Alison Willmore

The film’s bursts of violence are genuinely bracing — a face bashed in, a skull shattered, and the signature act of animal mutilation performed by a carnival geek, a figure of abject degradation who haunts the film’s ill-fated protagonist. But for a pulpy tale of addiction and desperate lives on the fringes, Nightmare Alley is otherwise depressingly short on actual darkness and discomfort.

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.

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.

Gaga is wildly watchable in the role, broad but unwinking, an absolute scream, and the movie only really makes sense when it’s about her.

There’s a sealed-off quality to The Souvenir Part II that the first installment doesn’t have, a sense of surrendering to the idea that it’s possible to authentically portray only oneself — which may be true and may be a creative dead end. But even that turns out to be by design, something both the film and its protagonist can acknowledge and then escape.

It’s a romp, full of touches that go by almost too quickly to pick up on — I was partial to the strongman who plays a small but key role — but the lingering mood is unmistakably sad.

In its glimpse into the lives of partnered-up fictional directors, Bergman Island invites its viewer to guess how much it’s a reflection of Hansen-Løve’s actual relationship, while also acknowledging the gap between the art someone makes and the person they are.

By the time the final act rolls around, Lamb approaches the idea that there’s a price that must be paid with a shrugging diffidence rather than impending doom. It’s such an underwhelming conclusion to a film with such a compelling start.

It’s so obviously shaped by fan response that it feels like the movie equivalent of someone who went viral online and now can only repeat themselves to diminishing returns in an attempt to hawk merch while they can.

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.

The Eyes of Tammy Faye, which was written by Abe Sylvia, is unable to decide if it wants to understand its subject or make fun of her, and ends up never really committing to either.

Diana, with her glamorous gowns and her taste for fast food, may be forever too much and not enough, but Spencer is just right.

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.

What makes The Card Counter so delicious, aside from the Mad Libs quality of the way it connects card playing and government-sanctioned torture, is that the movie undermines the Spartan swagger of William’s half-existence as often as it basks in it.

Shang-Chi and the Legend of the Ten Rings may give us the franchise’s first Asian American superhero, but what may be the most Asian American thing about it is the way it’s caught between the legacy of its forebears and a still-developing sense of self, its protagonist yanked away from that journey and enlisted as the face of the latest representational win, without ever seeming entirely decided on what he’s representing.

Reminiscence is the damnedest thing — a movie filled with promising concepts it doesn’t get around to exploring, because it’s dedicated to a romantic mystery that’s never very romantic or mysterious

We love charismatic murders and compelling monsters, but it’s always a little more comfortable to love them when they appear to be acting for good. The best thing about Don’t Breathe 2 is the way it constantly undermines that comfort, as though demanding we question the desire to assign hero and villain roles at all.

While a little sentimentality never hurt anyone, what stands out when revisiting CODA outside the festival bubble are the parts that feel unguided by formula, all of which have to do with the dynamics of the Rossi family.

Swan Song is a tremendously tender love letter to someone who survived so many of the slings and arrows that accompanied being an openly gay man in a small, conservative area.

Stillwater is the new movie from director Tom McCarthy, and it feels like one he’s spent his career preparing for — an enthralling, exasperating, and, above all else, ambitious affair that doesn’t soften or demand sympathy for its difficult main character but does insist on according him his full humanity.

The Green Knight is about someone who keeps waiting for external forces to turn him into the gallant, heroic figure he believes he should be. But at the film’s heart is a lesson that’s as timeless as any legend — travel as far as you like, but you’ll never be able to leave yourself behind.

Shyamalan . . . feels caught between the more emotionally considered movies he used to make, and the leaner, meaner ones he’s done more recently. His filmmaking can’t make up for the fact that Old is hovering indecisively between the two halves of his career, unable to commit to either direction.

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.

That it feels like it’s half at war with its title character, bringing her firmly to Earth (until she, like Bond in Moonraker, has to make her way to a high-altitude villain’s lair) and insisting on emotional coherence from her personal history, is its most interesting quality, though it’s maybe not as revolutionary as it first seems.

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

The film is about the power of storytelling, and not in the cornball, self-congratulatory sense in which that phrase is normally deployed.

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.

Luca is so intent on meaning something that it only ever halfway inhabits the delightfully colorful world it lays out. We never get a deeper understanding of the history between the sea monsters and the humans beyond some hints that there has been far more interaction than Luca was raised to believe.

Infinite feels like a depressing fable about the movie industry.

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

It’s not Chaves’s takeover that makes this new film feel like it runs off the rails — it’s the choice to shift focus from a haunting to a murder.

There is something endearing about watching a high-end cast and crew treat this material with such seriousness, even if they all seem to have missed the point. Sometimes schlock is just schlock, and it’s better off treated that way.

Aja knows what sort of product he is turning out and does it ably, if without much excitement, as though understanding he is filling a hole in a lineup. It’s actually Laurent, who is too classy to be here, who doesn’t entirely grasp the assignment. She keeps overreaching, giving her cutout character shows of realistic emotion that the film she is appearing in can’t support.

While Here Today never works, there is a confessional quality to it that makes it intermittently interesting. It’s the movie equivalent of someone telling what they think is a funny anecdote, but that instead comes out as an inadvertent glimpse into their soul.

At the age of 78, Andersson continues to make films that desire to capture no less than a grand sense of human existence — and that somehow achieve it. Here’s hoping this one isn’t his last.

Without Remorse is awful — an incoherently shot, grindingly dull movie in which just about every actor manages to seem miscast.

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

COVID has proven a difficult subject for fiction, but In the Earth feels as though it sets up an emotional parallel that it doesn’t follow through on, abandoning the virus as a backdrop for a horror story that’s slapdash and never very creepy. It’s another instance of pandemic cinema that feels as if it could use more distance to figure out what it wants to say.

Thunder Force doesn’t work as a comedy, but that’s because it doesn’t really work as a movie. There’s so little chemistry between McCarthy and Spencer, longtime real-life friends, that, rather than buddies, their characters often just come across as mildly surprised to find themselves in the same room.

Voyagers, in keeping its focus where it does, feels like a waste not just because of how predictable its beats are, but because it ends just when it feels like it’s getting interesting.

Watching the movie summons the distinct sensation of arriving at a party just as the guests are starting to leave.

Naishuller doesn’t bring the elegant coherence that Leitch and Stahelski do to their fight sequences or manage the same touch of absurdity to lighten up the brutal excesses. What he does have is Bob Odenkirk, and watching Odenkirk join the middle-aged action hero fold is pleasurable enough to make Nobody worth the while, even if it’s an obvious echo of other, better recent films.

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.

There is a maddeningly unconsidered quality to Boogie’s emotions about Asian American masculinity, and never more so than in the film’s fraught relationship with Blackness.

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.

Masterful and agonizing, The Father is a gorgeously crafted film about a doomed arrangement entered into with love, even though it can only end in tragedy.

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.

Chung is a patient filmmaker who works in small sequences that accrue imperceptibly into something grander.

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.

Wild Mountain Thyme is not just charmless. It is genuinely confounding, a movie constantly working against itself to make its characters and their dilemma comprehensible.

The delight of the exuberantly bittersweet closing sequence comes from the way it fulfills a promise the audience doesn’t realize, until that point, has been made.

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.

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.

They’re progressive, positive young women, and they’re tragically boring, which is less the fault of their woke makeover than the film’s conviction that it’s incompatible with conflict or distinct personalities.

It’s an adaptation without direction or purpose, with an unwieldy but deeply committed performance at its center. Hathaway looks to be having fun, at least. Someone should!

Time is an extraordinary documentary from director and artist Garrett Bradley, who didn’t make a film about Rich and her family so much as make one with them.

Shot in black-and-white with occasional accents of color, and given to camera-facing testimonials from characters around Radha’s neighborhood in a nod to Spike Lee, The 40-Year-Old Version feels like a ’90s indie throwback, loose and left raw at the edges, marked by an intimacy that can only come from drawing from the stuff of its multi-hyphenate creator’s life.

If Possessor ultimately feels more like a testament to its director’s excellent taste in influences than a film that entirely gels in itself, it’s still a thoroughly troubling watch.

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

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.

Ammonite is Winslet’s movie to shoulder, and she carries it as far as she can.

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.

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.

Mulan is a dour drag as a work of art and entertainment, an empty if occasionally impressive-looking spectacle propped up by some incredibly clunky writing.

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 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.

There’s a resilient buoyancy running through The Personal History of David Copperfield that proves irresistibly moving by the end of its journey. Its protagonist weathers hardships and cruelties in addition to benefiting from acts of kindness, and yet he never loses his capacity to be fascinated by people, a quality that’s comforting without feeling cloying.

For a movie marking a week in which theaters are reopening, Unhinged feels a lot like a movie that would be best caught on cable someday.

The trouble with trying to push at the boundaries of the superhero genre isn’t that we’re out of material, it’s that imaginations are so limited that a film that starts with a twist on a familiar premise nevertheless loops around to a standard showdown involving an incoherent blur of computer generated effects.

McBaine and Moss are the team behind 2014’s The Overnighters, a wrenching film about the North Dakota oil boom, and they’re interested in something beyond the contrast of adolescent faces and grown-up topics — or, for that matter, serving up simple optimism about Gen Z when taking in these young men at the cusps of their political lives.

As a thriller, The Burnt Orange Heresy is entirely underwhelming, but that doesn’t mean it isn’t worth watching.

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.

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.

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?

Irresistible isn’t just shockingly ineffectual in its insights into national schisms — it is, in an added betrayal, unfunny, requiring its audience to slog their way through so much laborious farce without a laugh in sight.

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.

The movie is so charmless and hopelessly incoherent that you might feel the need to consult Wikipedia afterward for some help on what it was even about.

The King of Staten Island shrinks Davidson down a little too much, to the point where his pathos and humor doesn’t blend with but actively gets obscured by his immaturity.

An interestingly woozy new film.

It’s an homage to radio dramas, maybe, but also works as a reminder that while film is a visual medium, sometimes sound can be enough to sustain you. It’s a sound, after all, that opens up the cloistered world that Everett and Fay are living in, exposing them to something terrible and awe-inspiring and new.

A deliciously absorbing documentary.

The best part of Scoob!, a computer-animated reboot of the Scooby-Doo franchise, is the part in which the movie painstakingly recreates the opening credits of the original series.

The problem with Capone isn’t that it’s an unconventional biography or a challenge to the image of a famous figure. It’s that it’s not bold enough on either of those fronts.

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

They’re stories you can find in the book, accompanied by ones from a multitude of other contributors, including Schellenbach, who gets to give her own account of what happened. So why not just read that?

Selah and the Spades ends just as it feels like it’s really picking up momentum, which is the major frustration of the film and also, likely, part of the reason it was picked up by Amazon both as a release and the basis for a possible series adaptation.

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.

The Hunt isn’t a total mishap, not with Gilpin being as good as she is and with Zobel’s gleeful aptitude for violence, but that’s what’s so exasperating about it. It has a habit of getting in its own way with trollish tendencies whenever it starts to build momentum.

It’s a performance that suggests the most interesting stretch of Affleck’s career as an actor is still to come.

The Invisible Man is not as smart as it could have been, but the concept is ingenious even if the execution gets slapdash. And with Moss at the center, it doesn’t matter all that much — she sells what’s approached as B-movie material with the unwavering dedication of someone starring in a prestige biopic.

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.

It is a terrible horror movie, by the way, just wretchedly unenjoyable.

Chemistry is nothing to sniff at, but P.S. I Still Love You does come awfully close to arguing itself out of its central romance.

If the results are mixed, it’s because the movie devotes more thought to putting distance between itself and Suicide Squad than to imagining what an independent version of the character is actually like.

Fennell’s film is a vibrant, stylistically precise piece of work, but the sentiments it conveys don’t feel examined. It’s an acceleration off a cliff when what you’d really like to see is some kind of road forward, no matter how rough.

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.

What makes the film such a spare but searingly insightful treatment of the issues at the core of Me Too is the way it refuses to separate its unseen executive’s sexual predation from the larger structures that enable it.

For a filmmaker who used to make these movies with a measure of anarchic glee, Ritchie appears to have bought into his own bullshit here.