradley, the movie loses its nerve.

There’s an admirable defiance to Haigh’s interest in characters who aren’t easy in their own sexual identities, who don’t feel in sync with queer culture, and who struggle with scars from the past and internalized shame that doesn’t go away just because it’s unreasonable.

Some films make a point of not pulling away from their main character’s uglier moments. If I Had Legs I’d Kick You, brilliantly and suffocatingly, turns its unrelenting photography into a manifestation of Linda’s self-loathing, her anxiety so intense there’s barely room for anyone else in the frame.

Even if it’s the weakest of the Paddington movies, it succeeds. The innate sweetness of the series carries it past figurative and literal rapids and into shenanigans involving bear carvings, a bear temple in the mountains, and a secret bear community.

The movie is called Americana, not America, and while it treats characters as mixtures of what they were born into and what they chose for themselves, it suggests that there’s something kitschy about the very idea of national identity, whether it’s defined by what’s in your display case or the color of your eyes.

This film is one of those exhilarating instances when Sorkin finds a context in which all of his well-established impulses that can be so annoying elsewhere — the self-righteousness, the straw men, the great men, the men who aren’t onstage but are nevertheless digging deep in their diaphragms to deliver their lines to the back row — actually work.

Fire Island is, in other words, a reluctant romantic comedy that’s willing to acknowledge the genre’s shopworn pleasures while only begrudgingly indulging them itself. All of its best parts — and there are plenty — exist outside of that framing, which raises the question of why it’s there at all except as a means of wrestling with its author’s ambivalence about the conventional wisdom that a happy ending is the result of a pairing off.

In its constant asterisking of its own material, I’m Thinking of Ending Things feels like an artistic dead end, like the confession of someone who can only burrow deeper and deeper into himself instead of looking outward.

The splatter comes more easily to this new movie than a grasp of overall tone does.

An interestingly woozy new film.

When Skinamarink sets out to actively scare . . . it’s very good at it. But the idea of the movie is more beguiling than the overall experience of watching it.

Sometimes you just have to let yourself be a sucker for the obvious — whether it’s for a holiday movie, a ridiculous romance, or an awkwardly grafted-on but very timely theme.

Roadrunner may have been made too soon, and made with a misguided approach in mind, but in its closing moments, it manages a sudden magnificence in affirming that there’s no right way to mourn. Grief, in all of its ugly reality, is a part of life too, and there’s no tidying it up for the camera.

"Perverse” is a good overall description for Stars at Noon, a hypnotic but relentlessly disconcerting movie and never more so than in the way that Denis frames Qualley like an influencer on a sponsored trip

Honestly, watching One of Them Days, you start to wonder why Palmer isn’t one of the biggest stars in the world by now, though part of the problem is that she’s a creature of comedy, and studios barely make them anymore. Even when the writing and pacing falls slack in this one, as it definitely does on occasion, she wrings laughs out of scenes with screwball physicality and surprising line readings.

When it works, which it does most of all in its opening and closing acts, it’s because it manages to give a surprising emotional solidity to what’s otherwise a whimsical premise.

Theater Camp really just wants to bask in the world it’s created, and it’s hard to complain about something being too affectionate.

With its clever construction and comic timing, it’s a mean romp with an escalating death count and some nice quips.

As Solène, Hathaway gives a particularly lovely and vulnerable performance. She’s radiant as a woman reconnecting with big, swooping emotions, and reminding herself that those feelings are not the exclusive territory of the young.

What it is, really, is a showbiz satire about media ownership and our nostalgia fixation, though it muddles its message before the tone gets too scathing. It is, after all, still a Disney movie, even if it takes a perverse pleasure in playing around with Disney’s vast catalogue of characters.

Talk to Me doesn’t quite have something pointed to say about it, or anything else, but that’s okay — it’s just here to show you a good time and then usher itself out before overstaying its welcome.

The Room Next Door is an alternately rapturous and ponderous meditation on mortality, though in a very Almodóvarian fashion, that exploration comes by way of a fantasy of set directing one’s own death, down to the moment, location, and outfit worn.

While "The Invisible Man" was built around its clever set pieces rather than its characters, Swallow is led by its protagonist’s mental and emotional state. It takes place in a landscape that’s largely internal — but that’s territory that can be just as filled with darkness and dread as a forbidding mansion.

It’s a perfectly preposterous set-up for a thriller, but the core of Fahy’s agonizingly distracted performance is something real and recognizable.

Supernova isn’t adapted from a play, but it sometimes feels like it was, not because of its talkiness or the tightness of its focus, but because it has a tendency to be a little blunter in practice than its understated initial tone might have you expect. The performances are lovely, though, and they carry this minor-key movie through to its ambiguous end.

Bird is the newest feature from Andrea Arnold — her first scripted film since the 2016 U.S. road odyssey American Honey — and it serves up an endearing, ungainly mix of the gritty and the magical.

Wuthering Heists is Fennell’s dumbest movie, and I say that with all admiration, because it also happens to be her best to date.

The most successful quality of the film is how close it keeps in spirit and haphazard style to the first two installments, and how it feels proudly unstuck in time.

It works so much better than should be possible because of Hartnett, who gets a showcase on par with the one the filmmaker gave to James McAvoy in Split.

Lawrence and Henry have a warm, natural chemistry, and that rapport really seems to guide where the movie ends up, instead of the other way around.

As a film, it’s warm and beautiful without being sentimental about the temporary intimacy that alcohol can provide, creating bonds that can dissolve in the daylightlike haze but are no less legitimate in the moment for it.

Whenever Paulson is on screen, she gives Run a much-needed jolt of vitality as this Munchausen’s-by-proxy monster in catalog knitwear. Her character’s devotion is as terrible as it is unshakeable, but what makes the turn so enjoyable is that it’s grounded in something recognizable — a soul-deep dread of being abandoned, hidden under a nurturer’s smile.

It’s not a film that fully works, but it’s a performance that’s monumental — and very grown up.

As the crowning touch on West’s horror-movie mille-feuille, MaXXXine demonstrates that the trilogy never really had all that much going on, depth-wise, despite its sprawl. But Goth does her own synthesis of the characters she’s played across the titles, and the result is alternately disturbing, touching, and downright triumphant.